'Hurt People' Do Not 'Hurt People'

“Hurt people hurt people” is the most commonly repeated phrase about trauma. It’s also the most bonkers one.

Some survivors of the Holocaust grew up to be Elie Weisel. Some grew up to speak about the Holocaust to classrooms full of schoolchildren, in hopes they would never forget. Some grew up to beat their wives and kids. All experienced the exact same horrific, unimaginable event. Are you really trying to tell me that Wiesel simply did not suffer as badly as other people did? Or that he found a better therapist? I think not.

Surely something else was going on which explains why some people survived hell and came out more resilient, while others were broken.

When I was 22 years old, I spent five months in a hellhole “young adult treatment center” in Texas. Fulshear included such ‘treatments’ as strip searching us when a staff cell phone went missing, or accusing us of “stealing” food when we took frozen bagels out of the freezer rather than choke down chili-dogs-in-a-can for dinner. Flies buzzed around the crates of fruit rotting in the kitchen and my friend Cara narrowly missed getting bitten by a poisonous coral snake walking back to her cabin at night because the path had no lighting.

By the time I left Fulshear, I was mentally and physically broken. I spent the next year on my parents’ couch, staring at the wall, unable to do anything, disconnected from my body. I would have dissociative episodes and trouble with my memory for the next four years of my life. Still, my life took a different path than that of my friends who I left behind. Jenna was back on crystal meth, living with Maggie, who was back on heroin. Cara was barely 70 pounds as an adult and seeing visions of God and the devil. The parts of me that are my friends never made it out of there. The part of me that is me, did. Why?

The answers for why some people are compelled to endlessly repeat their trauma experiences by abusing others cannot be found in analyzing the fact of what traumas we have experienced. This belief system is far too simplistic and too facile. Why do some survivors of sexual abuse go on to abuse others, while some of us become activists and advocates, and others never talk about sexual violence ever again? The human spirit cannot be defined by understanding only what we have endured.

Moreover, sorry to all you capitalists and individualists out there, but the answer also is not as simple as “therapy” or “getting help when you need it.” I have been in therapy for six years with fairly competent therapists, the best I can afford, but nonetheless there are parts of my life that have not moved forward at all since then. There are other parts of my life that are practically indistinguishable from how they would have likely been without undergoing the layers of trauma I have lived through. What gives?

In some ways, I have caused a lot of pain. I hurt people by abandoning them when they need me. I don’t stand up for myself, then get angry when others don’t see that I am hurting.

Much more than that, however, have been the ways in which I have been hurt. As a marginalized woman, as a disabled person in an ableist society, my life continues to be beset with challenges and barriers that many people do not have to face. The ostracization and cruelty that others direct my way have stayed with me, and are objectively much more obvious acts of violence than any acts which I have personally undertaken.

Yet what I do experience, again and again, is the assumption that I will do violence because of what I have been through and the pain I am in now. Others assume that I must be emotionally overwhelmed and therefore likely to overwhelm, that because my boundaries were once violated I must not understand what a boundary is or why it is important or how to either articulate or respect one today. Survivors of severe trauma are, in my experience, treated like a bomb about to explode. We are treated as a source of violence, until proven otherwise.

There is no way to prove ourselves otherwise. We are treated with hostility and ostracization. We are met with cruelty and skepticism when we try to tell our stories, but met with fear and resentment when we stay silent. Communities which ought to know better, don’t, and once they have pushed us to our breaking point or past it, they point to our reactions as proof that their beliefs about us were right all along.

Hurt people are far more likely to be hurt than to do the hurting. Statistically, while everyone seems to fear those of us with mental illnesses, we are far more likely to be victimized by crimes than to carry them out. As proven by experiments, autistic people are recognized as “other” by neurotypical people within 10 seconds of meeting, and the hostility which so many neurodivergent people know so well begins to take place. Yet the common story about autistic people is that we’re the ones who don’t know how to communicate, or we’re the ones who lack in empathy.

These stories are invented about marginalized groups of people to justify hurting members of these communities.

The statement, “hurt people hurt people?” That’s the best example of all.

Telling yourself that someone who was traumatized is likely to hurt you is a great way to avoid listening to what they have to say, a great way to avoid changing your own behavior or altering your community to fix what allowed them to get hurt and allowed their perpetrator to get away with it.

This statement is simply blaming the victim, codified, into eternity.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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