random, but I think the way people talk about abusers as hypercompetent, calculating manipulators that Know exactly what they’re doing makes it easier for people to get into abusive relationships
The people who abused me prolly had no idea what the fuck they were doing. It was still bad! I still don’t regret buggin out!! But I don’t think they had a secret wall covered in red string linking notes like “How to fuck up this person specifically”. Pretty sure they were in their own bubble the whole damn time, actually, and yeah, that does make it harder to recognize or get out of
This is one of several reasons it really bothers me to hear about “abusers” in the context of like…a distinct class of people, or an immutable identity. I feel like I see that a lot online, this idea that Abusers are uniquely bad people who can be neatly identified, ostracized, and avoided.
My aunt does not know she’s an abusive mother to my cousin and is rather in deep denial about it. Like deep enough she’s cut me off from her family for trying to start a conversation about it.
My abusive exes did not know they were abusing me in our intimate relationships. Again, one is in very deep denial, another feels fully justified in her shitty treatment of me, and learned these behaviours from her own mother. She’s very likely continuing these behaviours in her own family to this day.
And I had to learn to dismantle the bad habits I learned from them and enacted unintentionally. It took working with therapists to do this and I’m still hyper-aware of crossing the line without meaning to.
Cycles of abuse perpetrate because people aren’t always aware of whether their actions are abusive or not, whether through ignorance, learned behaviours or simple denial or some combination of the above.
And when the language and idea of abuse is wrapped up in this perfect villain easy to recognise rhetoric, it puts makes it easier for people to push the term aside and say “no, that can’t be me, im not like that.” It makes it easy to deny because there’s this preconceived notion. It’s the same as thinking all rapists are bad men in black hiding in bushes to grab women. Or that it’s “only real domestic violence if they’re in hospital” (which i have sadly heard from a real woman’s mouth while on jury duty for a DV trial).
Its not reality and the image actively harms victims and enables perpetrators and stops people from realising what they’re doing, the effects of their behaviours and making meaningful and long term changes.
My dad and I once had a disagreement over him using the adage “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
I said, “That’s just not true. Sometimes what doesn’t kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized.”
He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, “It’s like wood glue.”
He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, “Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?”
I did.
“But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn’t hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we’d never fixed them at all. You’ve got to give these things time to set.”
It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that’s not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.
So my dad and I agreed, what doesn’t kill you doesn’t actually make you stronger, but healing does. And if you feel like healing hasn’t made you stronger than you were before, you’re probably not done healing. You’ve got to give these things time to set.
ALT
