Why “Seeing Both Sides” Is a Manipulation Tactic, Not Wisdom

How False Balance Silences Survivors and Shields Abusers

There is a phrase survivors hear constantly, especially after they begin to speak the truth about what happened to them. It comes from friends, family, therapists, lawyers, sometimes even strangers on the internet. The phrase is always the same, always delivered in that soft, knowing tone: “Well… every story has two sides.” Or some version of it: “There are always two perspectives,” “It takes two to tango,” “No one’s perfect,” or “It’s never just one person’s fault.”

At first glance, this sounds like common sense. It’s packaged as fairness, wisdom, maturity. After all, who wouldn’t want to be balanced? Who wouldn’t want to take accountability for their part?

But survivors of abuse know exactly what happens next. This phrase doesn’t bring balance. It doesn’t bring clarity. It brings distortion and confusion. It reduces obvious cruelty into a “difference of opinion,” reframes manipulation as a “communication issue,” and reframes your trauma as a “two-way dysfunction.” Suddenly, what happened to you is no longer about what was done to you, it’s about how you supposedly contributed, how you failed to respond the right way, or how you were just as much to blame for the “dynamic.”

And this is where so many survivors end up trapped. Not just in the trauma itself, but in the aftermath, where every attempt to tell the truth is met with a cultural script designed to silence them.

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PART I: WHEN “SEEING BOTH SIDES” BECOMES A WEAPON

In a perfect world, the idea of listening to both sides might represent fairness. But in the context of abuse, it becomes something else entirely: a weapon that protects the abuser while forcing the survivor into endless self-defense.

This happens everywhere. You finally leave a relationship after years of manipulation and cruelty. You open up … maybe to a friend, a family member, a professional, and explain the patterns of gaslighting, the emotional destruction, the fear you lived with every day. And instead of hearing, “That sounds awful, I’m so glad you got out,” you hear something else. Something much colder, much more common: “Well… you know no relationship is perfect. I’m sure both of you made mistakes.” In that moment, your experience is reduced to an equal blame scenario. Your courage becomes another case of “he said, she said.” And you are pushed back into the same confusion you just fought your way out of.

It happens in families too. You tell your siblings or parents about the silent treatments, the public shaming, the years of walking on eggshells. And they answer, “Yes, but you’ve always been a little too sensitive.” Or worse, “I mean… you can be difficult too.” The result is always the same. The focus shifts away from what was done to you, and onto what’s supposedly wrong with you.

This isn’t balance. This is erasure. This is the quiet conditioning of a culture that cannot tolerate naming abuse directly, so it wraps it in the language of “two sides,” “relationship issues,” and “miscommunication.”

In reality, this tactic serves three purposes. It keeps the listener comfortable by avoiding the raw truth of cruelty. It protects the abuser by framing their behavior as part of some mutual dysfunction. And it silences you… by making you feel like telling the truth is being “unfair,” “biased,” or “not taking responsibility.”

Survivors don’t get retraumatized by just the abuse itself. They get re-traumatized every time they are pressured to make their story “more balanced,” when balance was never part of the equation.

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PART II: WHY ABUSE IS NOT A CONFLICT BETWEEN TWO EQUAL PARTIES

The most damaging consequence of the “see both sides” narrative is how it reframes abuse as a disagreement between equals. It takes what is fundamentally an abuse of power and repackages it as a communication issue or a mutual shortcoming. But abuse is never a mutual problem. It is not a failure to compromise, it is not two people misunderstanding each other, and it is certainly not a clash of personality styles. Abuse is a deliberate pattern of behavior where one person manipulates, dehumanizes, or controls another… often while maintaining the perfect public image to stay protected.

In healthy relationships, both people can make mistakes. Both can raise their voice in anger, have bad days, or struggle with miscommunication. But in abusive relationships, one person consistently dismantles the other’s sense of reality. One person consistently holds power and uses it as a weapon. One person systematically erodes the other’s confidence, safety, and autonomy… not because of miscommunication, but because it feeds their control.

Think of the woman who gets called “unstable” because she cries during every court hearing, while her abuser sits in the courtroom calm, polished, perfectly collected. On the surface, it looks like a dispute between two equally messy people — one calm, one emotional, both “having their issues.” But if you open the door to her home life, you’ll see years of gaslighting, financial control, cycles of love-bombing and withdrawal, and a slow, calculated destruction of her inner stability. You’ll see a woman who once had a vibrant personality, now reduced to someone explaining herself in a courtroom, begging to be believed.

Or think of the man who leaves an emotionally abusive partner, only to have everyone around him say, “Well, you knew she had a temper,” or “Maybe you just couldn’t handle a strong woman.” He’s told to “be the bigger person,” to “forgive and move on,” all while quietly nursing the wounds of years spent walking on eggshells, managing endless accusations, silent treatments, and outbursts designed to keep him small.

This is what happens when we confuse abuse with ordinary conflict. We give the abuser exactly what they want: plausible deniability. They thrive in environments where people say, “It takes two to tango,” because it allows them to continue their behavior while the survivor keeps getting blamed for not “handling it better.”

But abuse isn’t about mutual flaws. It’s about one person systematically violating another’s boundaries, eroding their dignity, and manipulating their sense of self. There is no “both sides” to that. There is only a perpetrator and a target. There is a person creating harm, and a person trapped trying to survive it.

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PART III: HOW “SEEING BOTH SIDES” BECOMES A SHIELD FOR ABUSERS AND A TRAP FOR VICTIMS

One of the most predictable patterns I see, both in real life and across every survivor community, is how easily the language of “balance” becomes a shield for the abuser. But it doesn’t stop there. It also becomes a psychological trap for survivors who are still in the relationship, still hoping for change, or still convinced that love can fix the damage.

