Parenting as a Survivor: Breaking Cycles Without Breaking Myself

Last Updated on 26 June, 2026 by Cara Sutra

I’ve tried to start writing this piece so many times, but just ended up closing the document, unable to gather the swirling mass of related thoughts and mould them into something coherent. It has been painful, not to mention exhausting, to write this here. But it’s been worth it. As a sex blogger I don’t talk about being a parent, a mother, here on the blog much. In fact it’s only recently I started opening up about this part of my life, in my piece on parenting in a neurodivergent household. This year is the year I stop splitting out parts of myself, as if I could be solely a sex blogger here, solely a mother behind the scenes, solely a Domme with my submissives. I’m all of these things and more. And I have a complicated past, with life experiences spanning childhood trauma, abusive relationships and more, all of it part of what makes me, me. Today I am going to talk about parenting as a survivor. How has my turbulent, traumatic past affected how I parent my children? Am I really the cycle-breaker I like to believe I am?

I won’t go into detail about my past experiences here, because I’ve written about them in my other Life Unscripted posts. The particularly relevant ones are Learning Safety After a Lifetime of Survival, Beyond the Sex Blogger Label, and Accepting I’m Deserving of Love.

Trigger warning: this post contains descriptions of traumatic childhood, toxic parenting, violence against children, domestic violence and abuse, and sexual violence. Please go gently. I cried many times, and had to take several extended breaks, when writing this. 

Parenting in my twenties

I had my first child when I was 25. It was life-changing, and I adored my baby son, but I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I did the best I could, with a combination of instinct and mimicking what I’d been conditioned to believe were the good aspects of parenting from my own parents. They were the only role models for parenting I had, after all.

That isn’t to say I was overly strict, or that I felt compelled to raise my son in a high control religious group. Or any kind of religion, come to that. But I was holding on to some old-fashioned childrearing ideals for no good reason. Things like etiquette. Elbows off the table when you’re eating, no eating off your knife, ask politely to leave the table when you’re done. Children being obligated to do housework as their “chores”. And physical discipline of a child, which I’ll talk more about in a while.

In my twenties I was still in contact with my parents, having been gaslit and manipulated into forgiving them for what they deemed insignificant parenting errors, that anything I felt hurt or damaged by was down to my over sensitivity and flair for the dramatic rather than due to their emotional neglect, cruelty and abuse. They were my parents, surely all parents genuinely love their children? I couldn’t imagine not loving mine, not wanting the best for him, not doing the best by him. So I bore the wounds of my childhood as if they were just scrapes, just mild knocks, an ego bruised, rather than the deep scars they were, that my parents seemed to relish prising back open and pouring their salty words of hurt into.

The father of my first child isn’t the wonderful man I’m married to now. No, the man I had my first child with, at 25, was toxic and abusive. We are drawn to people who are familiar, it seems. People we think we deserve. I try not to blame myself; it’s just how I was, no fault of my own. He was toxic and abusive, a violent alcoholic, someone who punched through the walls and doors inside our home and broke my bones as easily as he did the furniture.

Between him and my parents, and struggling for a supportive social circle due to deafness and being unable to drive, as well as financial constraints at that time, and pressure from my partner to stay at home and be a good partner and mother, I was being told I was wrong from all sides. My own mind and feelings weren’t to be trusted or believed, only they were. I was broken, damaged, wrong.

The result was an attempt to parent my own child as best I could, while being infantilised, belittled, manipulated, controlled and abused myself.

Throughout all this, my top priority was loving and protecting my child, but it was getting more difficult and more worrying. My ex’s violence was always against furniture, our home, or me, never our child; but I couldn’t say for certain that it would always remain that way. And I didn’t want to raise my child in a home where he saw his mother being attacked, or even verbally assaulted, to have a father figure and male role model who was so toxic, controlling, misogynistic, violent. And in any case, there were things he did that, although they weren’t direct attacks on our child, were still risky and harmful. To punish me when we had an argument he would take the baby out in the car, after he’d been drinking, drink driving with our baby son in the car because he knew I would be frantic with worry. He was also cautioned by the police for being verbally abusive, angry, at someone in a garden centre car park whilst carrying our son in his car seat.

