“Trying To Be There for Her, Knowing I’m Mentally Breaking Myself”: How Mothers Experience and Respond to Their Adult Children’s IPV

Most survivors seek help from people they know before, during, after, and sometimes instead of formal support. Chief among their preferred sources of support are their mothers. But what about mothers’ own subjective experiences in this role, and the interpersonal and contextual factors that shape their responses? Without such knowledge, we cannot effectively support those who are, in turn, so central to IPV survivors’ safety and healing. This qualitative study explored mothers’ own subjective experience of the IPV in their adult children’s lives.

We employed a qualitative descriptive methodology to interview 12 cisgender, straight mothers of adult IPV survivors who identified as either white or Black. We analyzed the interview data using inductive qualitative content analysis.

Findings converged to reveal how deeply survivors’ IPV experiences affect their own mothers, who feel an ongoing duty to parent their adult children; how mothers’ own relationship histories, especially prior interpersonal trauma, shape their responses; and how social messages about the nature of motherhood in the United States and in the Black community in particular create key pressures on mothers as they grapple with how to respond to their adult children in crisis.

These findings expand our understanding of what it means to support survivors, demonstrating that the people survivors are most likely to turn to for help are likely, in turn, to need support themselves.