Someone can abuse you and also love you.

For whoever needs to hear it:

Someone can abuse you and also truly love you.

Acknowledging that someone abused you does not mean you have to stop loving them.

The fact that someone abused you doesn’t mean the good times with them weren’t authentic.

Acknowledging that someone abused you doesn’t necessarily mean you have to stop having good times with them.

Acknowledging that someone abused you doesn’t even have to change the way you interact with them, if that’s not what’s right for you.

Acknowledging that someone abused you doesn’t necessarily mean you have to think of them as the villain of the story.

The discourse around abusers and victims is often black-and-white, full of false dichotomies. Real life is vastly messier and more complicated than a lot of well-intentioned advice-givers would have you believe.

The fact that there are so many nooks and crannies and compartments of the human mind makes people uncomfortable — people recoil at narratives about abuse that don’t fit cleanly into good vs. evil archetypes. It’s scary to acknowledge that those who commit abuse can truly be wonderful people in many ways, and even towards their victims 90% of the time, and that *this is not fake.* It breaks the comforting illusion that there are good guys and bad guys, and that we can be safe if only we can learn to recognize the bad ones.

Sometimes it’s right to talk about abusers. There are many chronic abusers in the world. Other times it’s more fitting to talk about *people who have committed acts of abuse*, the way you might refer to someone who shoplifted a few times as a teenager. You get to form your own opinions about what model is most accurate for the different people in your life.

If your story doesn’t fit into a classical good vs. evil shape, you don’t have to force it to. Acknowledging what happened doesn’t have to wreck anything else about the narrative you have for your life. There doesn’t need to be any decision-making outside the act of acknowledgement itself, if you don’t want there to be.

The boundaries that are right for you might look weird to outsiders, and that’s okay. Truths about your story might sound weird to outsiders, and that’s okay.