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So often victims have spent decades suppressing their emotions and emotional needs to protect themselves, to protect their connection with their abuser, to allow themselves to function in the world.

Anger allows you to own your experience, provides motivation for stepping back from an abuser, and gives you the opportunity and space to work through your emotions.

Anger can help you recalibrate your understanding of your worth and divest yourself of taking responsibility for the abuser’s actions.

Anger and hate can be important tools for stepping out of sadness, validating that what happened was not okay and that I did not do anything wrong, and helping break emotional ties to an abuser.

Anger and hate can be a catalyst for change, for strength, for standing up, for making a difference. Anger is often a symptom that something is wrong, not a disease that needs to be excised.

Anger is not ‘bad’.

Anger is a natural, NORMAL response to abuse. Anyone who believes that no emotions other than ‘positivity’ should be acknowledged, or who believes that anger and pain demonstrate a defect of character, is not someone who can be supportive of your healing.

Anger is generally a sign that something is wrong; we need to listen to our anger.

(…assuming we are not struggling with certain personality disorders or cognition errors.)

Children are innately in tune with their emotions – with no filter, or judgment, about them – but children of abuse are shown over and over that their emotions don’t matter, that they’re inconvenient, that they cause mommy or daddy to hurt them, that they are bad, wrong, ugly, mean. That child’s sense of themselves is destroyed and is replaced by the parent.

Anger can help a child of abuse find their voice.

Anger can help a child of abuse find their ‘self’. Anger can help a child of abuse realize that they have a right to be safe, to protect themselves. Anger can help a child of abuse know they are more than the use they have to their abuser.

A normal person feels angry when they see a child being abused; and it is normal to feel that anger on our own behalf.

Our culture has a lot of well-meaning, but harmful ideas around forgiveness:

• You can’t heal if you don’t forgive the person who harmed you.
• Forgiveness creates healing, is the cause of healing.
• Forgive even, or especially, if the other person hasn’t asked for it, hasn’t expressed remorse, hasn’t attempted to make amends.
• You are choosing suffering and pain if you don’t forgive.

These ideas are completely antithetical to the healing process.

Underlying the exhortations to forgive is the idea that anger is bad; the oft quoted “holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die” is ridiculously interpreted to mean that no one should be angry, or allow themselves to feel anger, and that being angry ‘makes you responsible’ for your own misery.

It becomes, essentially, thought- and feeling-policing; anger and hate and fear are toxic, we should only act from (and feel!) love and joy; ‘negative’ emotions serve to disconnect us from others, and we choose to suffer. But it isn’t an act of love to allow someone to hurt others, it isn’t an act of connection to ignore the pain they cause, and there is no joy in suffering. And people who’ve been harmed can connect through their anger and fear.

It is an unwitting cult of self-negation that preaches that normal human emotions and responses are toxic in and of themselves. That you should accept the ‘negative’ actions of others, and forgive them, regardless of how they have harmed you, but never accept ‘negative’ emotions in yourself.

It is an ‘enlightened’ iteration of victim-blaming

…one in which a victim is told that they are responsible for their own pain because they ‘refuse to let go’, one that demands the victim to accept someone else’s perspective on their reality before that someone else is ever required to see or act from the victim’s perspective.

Additionally, telling people what they should feel and how they should feel is abusive because it is defining.

“Any statement that tells you what, who, or how you are, or what you think, feel, or want, is defining you and is, therefore, abusive….as if to say, ‘I’ve looked within you and now I’ll tell you what you want, feel.'” – r/VerbalAbuse

Forgiveness is a result of healing, not the cause.¹
Forgiveness is not a solution, it’s a process.²

The version of forgiveness being pushed is, in reality, unasked for absolution: intentional emotional amnesia that invalidates a victim’s experience.

Much of this particular paradigm around forgiveness is rooted in religious tradition, both Judeo-Christian and Buddhist. And yet, it wrongly interprets the Biblical model of forgiveness; it wrongly misinterprets the Buddhist concepts of “suffering” and pain.

