the thing is, if your younger self was a bigot or an abuser, u can't make people forgive you. but you still gotta forgive yourself, like that's non-negotiable, dude. that happens before u can even ask the question of earning forgiveness from anyone lese
oops, in your attempt to martyr yourself out of respect for your victims you accidentally sabotaged your own ability to conceptualize yourself as anything but a perpetual evildoer who is always one bad day away from hurting everyone you love, all but guaranteeing history to repeat itself. rookie mistake
im gonna try explaining myself, cus im a gambling addict and im waiting for the day that it actually works.
"forgiveness" is personal, that's why I said in the post that you might inflict harm on people for which they can never forgive you, but that's their quest. if you abuse someone, you can't go no-contact with yourself. you actually keep living in your own head indefinitely, and ultimately you need to learn to live with yourself in order to continue living a full life without further harm. this is not necessarily an anti-carceral thought, although i am generally anti-carceral myself. I simply want people to like, fix their heart and atone for real with measured accountability & self love instead of dissociating, self-marking themselves forever and guaranteeing their recidivism.
You and a remorseful abuser would both think I'm giving the easy, coddling path. It's actually the tough pragmatic path in disguise.
Ok. I see where you going, but I strongly disagree. The one person who can't be allowed to forgive ones crimes is oneself.
Even if everyone else has forgiven you for the abuse you did, you must never allow yourself to let what you did be forgiven. Once you've done that, you've gotten to the point where you might do it again.
Never let up. Always strive towards improvement. Never let yourself live down the horrors of the past. Only by comparing ourselves to who we were can we grow.
this is called OCD
It’s so fucking frustrating to argue about this on tumblr.com. Because people might pay lip service to the idea of criminal justice reform or even prison abolition. But deep down they always come back to the Calvinism of it all: there are good people (victims) and bad people (abusers) and once someone has revealed themselves to be an abuser they can never be forgiven, never be part of society again.
And if you believe the world works like that one other thing also has to be true: You know you are a ‘good person’, so nothing you ever do could be truly abusive. You could never truly harm another person. And if you did they must have deserved it. Because you are a good person.
And wow, does that not just sound like something abusers usually say, when confronted with their own behavior?
I would leave the rest up to the reader but because we are on the piss on the poor reading comprehension site here, I’m going to spell it out: get comfortable with your own fallibility. Acknowledge that you could indeed severely harm someone else. And that means that you NEED to learn to forgive yourself.
What exactly is the alternative to "letting abusers remain in society"?
Locking people up for the rest of their lives doesn't really fix anything. (And does, absolutely, result in innocent people being locked up forever, too.)
Banishing people from being around other people doesn't work - we've seen that with the sex offender registry and how it increases recidivism rates. (And how it becomes a slippery slope where people get placed on it for crimes like public urination or sending nude selfies as a teenager, and then aren't able to work or live anywhere.)
Is your goal less harm happening in general, or is it just punishing people you don't like?
If people who were causing harm before stop causing harm, that's a net good in the world. There does actually need to be a path back into society for people who acknowledge the harm they've done and try to be better - even if YOU never speak to them again. (Certainly there are people I'm never forgiving for anything!)
The world isn't a better place just because Bad People(tm) are self-flagellating forever. "If you do something bad you go to Hell forever" is, weirdly, not an effective way to run a society.
I think this thread communicates something that I’ve always had trouble talking about. I’ve had a lot of trouble reconciling with my own behavior in the past, and the lingering attitudes that remain from my upbringing. It actually comes at odds with elements of my identity. Like, because I was shitty about queer people 5 years ago, I don’t get to claim my identity now, or how I can’t “claim my black-ness” because I tried to reject and minimize it for so long.
Even now I’m afraid of my mask falling off and saying or doing something horrifying to the people around me, even though I love them all so much, and it sucks to think like that all the time. Of course, I don’t think I’ve done anything as bad as some of the stuff mentioned in this thread, but I still agree with the sentiment. As someone who feels like shit cuz of what I’ve done in the past, it feels weird how we treat people who’ve wronged others as unredeemable. Even denying them the ability to right things with themselves. I think denying people the ability to change is cruel. But I’m no expert, and my wording is messy so idk.
Take this as you will.
