Quick summary: Toxic behaviour in a family member is often rooted in unresolved trauma or anxiety rather than simple cruelty, which reframes how we understand family conflict. Recognising this does not mean tolerating harm, since understanding someone’s pain and protecting your own well-being can and should coexist. For readers and mental health professionals alike, the practical takeaway is that boundaries and compassion are not opposites, and breaking cycles of harm within families depends on holding both at once.
Most families have one. The parent who criticises everything you do. The sibling who flies into a rage over nothing. The relative who leaves you anxious before you have even walked through the door. We call these people toxic, and often the advice is straightforward: cut contact, set boundaries, protect your peace.
That advice still has its place. But it misses something important. The relative who behaves this way is frequently the one carrying the heaviest load. Their behaviour is not a personality flaw so much as a coping strategy, and coping strategies are learned for a reason.
Most people are not acting from a script they chose freely. They are responding to their environment, often one shaped decades earlier. What looks like bad behaviour in adulthood is frequently a survival habit picked up in childhood, one that never got updated once the danger passed. Psychologists call these maladaptive coping mechanisms, and the frustrating thing about them is that they rarely disappear once they stop being useful. They just keep running in the background, long after the threat that created them is gone.
Where the behaviour comes from
A few familiar characters show up again and again in difficult families, and each one tends to have a story underneath the surface.
The controller needs everything arranged their way, and it rarely comes from a wish to dominate. More often it grows out of anxiety that has never been resolved. If chaos meant danger once, then keeping tight control over people and situations becomes a way of feeling safe.
The one with the short temper, who criticises constantly or explodes at small provocations, is often carrying something underneath the anger. Shame, insecurity, or an old wound that was never allowed to heal can all show up as hostility, because directing pain outward is easier than sitting with it.
The person who always ends up the victim in every story learned that lesson early too. If suffering was the only way anyone paid attention to them as a child, then framing themselves as wronged becomes a familiar way of getting care as an adult.
How pain moves through a family
Families function as connected systems, not a collection of separate individuals. When something painful happens and nobody deals with it properly, it does not simply vanish. It tends to move sideways and downwards, shaping how the next generation copes with stress, conflict and closeness.
A relative who grew up unable to express emotion safely, for example, often had to develop a hard exterior just to get through the day. Nobody taught them how to regulate what they felt or ask for help when they needed it, so that unprocessed pain leaks out into how they treat the people around them now. Hurt people are, more often than not, simply passing on hurt they never had the chance to resolve.
Understanding is not the same as tolerating
None of this means you owe anyone unlimited access to your life. Making sense of why someone behaves the way they do is a separate matter from accepting how they treat you. You can hold both at once: genuine curiosity about what shaped a difficult relative, and a firm decision to keep your distance from behaviour that harms you.
Seeing a relative’s outbursts or manipulation as symptoms of an internal struggle, rather than random cruelty, tends to loosen the grip that resentment can have. It becomes easier to stop taking every barbed comment personally when you recognise it as coming from someone still fighting an old battle rather than someone who simply enjoys causing pain. That shift in view does not excuse what they do. It just changes how much of it you have to carry.
The most useful thing this perspective offers is a sense of choice. You cannot heal another person’s unresolved pain for them, and trying usually leaves you exhausted. What you can do is decide not to hand the same pattern down to your own children or the people who depend on you. That balance, caring for your own well-being while still making room to understand where someone else’s behaviour comes from, is difficult to strike. It is also, for most people, the only way through.
Dina G. Relojo is a social media manager at Psychreg. She is a high school teacher from the Philippines.
