Why You Remember Things Your Abuser Doesn’t
A brief rundown of why, when someone hurts you, they probably don’t remember it.
I have a tumultuous relationship with my father. On the one hand, he helped me survive high school in a very literal way. On the other hand, we are very, very different people with clashing personalities. At the moment, I don’t talk to him, and I don’t plan to ever talk to him again.
As I said, I acknowledge that he helped me survive my teenage years while my brain was being ravaged by my bipolar disorder. That said, my father is the type of person who tends to speak without thinking through what he’s saying. As such, he’s a killer debater, but he also tends to make incorrect statements, even though he says them with such conviction that you might believe them.
When I initiated the sequence of events that would eventually drive us apart, it was a long, well-edited email that took months to get right. He responded, guns blazing, in a few hours without any consideration for what I’d written and what it might mean. He spared no insult or cutting remark in tearing my email apart.
That’s just the kind of person he is. He lived with mantras like “I don’t get mad, I get even,” and “you can start it, but I’ll finish it.” It’s not that he was particularly mean or explicitly abusive, he was just a firebrand.
Well, the firebrand occasionally burned me. He has made many offhanded comments that stuck with me for decades. One of them, when I asserted that I was an atheist, was him retorting “no you’re not.” I remember that, at the time, 13-year-old rebellious me thought that was stupid and insulting.
He’s done a lot of things like that. Making comments when I returned to family gatherings from decompressing — things like “look who’s back!’ and “thanks for joining us!” in a sort-of derisive, snarky tone. Berating me for daring to take a nap after Christmas Eve festivities had ended but people were still at the party — it was 8 in the evening and I’d been up since 4 a.m. for my job and was tired.
The worst offender of snarky comments, in my mind at least, is when I was in college and starting to discover many nerdy things that I would eventually turn into major hobbies and pastimes. I don’t remember what I was talking to him about — it could’ve been the LARP that I was in, or maybe some facet of a video game or other nerdy topic.
It doesn’t really matter, because my father didn’t care about whatever it was. He shushed me at one point in the middle of my diatribe, cutting me off at the knees with one simple comment: “know your audience.” The tone and implication were that he didn’t care about what I was talking about and didn’t want to listen to me, so I should not talk to him about such things. Just like that, the conversation was over.
I took several lessons from that comment. The first was the intended one: when talking to someone, be aware of what you’re talking about. The rest were not so nice. One lesson was that my father didn’t care about my interests and didn’t want to hear about my hobbies. At the time, I rationalized that this was fine, he just didn’t want to listen to me ramble. Internally, however, it felt like he just didn’t care about what was a big part of my life.
The upshot of this was that I decided that I couldn’t talk to him about these things. And, if I couldn’t talk to him about my hobbies and interests, then I probably couldn’t trust him to talk about other things in my life as well. Every topic was suspect: he seemed to respond well to talking about school, but I already knew that religion was off the table. Now, hobbies were off the table as well. Maybe I just shouldn’t talk to him about anything in my personal life. He doesn’t seem to care, after all.
When I was going through the fallout of the email chain that drove us apart, we had several conversations about it and life in general. One of the issues I’d brought up was the “know your audience” comment.
He denied having said it, or if he did, he didn’t remember. It wasn’t something that he apologized for, either; it got lumped in with the non-apology of “I’m sorry you felt that way,” the ultimate cop-out that translates to “I’m not sorry for what I did, but it’s your fault for being hurt.”
In our conversations, he didn’t remember saying a lot of those things. It struck me as odd — after all, they’d been burned into my brain; why were they not burned into his? I struggled with this for a long time, well after we stopped talking.
Eventually, I got my answer. When people — particularly abusers, but it can happen to anyone — don’t remember things they’ve said to you that hurt you, it’s because, while it meant everything to you, it didn’t mean anything to them.
My father was (and probably still is, I don’t know) a hot-headed snark. He makes cutting remarks as naturally as breathing. Eventually, those cutting remarks were directed at me, as they were directed at anyone in his life.
For me, those cutting remarks left scars. Whether said in anger (“no you’re not!”), as a joke (“look who’s back!”), or as legitimate advice (“know your audience”), they stuck with me. However, for him, they were just offhanded comments. They didn’t mean anything to him because that’s how he talks. In his mind, he was just interacting with me in the same way he interacts with everyone: in a very frank, forward, and snarky way.
His offhand comments were just that: offhand comments. They were of little consequence to him, since he tended to say whatever came to his head. He never seemed to consider that those comments meant anything to me since they didn’t mean anything to him.
But they did mean something to me. They meant a lot to me. Those words have been in my head for decades, and will likely stick with me much longer.
I don’t think of my father as an abuser, even though he did some things that might qualify as emotional abuse and actually did gaslight me. He was mostly just a guy who was trying to do good by his son in the way he knew. Unfortunately, the way he knew was incompatible with how I wanted and needed to be treated.
However, this kind of thing is common among abusers and manipulators. They often say things as a way to get to their victims, to get inside their heads, without thinking about what they’re saying or what the long-term consequences may be. Later, they will either deny they said it, try to convince you that you misunderstood them, or just plain not remember.
And, as I said, this behavior is not limited to abusers. I’m 100% sure that I’ve done something like this at some point or another without meaning to. We all make random, offhand comments that are either in poor taste and hurt someone nearby or are misunderstood by the listener. It is something that pretty much everyone does.
The thing that separates abusers and crappy people from everyone else is the willingness to take responsibility for your words. As I said, abusers will deny, misdirect, or gaslight away their comments. This is reflective of their inability to take responsibility.
If you find yourself in a situation where something you’ve said has inadvertently hurt someone else, own it and apologize. Even if you don’t remember, acknowledge that your words hurt that person and apologize. Remind yourself that even if you don’t remember the comment because it was inconsequential to you, it obviously meant a lot to the injured party, so you should give them the benefit of the doubt.
As a caveat, abusers and manipulators will often use this against their victims via gaslighting and other manipulative and coercive tactics. Telling you that something you said hurt them and you should apologize when you are the victim is a common misdirection tactic. If you understand that you are in an abusive relationship, look out for this. If you find that issues you bring up with someone are redirected into past comments you’ve made that have hurt them, maybe keep an eye out for other abusive or manipulative tactics that person may use. You may be in an abusive relationship and not know it.
Everyone makes offhanded, thoughtless comments from time to time, and sometimes those comments hurt people close to us. If you find that something you’ve said has hurt someone, apologize and own it. Don’t redirect their frustration back at them, don’t deny or excuse, and don’t try to convince them that they misheard or misunderstood. Especially don’t offer a non-apology like “I’m sorry you felt that way.”
We are all human, and we all make mistakes. Part of being a good person is acknowledging when we’ve screwed up and doing whatever we can to fix it. Remember that sometimes, we don’t remember the things we say because they aren’t important to us, but at the same time, they may be very important to someone nearby. That’s not necessarily your fault, it’s just part of being human.
The thing that defines you in that situation is what you do next. Do you deflect and deny? Or do you acknowledge your mistake and apologize sincerely? The choice is yours.
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