It reached the point where I couldn’t keep living with our son in danger like that. I secretly got a form to apply for council housing, for my son and I, and I filled it out and carried it in a stamped, addressed envelope for a while, trying to summon up the courage to post it. I knew what sort of fallout lay ahead for me when the time came for me to leave. A woman is always most at risk from a violent partner when she decides to leave. I genuinely feared for my life. I still have nightmares about the times he did almost kill me, almost stamped his foot through my skull as I lay battered on the floor at his feet, strangled cries coming from my windpipe already almost crushed from his fist around it previously.

I never did post that letter to the council. I still had it in my bag when I met my now-husband, and I was able to leave my violent ex with some semblance of acceptance from him, strangely enough. Probably because other, new people were around, people who I believed loved and supported me, and would protect me. He didn’t have any choice but to accept it, then. I was 29 when I escaped, and joined the polycule relationship. My now-husband officially became my new partner on my 30th birthday.

My parenting at this stage still wasn’t what I’d call perfect, but I don’t believe it ever is. Perfection isn’t the aim; love, safety and stability is. Throughout my years in the poly relationship I did my best, and I was – and still am – hugely supported by my husband. In my thirties I learned a lot more about myself, especially in late thirties, when I was able to reflect on how I parented in my twenties, the mistakes I’d made, and the falsehoods I’d been conditioned to believe about myself, and how to be a good parent.

Smacks of regret

Now for the biggest regret of my life. I smacked my child. I could try to justify it, and I can honestly say that I thought it was the right thing to do at the time, but it remains that it isn’t right. I was wrong for smacking him, and the regret will ache like a splinter in my heart for the rest of my life.

My brother and I were smacked by our parents as children. I can remember smacks just being a normal part of life, from whenever my memories started all the way up to around the age of 13 or 14. It wasn’t just the physical pain of being hit with hand, slipper or belt either. There was the psychological cruelty of being made to wait for our punishment. My brother and I, or whichever one of us had committed the misdemeanour or shown the disrespect, would be sent up to our room to wait for it. Our father would usually be the one dishing out the physical punishment, a tall, heavy set man with large hands. He would be deliberately and menacingly heavy on the stairs as well, so that each thud of his footfalls would strike a higher level of terror in our hearts. It wasn’t just the physical strikes. It was the fear we were forced to feel. Devastatingly cruel, with a lifelong impact.

It was described as ‘discipline’, ‘loving punishment’, ‘correction’, and not smacking us would be ‘making a rod for their backs’. The religious indoctrination is loud. Not just religion, either; my parents are of the baby boomer generation, and were raised being smacked by their own parents. Inter-generational trauma. And I was all set to continue it. Blind leading the blind, and both shall fall into the pit of causing childhood trauma.

I see some people of my generation and older online who state that they are glad they were smacked as kids. That it ‘didn’t do me any harm‘ and ‘that’s what’s wrong with society these days, kids don’t get a good hiding and therefore don’t learn respect‘.

1. If you believe hitting children is fine because you were hit, then you were in fact very harmed by it.
2. Children don’t respect a person who hits them, they fear and resent them.

If a child is too young to ‘understand anything else’ then they’re too young to understand why you’re hitting them. They just know that the person that’s supposed to love them is hurting them. If the child is old enough to understand reasoning, then why are you physically hitting them? There’s never a situation where hitting a child is right or appropriate. I know that now.

To my eternal shame and sadness, I didn’t know it then.

It took time, education from other sources (thank you big wide world on the internet), maturity, and trusting myself and my own, independent from my parents’ conditioning, parenting to see that smacking children is wrong. It’s harmful. It’s abuse.

I stopped. My eldest son was still young when I came to this realisation, around 4 or 5 years old, but it still happened, a few times. I never made him sit through the fear and terror of waiting for it, or the cruelty of menace before it happened. At least there is that. Also, I stopped. I try to give myself grace, to forgive myself. It’s only when we know better that we can do better. My son says he can’t even remember it happening, and I don’t know if that’s true or if he’s just sparing my feelings, but I hope with everything I have that it is.

Holding and releasing anger

I held so much anger from my childhood, the religion, my parents, the trauma of it all. Plus, the things which happened after childhood, as I moved into adulthood. Abusive partners, sexual violence, things I talk about in depth in Revealing The Rest of Me and Learning Safety After Survival.

