Confronting Abusers

[GrungeGuy]

Hi All,

 

I know that some people on this forum have gone and directly confronted abusers about their abuse and I was hoping to get some feedback from them. While I did attempt multiple times over the course of a year and a half to bring up my feelings when interacting with my abusive parents, to gently bring up my dissatisfaction with our relationship, and to request that we engage in family therapy, this was the extent of my confrontation with them and I have since stopped interacting with them. At the time, the idea of RTRing any further than I did just seemed like putting my heart out to be smashed with a hammer for no reason.

 

I think that my life has been substantially better, since not having them in my life, and I'm not sure that restitution and repair is possible to the point that I would want to have a relationship with them. Based on my two and a half decades of experiencing them and the rest of my family, I feel that the odds are that they will never be fully honest, or acknowledge the reality of our relationship, let alone truly empathize, apologize, work to change, get into therapy, deal with their own histories, and strive to make whatever restitution would be necessary.

 

While I am not looking to re-enter a relationship with my parents, and not hoping that I will finally be heard and acknowledged by them, I have been having a desire to contact them, perhaps in a letter, and really confront them about the abuses that they enacted upon me, putting my grievances in this message to them very thoroughly, and explaining why I am not talking to them. The letter would look something like "You did x and y and z and these were destructive to me in these ways..." among other things.

 

Part of me wonders if I could get some kind of emotional benefit from doing something like this. I don't know if this is rational, but some of the thoughts are that in being very direct and honest about all of the things that were not OK about how my parents treated me, this would somehow free me up to be more assertive, to access my anger more, to be less avoidant and withholding in relationships, to be more confident, etc.

 

If anyone has any thoughts about this, I would appreciate it, especially if you have been in a similar situation and confronted somebody. If you have done this, how did it affect you? 

[Tyler Durden]

My parents were not abusive, but my childhood wasn't perfect either, and I have confronted my parents with everything that was still bothering me. It was a very good experience.

 

Apart from that I pretty much always speak my mind and confront people when necessary. I'm very positive about confrontations for two reasons. The first is that it simply feels good to express yourself and speak the truth. The second is that I see confrontations as a way to strengthen the bond with people, to get clarity, or to make a clean break. Because I don't avoid confrontations I know exactly where I stand with the people in my life.

 

My experience with people who avoid confrontations with their parents is that it always shows up in other parts of their lives. Because the part of you that's scared of the confrontation is still a child, that's the part that protected you when you were physically smaller than your parents and in many ways dependent on them. But now you're an independent adult and if you still give in to that fear you're not allowing that part of yourself to grow up.

 

Which means that whenever you make a mistake and there is someone else who is more confrontational than you, you feel threatened and this avoidance mechanism kicks in. Even though the other person doesn't have any power over you, certainly not the power that your parents had, and may not even care about your perceived mistake. I've actually been on the receiving end of this quite a number of times, when people do something wrong and then they just start avoiding me because they'll know I'll bring it up when they speak to me again.

 

In my opinion the best way to avoid those sort of problems in your life is to confront your parents. Because once you've reached the point where you have no problem being completely honest with your parents, regardless of how they respond, you can handle pretty much anything.

 

So my advice is, follow your desire and write the letter. Don't hold back when you write it, write it as if you're the only one who is ever going to read it. Once you wrote it you'll probably feel a burst of anxiety right before you actually send it. But the more anxiety you feel, the more you'll grow by actually sending it.