[Ecce Homo]

Hmm. I see what you’re saying. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with me Apollia. I love the balanced way you see this question.

In my experience, I can’t be a victim unless I decide to interpret events in my life's story that way. In fact, now that I look back on my life, I’ve never been a victim, even though I grew up in a household that others might consider as “abusive”. For instance, my father hit me. Ok. That, for me, would be a fact of my past. Now, in the golden olden days, I interpreted that fact to also "be" abuse and I unwittingly took on the feelings of righteous indignation and moral outrage, not to mention years of depression that I thought I was supposed to feel having been a “victim” of “abuse”.

I love that my father hit me and I love that I used to think of myself as a victim and him as an abuser. It gave me a great opportunity to see for myself what leads to joy and what does not, both in terms of my father’s actions as well as my own actions and beliefs. I learned so much from my childhood! My father turned out to be my perfect teacher and I love him for that!

(DISCLAIMER: By no longer thinking of myself as a victim of abuse, I am not condoning, or labeling the action of hitting children, as morally good, nor would I recommend it as a parenting strategy. That’s not my point, just in case anyone reading this thinks that. It seems to be the conclusion a lot of people jump to when you move away from using words like “victim” and “abuse” to describe an experience, as in, “I must be condoning child abuse if I don’t label my fathers actions as abusive nor feel the requisite moral outrage.” That would most definitely not be true. The fact is, I would NEVER condone acts that can be considered as unkind and unloving.)

Having thought of myself as a victim in the past, I understand that we are all doing the best we can with the information we have. I for one would not use the word “victim” to put someone else down. That’s certainly not how I intended my post, although I can see how others might read it that way. In a very real sense, that first paragraph I typed describing what victims might believe was actually me typing about my former beliefs. Those are the things I believed once upon a time and I suffered for years as a result. But I don’t put myself down for believing those things. I understand that I was doing the best I knew how to do for myself. Like I said before, when we know better, we do better. In the meantime, we’re all doing what we can to be happy.