There was a particularly powerful thread of anger through me from my own experiences of being parented by them, as a child, connected through to how I parented my own child, now I was a mother myself. The echoes, the contrasts. The ongoing pain of being the daughter of parents who didn’t, or couldn’t, genuinely love their own child. My mother called social services on me a couple of times, out of spite, simply because she was losing the ability to control me. Whether directly, or via my own children which she seemed to view as pawns in a game of mother-daughter coercion, manipulation and control. She stated bluntly that she was disappointed I am bisexual, when I came out to her. She openly disapproved of me being polyamorous. She was cutting and dismissive of BDSM. Her and my father didn’t approve of the kind, gentle and wonderful man I got with in the polycule, who is now my husband. My father has my husband blocked on Facebook for no other reason than he doesn’t like him.

In contrast, my parents remain in contact with my violent ex, the father of my eldest, who literally broke my bones as well as various items of furniture, walls and doors. A volatile, violent alcoholic. Apparently preferable to them than the gentle, kind, can’t-even-swear-never-mind-raise-his-voice man my husband is. But then again my husband has long hair, wears jewellery, is alternative and bisexual, so he doesn’t exactly fit their idea of an ‘ideal man’. An idea which comes, again, from very outdated social ideals. Norms I see through, and have moved beyond.

They’d rather I were with a violent abusive man who conforms to cis het toxic male norms than with a man who finds other men attractive and is unashamedly a geek and a goth. Make it make sense. That’s right; it doesn’t.

They’re all about appearances rather than the substance of a person. Controlled by society and its outdated norms rather than welcoming any kind of freedom of expression. They’re both right wing, with my mother supporting Nigel Farage, which tells you a lot about our differences. I grew up hearing them both be racist and homophobic, not to mention fatphobic and judgemental of any alternative lifestyles. It was normalised at home. I learned and grew so much once I escaped.

And after all this, my parents had, and have, the audacity to criticise me as a mother. Mainly because I won’t allow them to infect my children with their brand of hatred, bigotry and intolerance.

So yeah, I had anger. I still have anger. I’m trying to release it, to look on it calmly and understand it, to respect it for what it is. Not get rid of it entirely, because I’m not into the whole forgive-and-forget-in-order-to-move-on thing, but to honour my past and what I’ve been through and what I’ve learned without the need to tightly cling on to a ball of anger as an integral part of who I am.

Giving my children what I was denied

Regular readers will know Christmas is huge for me, but it’s only lately I’ve been open on my blog about why that’s the case. I didn’t have Christmas as a child. I didn’t celebrate it until I left home, or escaped, as that’s how it felt, when I was 18. I never had the luxury of belief in Santa, the magic and wonder of Christmas, all those memories and warmth and love that other people who had those things tend to take for granted. It’s incredibly important to me that my children have and enjoy what I didn’t, in that regard. Christmases have been, and remain, huge and wondrous, as much as I can make them so.

At this point my children do take it all for granted, but I’m learning to accept that’s normal. I try not to dampen their spirits and the atmosphere with my resentment over my own childhood and parentage, with phrases like “you don’t even know what you’ve got, you don’t appreciate any of this, you’re lucky to have it when I didn’t!” That would be the voice of my parents speaking through me. I refuse to be a vehicle for their toxicity and resentment.

In recent years I made a casual comment to my eldest son about how I hoped Christmas would be amazing that year, and he told me I shouldn’t worry because it’s always brilliant, which I wasn’t expecting from him at all. I was thrilled to realise that he really had appreciated it every year. I hope he’s got a memory bank full of wonderful Christmas memories, as well as other family togetherness through the years like birthdays, holidays together, and the everyday safety and love I did my best to provide for him; then his brothers too, when they came along.

It’s normal that they take my love, care and protectiveness for granted. They were and are children, and they’re not supposed to know there’s anything other than unconditional care and affection from parents, from their mother. Mothers are supposed to be warm, approachable, caring, kind, generous, thoughtful. They’re supposed to love their children.

Becoming the mother I should’ve had, and that my children deserve

I’m doing my best to be the mother I would have loved to have, that I should have had. That every child, every little girl in my case, deserves. The mother the little girl who is still a part of me deserves. The mother that my children deserve. It’s hard because I still fear that I’m parenting blindly, stumbling along with no real way of knowing if what I’m doing is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ until after the fact. Doing it all through instinct, powered by my love for them, rather than mimicking my parents who were clearly not good role models for being parents.

