Human moral frailty is never singular. Meaning, we don’t sin with just one sin. Every moral failing includes at least 3 parts: deception, action, cover-up. Think of deception and cover-up as bookends and the specific behaviors as the books in the middle. And just as it is hard to keep books on a shelf without bookends, it is hard to do what we know is wrong without deception of self and cover-ups.
What are your versions of bookends that give you “permission” to hate, to excuse, to overlook your faults?
Knocking down the bookends goes a long way to defeating outward sins like abuse as well as inward sins like festering bitterness.
Musings on Faith and Psychology 
For a while my bookends could best be described as the sacrifices my kids were making as children of a ministry family. The sin that resulted was my occasional decision to excuse or not address some behavior that I knew called for a loving parental response. My thinking went thus: “They have it harder than I did because they are kids of a ministry family. They have had to move several times – they have had to make big cultural transitions (we went from suburbs to extreme wilderness back to suburbs), they have been asked to make sacrifices that I was never asked to make as a child. Rather than take something away in response to this behavior, I will let them get away with it because they have already suffered in ways I can’t control.” The deception was that I could control the suffering of my kids by doing discipline on my terms rather than on God’s. Thankfully the Lord showed me several years ago that this would ultimately increase their suffering, not decrease it! I can sometimes still fall into this mentality, but by God’s grace, I am aware of those bookends and I am intentional about “knocking them down” as you say and determining to not use them to hold up any more “books.” This article gives me yet another way to visualize my desire to not excuse sin, in myself or in my kids – to choose rather to do things God’s way, by His strength, for His glory, trusting Him for the results. Thank you for challenging and helping us in this way.