Oddbean new post about | logout
 I read OP the same way as you did, and obviously several others did too, who found it a good opportunity to advocate abuse. (And yes, deliberately inflicting pain = abuse.) Abuse can be non-physical too, by the way. Not going to write a wall-of-text about how here, but it can.

I still have emotional/psychological scars from my childhood, from both non-physical and physical abuse (despite the latter being both illegal and generally frowned upon here), and even though it was not extreme, they do degrade my quality of life to a not insignificant extent. It doesn't "make you stronger", it may make it look like that to (a certain kind of) external observers, but from a first-person perspective, it only hurts and will likely do so for the rest of life.