I’m trying to break cycles as a survivor of a traumatic childhood myself, while the cycle-makers are still alive. We’re not in contact anymore, but I know they remain hostile, judgemental, manipulative, controlling, cruel. And all of this while I attempt to heal from the damage that they, primarily, did to me from babyhood onwards. The fears and insecurities and harsh inner critic they programmed into me, embedded so deeply that even in my mid-40s and with the help of therapy, it’s difficult to distinguish what parts are me and what parts are their doing. What is my voice, and what’s theirs. I’m trying to untangle the knots, trying to tidy the mess.

I regularly feel lost when it comes to being a mother. I don’t know if what I’m doing is right. All I can do is examine my motivations, and if they’re good and sound, then it’s probably ok. I focus on my love for my kids, and let that guide me. I try not to assume I’m right about everything.

I don’t have a single pattern that works across all three of my sons. Each of them has different needs and different paths. My eldest is neurotypical, and lived through those early years of me being with his violent and abusive birth father, then stability and family love and closeness when I got with my now-husband. My middle son is neurodivergent and came to my mothering later, in his teens, after his birth mother died in 2022 from alcoholism. He’s my husband’s birth child, but he had been kept from us by his birth mother’s cruelty. There are things from his past that we live with and care for him through. My youngest, the son I biologically share with my husband, is autistic, in his early teens, and still lives at home. He’s secure and happy, but his path through teenage years looks different to my eldest’s: more dependencies, more ongoing support needs, a different shape entirely.

There’s also the effect of my past drinking, and my decision to go fully sober from early 2023. I decided to get sober before I knew the ex of my husband and I had died from alcoholism, weirdly. So it wasn’t because of that; it was my own independent decision based on the crossroads I felt I was at, at the time. You can read more about this in my post about my sobriety. I have become a better mother since I got sober. My kids don’t see their mother relying on a substance to ‘cope’, and I hope this means they have less chance of having alcohol issues or dependencies themselves. It’s the best decision I ever made, for my mental, emotional and physical health, and for my journey towards being the best mum to them that I can be, and that they deserve.

Hopes and fears for my children’s memories

I fear my children remembering me at my worst. That my eldest will remember me smacking his bum when he was small. That he and my youngest will remember mummy making the most of ‘wine o’clock’ and ‘mummy juice’ culture, ending the day with wine or vodka in order to ‘relax’, ‘unwind’, ‘let my hair down’, as if none of those things were possible without the help of alcohol. That my youngest will smell alcohol in the future and associate it with wine on mummy’s breath as I read him his bedtime story at night, hurried and distracted because I couldn’t wait to get back to nursing my beloved booze until I passed out, blotto, on the sofa, and had to be woken to go to bed.

I hope they remember the good times. The times mummy wasn’t sad, cross, or stressed, but the mum who was excited to see them open their Christmas presents on Christmas morning. Who slaved over memorable Christmas dinners, but also the weekly Sunday roasts and the midweek evening meals. Who sang happy birthday with tears in her eyes as she watched them blow out the candles on their cakes, with a mixture of sadness for my child self, and happiness for them. Who celebrated every one of their achievements. Who tried to make sure we had a nice family holiday each year. Who tried her best. Who helped them through every stage of their life, supported them with every dream and ambition, who was fiercely protective of them and advocated for them every step of the way: through school, through CAMHS, through EHCP, through special school placements, through funding, through all of it.

I hope they felt as loved as they are. I hope they know it now, in their heart, in their bones. I hope they take it for granted, just as the sun sets in the evening and rises in the morning.

Parenting in my forties

Now I’m in my forties, I’m more mellow and more at peace with myself. Not totally, but so much more than before. I’m a completely different person to the Cara and the mum I was in my 20s. I’ve been through lots of changes; not just the natural evolution of a person as they learn, mature and age, but impactful things. I got sober. I’m getting deafer. I entered perimenopause. I developed M.E. and now live with chronic illness. All of this caused me to have low libido and I’m only seeing the return of my sex drive recently, after years of worrying absence.

