Post-Traumatic Growth: The Life Changing Art of Thanking Your Abuser
If you didn’t know, I’m a book publisher for a living. A few months ago I was working on a project about PTSD by a psychologist in San Francisco. His father—who was likely suffering from wartime PTSD — had been various forms of abusive to his family. When he was almost 30-years old, my client was watching TV in his childhood home when his father shot his mother in the next room and then shot himself. Through his harrowing story, he traces the history of PTSD and its associated diagnoses, as well as his personal experience overcoming the grief of his parents’ murder-suicide and other traumatic events in his life. Some of his suggestions and conclusions are what inspired this post—namely the radical suggestion that one practice radical acceptance of abusive people.
I’m going to take his advice one step further and say one can thank the abusive people in your life (once they are at a safe distance, of course). This post1 is how I synthesized what I learned while working on his book.
Is it better to have been abused than to never have been abused at all?
Just because you have never experienced emotional or physical abuse doesn’t mean you have never been abused. One of the most fascinating aspects of the trauma cycle—abused people abusing people—is that there is often a lack of presence in not just one but both parties. While the abuser is usually re-enacting something they underwent during childhood, their victim is usually in a state of disbelief, constantly rationalizing and unable to see the situation for what it is: “No, they really love me!”
In this way, it is only by actively allowing oneself to experience the abuse that people can leave these toxic relationships and begin the process of post-traumatic growth. Otherwise, we stop developing out of fear. We make excuses for our abuser because to accept the reality would be to accept that it’s time to leave the relationship. And that’s painful. And we don’t like pain.
Like most things, abuse is a spectrum. While there are certain extremely undeniables—physical violence, routine psychological manipulation— there’s also just the confusing and often unchecked interaction between two people with their different stories and hurts. This part of the spectrum can perhaps just be called “abusive behavior” or “abusive dynamics.” My partner and I often admit to one another that some of our behavior in past relationships could be considered abusive. Abuse, like all violence, is always caused by an inability to communicate. When Marley or I experience what feels like abusive treatment from one another we are (often but not always) able to say, “What’s really going on? What are you trying to say because this behavior is unkind and is not what we put up in this relationship.” This is usually enough to snap us out of it and think about what underpins our behavior.
Many people exist in relationships that I would consider abusive, but if their benchmarks are different than mine, they can persist for a lifetime with these partners. That’s okay! It is the discovering of your benchmarks—what you can and want to put up with—that enables you to make for yourself relationships that feed and inspire you rather than stunt and damage you.
What’s really going on?
Stop making excuses. And just for a moment, stop being afraid of the future. When you empty your mind of any false commitments, any societal pressures, and any personal insecurities, you might be able, just for a second, to truly experience your partner, your friends, and your family who you suspect are being abusive (or just hurtful). There is a good chance you will feel something like “Oh, so and so are acting in a way that kind of hurts me but I see that they mean well and are actively dealing with their issues. I can put up with this for a time because I love them and being human is hard!” But you also might feel something like, “I can’t really sense that this person actually cares for me, nor does it feel like they are aware of and working on their issues. I feel like I’m their emotional punching bag. I deserve better.”
At that point, you have a choice—depending on how much gas you have left in your tank for this person. If you want to continue a relationship with them, it’s time for a boundary; it’s time to explain you won’t stand for them using you to relive their past. If they can’t do that, you can leave. You have given them a chance, you no longer owe them anything.
The gratitude for abusers comes in the fact that going forward with this realization, these once victims are usually more discerning about who they give their time and energy to. They stand up and protect themselves, and understand that they are the arbiters of what they want to put up with, not someone else. That skill is what we are thankful for.
Getting Out and Getting Aware
When I was in my late-20s I was in what I consider to be a psychologically abusive marriage. It got so bad I filed for divorce and abandoned a whole storyline I had invested myself in. While my partner was dealing with her history, I would not say she was dealing with it well; she was re-enacting her trauma with me nearly every day. I couldn’t grasp what was going on in my life anymore, I couldn’t tell what was real. I felt like I was going insane. I was thinking and behaving in ways that were not kind or sane. Something was wrong. It was painful, but I found my benchmark. I realized what I was capable of putting up with and that boundary was broken irreparably.
A couple of years later, I was walking through the forest in Cambridge, England with M, a Persian dentist I was falling in love with and who is probably reading this post [I’m going to write about our love story in a future post]. She asked about my marriage. I began talking about how mean my ex was and how badly I was mistreated. I was probably still experiencing some PTSD but I was not yet actively experiencing any post-traumatic growth. M told me that I shouldn’t speak badly of my ex, I should be grateful for what she taught me, and that it lead me to this point in time, on a nice forest walk with her.
It was such a seemingly simple observation that nonetheless flipped a very important switch in my head. I began to see the connections between the nodes in my life, and I began the conscious act of post-traumatic growth. That growth is not just healing or feeling better after a traumatic experience— it was thanking someone I once blamed. I thank her for teaching me what I’m willing and unwilling to put up with, I thank her for forcing me to rebuild my spine, and for showing me that I need to be more discerning with who I give my heart to. I thank her for revealing the parts of me that are abusive, have the potential to become abusive, and what parts have the potential to be taken advantage of and abused.
