Princess or Villain. Either one is the victim.

Once upon a time in Neverland, there lived a girl who was both a princess and a villain. Her name was Carina.

While her parent bestowed love and lavish praise on her in some instances, there were many, many rules. Hidden rules. Rules that the princess didn't know she had broken until she was villainized by the parent. This was confusing. The princess became more adaptable. She learned to be at the ready, to interpret the signs, to smell the winds of change. The little princess began to know how to maneuver the hidden rules and to survive. She adapted. But not without a cost. You see, the adaptation was to be ready for anything. Which leads to living life in survival and being ruled by the fight, flight, freeze part of the brain. This also signals the body to make more cortisol. The longer you live in this part of the brain, the more your body just keeps producing cortisol. Stress hormone. And for one thing, this is exhausting. For another thing, it impairs the ability to think through things rationally. It is amazing though, how well a person can adapt and play the part of a sound thinking human while in survival. Kids who live in fear of abuse do it all the time. Teachers see it everyday. Little Carina, princess in training, was living in fear and chaos. And did I mention fear? Sometimes this presents in making decisions that leave not only the person making the decision scratching their head, but also the people around them. And those beloved adults are wondering and saying to the child, "What happened?!" "What were you thinking?!" Well, they weren't. Thinking. Their brain just did something crazy without their permission and they are going to need help navigating back to a better place. A safer place. But this is where they are often misunderstood and left to their own coping skills (or the lack thereof). And so it was for Princess Carina.

She is left in her kingdom with a lot of power. Power = responsibility. Responsibility to entertain herself, to stretch her knowledge, to learn new things.  She has a responsibility to amaze the queen. And she can mostly manage to pull this off, even though she lives her life at the ready. Ready for anything.

But villainous Carina is always there. Always lurking. Ready to just say "chuck it" and do something crazy. There are those times that, if the punishment is coming, she makes sure that a crime has been committed.

The moral of this tale is this: Controlling violence is powerful for the victim (I mean villain), and provoking violence is better than waiting in fear of not knowing when the wind will change.