Yet there is a reason that people subscribe so wholly to this mythology of forgiveness, a reason it is so enduring in spite of its harmful nature.

The reason is that we’ve mistaken forgiveness for compassion.

Compassion asks us to look at others and see, and acknowledge, their essential humanity.
Compassion asks us to look beyond a perpetrator’s actions, to the person.
Compassion asks us to treat them as human, and not an inscrutable monster.

Compassion doesn’t ask us to value someone else’s humanity and experience more than our own.
Compassion doesn’t ask us to justify/excuse/minimize a perpetrator’s actions because they are a human being.
Compassion doesn’t ask us to protect them from the consequences of their actions/choices.
Compassion doesn’t require a relationship with someone who has harmed us.
Compassion doesn’t demand we ignore ourselves, our experience, or the harm.
Compassion doesn’t demand that we ignore the perpetrator as an “unsafe” person.

And compassion doesn’t demand that we forgive

…though it might facilitate forgiveness, as it does accepting/letting go.

Compassion… asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. – Karen Armstrong

The issue with forgiveness comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of forgiveness and the process of healing. Here is how I personally clarify the issue of forgiveness:

• Forgiveness is a possible result of healing, not the result of healing. Basically, you can heal without forgiveness, and people who insist otherwise are mistaking cause-and-effect.
• Forgiveness requires the other party ask for forgiveness. What the forgiveness-pushers are really pushing is un-asked for absolution: “a freeing from blame or guilt; release from consequences, obligations, or penalties”. Additionally, it is impossible to genuinely and sincerely ask for forgiveness without attempting to make amends or restitution for those actions. It’s technically possible to ask for forgiveness without attempting to make amends or restitution, but it is a manipulation tactic without either of those elements.
• Forgiveness-pushers are also mistaking the concepts of “acceptance” and “letting go” for forgiveness. You do not have to forgive someone to accept what happened and let it go. For example, you can accept you were raped and let go of your pain from that rape and still go through with prosecution of the rapist. You do not have to forgive the rapist to accept what happened and move on.
• “Acceptance” and “letting go” are necessary for healing, however, people (1) do not understand that healing is a process and (2) these people mistake the effect of the healing process for the cause of the healing process. In order to accept what happened and let go of your pain, your experience needs to be validated. Anyone who demands you ‘let go’ of what happened so you can heal when what you need is validation of your experience, and support for that experience, is invalidating you and harming the healing process.
• Forgiveness is for the purpose of preserving relationships. If you decide, at a point along the healing process, that you want to maintain a relationship with someone who has harmed you, then forgiveness is necessary to move forward with that person at some future point. If you want a relationship with that person, at some point you have to move past what happened, because otherwise there really is no relationship, just contact that reinforces the harm. (Again, you do not have to have a relationship with an abuser or someone who has harmed you.) And how can you have a worthwhile relationship with someone if they never asked for your forgiveness, or apologized and tried to make it right?

The most important thing to remember about forgiveness and healing and acceptance and letting go is that healing is a process. You can’t insert A and get output B. I think of it like a continuum, and that healing is moving from one part of the continuum to the other. It is perfectly understandable to not be ready for something at one part of the continuum that you will be for at another part. Not being able to accept or let go of what happened now doesn’t mean you won’t be able to later, and you are not deficient for not being ready for that at the beginning.

People who push forgiveness forget the process they went through, and don’t understand the importance of that process, which is one reason why you see them push so hard. And they don’t understand that forgiveness and acceptance/letting go are not the same thing. They are only seeing a distorted part of the picture when trying to paint it for you.

The result of healing is not the cause of healing. And healing cannot begin until the harm has ended. How can you heal while the knife is in you?

