The last post we put up was all about trauma and how our responses to trauma don't need to be pathologies or treated as abnormal. Now, whenever I share something around that what I tend to get one or two people responding by saying or asking, well what about when those behaviors become abusive? Now, the behaviors or the responses, the responses that are shared in the last post in and of themselves aren't abusive.
Now, that doesn't mean that sometimes abuse doesn't happen by people who were also having these responses. And so this is where it gets a little bit complicated and messy and confusing. Where I try to come in to talking about behaviors being normal human responses is from a place where we're not talking about the times where harm has been done or abuse is being perpetuated. Abuse is never okay. Never. And even if we can see that abuse has stemmed from a pattern of behaviors or responses that in themselves were responses to other traumas, that they had themselves experienced, it still doesn't make it okay. We can maybe understand the behavior more, but it doesn't mean it's a justification for that behavior.
The reason that I try to normalize the responses without assuming that harm has been done is because mental health, all areas of mental health, all areas of trauma, tend to be stigmatized. There's a stigma put on the responses within trauma responses and there's a stigma put on many mental health conditions, where people assume that having a mental health condition or mental health challenge or living with trauma will lead that person to being harmful. Now, don't get me wrong, we all do harm We all hurt people. We do. And having a mental health condition or living with complex trauma doesn't mean that you necessarily become an abuser. It doesn't. It gets really complicated because sometimes we might know might have had an abuser who has, say for example, one of the first things on the list that I've read in the previous post was addiction.
Now, we might have had an abuser who had an addiction and so it's understandable that we then maybe couple addiction with abuse because that was our experience of that person and that is how we saw that, that was one of the factors in their abuse, and it's a trigger for us, and it's something that is very much within the story of our abuse. I say this as someone who with that experience. And having that addiction doesn't necessarily mean that that person is going to become abusive. There will be other people who have a similar addiction who haven't gone on to perpetuate the harm that that abuser did. And so yes, while it it might be very difficult to pull apart the narrative of how that addiction was apart of that abuse, it also doesn't necessarily mean that it's that addiction that caused it.
It doesn't necessarily mean that every addiction causes someone to become an abuser. And so where I where I try to normalize the responses is from that place before we before any of them become abusive to other people or to ourselves. Because the response in and of itself is a human response, is a form of us trying to survive some how .If then us trying to survive leads to abusing another person then that's no tokay, and I will never advocate for that. And then in that case, well I mean it will be very different case-by-case how then we respond to that. Abuse is never okay and I will never sit here and say abuse is okay.
Ever. It isn't okay. And it can have hugely painful and life-altering impacts and so I will never say that continuing abuse is an okay thing to do even if we can understand some of the root causes or some of the past traumas that have factored into the continuation of abuse cycles. It still doesn't make it okay. Ever. We're each responsible for our behaviors and yes we will all do harm, and we are all then responsible and accountable to make repair when we do that harm. And where that harm becomes abusive that's a whole thing in and of itself.
But having mental health challenges, problems, conditions, however we want to define that, living with and living with complex trauma, which isn't only a mental health condition, which is why don't separate this, because as we'll talk about in more videos I'm sure, trauma is a whole body experience, but when we live with these experiences, we don't want to be as a culture putting labels on to those onto people who live with complex trauma and mental health challenges that they're response, their natural human responses and behaviors are necessarily perpetuating harm.
And this is where the stigma comes in because a lot of the time we see someone who, maybe someone really high-profile, I'm not going to name names here because that is, I'm not going to I'm not going to get into that, but we see someone real high-profile who is causing so much harm maybe on global scales, and then someone throws in, oh well they must be and then, insert mental health condition, they must have, insert mental health condition. And that's not okay because to assume, they might have that mental health condition, they might, but that condition hasn't isn't necessarily only factor in the harm that they are causing, in the abuse that they are doing. We are complex beings. We are all complex.
We all have responses, whether they get put into the boxes of labels of mental health conditions or trauma responses or whether people are allowed to just claim them as human, which my hope is that we can do that more and more, where we then assume that that response is doing harm is where the stigma continues. And, like I say, I understand that this is so complex. And if you read about responses to trauma, for example, and some of those have been part of your experience with abuse and part of some of your experiences in terms of the other person abusing you and what they lived with, it can be really really difficult to not just put them all together.
What I'm trying to do is to say okay we actually as humans, we can understand that we can unravel these things and we can sit with complex information and we can sit with the both and of this, that yes someone can be abusive while having these natural human responses, and for some people there might be really many linked, and for other people they're having these human responses and they don't turn into abusers. And that can be true as well. What I always try to do in my writing and what I will be doing here is to allow us to be in the complexity of all of that, to not label people as one thing instantly because this other person ,because that's how it played out the other person. We are all complex beings and we get to be in the nuance of our experiences. And if those experiences do the lead to abuse, that isn't okay. It's not okay. And I will say it again and again, I've said it so many times now .It isn't okay that you were abused. It isn't okay if you are abusing other people.
And if you're not abusing other people and you're having natural human responses to trauma, you don't have to assume that those responses are abusive. We get to be accountable and we get toex amine our behaviors and we should. And let's take the stigma away. Let's take the stigma away before we start the conversation and if it turns out that actually the stigma was correct in one case, well okay it was correct in one case, but it wasn't in every case. Where I want us... Bringing a post like I did in the last post isn't to make abuse okay. It's not to normalize abuse. It really was there to say, it wasn't actually talking about where those behaviors factor in to abuse, it was talking about the initial response in and of itself before that actually impacts anybody else. I'm saying this is a natural human response. What we do with that response, again complex, and can legato so many different outcomes. But the response you're having is human. And then you get to be human and you get to be accountable for what happens with that.
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