Victim blaming is completely different, that's saying that you deserved to be abused. Nobody deserves to be abused.
There is a longitudinal study on PTSD cases that investigated why only 35% of people suffer PTSD while some of their colleagues go to similar events and while going through trauma processing, bounce back after some time.
The main finding was that many of them found helpful frames of references to manage their feelings around trauma (often along the lines of... the guy next to me was worse off, at least I am alive) and that allowed them to go into post-trauma growth.
Assigning present-day problems to old events is just a very common way for people to take on a victim mentality and avoid dealing with what is in front of them.
I’m not saying it’s exactly victim blaming, but it’s pretty close: you are attributing the cause of somebody’s misery to them, instead of the person that abused them.
Try the same line of reasoning with physical abuse and you will hopefully feel less certain. E.g. why does one person fall, hit their head badly and become paralyzed, while another could just shake off the same punch? And if you met somebody who had been beaten badly by a parent and become paralyzed for life would you give them a pep talk about how it’s a choice they’ve made? Probably not (I hope).
The choice is obviously not on being abused. The choice is on moving past it and taking a positive outlook going forward rather than keep looking backward at the injustice that happened to you.
Obviously. And what I’m saying is (obviously) that that is not always a choice. It would be nice if it was, but the human mind simply does not work that way.
There is a longitudinal study on PTSD cases that investigated why only 35% of people suffer PTSD while some of their colleagues go to similar events and while going through trauma processing, bounce back after some time.
The main finding was that many of them found helpful frames of references to manage their feelings around trauma (often along the lines of... the guy next to me was worse off, at least I am alive) and that allowed them to go into post-trauma growth.
Assigning present-day problems to old events is just a very common way for people to take on a victim mentality and avoid dealing with what is in front of them.