You Can Understand His Wounds Without Becoming One of Them

I’ve dealt with domestic violence in my life and lately I've been thinking about it a little differently.

Not differently as in less serious.

And definitely not as in making excuses for someone who hurts another person.

I’ve been thinking about what can exist underneath it.

Children can grow up surrounded by fear, control, humiliation, or violence in more than one place.

It can happen at home.

It can happen at school, where they spend much of their childhood, with staff, other students, in class, at recess, or on the bus.

Over time, those experiences can shape complicated ideas about power, safety, conflict, and relationships.

Some boys grow up being hurt.

Controlled.

Embarrassed.

Made to feel powerless.

And sometimes, some of those boys become men who are determined never to feel powerless again.

That does not mean being hurt causes someone to become abusive.

It does not.

People are still responsible for what they choose to do with their pain.

But I do think there is something worth looking at in the space between being powerless and needing to have power over someone else.

Understanding is not the same as excusing

I have always had a hard time looking at people as simply good or bad.

I tend to see the hurt underneath the behavior.

The fear.

The insecurity.

The things that may have shaped someone long before I met them.

That can make compassion come easily.

But compassion can become dangerous when it starts replacing accountability.

A person can have been deeply hurt and still become someone who hurts other people.

Both things can be true.

He can have a story.

He can have trauma.

He can have wounds he never learned how to deal with.

And he can still know that threatening, humiliating, controlling, intimidating, or hitting someone is wrong.

Understanding where something came from does not make it acceptable.

I can understand someone’s pain and still say:

You cannot treat me this way.

Sometimes power moves downhill

I think about how easy it can be to hurt someone who loves you.

Someone who sees the good in you.

Someone who understands that you have been through things.

Someone who keeps giving you another chance because they know there is more to you than your worst behavior.

Compassion can become a dangerous place when it does not have boundaries.

You can understand why someone is angry.

You can understand why they are afraid of being abandoned.

You can understand why control may feel safer to them than vulnerability.

You can even understand that somewhere underneath all of it may be a person who once felt completely powerless.

And none of that means you have to let them make you feel powerless instead.

Self-love changed the question for me

For a long time, I thought love meant understanding.

Being patient.

Trying again.

Seeing past someone’s behavior to the person underneath it.

There is value in all of that.

But I think love without enough love for yourself can become something else.

You start asking:

Why is he like this?

What happened to him?

How can I help?

What can I do differently?

Maybe if I explain it another way.

Maybe if I give him time.

Maybe if I love him better.

Those questions can keep you very busy.

So busy that you forget to ask another one:

What is this doing to me?

Self-love did not make other people kinder.

It changed what I was willing to call love.

You do not have to hate someone to leave them

This may be the biggest thing I see differently now.

You do not have to decide that someone is a terrible person before you protect yourself from them.

You do not have to erase their humanity.

You do not have to pretend their childhood did not matter.

You do not have to deny that they were once hurt too.

You can have compassion for the child they were and boundaries with the adult they became.

You can understand someone and still leave.

You can forgive someone and still never give them access to you again.

You can hope they heal without volunteering to be there while they figure out whether they will.

Because being wounded is not permission to wound someone else.

Maybe this is what self-love looks like

I used to think self-love was mostly about confidence.

Liking yourself.

Feeling beautiful.

Knowing your worth.

I think it is also much more practical than that.

Sometimes self-love is deciding that understanding someone does not obligate you to endure them.

Sometimes it is realizing that another person’s pain is real, but it is not yours to absorb.

Sometimes it is refusing to prove how compassionate you are by staying somewhere that is hurting you.

And sometimes it is being able to look at someone and think:

I know you are human.

I know something happened to you too.

I know there may be reasons you became this way.

And I still love myself enough to go.

Maybe healing is not deciding that everyone who hurt us was evil.

Maybe it is understanding that hurt people are still responsible for what they do with their hurt.

And maybe self-love is realizing we are no longer required to stand close enough to be hurt by it.