This reminds me of the way that sometimes people we cast into abuser roles based on their behavior are not acting with abusive intent but rather lack what we might call the emotional maturity to be able to choose not to behave in ways that will be abusive towards others. For example, a person with low emotional maturity might get mad when things don’t go their way and, lacking the ability to separate their emotions from the cause of their emotions, will attempt to regulate their emotions by controlling other people. In contrast a person with high emotional maturity might get mad but then treat that as a signal about the actions of others and see that, although they are related, they can deal with the emotion in part separately from the person whose actions triggered the emotion. This gives the high emotional maturity person choices over how to respond that the low emotional maturity person doesn’t have access to!
This is by no means a complete model (shoving it into a single-dimension measure loses a lot of the nuance of how decisions get made), but I think it gives us a little more insight into what’s going on in these situations and helps address some of the confusion you’re seeing between acknowledging the validity of emotions, including the abusers emotions, and the abusive quality of some behaviors.
This reminds me of the way that sometimes people we cast into abuser roles based on their behavior are not acting with abusive intent but rather lack what we might call the emotional maturity to be able to choose not to behave in ways that will be abusive towards others. For example, a person with low emotional maturity might get mad when things don’t go their way and, lacking the ability to separate their emotions from the cause of their emotions, will attempt to regulate their emotions by controlling other people. In contrast a person with high emotional maturity might get mad but then treat that as a signal about the actions of others and see that, although they are related, they can deal with the emotion in part separately from the person whose actions triggered the emotion. This gives the high emotional maturity person choices over how to respond that the low emotional maturity person doesn’t have access to!
This is by no means a complete model (shoving it into a single-dimension measure loses a lot of the nuance of how decisions get made), but I think it gives us a little more insight into what’s going on in these situations and helps address some of the confusion you’re seeing between acknowledging the validity of emotions, including the abusers emotions, and the abusive quality of some behaviors.
Thank you!
Your comment really shone light into things that were cloudy, it’s a great help :-)