Why Understanding Your Abuser Does Nothing. A Clinical Position

Last update: May 2026 | Reading time: 8 minutes

Author: Claudiu Manea, psychologist, creator of the Alignment Method methodology

TLDR

The therapy culture consensus that understanding is the morally superior, clinically sound response to being harmed has produced a specific and underexamined consequence: it has systematically undermined the self-protective instincts of the people who most need them. Understanding is not neutral. When it is directed at the wrong person, meaning when it is demanded of the victim rather than required of the perpetrator, it functions as a sophisticated form of the same dynamic it claims to oppose. This is a clinical position, not a polemic. It has evidence behind it. And it is long overdue.

The Moral Architecture of the Understanding Argument

The argument goes like this: if we understand that harmful behavior originates in trauma, we can respond with compassion rather than judgment. We can break the cycle. We can evolve beyond the primitive reaction of anger and into the more sophisticated response of insight. Understanding is healing. Understanding is growth. Understanding is what separates the psychologically mature from those still operating from their wounds.

It is a compelling argument. It has the texture of wisdom. It scores significant moral points, which is, I would suggest, partly why it has become so dominant in therapeutic discourse.

It is also, in the specific clinical context of someone being harmed by another person’s behavior, almost entirely useless. And in a significant number of cases, it is actively harmful.

Let me be precise about the argument I am making, because precision matters here. I am not arguing against understanding as a clinical tool for the person who caused the harm. If a person with narcissistic traits, or a history of perpetrating abuse, or a pattern of destructive relational behavior enters therapy and does the work of understanding how their own history generated their damaging patterns, then that is clinically appropriate, genuinely valuable, and exactly what should happen.

What I am arguing against is the demand that understanding be performed by the victim. By the person on the receiving end of the behavior. By the one who is being harmed, right now, today, regardless of the historical origins of the harm.

That is a different claim entirely. And it is the one that needs examining.

What Understanding Actually Produces In Practice

Whenever a therapist advocates understanding, they always feel compelled to add the following disclaimer: “I am promoting understanding, not excusing hurtful behavior.”

This sounds reasonable. It is not, in practice, a meaningful distinction.

When a person is in an abusive relationship and their therapist, or their support network, or the cultural messaging they are receiving encourages them to understand their partner’s trauma history, what actually happens? Not in theory. In practice.

They hesitate. They qualify their own anger. They introduce complexity into a situation that, for their immediate safety and psychological survival, needs clarity. They begin to ask themselves whether their response to being harmed is disproportionate, given the suffering the person who harmed them once experienced. They soften their self-protective instincts at precisely the moment those instincts are most needed.

The bully does not stop bullying because the target understands that the bully had a difficult childhood. The narcissist does not stop the cycle of idealization, devaluation, and discard because their partner has achieved insight into the attachment wound underneath the grandiosity. The abuse does not end because the person being abused has developed compassion for the abuser’s origin story.

What ends the bullying is the boundary: the defense, the removal of the target from the bully’s accessible range. What ends narcissistic abuse is leaving. Not understanding. Not compassion. Not the development of a sophisticated clinical framework for appreciating the perpetrator’s psychological history. Leaving. And never going back.

Understanding, in these contexts, does not produce the protective action. It delays it. Sometimes indefinitely.

The Wrong Person Is Being Asked to Do the Work

The clinical argument against demanding understanding from victims is straightforward: understanding is appropriate remediation for the person whose behavior caused the harm, not for the person who received it.

If trauma causes narcissistic personality traits (and the evidence for this relationship, while present, is considerably more complex than the simple causal claim typically made) then the appropriate clinical response is that the person with those traits should receive treatment for the trauma. That is where the understanding should produce action. That is where the clinical insight should become clinical intervention.

The trauma history of the aggressor is clinically relevant to the treatment of the aggressor. It is not clinically relevant to the victim’s decision about whether to remain in harm’s way.

What the “understanding” discourse does, in practice, is transfer the remediation obligation. The perpetrator’s trauma history becomes the victim’s responsibility to account for. The psychological origin of the damaging behavior becomes a mitigating factor that the victim is expected to hold in mind when deciding how to respond to it. The clinical complexity of the perpetrator’s inner world becomes a weight placed on the shoulders of the person the perpetrator has damaged.

This is not compassion. It is the redistribution of burden in the direction it was already traveling: toward the person with less power in the dynamic.