Due to all of this I have limited energy and restricted capacity, and it feels especially cruel to have this now, when I’m ready in all other ways to be the mother I should always have been and regret not being, at times. I have to live and try to make peace with being the mother I’m able to be, compared to the mother I want to be, in terms of what I can actually do in my everyday life and the plans I can make for the family. My love never falters but my body regularly does. C’est la vie, as they say.

The family landscape has also changed a lot over the past few years. My husband’s mother became too ill to keep living in our home, moved to a full time care setting, then sadly passed away a couple of years ago.

My eldest son grew up, went to college, got a job, moved out, and is now engaged to his girlfriend. They live very close to our home, which brings me a lot of peace and comfort about my eldest and I’s relationship.

I went from being the mum of two boys to three, when our middle son reconnected with his father, my husband, and I adopted him. I became the mother of autistic and ADHD sons, and helped my adopted son through his own traumatic history with his birth mother, things we never knew were happening at the time, things that sometimes mirrored my own childhood and my mother’s abuse. So we have a shared understanding and emotional landscape in that respect. And he, in turn, passed 18 and moved out, and lives a county away with his wonderful boyfriend, his now-fiance.

I’ve gone from having two sons, to three, all living at home, all the way down to one son, our youngest, just turned teenager, with his own neurodivergent and changing teenager needs, just him now at home with my husband and me, in the space of a few years. With all my changing health and emotional issues layered on top.

I started therapy, being finally ready for it, just over a year ago now. It’s been incredibly helpful and insightful, and is a highlight of my week. I’m understanding myself better. And that my childhood wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t treated badly because I deserved it. But because my parents either didn’t know, or refused to do, better. I’m learning to integrate the person I was as a child with the me now, not at odds with each other, but every aspect as parts of the whole. I’m discovering the real me, the me that I wasn’t allowed to be, and I’m recognising the unfinished me of my twenties and thirties, and the still unfinished me now, still dealing, but at the same time healing. I’m feeling more at peace with myself, with life, with things in general. Despite not having ‘wine o’clock’ or any other mind-altering substances other than my own mind itself, I’m able to cope. I’m able to be happy.

In my 40s I feel like a true mother to my family, their steadfast anchor. Not someone being tossed around in a storm of confusion, but a safe haven. A person, a place where my children know they can always return and get the love and comfort they need and deserve. I can’t promise to have all the answers, but I will give them all the love I have.

Making peace with the past

This is the heart of my ongoing work. I don’t feel totally at peace with my past, whether it’s my childhood or my disappointments in myself as a mother in the early days, and I don’t know if I ever will. But I’m learning to accept it. I don’t know what being totally at peace feels like, but continuing to live and love as best I can must be a kind of peace.

I’m realising that cycle-breaking means repairing and healing, not 100% perfection. As if there could be any such thing, when it comes to being a parent, being a mum. None of us are perfect. The difference is in owning that. My kids seeing my self-acceptance, and hearing my apologies when I fuck up. Them knowing at all times, even through any fuck-ups, that I love them unconditionally and endlessly, and that everything I do is motivated by that love and care for them. All three of them, the same.

It also means forgiving myself. Not just apologising to my kids for their sake, but apologising to my past self for beating her up emotionally and psychologically for years. Being overly critical and harsh on myself, echoing my own mother, taking in her views and adopting her voice when I talk to myself. My inner voice is changing, slowly. It used to be hers: berating, belittling, mocking, cruel. Now a new voice is coming through, challenging the first. It started quietly, but it’s getting more confident. Not necessarily louder, just clear, firm, sure. It’s calm, gentle, loving. I’m parenting myself, and I’m sure it’s helping me become a better mother to my children.

I know I haven’t always been the perfect mum. That’s ok. I did the best I could with what I knew at the time. Now I know better, I do better. I’m proud of the home my husband and I have built. Not just the stability of moving into our forever home, the bricks and mortar of a physical house. I mean the home. I hope our sons know we will always be home for them.

My father used to say that when I have my own house, I can make my own rules. He said it in a cruel, vindictive, mocking way. I’ve come to accept the message, while changing the meaning into something kind and loving instead. Our house is our home, and we have made our own rules. The most important of which is a foundation of love, honesty, respect and mutual care in all we do. My husband and me, and our three children.

It’s the best I can do, and I know that’s enough.