What makes a grown person, a human being with a brain that knows the difference between good and evil, abuse someone? Oh, Jesus, Buddah, Hannah Arendt, Hank Green, why people do horrible things?

It’s a question as old as time that sent me to the hospital in 2008, when I learned that one of Raymond’s victims had molested his own daughter.

Here’s what the years of reading about psychology taught me: all abusers have one thing in common and it is not the male gender. They all have a trauma, like an infected sore on their soul and every time their conscience asks “Hey, are you sure you’re not the villain, here?” they can point at that infected sore and be comforted in their own victimhood: I beat my kids? So what, I was beaten up when I was a kid. I raped my daughter? So what, my dad made me lie in the snow when I was eight!

Oh, the things you can justify when you are a victim! When your trauma is such a devastating weapon, who wants to heal from it?

And yet, for every person out there who uses his traumas as a licence to hurt people, there are hundreds, thousands who refuse to pass the pain down to someone else. There are even people out there, and it is absolutely divine, who use their trauma to motivate themselves to help others!

All abusers have this in common: they lie to themselves about their behaviour and they manipulate the empathy we can have towards them to justify their horrible actions. That’s what my uncle did, that’s what his victim did when he became an abuser himself. They don’t deserve our empathy (they use it!) or our pity. They just deserve the consequences of their actions….

...and maybe, if it is not too late, the chance to change.