The loudest critics of survivor-centered education almost always come from two places. The first group is the people who have never experienced abuse. They think abuse is an argument gone too far, a breakup that turned ugly, or just two people not communicating well. These are the people who dismiss survivor voices, who call us “angry” or “bitter,” who want everything smoothed over with forgiveness and understanding… because they’ve never experienced the chronic nervous system destruction of living under manipulation. Their ignorance makes them cruel. They don’t know what it feels like, so they preach neutrality as if it’s wisdom.

Then there’s the second group, and this one is harder to witness with judgment …because it’s made up of survivors who haven’t realized they are survivors yet. People who are still in the thick of it. People who are still in trauma bonds, who defend their abuser because their brain has been rewired to believe in hope over truth. I see them every day in comment sections. They are the first to rush in with “you shouldn’t label people,” or “you don’t know their side of the story,” or “sometimes the narcissist isn’t the narcissist.” And underneath every one of those comments, I don’t see cruelty… I see captivity. I see people so deep in cognitive dissonance, so invested in the false hope of redemption, they lash out at anyone who reminds them of the reality they aren’t ready to face yet.

I don’t write this with contempt. I’ve studied trauma long enough to know what happens to the brain in these environments. The nervous system adapts. Hope becomes a survival mechanism. Love becomes an endurance test. Reality gets rewritten just to make the day tolerable. But the painful truth is, when these survivors stay stuck in that loop, they don’t just harm themselves, they contribute to the cultural delusion that abuse is always “two-sided,” that every toxic relationship can be repaired, and that anyone who names narcissism is overreacting or being dramatic.

What this means is simple: the “see both sides” narrative does not protect the innocent. It protects the abuser. It invalidates the person trying to escape, and empowers the person holding the leash. It’s the language of status quo. It’s the language of enablers. It’s the language of those who benefit, either emotionally or socially, from pretending that abuse is just a personality clash between two flawed people.

Survivors do not owe balance to those who never survived what they survived. They do not owe explanations to people still lost in the fog. They do not owe softness to those who used their softness against them. We can hold compassion for people still trapped in abuse while refusing to let their defenses silence us. We can believe in neuroplasticity, in recovery, in the power of survivors to awaken from the fog, but we are not required to make ourselves small just to avoid upsetting those who are not ready to see.

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PART IV: CLARITY, NOT BALANCE, IS WHAT SETS SURVIVORS FREE

After abuse, survivors are conditioned to think that healing looks like becoming “balanced.” That true growth is measured by how neutral they can sound, how forgiving they can be, how much they can avoid words like “abuse,” “manipulation,” or “narcissist.” They are taught by therapists, by courts, by family, that their anger is the problem, that their boundaries are too rigid, that their descriptions are too harsh. Slowly, they are nudged back into self-doubt, back into editing their own truth for the comfort of others.

But real healing doesn’t come from balance. It comes from clarity. The survivor’s path to freedom is not paved with softened language, forced empathy, or “understanding both sides.” It is built through unflinching recognition of reality, through calling abuse by its real name, through telling the truth of what happened without downplaying, without minimizing, and without apologizing for it.

Think of the survivor who spent years calling their relationship “difficult” or “high-conflict,” before finally admitting it was abuse. The moment they used the correct word, the weight shifted. It didn’t make the memories disappear, but it made the confusion dissolve. Naming it clearly was the first step toward reclaiming their reality.

Or the survivor who was trapped in self-blame, convinced their reactions “provoked” the cruelty, until they learned how trauma responses work. Once they understood how chronic gaslighting had rewired their nervous system, they didn’t need to “see both sides” anymore. They needed to see clearly what had been done to them, and what their body did to survive it.

Clarity is what restores the survivor’s compass. It doesn’t make them cruel… it makes them honest. It doesn’t make them rigid… it makes them safe. It doesn’t make them unforgiving… it makes them free. Because when you finally see clearly, you stop explaining your pain to people who never had the capacity to understand it. You stop debating your lived reality with those who are still trapped in the delusion of “two sides.” You stop waiting for validation from people who never had to survive what you survived.

Healing doesn’t mean you neutralize the truth. It means you stop diluting it. It means you stop managing other people’s comfort at the expense of your own clarity. It means you choose reality over performative “balance,” every single time.

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YOUR CLARITY IS NOT CRUELTY

Every survivor comes to a moment where they realize they’ve spent years making themselves smaller… softer in their words, quieter in their truth, more “reasonable” for the comfort of people who were never on their side to begin with.

This is your reminder: you are not here to sound agreeable. You are here to tell the truth.

You are not here to negotiate your reality down to something easier for others to digest. You are here to name what happened, without apology, without distortion, without the constant footnote of “I’m not perfect either.”

You are allowed to use words like abuse. You are allowed to use words like manipulation, gaslighting, and narcissism. You are allowed to reject the pressure to be “balanced” about your own survival.

Let them call you angry. Let them call you harsh. Let them call you unwilling to “see both sides.”

Because you know the truth: the person who freed themselves was never the problem. The person who finally told the story as it happened is not the villain. The person who stopped playing small for other people’s comfort is the one who ends the cycle.

Your clarity is not cruelty… it’s reclamation.

And it’s how the cycle finally breaks.

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Written by Vera Hart, MD, PhD.

This piece is part of my Healing from Within Series exploring trauma, nervous system truth, and the neuroscience of power. If it resonates, please feel free to restack with credit, share with someone who needs it, or follow me here on Substack. You can also find daily survivor insights and trauma neuroscience on Instagram @verahartmdphd.