Things you wouldn’t believe if you hadn’t seen them yourself

This is a bit of a different article for me.  I typically try to focus on helping those who want to be helped.  I don’t often focus on commenting about people who behave in ways that you wouldn’t believe if you hadn’t seen them with your own eyes.

One of the saddest things a parent must do is educate their child about things that should just not happen.  Sadly, we have seen too much of what should never happen to even be surprised any more, especially from those who should know better, those we expect integrous behaviour from.

It’s the character of a person who will choose to abuse others, and if that isn’t enough, they redouble the abuse, compounding the trauma, by covering their tracks.  “Nothing to see here,” their approach is.  People who do these things, do them with malicious intent.

The greatest surprise for people who don’t anticipate such behaviour is they discount the possibility, because they impute a character of integrity on a person who should be entirely trustworthy.

This is something that catches many people unawares, even to the point of defending people who have betrayed goodness and behaved malevolently.  People caught unaware like this are dangerous in their own right because they defend those who manipulate them.  The trouble is, unless you see it with your own eyes sometimes, you don’t believe ‘good’ people are capable of evil.

Let me say it plainly.  Good people, supposedly good people, are entirely capable of doing all sorts of things; good, not-so-good, and downright criminal.  We are all capable of criminal behaviour, but what sets the normal person apart from the malevolent one is intentionality.

But we still don’t believe some things unless we see them for ourselves.

Would we believe a pattern?  Would we believe a string of people saying pretty much the same thing?  Would we believe one person who is an outlier?  And what do we think of the theology of scapegoating?  So many people who should know better do not believe in such a thing because they have never seen it, lived it, or had to endure it.  I can tell you, scapegoating is a thing—a terrible, terrible thing—and it’s far more common than you may realise.

Everyone who suffers abuse feels castigated and all alone, and this is part of the imperative of the abuser.  Even if it is a string of a dozen people at the same time or one after the other in series, each person abused feels alone, as if THEY did something wrong, and completely disempowered.

If you are reading this right now, please consider that there are things that occur in life that you may not believe or want to believe but that are still altogether true.  You just haven’t seen them yet.  If a thing seems too fanciful, and if someone is telling you a story that seems too far-fetched, just give a little benefit of the doubt.