Additional resources:

• u/SQLwitch explains true forgiveness and why we get it so wrong
• “I am prepared to forgive my enemies. But only when they cease to be my enemies.” – Primo Levi (regarding Holocaust Deniers)
• The misunderstood role of blame in healing and why you should blame your abuser
• “Forgiveness is giving up hope for a different past.” – Dan Siegel
• u/Polenicus’ gold standard explanation of how forgiveness is a result of healing, not the cause
• How I was able to forgive my father I wrote this before I got clear on the concept of forgiveness, so it really should be titled “How I Was Able To Accept What My Father Did and Let Go”
• An adult survivor’s guide to coping during the holidays, including the comments, is not directly about forgiveness but addresses the most important and unstated component of forgiveness which is to not abandon yourself
• My issues with forgiveness as enlightenment
• Concerning Foregiveness: The Liberating Experience of Painful Truth (via u/SQLwitch)
• Forgiveness and Letting Go
• The misunderstood role of blame in healing and why you should blame your abuser

You begin to realize that disagreements aren’t attacks, lacking boundaries isn’t empathy, and not amount of external validation can replace self-love.

Trauma bonding isn’t healing, ignoring your needs isn’t strength, people-pleasing isn’t kindness, staying in toxic situations isn’t loyalty, numbing your emotions isn’t coping, and suppressing emotions or staying silent doesn’t bring peace.

–mindtendencies2, via Facebook

“If you’re spending time with family during the holiday, remember this: it’s not everyone else’s holiday, it’s yours too.” – Nedra Tawwab

• An Adult Child Abuse Survivor’s Guide to the Holidays by Gracie Davis
• Beware of Tribal Shame
• How do healthy families work?
• The Truth About Forgiveness and Why Healing Doesn’t Require Forgiveness
• You Don’t Have to Ruin Your Holidays to Make An Abuser Happy
• When an abuser tries to hoover you back in during the holidays

What is love?

• Interpreting unconditional love to mean “no boundaries” creates optimal conditions for abuse
• What is “unconditional” love?
• The abusive person is not the only source of love in the world
• “Love, in whatever form, should not be a blank check. The expectation of gratitude is too often rooted in toxic power dynamics between the powerful who demand thanks and the marginalized that are expected to give it.” – Ana Maria Guay

Boundaries

• Ten Laws of Boundaries
• Types of Boundaries
• A lack of boundaries is often at the root of long-term abusive relationships
• How to Set Boundaries
• Festive Holiday Boundary Setting
• Know what boundaries are and what they are not
• “Setting a boundary usually doesn’t work unless there is a consequence along with the boundary.” – Michael Y. Simon
• “Giving reasons to unreasonable, difficult, manipulative people is like giving them ammunition for the fight they want to have with you about your boundaries and how you should not really have them.” – Jennifer Peepas, Captain Awkward
• “That’s like… BPD in a nutshell. ‘Your boundaries are judgements against me so you can’t have them.'” – u/wandmirk (source)
• “But those same rules do not apply to me. I’m entitled to my judgements, and they’re not bound by ‘fact’.” – u/dinosaurs_r_awesome (source)
• Setting Boundaries with Unreasonable People
• “I like to think about boundaries as the places where one individual’s personhood ends and another’s begins. That is, having good boundaries means having a clear understanding of the difference between your thoughts, feelings, and needs, and those of other people.” – Kai Cheng Thom
• “A common misconception about boundaries is that they are meant to keep people or feelings out. That’s far from the truth. Boundaries are there to show respect to yourself and others…key to earning and giving trust, which is the foundation of all healthy relationships.” – Alison Chrun
• “Only you have ultimate control over what you eat. Especially this time of year, friends and family may try to get you to eat things you normally would not eat or to eat more of something than you are comfortable eating. It is critical during this season to pay attention to your internal cues and personal decisions rather than the external pressures to eat.” – Laurie Conteh

Managing Holiday Triggers

• Tips for staying on the eating disorder recovery track throughout the holiday
• How to Cope With Holiday Triggers
• Managing Emotional Flashbacks
• Emotional Triggers (parenting perspective)
• 9 Tips for Coping With Holiday Blues and Stress (CAVEAT)
• 6 Ways to Reduce PTSD Stress During the Holidays (via Wayback Machine)
• Trauma and the Holidays: 3 Practices to Reclaim Your Experience

