Comme se tressent leurs rapides eaux

I know? I don't care. There is no inherent contradiction between the way horrors will warp one's behavior and how that behavior is bullshit. The unfairness of trauma, the tragedy of it, is that suffering will only ever explain something you do but no amount of it will ever justify it. I feel like people, understandably to be clear, misjudge how easily and how commonly abuse victims become abusers. I don't care that someone was so severely beaten down by their circumstances that they've become incapable of having normal conversations with someone else without blowing up, themselves. You are abusing someone else now. I'm sorry for what happened to you in your past, you didn't deserve it. The person you're talking to doesn't deserve it either, doesn't deserve to have you become The Thing That Happened To Them.

And it's hard because part of this is that, obviously, on some level, you are aware of what you're doing and you hate yourself so much that any attempt at introspection is like touching a hot stove. The brain recoils from it. Some kindness is necessary. But how much patience can someone realistically be able to extend to someone who is repeating the abuse patterns they experienced? How patient were you to your abusers? Did that ever lead them to change? At some point the primary difference becomes not whether you can be coaxed into believing you're capable of being better (and I do think this IS necessary) but whether you can continue to stand looking at yourself without trying, and I do think that the unfairness of having had something horrible happen to you only for you to become not noble not kind not strong but just as horrible is so godawful that a lot of people just find it more comfortable to not look at themselves at all