The Moral High Ground Problem

There is a specific social and professional reward structure that explains why the understanding narrative is so durable despite its clinical limitations. Understanding sounds evolved. It sounds sophisticated. It positions the person making the argument as someone who has transcended the primitive response of judgment and arrived at the enlightened altitude of compassion.

When a therapist says “narcissism is caused by trauma, so we should understand rather than judge” they are not only making a clinical claim. They are making a moral claim about themselves, about the kind of clinician they are, the kind of person they are, the quality of their character. The argument comes pre-loaded with self-flattery.

And because it sounds evolved, it functions as a silencer. If you respond with anger to the understanding argument, if you say “I don’t think my client needs to understand her abuser’s childhood, I think she needs to leave the relationship”, you risk being positioned as the unsophisticated one. The one who hasn’t done the inner work. The one who is still operating from judgment rather than compassion.

This is the moral high ground problem. The understanding argument is structured in a way that makes it very difficult to challenge without appearing to argue against empathy itself. Which is not what the challenge is. The challenge is against the misdirection of empathy, against the insistence that the victim’s empathy for the perpetrator is clinically useful, morally required, and a sign of psychological maturity.

It is none of those things. It is a burden placed on the wrong person, dressed in the language of healing.

The Trauma Causation Claim

The specific claim made in the exchange that prompted this article, that narcissism is “caused by trauma”, deserves direct clinical examination, because it is the load-bearing assertion of the understanding argument.

The relationship between early adverse experience and the development of narcissistic traits is genuinely complex. There is clinical and research evidence that certain early relational environments (characterized by inconsistency, conditional regard, or specific kinds of emotional unavailability) correlate with the development of narcissistic defenses in adulthood. This correlation is real and clinically relevant for the treatment of the person who developed those defenses.

But the causal claim (that narcissism is caused by trauma) is a significant overreach. It ignores the substantial evidence that narcissistic traits develop across a range of etiological pathways, including some that do not involve what would conventionally be called trauma. It ignores the fact that many people who experience severe early adversity do not develop narcissistic personality organization. And it ignores the fundamental logical problem with using causation as mitigation: the cause of a behavior does not determine the appropriate response to it.

A driver who causes an accident because of a medical episode they could not have anticipated is not culpable in the way a driver who was texting is culpable. The cause matters for the assessment of culpability. It does not matter for the person in the other car, who has been injured regardless of the cause, and whose primary clinical need is treatment of their injury, not a sophisticated appreciation of the medical history of the driver who hit them.

The narcissist’s trauma history, whether it is causally implicated in the narcissistic presentation or not, is relevant to the treatment of the narcissist. It is not relevant to the victim’s clinical needs. Those two people are sitting in different offices, or should be, preferably with a lot of distance between them.

What Understanding Does to Anger

Anger is not a problem to be managed. In the context of being harmed, anger is a signal: specifically, the signal that a boundary has been crossed, that something of value has been violated, that a protective response is warranted.

The therapy culture’s relationship with anger is deeply ambivalent. On one hand, anger is acknowledged as a valid emotion, as legitimate, as something to be expressed rather than suppressed. On the other hand, the entire architecture of the understanding narrative is designed to complicate the anger, to introduce the perpetrator’s history as a moderating variable, to replace the clean signal of the anger with the more sophisticated response of compassionate insight.

This complication of anger in abuse contexts is clinically dangerous. Not because anger is always the right response, and not because the perpetrator’s history is irrelevant (like I said, it is relevant to the treatment of the perpetrator). But because the self-protective function of anger depends on its clarity. An anger that has been complicated by the obligation to understand is an anger that has been partially neutralized. And a partially neutralized anger in an abuse context is a protective instinct that has been partially disabled.

And that is a very dangerous thing to do.

Nobody ever left an abusive relationship because they understood their abuser better. They left because they finally allowed themselves to feel (and act on) the full, uncomplicated weight of what had been done to them. The understanding came later, in the safety of the aftermath, as a way of making sense of the experience. It was never the vehicle of the exit. The anger was the vehicle of the exit. The anger, honored rather than complicated, was what moved the person’s feet toward the door.

Society Is Not Changing. The Trauma Continues. The Victims Are Still There.

The understanding argument rests on an implicit optimism about systemic change that is not warranted by the evidence. The logic is: if we understand that harmful behavior originates in trauma, we can address the trauma, reduce the incidence of harmful behavior, and produce a less damaging social environment for everyone.

