A recent phone call i had with my dad made me think about the prison scene in half man, the one where ruben tells niall that he isn’t responsible for all of his problems and he’ll accept only a small percentage of the blame.
This scene beautifully shows how it looks like to maintain a relationship with your abuser, even if you decide to let the bygones be bygones. My dad called me to talk about my reluctance to accept financial help from my parents. He wanted to let me know that I can always count on them to help me, said that I shouldn’t think about our relationship as transactional, he opened up about his own struggles as a young man in a post communist transformation country with no job prospects and how his own parents supported him then.
And you know, with your abusers who are also your loved ones you’re never going to get what you actually want from them. Because during this conversation he said that i have a good family and i shouldn’t fight against people who want to help me. And if i said what i was thinking, which was that most of my problems in life, including my financial ones, stem from his abuse, this conversation would have taken a very different turn.
So you’re forced to make a decision - one possible decision is that you don’t call something out because what you’re getting: help, care, attention - it’s something that you’ve always wanted. You know you will never get the acknowledgement of the hurt they caused you (for Ruben to accept even part of the blame must have been so emotional for Niall).
And if you get too comfortable and you forget the rules like Niall did, well then…
