TW: suicide
Don’t want to hurt abusers, but I do want to be able to hurt them and choose not to. I think it’d help me if I gained the ability to imagine physical vengeance. I want this to end in forgiveness.
It’s long been unsustainable for me to be a martyr. I waste my life away in maladaptive daydreaming where I imagine helping my past abusers. I’ve attempted suicide over the grief of past events, which gave me CPTSD and OCD.
I’ve had multiple physical abusers, and can barely imagine hurting them. I need to build the ability to imagine attacking. I think if I can imagine hurting my attackers and physically punishing them, including just for my own vindictive fun, then maybe I can gain the ability to actually forgive them.
Currently, I imagine giving them what they want, and then magically figuring out a compromise with them where they change their minds and stop being an abuser. (Like dating someone who sees me as a piece of meat, and using the relationship to change their mind so they’re not a shithead anymore.) I think that’s not actual forgiveness, it’s just bending to their will. I cycle through these maladaptive daydreams of self-sacrificing for the benefit of the inhumane, and waste my life in suicidal grief. I’m skipping something crucial…
…I realize cannot truly forgive without making a choice to not hurt them. I think I need to first imagine brutal vengeance. Not to act it out, but as a step to expressing myself differently before I attempt forgiveness.
A friend has also been trying to train me in MMA, but I won’t hit for real. I won’t spar with them even though I know its good for me. I just imagine stopping danger through compromises that don’t actually exist.
One session I hit a bag for real. I was down to punch after someone had attempted to assault me days earlier. Being vindictive seriously helps, and imagining torturing and annihilating the predator was a huge help.
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So, it seems you just cannot retaliate for yourself. Might be easier to view this that they’ve not only harmed you, and will definitely harm others if they’re not already doing so. And that giving them what they want will not fix them as it obviously did not while you were with them.
Ideally, eventually realizing even if you don’t care about yourself being treated that way, you are still a human, and you’re still worth defending is kinda important. I used to be the same. But you cannot play middleman forever, and doing so rarely is useful at all. While sure maybe you think you can handle it, there are much better uses of yourself than helping pieces of shit who don’t even deserve it. It may help to find something actually worth your time, and realize people using you will get in the way of you doing your best towards that thing. That sometimes doing things for yourself is okay, as feeling better means you can put more into something else. You can’t just let yourself fall apart. Especially not for pieces of shit. You’re worth much more than that.