This is what caused me to cut the cord with my parents. My father is a massive criminal, got himself into prison for a large part of my formative years, never said I love you. Mother is untreated borderline, was emotionally abusive my entire life.

I spent years of my adulthood trying to find a way to reconcile with them and the conclusion I came to was it's not your burden to suffer for your parents' sins. They will change or won't change of their own volition. But you deserve to survive and thrive in kindness.

So much of ourselves is steeped in the company we keep. Choose the company that fosters the better, kinder, wiser you.

Ex: I have a (former) coworker who told me his life story. He's homosexual and his parents sent him multiple times to gay conversion therapy. Learning to accept himself for who he is required him to leave his parents: because they would not accept a homosexual child.

No sexual abuse or physical abuse in this story, but its pretty clear that he's healthier for leaving his parents.

IIRC, he's an only child as well. I'm not sure if he'll be willing to take care of his parents as they get older.

Considering the posters background, they may have just not taken it into account.

One challenge with abuse on all these fronts is that there is a huge amount of grey area in all of them, and judgement that would need to be drawn on what is and is not abuse. Sometimes/often it is REALLY clear cut (yeah, someone doing munchausen by proxy on their kids, or beating them, or whatever is clearly abuse).

Other times, you'll find a lot of controversy. There was a lot of discussion recently about parents getting cut off from their kids because of rabid Trump support. Is that abuse? From whom? There have also been stories of parents cutting off their kids because of their strongly anti-Trump views during the election. Is that abuse? From whom?

Mental abuse can be incredibly subtle, and a key component of many abusers is their ability to convince others around them that they totally aren't abusing anyone and it's that OTHER PERSONS fault.

Made even worse by the fact that sometimes the person being painted as the abuser IS NOT the abuser, and it really IS the other persons fault!

Sexual abuse and physical abuse can at least be generally judged somewhat accurately from a third party witness/video perspective.

If you've ever worked as a camp counselor for rich kids - the term abuse can work out as follows:

"Clean up your crap" = "You can't make me, that's abuse, my dads a lawyer."

Is asking someone whose had maid service / cleaners to clean up their crap in a group situation abuse?

The other stuff is feeling "uncomfortable" or "unsafe" in situations where you are asked to take the most basic responsibilities (ie, turn in an educational assignment").

Kids will get a school counselor to excuse them from the work because it makes them feel "uncomfortable and stressed".

This is an interesting example of subjective versus objective well being.

Asking someone to help clean is clearly not a misuse of power (e.g. abuse), but to an ill informed/molded individual, any request that they do something they don’t want to do (homework, chores, work, etc.) can ‘feel’ like abuse to them (subjectively), even though objectively it is not.

Most of our society is shifting to focusing on subjective well being over objective well being, so we get these confusing situations. (at least this framework helps me parse these issues).

It's interesting - because if you work with really rich / spoiled kids, they are sometimes being sent on these summer / camp type programs as a punishment. So some kids have been mowing lawns to try to pay for the program (thinking of it as something super special - which it is), and other kids are being sent as punishment.

Reality is underneath most kids are good. Get them out of the environment and if you can get peer pressure going the right way, they'll drop right into it. Seriously, their parents wouldn't recognize them (cooking, cleaning, being very physically active etc).

But early days can be a shock to the system. If you've been jetting to paris to shop on weekends, and then are being asked to eat a meal cooked by other kids (no meal choice at all - just one big something) and/or need to cook it, it can really feel like something way out of comfort zone.

Written down and agreed upfront clear principles and responsibilities should help, even with lawyer dads, no?

Actually - I was working internationally. What these kids didn't realize is that where I was - I really was in charge from the locals point of view. Local law enforcement was sometimes a wack and a "spot fine" or pre-trial / charge detention (formal judicial cases took forever/unreliable so this method of on the spot justice/corruption was tolerated).

None of my kids had this happen, but overseas the tolerance for foreigner bad behavior can be low in some cases if there is a perception of disrespect. Some of the rich kids in another group stole some liquor "as a joke". Hahaha. They were jailed and the locals squeezed cash out of parents before parents had to charter a flight to get them out (program required parents to pay repatriation expenses in these cases).

Only real downer culturally at times was treatment of women - the US kids are used to bikinis and the girls are used to agency / freedom as it should be. Locally dress / behavior etc can send a message that generates a metric ton of harassment - and it can be no holds barred even under age. Only thing I really disliked I think and female counselors doubly so - locals would sometimes not respect even the female counselor push back but need the guy to intervene. For trips that were in part about independence building a bummer. My sense over some time though was that this was changing though so by now I suspect probably much much better.

We did have all the paperwork in place of course. But what really works is actually peer pressure. I mean -> it's insane how powerful that is. Kids that age will do almost anything if it's the thing to do based on peer behavior. So you want to get the dynamic going and you are home free if you can.

The thing about abuse is that it has to be excessive or misuse of some power. Generally, mental abuse should require that the person being abused say that they don't like whatever is being said and for what is being said to be objectively meant to harm them (serve no legitimate purpose, phrased vulgarly). If it does serve a legitimate purpose and was delivered in a decent way, then I don't see how that could be abuse. That is protected speech. Forcing someone else from expressing their views just because someone else doesn't like it would then also fall under mental abuse and restriction of of their protected speech.

"Protected" vs "unprotected" speech: The distinction itself is an abomination, papering over a more subjective reality.

Objectivity is really just society's collective subjectivity as far as determining what is protected, unprotected, reasonable, who is "wrong", etc. I don't see how societies can exist without this (even anarchists would implicitly be subscribing to the collective rules and interpretations, or lack there of).