There is a part of this story that is uncomfortable to admit. For a long time, I was not only shaped by harm — I replicated it.

Not in identical ways. Not with the same cruelty. But in patterns that were recognizable enough to be unsettling. Ways of relating that mirrored what I had lived under. Ways of responding that I despised — and yet enacted.

This is difficult to say out loud. Because it sounds like confession when it is actually recognition.

The shock of resemblance

At some point, many people raised in harm notice something unsettling.

A tone. A reflex. A way of controlling or dismissing. A way of withholding, reacting, or wounding when overwhelmed.

The realization lands with force: I sound like her.
Or worse: I am behaving like her.

This moment is often followed by shame — sharp and immediate. But shame is not the most accurate response here.

Confusion is.

Why resemblance happens

We do not only learn what was modeled. We also learn what explains what was done to us.

When a parent’s behavior is incomprehensible — cruel, dismissive, erratic — the mind searches for coherence. One way it does this is by inhabiting the behavior itself.

If I can become like you, maybe I can finally understand you.
If I can enact what you enacted, maybe it will stop feeling arbitrary.
If I can reproduce the pattern, maybe it will hurt less.

This is not identification out of admiration. It is identification out of desperation.

Harm as inherited language

Harm teaches a language before it teaches ethics.

It teaches how to speak under pressure. How to assert control when afraid. How to protect oneself by diminishing others. How to survive closeness without safety.

Using this language does not mean one endorses it. Often, it means one has not yet learned another way to speak.

The unbearable contradiction

There is a particular pain in becoming what we hated.

It fractures the self.

On one side: the part that suffered.
On the other: the part that inflicted.

Living with both creates internal violence. The urge to punish oneself. The belief that one is fundamentally flawed. The fear that the harm was contagious — and irreversible.

But this framing is too simple. It assumes intention where there was imitation.

When becoming like her was an attempt to heal

Here is the harder truth. Some part of becoming like my mother was an attempt to heal the relationship with her.

If I could understand her from the inside — not as a victim, but as a participant — maybe the pain would finally make sense. Maybe her treatment of me would stop feeling random. Maybe I could forgive her by becoming her.

This did not work.

But the attempt itself was human.

Accountability without annihilation

Naming this does not absolve harm.

I hurt people. I behaved badly. I replicated dynamics I should not have. Those actions mattered.

And — they did not arise from nothing.

Accountability does not require erasing context. Context does not require excusing harm.

Both can coexist.

The moment of differentiation

There is a moment — often late, often hard-won — when the replication breaks.

Not because someone becomes perfect. But because the resemblance becomes unbearable. Something in the self refuses to continue the cycle — not out of virtue, but out of exhaustion and clarity.

This refusal is not loud. It is quiet and irrevocable.

A different kind of responsibility

The responsibility now is not endless self-punishment. It is vigilance.

It is learning to recognize inherited reflexes before they act.
It is choosing interruption over repetition.
It is allowing remorse without letting it calcify into identity.

It is becoming conscious of what once ran automatically.

A closing truth

Becoming like the person who hurt us does not mean we were always the same.

It means we were shaped in their image before we had the chance to choose our own. Breaking that resemblance is not redemption.

It is authorship.

And authorship is slow, uneven, and earned.