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Abuse is Like Being Handed a Weapon You Can’t Put Down
The thing about it is, it’s non-refundable. Fully transferable, but absolutely non-refundable.
Abuse is a weapon you can’t put down. Once you’ve experienced it, you’ve been handed a weapon that you can’t remove from your hands.
This is the most jagged pill we have to swallow. We don’t want to believe we’re holding a weapon we didn’t ask for and that we can’t release.
People become perpetrators of abuse—either a carbon copy of the abuse they sustained or a responsive outline—specifically because they don’t want to accept that they’re holding a weapon.
It’s not inevitable that we repeat abuse.
Others See the Weapon You Don’t
When you’re carrying around a weapon, you look scary to other people. Especially if you appear as if you don’t know what you’re doing with it.
When you’re firing off from cylinders you don’t realize are toxic, or even present, people will move away from you and it may confuse you.
People who’ve sustained abuse can find themselves in a relationship hole; they can’t seem to find or form healthy ones and don’t fully understand how other people do.
This hole is often dug by the weapon they don’t know they’re holding.
‘Hurt people hurt people,’ is an accusatory statement. As if hurt people only ever act of their hurt. The concept of an abused person struggling with emotional regulation, not identifying and expressing their needs clearly, and engaging in learned toxic behaviors, is reduced to a matter of fact—hurt people hurt people.
And to some degree it’s true, which can be hard to accept. Because the last thing a hurt person needs to hear is that they’re hurting other people.
The Weight of Responsibility
Cycles of abuse persist because once a person has been harmed, and especially when there has been no…