Relationships

• The Truth About Estrangement
• Do my parents have a right to see my children if they don’t love me? (via WaybackMachine)
• Are abusive parents entitled to a relationship with their children once they have ‘fixed’ their abusing/what led to their abusing?
• The 6 Awkward Holiday Conversations You’re Dreading, And How To Deal With Them
• “There’s good in him. I’ve felt it!”
• Grieving what you never had
• Singleness isn’t a problem to be solved
• Family Holidays with Bad Relatives
• And remember, narcissistic families blow up when family members show up.

Defining your own experience

• “I also think it’s perfectly appropriate to come to a point in one’s life where the long, difficult retraining of a vicious family member is just not something you want to undertake on your holiday.” – Emily Yoffe
• “People from fucked up families do not owe people from ‘normal’ families the performance of ‘normality’ or happiness, especially around the holidays.” – Jennifer Peepas, Captain Awkward
• “Guess what? Not everyone’s family is awesome and not everyone loves ‘the holidays’.” – Jennifer Peepas, Captain Awkward
• “People keep asking me if I’m going home for the holidays. I look around my apartment and think ‘This is my home.'” – PostSecret
• “Self-Differentiation. ‘I am different than you and you are different from me…’ Self-differentiation’s key ingredient is acceptance. . . acceptance that the people we are dealing with are broken and don’t recognize their own unhealthiness. The second piece of this equation is about boundaries. Going back to the first part of my definition of Self Differentiation, we have to remember that we are all separate and we get to keep our own power. No one can make us do anything! A lot of times we get very uncomfortable when we feel guilted or manipulated into doing something we didn’t want to do! When we stay true to what we want, what we are willing to do or not do, and remember that we get to choose how we respond to things, we feel less threatened because we are retaining our own power.” – Kathy Henry
• “This moment is not your life. This is just a moment in your life.” – Ryan Holiday
• If you absolutely have to have contact with your dysfunctional family, pretend you’ve sent them this for the holidays.
• If you need help setting boundaries, Grumpy Cat has you covered.

If you are stressed, overwhelmed, angry, or scared over the holiday, you can call a crisis help line/suicide hotline for someone to talk to. They will listen. They won’t judge. They will be there.

Abusive family dynamics often hinge on appearing like a ‘normal, happy’ family, and so the pressure is very high for a victim/scapegoat/blacksheep to ‘play their part’ for the holidays. This typically requires that the victim completely ignore the actions of the abusive family members, their own pain, and the soul-anguish emptiness they feel in realizing that they don’t have family.

See also:

• u/ breakfastpotato’s Don’t rock the boat
• The Missing Stair by Cliff Pervocracy
• “I really hate the culture of guilting good people instead of holding the bad ones accountable because it’s easier to do so.” – u/hummingelephant, excerpted
• “I feel like the whole, ‘You’re right but you could have handled this better’ can be a kind of ‘don’t rock the boat’.”
• You aren’t the cause of the rift
• “You are experiencing an extinction burst. You said ‘no’. Now the group of people who have become accustomed to ignoring your ‘no’ are amping up the abuse, because if they overwhelm you into apologizing, they can go back to using you…”

People like to think that being polite and respectful to people who treat them like shit means they’re being the bigger person, when in reality it means they’re being a doormat and are encouraging the other person to treat more people like shit.

Don’t be civil towards uncivil people…

–u/Recent-Stretch4123, excerpted

u/Polenicus

Forgiveness is a result of healing, not the cause.
Amends can speed healing.

“Forgiveness” has become a kind of polluted concept. It used to be something you sought and earned. Now, in many cases, it’s expected of you, as something the person who has wronged you is entitled to, by virtue of having wronged you in the first place. Them committing a crime against you obligates you to them.

