r/CPTSD is not ready for this take so i am posting it here but having survived abuse and developed PTSD or CPTSD does not guarantee you are a morally good person or not an abuser. it is NUTS to me how often I see what essentially boils down to “I’m good because I got CPTSD from my abuse and therefore everything i do is ok, but people with NPD are bad, therefore if they were abused it’s inappropriate to call them survivors or show them any empathy about it.” Ironically enough i think this kind of mindset is very....well, abusive.
you definitely don’t owe your abuser sympathy on a personal level, like, it was wrong of my dad’s father to beat him with a belt, but you couldn’t pay me enough to give a fuck about his feelings because he’s a monster. that doesn’t mean i’m of the opinion that Everyone With NPD Is A Horrible Subhuman Undeserving of Sympathy (or even that he has it, bc the social worker who armchair diagnosed him when counseling me was a moron, but that’s another conversation). i just don’t care about my dad in particular.
like, idk, i understand the urge to draw sharp lines between victim (good) and abuser (bad), but it’s unhelpful. victims can also be abusers in certain relationships. everyone has the potential to be thoughtless and cruel and hurt other people, too. and as much as i agree on an EMOTIONAL level claiming that someone who was abusive is now Forever confined to the abuser category and ontologically evil and worthless is not helpful either. being told “you’re irredeemable human garbage” isn’t going to convince them to change their behavior, nor convince people who are unintentionally replicating abusive behaviors to examine themselves (because why would they, abusers are evil and they don’t think they’re evil). i don’t feel bad for abusers in that they made the choices they did, but it IS important that we as a society find ways to get them to stop doing that, and i don’t think this attitude works.
like i’m just tired of people being convinced that there’s something inherently more moral about them because they suffered abuse and then applying that in the most insanely shitty self-centered ways. sorry to say it but having CPTSD does not prove you’re a good person any more than a broken leg does. you still need to work on yourself. you’re still capable of wrong. literally everyone alive is.
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