as small as a world and as large as alone

7:31am June 18, 2014

madeofpatterns:

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madeofpatterns:

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stimmyabby:

stimmyabby:

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stimmyabby answered your question:Has anyone actually been helped, personally, by…

No, but I’ve been helped by reading blog posts that said that. I think it’s more useful as part of a two-part answer.

IME it’s helpful in the context of “it…

how so? actively unhelpful or just not helpful?

actively unhelpful. because… I’m trying to think how to put this…

hurting people is inevitable. people you love will hurt you unintentionally. there’s a difference between a relationship where you sometimes hurt each other by accident, and sometimes intentionally when angry  (every relationship regardless of functionality) and a relationship where you frequently hurt each other both by accident and intentionally (dysfunctional, maybe abuse) and a relationship where one person intentionally and unintentionally hurts the other disproportionately, probably in an attempt to control them (abuse)

and those all can create a situation where someone needs to leave or needs help, but they have to be handled very, VERY differently, ESPECIALLY in the context of child abuse where there are additional barriers to leaving due to legal issues. and conflating them is harmful because it encourages people not to try to figure out what’s going on and treat it appropriately. and saying “don’t worry about which it is” can be harmful, depending on the specific situation. It can also be helpful though, which is where I’m not sure how to approach this.

i need to think about this a LOT

I don’t really know how to handle it. Because like I said it can cause problems to encourage people not to think about it. But it can also cause problems when people are worrying about it intensely. And it’s very hard to say, this relationship is abusive, or this relationship is not abusive, from the outside a lot of the time, depending on what kind of abuse is taking place. Because there are things that are definitely, always wrong, but then there are so many other things that are situational, and there can be situations where all the people involved are doing things that are very definitely wrong and not in self defense, either.

And, like, if they want to leave or have already left and are feeling guilty, then it probably isn’t important. But it matters if they’re trying to decide whether to go into relationship counseling. And it matters when you’re dealing with kids in family services of various kinds. And it can definitely matter when deciding whether to let someone back into your life, whether they were hurting you out of reasonable ignorance, or because someone else manipulated them into it, or you were both hurting each other, or they were hurting you because they wanted to control you. Which isn’t necessarily a perfect map to abuse/not abuse, but is related.

I do think that, most of the time, if the question has actually come up the answer is yes. (There are abusers who will say they were abused, but my impression is that they are rarely uncertain about it. This might be wrong.) But not all of the time.

all good points

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