There is a mystique that has sprung up around forgiveness. That somehow it will heal the wounds caused by the person who has inflicted them, even if they do not change, and that if you forgive someone enough, it can even magically redeem them. That the sooner and faster you forgive someone, the sooner you can bask in this healing boon.

There is no magical healing power of forgiveness. It is a natural part of the road to healing, yes, but it comes after our wounds are healed, and we are entitled to all the rage and anger and sorrow that comes before. Forgiveness is not absolution. Forgiveness is a result of healing, not the cause.

Amends can speed the healing. Amends can have this almost magical effect society ascribes to forgiveness. If someone who has wronged you acknowledges what they have done, expresses regret, and makes real efforts to change their ways, it can soothe even the worst wounds, mend broken families. This is something on those who wrong us can do, and true amends are rare.

But, it’s gotten all turned around somehow. They put the burden on the victim, to somehow forgive the crime away, to redeem their abuser, and they are looked down on when they can’t or won’t.

u/Issendai

We’re often trapped by our virtues, not our vices.

“…if you’re stuck and trying to figure out what’s keeping you in, remember that people rarely get stuck because of their vices. They’re usually caught by their virtues.”

–from Qualities That Keep You in a Sick System

Missing-Missing Reasons

Posts in estranged parents’ forums are vague. Members recount stories with the fewest possible details, the least possible context. They don’t recreate entire scenes, repeat entire conversations, give entire text exchanges; they paraphrase hours of conversation away. The only element they describe in detail is their own grief or rage. Nor do the other members press them for more information.

Compare this with the forums for adult children of abusers, where the members not only cut-and-paste email exchanges into their posts, they take photos of handwritten letters and screenshot text conversations. They recreate scenes in detail, and if the details don’t add up, the other members question them about it. They get annoyed when a member’s paraphrase changes the meaning of a sentence, or when omitted details change the meaning of a meeting. They care about precision, context, and history.

The difference isn’t a matter of style, it’s a split between two ways of perceiving the world. In one worldview, emotion is king. Details exist to support emotion. If a member gives one set of details to describe how angry she is about a past event, and a few days later gives a contradictory set of details to describe how sad she is about the same event, both versions are legitimate because both emotions are legitimate.

Context is malleable because the full picture may not support the member’s emotion. If a member adds details that undermine her emotion, the other members considerately ignore them.

Emotion creates reality.

In the second worldview, reality creates emotion. Members want the full picture so they can decide whether the poster’s emotions are justified. Small details can change the entire tenor of a forum’s response; members see a distinction between “She said I’m worthless” and “She said something that made me feel worthless.” Members recognize that unjustified emotions (like supersensitivity due to trauma, or irritation with another person that colors the view of everything the person does) are real and deserve respect, but they also believe that unjustified emotions shouldn’t be acted on. They show posters different ways to view the situation and give advice on how to handle the emotions. In short, they believe that external events create emotional responses, that only some responses are justified, that people’s initial perceptions of events are often flawed, and that understanding external events can help people understand and manage emotions.

The first viewpoint, “emotion creates reality,” is truth for a great many people. Not a healthy truth, not a truth that promotes good relationships, but a deep, lived truth nonetheless. It’s seductive. It means that whatever you’re feeling is just and right, that you’re never in the wrong unless you feel you’re in the wrong. For people whose self-image is so battered and fragile that they can’t bear anything but validation, often it feels like the only way they can face the world.

–excerpted from Missing-Missing Reasons

Assistance v. Enabling

“Assistance is what you give someone when they’re ready to get help. Enabling is what you give someone to keep them from hitting rock bottom.” –comment

u/dankoblamo

Definition of Respect

“Respect is when you treat something that matters like it matters, and disrespect is when you treat something that matters like it doesn’t matter.”

(updating)

…versus social support (help from others), self-esteem (learned belief that you can ‘help’ yourself and effectively act on your own behalf), and coping strategies (direct ways to help yourself)

Feeling helpless can magnify the impact of trauma.