This is a long-term, systems-level argument. It may or may not be clinically sound. What it is not is useful to the person being harmed right now.

Society is not changing at a pace that is relevant to the person currently in an abusive relationship. The trauma that produces narcissistic traits, abusive behavior, and the full range of damaging relational patterns is being created in the next generation of families at approximately the same rate it has always been created. The clinical infrastructure for treating the perpetrators of harm, for actually addressing the trauma histories that the understanding argument invokes, remains inadequate, underfunded, and largely inaccessible to the people who most need it.

In the meantime, the victims are there. Today. In the office, on the phone, in the clinic. Not in a future where societal change has reduced the incidence of abuse. In the present, where the abuse is ongoing and the question is what to do about it now.

The understanding argument, applied in this context, is asking the person being harmed to bear the cost of a future that has not arrived. To moderate their self-protective response in deference to a systemic optimism that the evidence does not support. To be patient with their own harm in service of a compassion that is not producing the change it promises.

This is not clinical wisdom. It is the displacement of responsibility from the systems and individuals who caused the harm onto the people who are suffering from it.

What Actually Works

The bullying stops when the target leaves the bully’s accessible range, or develops the capacity to defend themselves effectively within it. Not when they understand the bully’s attachment difficulties. The bully’s attachment difficulties are the bully’s problem to address with the bully’s therapist.

The narcissistic abuse stops when the person leaves and does not return. Not when they achieve a sophisticated appreciation of the perpetrator’s object relations. The perpetrator’s object relations are the perpetrator’s clinical territory.

The abusive relationship ends when the person being abused decides, clearly, without the complication of compassion for the abuser’s history, that the behavior is unacceptable and acts accordingly. The origin of the behavior is irrelevant to that decision. It was always irrelevant to that decision.

This does not mean the origin of the behavior is clinically irrelevant in all contexts. It means it is clinically irrelevant to the victim’s primary clinical need, which is protection: from the ongoing harm, from their own implicated self-doubt, from the narrative that their protective instincts are a sign of psychological immaturity rather than a sign of an intact survival mechanism.

The person who has been abused deserves, first and above everything else, to have their experience of the harm taken seriously without qualification. Not “yes, that was harmful, and here is the complex clinical context that explains the harmfulness.” Just: that was harmful, your anger is correct, your self-protective instinct is functioning as it should, and the next step is removing yourself from the source of the harm.

Everything else (the understanding, the compassion, the clinical appreciation of the perpetrator’s history) can come later. In safety. Without urgency. When it has no bearing on the decision about whether to stay in harm’s way.

That sequence is not unsophisticated. It is the clinically responsible one.

A Note on What This Argument Is Not

This article is not an argument against empathy. Empathy, the genuine capacity to understand another person’s internal experience, is a clinical virtue and a human one.

It is not an argument against treating perpetrators of harm. Perpetrators deserve clinical treatment. Their trauma histories are relevant to that treatment. The understanding of those histories is appropriate and valuable in that specific clinical context.

It is not an argument for sustained anger or for the permanent positioning of oneself as a victim. Anger is the vehicle of the exit. It is not the destination.

It is an argument for directing clinical resources, including the resource of understanding, toward the people and the problems they can actually affect. Understanding directed at the victim of harm, for the purpose of moderating the victim’s self-protective response, does not affect the perpetrator’s behavior. It affects only the victim’s response to it. And in abuse contexts, that effect is reliably negative.

The therapy culture’s love affair with understanding has produced a generation of clinicians who are very sophisticated about the origins of damaging behavior and less focused than they should be on the immediate clinical needs of the people being damaged by it.

That is not sophistication. It is misdirection. And it is time to name it as such.

Claudiu Manea, M.A., is a licensed psychologist and psychotherapist with 15 years of clinical experience across Europe, North America, and Australia. He specializes in Adlerian depth psychology and is the founder of TherapyMatters.co and the creator of the Alignment Method. The positions expressed in this article represent the author’s clinical judgment and are intended to contribute to honest professional discourse, not to dismiss the genuine value of empathy or trauma-informed approaches in their appropriate clinical contexts.

Last Updated: 05.19.2026 | Sources verified and current as of publication date

Medical review: Content has been reviewed for accuracy by licensed mental health professionals.