“Forgiveness,” I said, “does not mean rescue.”

That distinction had taken me two years of therapy to arrive at, and it is, I think, the single most important thing I learned in all of it, because the word forgiveness is used, so often, as a weapon against victims.

We are told that we must forgive, that holding on to anger poisons us, that forgiveness is the higher path, and there is truth in some of that; I did not want to spend my life consumed by hatred, and I have worked hard not to.

But my parents, and people like them, rely on a deliberate confusion at the heart of the word, a conflation of two entirely separate things.