Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
btilly · 2022-05-26
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Spoken like someone whose parents never did anything that most find unforgivable.
https://www.amazon.com/Singing-Songs-Meg-Tilly/dp/0929636627 is beautifully told story about growing up in an abusive family, written by a movie star. Who happens to be my sister. She eventually admitted that it was autobiographical. She didn't have to admit to anyone in the family though. It was hard not to put the real names back on the people I knew well.
Maturity for me meant understanding and having sympathy for why my parents acted as they did. To find in myself how it is possible to become the monsters that they were. Which I have to be able to see clearly to avoid carrying on the pattern.
But I do not forgive them. Nor could I ask for forgiveness if I had acted as they did.
For me, personally, this was a source of frustration. I came from a family with actual abuse. But when I went to read up on abuse, the literature at that time was dominated by accounts from those with "recovered memories". And what they described and went through looked absolutely nothing like my experience.
Since learning how easily memories can be implanted, I came up with a simple litmus test to tell the false apart from the true for sexual abuse. People with recovered memories have memories that feel like they would expect. Very simple and stark emotions. By contrast people who have been through abuse have much more complex backgrounds that contain things that non-abused people wouldn't expect. For example abused children do not look at events with adult eyes and mark this as wrong. Instead at the time children try to accept events as normal, and wind up with a very confused picture of the world.
For anyone who wants a picture of how it actually looks from a child's eyes, I highly recommend my sister's book, https://www.amazon.com/Singing-Songs-Meg-Tilly/dp/0929636627. (I was the baby who winds up taken by "Richard" at the end of the book.)