It is a theory that sounds like kindness and functions like fuel.

Because a cruel person does not experience your appeasement as generosity that might move them; they experience it as confirmation that cruelty is free, that there is no cost, that they may continue.

Every insult I swallowed taught Wendy that insults were permitted.

Every time I kept the peace, I was not defusing her cruelty; I was subsidizing it.

Two years of my appeasement had produced, as its direct result, a hand raised against a two-year-old, because I had spent two years teaching a cruel woman that nothing I loved was defended, that she could escalate indefinitely and meet only my silence.

Accountability is the opposite theory, and the harder one, and the only one that works.