tbh i think while toxicity and abuse can have similar outcomes - acknowledging intent or lack thereof is important in terms of deciding who needs resources in survivor communities. obvs people hurt have no responsibility to provide aid to people who hurt them. but i think painting all people whose symptoms involve lashing out or directionless anger or other, less internal symptoms whose actions are unintentional or even unknown, as the same as people who make intentional, systemic grabs for power to control the other person is counter productive.
and more to the point, it paints people who are surviving abusive relationships as the same as their abusers. survivors have to manipulate relationships to their advantage to have their basic needs met - and any abuser will tell you that defensive manipulative behavior on the part of their victim is exactly like their behavior. but it’s not. because in evaluating who is morally in the wrong here - you have to look at intent. and someone trying to survive an abusive situation doesn’t have the intent to control and harm someone for the sake of harming them - they’re trying to survive.
anyway, interpersonal dynamics are actually incredibly complicated, and i think it can be really difficult to set hard and fast rules - because coping is so personal. so while i think that whatever individual needs to personally decide if intent matters to them or not wrt to unhealthy relationships if we’re looking at things from a systemic standpoint i worry that by discounting the reality behind someone’s actions we villainize people for not knowing how to ask for help, or that they even need it.
believe it or not, some people are actually completely unaware that being constantly angry (even if it’s not directed at anyone - eg. i am rarely actually angry at one person, and i rarely fight with people around me. but i, in the past, have been consistently angry and bitter and sarcastic - and because one of my only abilities to cope involves vocalizing my distress, other people will be affected. and that’s not good. but there’s never any direction, or outright confrontations behind my anger, it’s just there as the background noise to my actions. and i never knew that other people didn’t live with that kind of rage 24/7, and being made aware of it gave me the realization that i needed to change and that i was hurting people) or constantly weepy, or clingy or whatever is actually really really unhealthy and not normal.
it’s more useful imo w/in communities to make people more aware of what unhealthy behaviors look like - so they can become aware, and know that they need to fix the situation. having maladaptive coping mechanisms and poor insight doesn’t make you a bad person. but refusing to change your behavior when you’re made aware of it is a problem.
btw - i’m speaking as someone who’s about the third generation of abuse in my family, with a mother with a shallow ability to take responsibility and zero self awareness. i know how frustrating living with that kind of person can be because i’ve lived with it. and for years my mother refused help, and for years i was forced into a parental/emotional caregiver role because of my mother’s trauma and (probable) mental illness.
what is so hard for me is that my mother loved me, and made the moral choice to not do the thing that her mother did to her - making fun of her, isolating her, emotionally neglecting her etc. and, had i been an adult i don’t think my mother’s impact on me would have been nearly as damaging. but because i was a child and there was an inherent power dynamic between us, my mother’s rage and pain shaped me into the fucked up person i am today. but, for me, being angry doesn’t help. it doesn’t change the fact that my mother never heard of emotional abuse until i told her about it when i was fourteen. it doesn’t change my childhood. it doesn’t change that my mother was never aware of her dysfunction and that listening to her daughter was more or less impossible for years. now that i am an adult, she is finally trying to fix her symptoms, and we’re essentially building a new relationship from scratch. not one where she raises me, because that was a disaster, but one where we’re equals and i essentially do whatever i think is best for me.
not everyone has this experience or this eventual outcome with their parents and i get that. but, i dont think denying people help when they ask for it is any way to break a systemic abuse cycle either. and that’s more what i’m concerned with because of the generational aspect to abuse in my family.