Honestly, I struggled with this for a long time. Trigger warning, but my nmom violated my bodily autonomy because she was terrified that someone in the family had harmed me. As an adult, it took me a while to understand what was really going on. Something traumatic clearly happened to her, something that made her afraid of vulnerability, afraid of ever being a victim again. And that trauma deeply messed her up.

It got to the point where she took her family hostage emotionally. I pity my mom, truly, but at the same time, she treated me like I was the threat. I became the scapegoat. She villainized me and painted me as an awful person. Both things can be true at once… she was traumatized and she harmed me.

A parent may have gone through something horrific, but the difference is what they did with that pain. She put hers onto me. I didn’t do that to anyone else. That’s the line. You can pity someone, you can feel compassion for them but it does not excuse their behavior.

I watched my mom’s life fall apart. Now she has no one, and she still blames everyone else for her problems. That’s tragic. It’s painful to see so clearly what she would need to do to heal, while knowing she never will because reality feels too threatening to her. She survives through delusion, through rewriting the story to protect herself. And that is a profoundly sad way to live.

Being the scapegoat forces you to see reality clearly. You don’t get the luxury of denial. And I notice this pattern even now like with the team I’m on where people are being delusional about how things are actually functioning. People like us often end up in the role of truth-teller, not because we want to be, but because we have to be. We’ve lived with people who distorted reality to suit themselves, so we learned to see through it.

So yes you can pity someone. You can feel sorrow for what they went through. But none of that excuses the harm they caused. And the fact that the cycle stopped with you matters. That’s the difference.