See: Which Factors Mitigate the Effects of Childhood Trauma? to contrast helplessness as a “trauma multiplier” and social support (help from others), self-esteem (learned belief that you can ‘help’ yourself and effectively act on your own behalf), and coping strategies (direct ways to help yourself)

How the phrase “take responsibility” makes you feel.

When you are in the early stages of your healing process, that’s going to feel horribly invalidating. It feels like someone is ‘blaming’ you for the abuse you experienced, which is unfair.

ESPECIALLY SINCE WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR SOMEONE ELSE’S ABUSE OF US.

A lot of the self-help stuff at this point, in general, is just going to be hugely triggering:

• “You define your own self-worth!”
• “Your response determines how much something hurts you.”
• “You are choosing and creating your reality.”
• “You can decide not to live this way and experience this pain whenever you want.”
• “You don’t have to be sad, just look at everything in the world to be happy about! You’re alive, right??”

Like hot damn, NO, guys. No.

We say this shit to people who are just figuring out what’s happening to them, are in emotional crisis, and (it can feel to them) like we are telling them that they are responsible for their own pain.

Meanwhile, they are struggling with all the pain and hurt they have endured, all the confusion they’ve been dealing with, and often reconstructing their sense of reality and what happened.

This is the wrong tool for this stage of healing.

What someone in this early stage of the process needs is emotional support and validation. We really need to honor that this is a process, and that we all go through it at one point or another. Now, it is completely fair to not be able to support someone at this stage of the process. Truly this is what a good therapist is for, to support someone as they go through their emotions and thoughts and triggers, and exhaustively discusses the minutia of everything that happened.

Recognizing where we are at is so important.

ESPECIALLY since there’s a point where all of this becomes empowering. THAT’S when you know that you are farther along in your healing process. When stuff like this no longer makes you feel pain but power:

• “You define your own self-worth!”
• “Your response determines how much something hurts you.”
• “You are choosing and creating your reality.”
• “You can decide not to live this way and experience this pain whenever you want.”
• “You don’t have to be sad, just look at everything in the world to be happy about! You’re alive, right??”

Like, YES, I get to define my own self-worth! I get to be the person whose opinions matter most to me! I get to choose and create my own reality! Often starting with who else I allow in with me. I get to decide I don’t want to live this way anymore, that I am over it, and I get to walk away! I can shift my emotional state by focusing on awesome stuff! I don’t have to be sad anymore!

Suddenly it’s response-ability instead of responsibility.

It doesn’t feel fault-oriented!

I totally get why we respond to in-crisis victims with this.

Because we’ve reached this place after going through so much pain and hurt, and we so empathize with someone else who is going through it. But we have to respect that healing and recovery is a process. We go through the experience so we can make our own internal shifts. Our growth happens in stages.

Being goal-oriented doesn’t respect the process.

There is so much value in experiencing the validation of our pain experience. That, yes, we were victimized and it was not okay. And maybe we begin to allow ourselves to experience anger on our own behalf, which maybe we haven’t done until now. That’s so, so important. We need our anger. It lets us know something is wrong. And for many of us finally begins to allow us to center ourselves in our own experience.

Which is so important, because a lot of abuse is about centering the abuser at the expense of ourselves.

And then someone blithely comes along with “being angry is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die”. Knock. it. off. self-help. people. It’s well-intentioned but comes from a lack of understanding of the healing process.

Can someone get ‘stuck’ in being a victim? Absolutely. Is that necessarily our business? Probably not. And will they ever be able to grow past that stage if their experience isn’t validated? It’s more unlikely.

Some people do use the ‘victim’ phase to meet their emotional need for attention and caregiving from others.

And they get stuck in that stage. And it’s perfectly okay to recognize that and not want to be coerced into providing that. That’s good boundaries! Recognizing where we are at and what we want to consent to participate in!

But we also don’t get to dictate to them their healing journey.

It’s hard and there are a lot of factors and nuances, definitely. But the core piece of healthy behaviors and choices and actions is recognizing that we all are living our own lives and on our own journey.

I really do feel like the process is the point.