A few years later at a hotel in Florida, my now life partner Marley asked what was at the core of my bad mood. I told her my ex-wife was on my mind—I was wondering where she was, what she was doing, I was wondering if she was happy, I was angry at her. Marley told me to let my ex into the room, not to push her out and be resentful. She asked me to give love to my wound—to say “I’m sorry, thank you, I love you, I forgive you”. We held one another beneath the sheets and I lay between Marley’s legs imagining she was my ex-wife. It didn’t take long for the tears to come up in me as I held Her and mumbled through broken breath: “I love you so much, I understand. I’m sorry. I love you so much, I understand. I’m sorry, thank you.”
In one fell swoop, I not only jettisoned tons of baggage I had been carrying around—swinging in the faces of all my new partners—but I also found a new benchmark for how I wanted to be treated. I was finally able to love again without fear of pain. Marley was able to hold space for my past and my pain, she experienced me without ego, she let us just be two souls trying to figure it out.
These two healing events (to be specific: the wisdom and care I received from two women, M and Marley) showed me that while getting out of a bad relationship is an important first step, turning that experience into something positive, something to be grateful for, is a whole other process on the way to becoming whole again. Traumatic events are fracturing, you have got to find a way to put yourself back together again.
And it’s frightening because abuse is often so crushing that people never get out of the hole it digs for them. They identify with the pain so hard (I did) that the idea of ever throwing the pain overboard is more frightening than death.
Second-Hand Abuse Helps Too
The unfortunate thing about post-traumatic growth is that you usually learn one very specific sort of lesson, but this still leaves you to be abused in other realms. For instance, someone in a physically abusive relationship might set that benchmark, but then leave themselves open for psychological abuse. That’s why it’s important to listen to victims.
A friend of mine’s friend who was a famous musician was recently canceled for grooming young girls from 16 years old to 18 and eventually marrying one and then being abusive in the relationship. My friend wouldn’t believe it. “But he’s so nice! He’s only ever been nice to me!” In another similar event, this show on Showtime called Couples Therapy featured a woman whose dad had been abusive and violent as a kid but was no longer violent. Her husband was friends with his father-in-law and it came out that this really troubled her—to see her husband befriending her abusive father. Her husband would say, “I don’t know, he has always been a such nice guy to me!”
To both these men I would say, “Of course they were nice to you, you nimrods: you are men, not women in an unfair power dynamic. Why or how would they ever be abusive to you?” Abusive people rarely abuse everyone, they abuse people who they can, which is almost always people who rely on them financially or otherwise. Very few interns abuse their bosses. . . .
I’ve been alongside Marley while she engages with abusive behavior from her family and friends. Our conversations about how to navigate them often result in me setting all sorts of new benchmarks I didn’t even know were there. The tactics and crazy-making communication style of narcissists and hurt people impresses and frightens me every day. It’s up to you to decide what you’ll put up with.
The ability to abuse one person but then be shining examples of grace and ease in the presence of others is eerie, but it’s this shapeshifting which maintains walls of silence around abusers. Abusers are usually very kind folks to the people in their lives that could actually hold them accountable.
In Closing
While part of me feels bad for mean or abusive people—because they are so clearly in pain— I feel worse for people that don’t see abuse anywhere. Some don’t accept that some people are truly abusive, and therefore they put up with anything because anything goes. They let themselves and their friends and family be abused in plain sight. Perhaps, try to be truly present with the way power is used, wielded, and manipulated. Are you okay with what you see? You don’t have to be.
The sad reality is that our society has turned some mental sickness into acceptable character traits. These traits are often (especially for men) beneficial to getting ahead in society. The asshole CEOs who throw things when they are angry or mistreat employees on the regular are not mere “assholes,” they are hurt people hurting people. Your “bitch” mother-in-law is traumatized and was never given the tools to express her hurt in a productive way.
Thank God that era of blindness seems to be ending. Thank God PTSD is now a household acronym I don’t even have to explain. That wasn’t the case even a few years ago and that is so damned exciting for the healing of humanity.2
Radically accept that some people can’t help but hurt the people closest to them. Radically accept that in most cases, you can’t help them so you’ve got to help yourself. Today is a glorious day to leave a relationship that does not serve you.
You deserve the best.
As usual, this post comes with a picture of my son and a picture of my breakfast. Both also on Instagram.
I’ve gotta say, I’m not feeling confident about this post. I feel like I have some huge blindspot, or like I don’t have the right or qualifications to be writing about this. I don’t know why I felt the need to include this footnote but I also couldn’t press publish without calling out this feeling. I stand by everything I’m saying, but I feel like maybe I should put it in a song or a poem instead. Maybe you can for me in the comments.
Of course, many indigenous peoples knew about the unconscious and trauma and how to engage with it meaningfully, but we were too busy being civilized to learn from them. We had to wait for Sigmund Freud to do a bunch of cocaine and pontificate and then wait over half a century while we picked apart his work and focussed on the good parts.
Thank you for this post x