This post differs greatly from the formats of my other posts on abuse recovery. I was inspired to write a letter to the abusers I’ve encountered and all the ones I know out there in the world who are still hurting others.
Writing can be an incredibly powerful tool for healing and empowerment. It serves as a portal for us to create a reverse discourse to the abuse we may have experienced over the course of our lives from various sources. I hope I can speak on behalf of many victims of abuse in this post. I also invite you to also write your own “Dear Abuser” letter in the comments section below. You can share this post or your own on your social media networks using #SurvivorLetter.
Please note that all letters should omit names of the person/people being addressed. The purpose of this exercise is simply to empower you with a creative outlet for your emotions.
Nobody deserves to be abused, harassed or bullied. The more we speak up for ourselves, the more we speak up for others.
A Letter to All the Abusers Out There by Shahida Arabi
Dear Abusers:
You may not know me, but I know you. I’ve been involved with you, and though you come in many different appearances, shapes, sizes and backgrounds, you are all more similar than you think.
You feed upon the insecurities of others. You make cutting sarcastic remarks to belittle others, because you will never know the joy of elevating others or respecting them the way they deserve to be respected. You are condescending in tone, manner and attitude, because you want so desperately to believe you are the powerful one in every interaction. You are physically aggressive, emotionally depraved, sadistic, destructive and poisonous.
Here’s news for you: you are powerless. You are powerless without supply. Powerless without a victim to believe in your lies. You derive your sense of superiority from another’s subjugation. Your power is dependent upon a victim’s psychological investment in your false image, not your true self.
Each victim you come across, each victim you use as an emotional or physical punching bag, will eventually leave or be left by you when you realize you can no longer control him or her. The victim that stays will be the unlucky one, forever enslaved to your mind games. Even so, little by little, you will have to up the ante on the power ploys in order to maintain power and control.
How exhausting it must be to try to play puppeteer to someone whose strings you’ve entirely manufactured; you will never have the pleasure of receiving love and affection from a pure source of willingness, but rather from a place of fear, a place of trauma, of enslavement, of necessity. Your audience or harem does not count, as no one besides your victims know the real you. Even if they have caught glimpses of who you are, they do not love who you really are. How difficult it must be to realize that you will never be truly loved, and that you will never truly love another person.
You so desperately want to believe that within every relationship, you are a “catch,” more intelligent, more attractive, more desirable and more accomplished than the victim whose energy you drain every day like the emotional vampire you are.
The truth is, you are none of these things. Every victim you target is inherently morally, spiritually, and intellectually superior to YOU. That is because victims of abuse do not have to abuse others to gain a sense of self-worth or importance. They already feel whole just as they are. They derive fulfillment not from harming others, but from helping others. They feel joy in showing compassion, respect and empathy for their fellow human beings. They give love without hate. They know that we are all interconnected, and that hurting another hurts themselves. They have genuine, authentic accomplishments and success that they don’t need to defend or boast about in order to feel good about. They have a conscience you can only imitate.
You, on the other hand, live in a world of brokenness, of false pride and fragile egotism. You realize you are truly alone, on the inside, regardless of how much power and pull you think you have over others. Surrounded by adoring fans who know nothing about your true intentions or your malice, you start to recognize that they, too, only care about your prestige and your appearances.
One day, your false image will shatter and the world will see you for who you truly are, and not who you pretend to be. One day, your victim will walk out the door. One day, you will look at yourself and realize that had you spent more time healing and loving, rather than fighting and hurting, you would be one with this world and not a destructive force within it.
Copyright © 2015 by Shahida Arabi.
All rights reserved. No part of this entry may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
I also invite you to also write your own “Dear Abuser” letter in the comments section below or as your own blog post (with the hashtag #SurvivorLetter and a link back to this post). Please note that you should not include names or identifying information of the person/people being addressed. The purpose of this exercise is simply to empower you with a creative outlet for your emotions. Although I addressed this letter to abusers, I truly wrote it to empower and validate victims themselves – to motivate them to express themselves through other outlets and gain their own closure through exercises like writing the “unsent” letter.
Please share this post and stand up against emotional and physical abuse.
My strongest trait is my ability to always make an incredible comeback from a devastating setback. What’s yours? #Survivor #Abuse #Recovery
— Shahida A. (@selfcarehaven) October 26, 2014
A Letter to All the Abusers Out There – write your own using #SurvivorLetter http://t.co/eHDLVFetvp via @selfcarehaven #abuse #recovery
— Shahida A. (@selfcarehaven) October 26, 2014
To learn more about recovering from emotional trauma and staging your victory from abuse, please see my book, The Smart Girl’s Guide to Self-Care available in Kindle and in Print.
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About the Author
To learn more about recovering from emotional trauma and staging your victory from abuse, please see my book, The Smart Girl’s Guide to Self-Care available in Kindle and in Print.
Self-Care Haven: Home of The Smart Girl’s Guide to Self Care by Shahida Arabi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. In other words, you must ask permission if you intend to share this blog entry somewhere, and always provide proper credit in the form of a link back to this blog as well as my name.
