regret, personified

The screen door slammed shut with a crash, and Judas flinched, digging his fingers into the tangle of reeds. This place had them in abundance, some familiar to Judas as papyrus and cane, others strange—in his wandering, he had met other souls, who named them for him: cattail and bluegrass, bamboo and sugarcane. They felt like nonsense on his tongue, too stiff compared to the sweetness of qanah.

Beyond the reeds was nothing, a vast sea of nothing that had no ending that could be seen from the shore, black and full of wind. Judas had taken to sitting there, feet dangling over the edge, his back to the waving grass and the little house on the hill, with the screen door that slammed.

Judas did not look up as Simon Peter lowered himself to sit beside him with a sigh. Peter carried the smell of the house in his clothes, baking bread and warmth and spice and sweat, things that did not exist in this place—this place was only waving reeds and nothing, other grey spirits wandering from black shore to black shore.

Judas hated him.

Judas’s fingers, still buried in the grass, found a small pebble. Carefully, he prised it from the dirt. “You know, I was speaking with one of the leaders of your church not so long ago,” Judas said idly to Peter, rolling the pebble around his palm.

There were no stars in the sky over this place-that-was-not-a-place, but he took aim at a spot amid the darkness and threw as hard as he dared—

The pebble flew, and vanished into the blackness. “He told me this place is called Purgatory, it is a place where the lost spirits go until they can be reconciled with the Lord. I told him that could not be true, for I cannot seem to stay lost. For some reason, the people I least want to see in this life will not leave well enough alone.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Judas could see the broad flatness of Peter’s hands, still calloused from nets and lines. They had not aged with the rest of him, familiar to Judas as the day they first clasped hands—all but the nail-holes, deep and crusted with blood, at his wrists.

One of the grey spirits Judas had met in this place had told him Saint Peter was crucified upside down, unworthy as he was to have the same death as his Savior.

Judas turned his face away.

Júdáscsók

Jörg Breu the Elder - Melk Abbey alter painting (1502, Austria)

I think it must be, at least partially, because, people hate the imperfect victim. Its easy for so many people to sympathize with someone who never lashed out. Less so for people to sympathize with people who are angry and lash out. Even though its a perfectly sensible reaction to being hurt over and over. I'm sure most people would like to think they would simply never.

Some kids who experienced trauma would react by becoming violent, disruptive, and rageful.

This is an inherently normal and natural response for a creature to have. Attacking and fighting for survival is inherently something most animals sometimes do, it's fundamental and will always happen sometimes

But children that are violent, disruptive, hateful of authority, or angry are labeled as "bad" and are punished for it, and the label of "bad" is not just temporary but lasts a long time, as though there is something fundamentally wrong with the child

So, I thought, a child's value in the world and whether they deserve to be helped is judged in this harsh, punitive way, based on whatever natural survival response happened to pop out of them

And I thought, that is grotesque. It means that a certain fraction of traumatized kids will not be helped, but instead be considered "bad," because of basically a biological thing that their body had to do to survive.

Also it is a good point about perpetrator trauma. People are very caught up in the idea that PTSD means the same thing as being a victim, or that you have to be "innocent" to be traumatized. And many people think that people that are not "innocent" are not really traumatized, they just act like they are to get sympathy.

But in reality people can get PTSD from killing another person or torturing them or harming them in another way. Committing that violent act against another person is very devastating emotionally and mentally.

And sometimes people think that perpetrators don't deserve help for their trauma, as if trauma is a punishment for doing something bad.