[gruseom]

Some things you just don't get over.

You do when you figure out how much pain you're causing yourself by holding on to them. In fact, the moment you see that, it's impossible not to let go - the same way you'd drop a red hot poker when you figured out you were holding one.

I can see why this idea makes you angry if you interpret it as expecting people to "just accept" violence, abuse and so on. And I can see why it would sound like blaming the victim.

Respectfully, though, it's not about accepting such things, it's about the effective way to reject them. The trouble with many of the obvious strategies for rejecting abuse is that they are deceptive: they cause one to unwittingly perpetuate it. You can easily end up inflicting more pain on yourself by reconducting the abuse in your imagination than the original experience entailed. You can also easily end up inflicting pain on people you love.

The cycle of violence is a strange game, the rules of which don't work the way you (I mean anyone) would think they ought to. Just the fact that so many victims turn into victimizers is a pretty big indicator of that. The important question is, when one finds oneself in a game like that, what's the way out?