Dear Wendy:

When a person is angry at another and proceeds to behave in an abusive way, is motivated by the desire to hurt. The person knows hurt from their own experience and feels relief inflicting it on another.

Sometimes, a person is not currently more angry than the usual, and yet the person proceeds with abuse, out of habit, or because he/she thinks it is effective, helpful for him/her.

In any case, the origin of abusive behavior is a person’s hurt turned into anger. There is no such thing, I strongly believe, as a person whose abusive behavior toward others originated in an “evil seed” – an inherent evil-ness that was there independently of having been abused in their own lives.

A distinction is often made by lots of people suggesting there are people who had good childhoods, experienced nothing but love, and for no other reason than their inherent evil, abuse others. I don’t believe such a possibility exists in reality (other than in the case of severe and rare brain abnormality perhaps).

anita