hey like, if you happen to do something abusive because of your mental illness
you still gotta apologize for it????
you still have to accept responsibility???
you can’t expect the people around you to just suck it up when you hurt them because you’re mentally ill.
spiraling further and self-deprecation/calling urself a monster also isn’t an apology. an apology does not involve another person comforting you for your harmful actions.
same with claiming that you are a failure and are doomed to never change or improve. Apology should not involve the other person comforting you and rooting for you, and essentially being your cheerleader.
Same if you claim that not doing abusive things to someone repeatedly is “so hard” while also refusing to examine your behavior, to create a plan of action to help you cope with your mental illness in a healthy way, or by refusing to seek help in any shape or form. Twice as bad if you expect the person you abused to be your mental health therapist/processor.
!!!!!!!!! SAY IT LOUDER !!!!!!!!!!!!!
SO HI YES
I was the lord of garbage mountain when I was in the worst throes of my depression. Not to my friends, who only saw the bleary, removed, dissociated version of me that sat and stared vacantly at nothing in the cafeteria during lunch– but to my family. Specifically, my brother and sister.
I was awful to them. I excused it to myself, convinced that it was just because we’d never had a good relationship anyway, that they didn’t understand, that they had no sympathy, that it was all their fault. And while, no, they did not always have the most supportive attitude toward me while I was depressed, it didn’t make the things I said or did to them okay.
One night, after a particularly aggressive outburst from yours truly toward my sister, she told me that I was behaving like our mother.
Our mother who made all of our lives a living hell, who was verbally abusive, who has never apologized for a single bad thing she has ever done to any of us in our lives. And I responded by calling my sister a bitch.
Of course, a comparison like that doesn’t just go away (especially when you’ve got anxiety lol), it’ll hang around in your head for a while.
About a YEAR after this fight with my sister, after I got on medication that was right for me, after I balanced myself out and had more good days than bad ones, I stepped back and realized, holy fuck, my sister was right. I was behaving like our mom.
But fuck, if I wasn’t determined to make her at least a little bit wrong.
So I went to her and my brother, and I apologized. I told them that it wasn’t right for me to treat them that way, that there wasn’t an excuse for it, and that I hoped they could forgive me. And I’m lucky enough that they did.
Tl;dr your actions have consequences regardless of what prompted them, and you have to accept responsibility for that
