Why what happened to you is three things at once — and why naming them separately matters
by Mike, founder, SoulForge Community
The psychologist Jordan Peterson, drawing on the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, makes a distinction that I’ve found genuinely useful.
Tragedy alone, he argues, is bearable. Suffering, loss, the hard things that happen in life — grief, illness, disappointment, failure — these are part of the human condition. Painful, sometimes devastating, but within the range of what people can process. Human beings have developed the psychological and cultural resources to absorb tragedy. We have rituals for it. We have language for it. The people around us understand it.
But what has the power to break people is tragedy plus malevolence. When you have the realisation that the suffering wasn’t random, but that it was deliberately perpetrated against you. That someone knew the harm were doing to you, and/or the ones you love, and did it anyway. That combination — pain plus the knowledge that it was deliberately inflicted — is qualitatively different from ordinary tragedy that arrives at random. It lands differently. It is far harder to process.
I’ve been thinking about this framework in relation to what a lot of men in this community have been through — and I want to add a third element that Peterson’s formulation doesn’t quite capture within this niche. It’s not just tragedy. It’s not even just tragedy plus malevolence. It’s tragedy plus malevolence plus injustice.
The first layer: tragedy
The losses are real. The marriage that ended in strife, possibly abuse. The daily relationship with your children, taken away. The home, the friends, the sense of who you were inside the family you built. The future you had imagined – wiped out.
These are genuine losses, and they produce genuine grief. If they had happened through ordinary misfortune — illness, accident, simply two people who were no longer right for each other — they would still have been devastating. The grief would still have needed processing. The rebuilding would still have been necessary.
This is the tragedy layer. It would be enough on its own. But for most men in this situation, it isn’t on its own.
The second layer: malevolence
For many of us, the losses we suffered were not random. They were engineered by our (former) partner. The disappearance of our children wasn’t a tragic accident — it was a decision made by the other parent. The false allegations weren’t mistaken perceptions — they were carefully constructed. The campaign through courts, services, and institutions wasn’t an honest attempt to protect anyone — it was a continuation of the same controlling behaviour that had characterised the relationship, now with an institutional ally.
This is what makes what happened to these men so much harder to process than ordinary bereavement. The grief would be enormous either way. But grief plus the knowledge that it was perpetrated against you — that someone sat down and decided to do this, knowing what it would cost you and your children — is a fundamentally different weight to carry.
It also explains something that puzzles the people around us: why the anger doesn’t go away. Anger at tragedy softens over time. There’s only so long anyone can rile against the gods or the universe. Anger at deliberate harm is something different. It keeps finding new fuel in each reminder that this wasn’t an accident. Especially if a victim is forced into a dynamic that requires continued contact with their abuser – and where the abuser, in the case of parental alienation could actually quit with the abuse and move to restore the contact if they so chose to.
The third layer: injustice
This is the part I want to add to Peterson’s formulation, because it is specific to what men in these situations face.
There are systems designed to prevent and remedy this kind of harm: the Family Courts. Local authorities’ children’s services. The police. Professional bodies with responsibilities to safeguard children and families. The cultural expectation — the one most of us grew up with — is that these institutions and systems are there for you when something goes badly wrong. That they will at least try to find the truth and act on it. They are the safety net. Or so we believed.
But for many men going through domestic abuse and parental alienation, the experience has been something different. Not that the systems tried and failed. But that the systems either didn’t try, or actually actively aligned with the harm being done. Cafcass officers who spent thirty minutes with children and spoke about their wishes with full authority. Courts that ratified new arrangements as though they had always existed rather than being unilaterally crafted. Police who responded to reports from men with surprise or dismissal. Professionals who accepted one parent’s account without adequate scrutiny.
This is the injustice layer. And it may be the hardest one of all. Because it removes the safety net you believed was there. It isn’t just that something terrible happened, and it was deliberately caused. It’s that the systems built to prevent it participated in it — or stood aside while it unfolded. That disillusionment runs deep. It doesn’t resolve quickly.
Why naming all three matters
I think there’s real practical value in distinguishing these three layers — not as an intellectual exercise, but as a way of understanding why this is so hard to carry, and why the standard frameworks for processing grief and difficulty don’t quite fit.
Most bereavement support is designed for tragedy. The frameworks — the stages of grief, the idea of processing and moving on — assume that the loss was not deliberate. They don’t account for the anger, the sense of betrayal, the recurring fury at the knowledge that this was chosen. That’s not a failure of those frameworks – they simply weren’t built for this.
Similarly, most anger management and therapeutic work around difficult relationships doesn’t fully account for the injustice layer — the specific experience of systems that were supposed to protect you failing to do so, or worse. A therapist working with standard frameworks may help you process the grief and work through the anger but not fully reckon with the third thing.
Naming all three gives you a more accurate picture of what you’re actually carrying. It validates the full weight of it. And it points toward what actually needs addressing: the grief of the losses, the processing of deliberate harm, and — separately — the reckoning with institutional failure and what it means to trust systems again.
What the Stoics would say
The Stoic tradition, which runs through a lot of SoulForge Community’s thinking, doesn’t pretend that tragedy, malevolence, and injustice don’t exist. It takes them seriously. What it offers is a framework for what to do once you’ve named them.
The question — which is the hardest question, and perhaps the most important one — is this: given that all three of these things are true, what is within your control now? Not what was within your control before. Not what should have happened. What is actually available to you, as a man, right now, in the situation as it stands?
The tragedy, the malevolence, and the injustice are facts. They are not going away. But how you carry them, what you build alongside them, and who you become through them — those remain yours. That’s not a comforting slogan. It’s the hardest and most useful truth available.
Mike, founder, SoulForge Community
For more on rebuilding through adversity, see Post 10 — Strength Through Adversity — and the Support and Recovery section at soulforge.org.uk/support-recovery-start. If you’d like to understand the family court system that forms the backdrop to the injustice layer, the SoulForge Community Resources section at soulforge.org.uk/resources covers it in detail.
SoulForge Community exists to support men navigating domestic abuse, parental alienation, and the family court system — and the longer work of rebuilding. Visit soulforge.org.uk.