The cycle of abuse and revenge after trauma

The cycle of abuse and revenge after trauma is a pattern in which harm does not end with the original abuse: it returns in memory, shapes how care and power are understood, and can make revenge seem like a way to regain control. The novel gives this pattern particular force through Victoria Bergman’s stored anger and her thoughts about Karl Lundström, while also showing the gestures of trust and therapeutic contact that stand in contrast to retaliation. Its evidence establishes intentions, memories, and repeated habits—not a simple or inevitable progression from victimhood to revenge.

Anger, Memory, and the Prospect of Revenge

Victoria treats anger as something to preserve rather than release. In her imagination, it gathers strength until she can open the floodgates; the anticipated reckoning is directed not only at one person but at everyone she holds responsible. Her remembered list of injustices gives that future scene its emotional structure: those who caused or permitted harm will, she imagines, eventually ask her for mercy. Revenge is thus conceived as a reversal of power, with the former victim placed in the position of deciding whether others deserve compassion.

The narrative connects that expectation to Karl Lundström and his abuse of his daughter, Linnea Lundström. Victoria’s thoughts describe Karl as a man who showed no regret and who had attempted to end his life. The combination matters: his apparent lack of remorse does not make him seem beyond consequence to Victoria; instead, she considers whether she can help bring about the end he had sought. This remains a contemplated course of action in the evidence, not a confirmed act or outcome. The distinction preserves the tension between revenge as an inwardly rehearsed possibility and revenge carried out in the world.

Victoria’s focus on Karl also draws attention to the persistence of abuse beyond the original relationship. Linnea’s experience is not presented here through a full account of what happened, but the fact that her father abused her for years anchors Victoria’s anger in an identifiable history of harm. Karl’s lack of regret sharpens the perceived distance between accountability and what the abuser himself appears willing to acknowledge. The wish to intervene grows in that gap, where justice seems unavailable or insufficient and personal retaliation begins to look like an answer.

Harm Repeated as a Pattern of Conduct

A recurring idea in Victoria’s reflections is that tenderness and harm can alternate rather than cancel one another out. She understands a sequence of caressing and hitting, protecting and destroying, as something she has been taught. The sequence turns contradictory behavior into a learned pattern: protection does not guarantee safety when the same person can also cause harm, and gestures of care can exist alongside control. The pattern is more disturbing than a simple opposition between kindness and cruelty because it makes each gesture difficult to trust on its own.

That idea recurs in a scene after a man has tended to Victoria’s injuries. She sits wrapped in a towel, conceals a smile, and silently returns to the paired sequence of harm and care while he explains that negotiations have encountered problems and that they will have to go home soon. The evidence does not identify the man in these lines, so the scene does not warrant assigning him a name or assuming more about the negotiations. What it does establish is the collision between immediate care and Victoria’s mental rehearsal of a pattern in which protection can turn into destruction. The juxtaposition makes comfort feel unstable rather than conclusive.

A smile also brings back memories of a large house in Copenhagen, a farm on Jutland, and a pig slaughterhouse. In that recollection, a man had shown Victoria how to cut and directed her toward the heart; later, the remembered direction returns to her thoughts. The narrative links an instruction from the past with the language of the present, allowing memory to intrude without explaining every connection between the people and events. The return of the directional thought gives the memory a continuing hold: what was once taught is not sealed off in the past but remains available to shape how Victoria imagines action.

Trust and the Possibility of Another Response

The novel also places therapeutic encounters alongside the cycle of harm, though the evidence does not establish that treatment resolves it. At Sofia Zetterlund’s office at Mariatorget, Samuel Bai initially appears reserved and uninterested. When Sofia offers to speak with him in Krio rather than English, he becomes more communicative. The shift is concrete and limited: changing the language of the conversation creates an opening for Samuel to engage. It contrasts with the pattern of control and concealed anger elsewhere, suggesting that contact can depend on whether the other person is met in terms that make communication possible.

Linnea Lundström’s visit to Sofia offers a second instance of trust taking shape in a treatment setting. Sofia is surprised by how quickly Linnea has come to trust her. That observation does not establish what Linnea later discloses or whether the trust leads to recovery, but it does place listening and confidence in the same narrative field as family abuse and retaliation. Where the cycle described by Victoria makes care suspect because it can turn into harm, these scenes show trust beginning through conversation and through the possibility of being heard.

Meaning and Limits of the Cycle

The pattern is not presented as a claim that every harmed person becomes violent, or that revenge is an unavoidable result of trauma. Rather, the narrative traces how an imagined response can be formed: anger is deliberately retained, remembered injustices are rehearsed, and an abuser’s lack of remorse intensifies the desire to reverse the balance of power. At the same time, Victoria’s thoughts about Karl remain thoughts in the supplied evidence. The difference between anticipating an act and completing it is essential to understanding the moral uncertainty of the pattern.

The repeated alternation between care and harm deepens that uncertainty. When protection and destruction have been learned as neighboring actions, a caring gesture cannot by itself prove that the cycle has ended. Yet Sofia’s encounters with Samuel Bai and Linnea show a contrasting possibility: communication can open when a person is approached in a way that enables trust. Together, these strands make the cycle both psychological and relational. It persists through memory and learned conduct, but the novel does not reduce every later relationship to repetition; it sets the prospect of revenge against tentative, specific acts of listening.