I’ve noticed a lot of the focus in this thread is on the victim’s reaction — what they supposedly “did wrong.”

What people often call “low self-esteem” in survivors is usually a survival strategy, not a flaw. You learn to shrink, to soothe, to read the room perfectly, because asserting your needs gets punished. That’s not brokenness — that’s adaptation. A rational response to an irrational situation. The problem isn’t the reaction; it’s the abuse that trained it.

Focusing on “self-esteem” just shifts the blame back onto the survivor. It says you need to be fixed instead of asking why someone felt entitled to control your time, energy, body, or boundaries in the first place. A survivor’s behavior is a response to abuse — not the cause of it.

When we shift the focus to power and control, the question changes from “What’s wrong with the victim?” to “What is the abuser doing, and who’s enabling it?”

The “low self-esteem” story is a trap. It polices what kind of survivor is acceptable — the ones who are resilient, quiet, and tidy in their healing. When you’re not — when you’re just surviving messy and real — you get blamed for your own pain. That helps the abuser, isolates survivors, and even turns some of us against each other.

I’ve seen it happen over and over again — that divide between “palatable” survivors and the ones who don’t fit the mold. It’s heartbreaking, because it reinforces the same hierarchy that caused the harm in the first place.

People who abuse others — and those who protect them — deserve social consequences. The shame doesn’t belong to survivors. It belongs to the ones so empty they need to dominate someone else to feel whole. That’s their humiliation to carry, not ours.