And that’s something that victims of abuse in the early stages of their journey are drowning for from the person who abused them.
When you see advice along the lines of “only you can give yourself closure”, it can evoke a rage response. Because it feels so deeply unfair and because when we are on the early stage of our healing journey, it feels like that if only the abuser would apologize and take responsibility for what they’ve done and make amends, then we would be healed.
And it isn’t true.
In over a decade I have never seen, not once, an abuser apologize to a victim in a way that healed them. The response tends to be “How could you do this to me?? How could you do this??”
It doesn’t provide closure, it actually opens things up more.
And there is nothing the other person can really say or do, because the victim is still in the healing stage. Theoretically speaking, the abuser could try over and over to make amends and show up and ‘prove themselves’ but I’ve never seen that work because it tends to make the unhealed victim angrier.
“Where was this before? This means that you could have been better but you weren’t.”
Honestly, it is only a in healed state that the actions of a perpetrator won’t continue to harm the victim…which leads me back to the concept that an abuser can’t provide an unhealed victim closure, there is nothing the abuser can really do to ‘heal’ the victim; it’s an internal process.
And there’s a part of me that used to hate that this was true
…and I know a lot of victims of abuse who rail against it and hold on to that idea: that if the abuser apologizes and accepts responsibility for the harm they perpetrated against us, then we would be healed.