I began to see that the worst thing about child abuse would be the empathy you would have for the grown-up, who feels compelled to do these things. Worse would be the tenderness you would feel for the adult because you love them—because you believe they are being forced by something inside of them to do these terrible things. You would want to help them—to make them feel better—and you would help them feel better by complying, and complying without judgment. To do otherwise would leave you guilty for making them feel so bad. But the next thing that would happen is you would confuse their desire with yours—but your desire would be to love, not for the act itself. Forever after, though it would be really hard to untangle how you imagined other people wanted you to behave from how you wanted to behave. How would you even know what you wanted, when at such a young age, desire had been all mixed up with empathy and guilt?
How could I castrate my mind—neuter it!—and build up a resistance to know what was mine from what was everyone else's, and finally be in the world in my own way? That endless capacity for empathy—which you have to really kill in order to act freely, to know your own desires!
—from How Should A Person Be?
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