furiousgoldfish:

As a society we
need to stop extending our empathy to abusers and predators. It is absolutely
not necessary in order for being a good person, to extend your understanding
and compassion to those who would hurt and torture you. It’s in our basic
survival instincts to regard those who would harm us as a threat, to block any
kind of empathy towards them and only think about how to get the hell away from
them and be protected from them. No sheep will stop running and consider how
the wolf feels, and try to make him feel better while risking her own life
doing it, so why would we? It’s against our basic survival interest. No victim
of abuse needs to consider the perspective of abuser for even one second, for
the victim the abuser is a threat, a predator, something to get the hell away
from or destroy for the sake of saving her own life.  

We’re encouraged
to look at every situation from all perspectives but once we’re faced with
abuse, considering abuser’s perspective means we no longer care about
ourselves. We’re looking at ourselves thru abuser’s eyes and what we see is that
we are not human to them, we are objects, resources, things to use and throw
away as if worthless. We are forced to see ourselves dehumanized, reduced to a thing, and then accept that as one side of the story, as if that doesn’t destroy our perception of ourselves! Once both we and the abuser look from abuser’s
perspective, there is nobody left in the world who will consider our point of
view, who will defend our humanity, our life. It means abandoning ourselves
completely. 

There is no need to look at ourselves thru abuser’s eyes because
their perspective is not any kind of truth, it’s not going to help us
understand anything, it’s a self-serving delusion. Just because predators don’t
think of us as humans, it doesn’t change the fact that we are! They can’t
change who we are. But if we are lured into looking at ourselves thru their
eyes, they can convince us that we’re what they think of us. And we need to
refuse to. We can assume they know we’re human, and are doing this to us
anyway. We can assume they’re not as deluded as they pretend to be. They’re
aiming at our empathy and compassion to humanize themselves by dehumanizing us,
and it’s been enough of that. No more self hatred for the sake of abusers being
justified in hurting us. Abusers don’t deserve compassion or empathy from their
victims.