I know it's late but I'm cranky & gotta get this out (again):

I've never met someone (& I've met many due to my work+life) who's been abusive who hasn't had REASONS for their behaviors & traumas/pain undergirding their actions.

STILL DOESN'T MAKE IT OKAY TO ABUSE {thread, CW}

Like, the most basic (& bad) idea of abuse is "oh wow they're monsters."

Then you dig & see: "oh they're not monsters & there's often pain beneath their abuse!"

But then people still have this fake binary of "tortured, empathetic abusers" & "monstrous, callous abusers."

Someone isn't SPECIAL for having endured traumas or experiences that manifested in the form of patterns of control & harm. That's BASICALLY MOST IF NOT ALL ABUSERS, Y'ALL. If you're like "oh but this person did this out of PAIN"—yeah that's HOW IT WORKS?! Still not justifiable.

Understandable? Maybe, yeah!

Useful to figure out how to help them modify or challenge behaviors? Totally!

Valuable to create community change efforts? Absolutely!

An excuse to ignore harm caused? Nope.

If someone's trauma reactions or neurodivergence or w/e in a relationship keep repeatedly manifesting as controlling, as dismissive, as bulldozing boundaries, as retaliatory, as belittling, as dysregulated, etc... guess the fuck what—THAT CAN STILL BE ABUSIVE BEHAVIOR.

So much of the violence we perpetrate is DEEPLY INTERGENERATIONAL & full of *learned, community-spread behaviors.*

This is part of why it's a community issue when abuse happens, not just an individual matter!

We all have duties to e/o to foster kind, respectful relationships.

Anyway. That's also why we need nuanced understandings of how abuse works & why people perpetrate various ways. Abuse doesn't need to be this...cold masterminded shit; it just needs to be a pattern of harm and control toward another person that fucks with their agency/worth/etc.

And those are patterns we can learn to intervene and disrupt! Those are patterns we can learn to talk about and untangle! And support people on both sides of the abuse equation so we can foster safer, more collaborative communities!