By Adrian Gabriel Dumitru, a well-known Romanian author
In his intense and confessional book, The Abuser Is Always … The Victim, Adrian Gabriel Dumitru — a well-known Romanian author with over a hundred volumes of essays — explores the fragile boundary between pain and power in human relationships. Known for his raw honesty and poetic reflections, Dumitru turns emotional darkness into philosophical clarity, revealing how love often hides a silent struggle between victimhood and control.
He writes not as a distant observer but as someone who has lived both roles. “I write as a form of self-therapy,” he confesses. “She abuses me … I become the devil … and then we change the roles. It’s a game — a non-ending stupid game.” Through these words, Dumitru exposes the toxic cycle that traps many relationships: love becomes dependence, tenderness becomes manipulation, and both partners alternate between hurting and being hurt.
The central idea of the book is duality — the constant shifting between emotional extremes. Dumitru shows that no one is purely innocent or guilty. The abuser is often a wounded soul acting out of fear, and the victim carries anger that eventually becomes violence of its own. His essays dig beneath judgment, searching for understanding instead of blame.
Each page feels like a mirror held up to the reader. Dumitru’s style is direct yet deeply poetic, filled with questions rather than answers. He challenges us to see how pain repeats itself when we refuse to face it, and how love can only survive through awareness and honesty. For him, writing is healing — an act of confronting the parts of ourselves we hide from the world.
The Abuser Is Always … The Victim is not a book about cruelty, but about awakening. It is a brave exploration of how darkness teaches empathy, how guilt can become self-knowledge, and how broken love can reveal the deepest truths of the human heart.
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Through this haunting and emotional work, Adrian Gabriel Dumitru once again proves why he remains one of Romania’s most powerful and authentic contemporary voices — a writer unafraid to turn suffering into wisdom and to show that even in pain, there is meaning.
