Issendai’s writing about how to get out of “sick systems” profoundly changed my life. If you are trapped in a job or relationship and feel too overwhelmed to get out read these:
This is incredible work.
I recently attended Westpoint and got out for reasons beyond my control, this is basically a recipe for that whole system. Every. Single. Point. Describes what I went through to a T.
Seeing this laundry list for the abuse I went through is chilling, but it's nice to be gone. Hopefully people read this and avoid those situations, it's a pretty horrible thing to get involved with.
I remember coming across the first sick systems article you mentioned almost 5 years back when I was with a company which the symptoms of a sick system and this article helped immensely. While I could know that the place is bad and not suitable for me I couldn't really pinpoint why it is bad and how I can get out of it. This article gave me a great perspective and actually propelled my career.
I've been estranged from my dad for decades - I even changed my name when I reached adulthood, to further separate myself from him. By outward appearances it was the perfect nuclear family - father a successful and connected politician with charming perfect children and a doting wife. Inside though, he was a drunkard, a narcissist, horribly abusive on every level to my mother, and otherwise absent in my childhood when he wasn't busy talking about himself and his successes.
All that said, now as a parent myself, I feel sorry for him. I consider his childhood and realize he didn't have a chance - he was screwed up from the very beginning. Parenting is darn hard and even if you spent your early years baby-sitting or as a camp counselor or something, it still doesn't prepare you for when they are your own and you have responsibility for them 24x7 from now into eternity. Throw in an unhappy marriage or a failed career and is it any wonder so many parents end up estranged from their children?
So, yeah, the brief article matches my own experiences and those of other people I've spoken with who are estranged from their parents. I think about it regularly, as if I mistreated my children in the same way I can't say I would really blame them for not wanting to associate with me in adulthood when they are able to make that decision for themselves. As my kids have gotten older, I've even made a point to explain to them that every parent is just a human who is mostly winging it trying the best they can -- and that's the thing kids tend to realize, IE: my parent might not have known what to do, but if they showed love and concern, that tends to trump any mistakes.
> All that said, now as a parent myself, I feel sorry for him.
Slowly but surely, everything I thought I knew about my parents has changed now that I am a parent. I used to harbor bitter resentments against my mother, and wanted her to know how she failed me… now I just see an old woman who gave what she could to her five children and is just as much a “beloved child of God” as each of them. I am also acutely aware that, as long as I’m not abusive, absent or wildly inconsistent, my behavior as a parent is probably more important as my child’s future model of parent behavior when it comes time to raise the next generation. I like to joke that I insist on my son giving his grandmother a hug each time he sees her as a favor to my wife: down payment on more grandchild hugs for her in the future.
I guess that's what happens if you're a competent parent. I had the opposite experience, my failures as a parent have highlighted my own parents' failures that I had previously thought were normal.
I wish I'd been so lucky. As I've grown as a parent, I've unconsciously put my mother under a microscope and keep discovering that, while she tried, she failed. We were once very close but as I've gotten older, I can compare and contrast her behavior with mine. We all suffered emotional abuses (and I've my sisters repeat the patterns, to varying degrees) but I also suffered physically, which is then took out on my younger siblings. And my mother was the good parent.
My father (a term I use only to describe lineage) was mean and heavy handed. Belts were common, switches less so but not out of the realm of possibility. He was violent with my mother, his next wife's, my oldest sister and me. Probably more but those are the ones I remember. To the world outside, he was a good person but to me, he's both my demon and my motivation to be good person, a good father and a good spouse.
Ask him and he'll tell you that things we witnessed never happened. The tray of brownies fell, he didn't throw it. That burn mark on the ceiling is just there; he threw the iron "in the general direction because if I'd wanted to hit her with it, I would have."
We've been estranged since I was in 17. We agreed to let him back in once. Lasted six months. Never again. He doesn't know where I live and unless my kid wants to meet him some day, he'll never be given the opportunity.
My mother and I finally fell out because of COVID. There were other things going on but COVID was the last one. I drew a line that said unless you get vaccinated, you can't come in my home. (She got every flu shot and vaccine, until this one.) She chose politics, I chose to protect my kid and wife. Since she won't be visiting ever again, we decided the easiest path was to just stop talking. If my kid wants to meet "mean nanna" some day, I'll arrange it but my wife and kid come first.
I live my mother. It's an unfortunate outcome. My father... I couldn't care less. He's been dead to me for years.
I'm in a similar situation, but I'm don't sympathize.
I don't support the "doing their best" philosophy. Everybody does their best; at the very least, in the sense that actions are rationalized as the best in the moment.
- If I put up with a certain level of mistreatment from my own parents, then you should put up with the same level of mistreatment from me.
The real difference between parents is those who are willing to sacrifice themselves and change, and those who don't. Theraphy can help a lot, and I bet that all the abusive parents actively refuse it precisely because they don't want that change.
Therapy doesn't do anything for personality disorders. Therapy can't undo the childhood traumas that cause personality disorders. A personality disorder by definition is an inability to change that begins at childhood.
Therapy is not (necessarily) a solution to the given problem; it can help handle problems. In the specific case of estranged relatives, it can establish some level of communication, which can be a very significant step.
A step towards what? Even in the field of psychology* it's generally accepted that personality disorders don't resolve.
[*] Psychology as an analog to medical science is also a con job. Psychotherapies don't need to prove efficacy in clinical trials like drugs do. Whenever anybody does bother to do a study like that though (again -- purely voluntary) therapy never shows itself to be very effective at doing anything. But especially not for people with personality disorders.
Towards communicating between the two parties, which is significantly better than permanently truncating contact. But also prevent certain events/developments.
A minimum of progress could avoid, for example, the abusive parents calling the social services, and/or going to court, and/or receiving a restraining order.
There's lots of behavior that therapy can (potentially, of course) at least mitigate or teach to handle.
> every parent is just a human who is mostly winging it trying the best they can
This is an eye opening statement. Often as a kid, parents tend to look like gods and superheros because they are doing things which are impossible for us. As we age we tend to notice the shortcomings both from the current situation as they are ageing and from our child hood which we have better understanding now. Again, second order thinking helps a lot here I guess.
Maybe it's just my outlook - I sit in meetings with adults and have to remind myself that we are all just children in overgrown bodies. Sure, some will have had experiences that have taught empathy, communication, etc, but most of us are still prone to the occasional temper tantrum or emotional outburst. And that's ok. Rather than seeing it in a derogatory way, I think it helps us all stay humble and open minded toward each other. With my kids - they are at an age where they are starting to realize that I'm human, with foibles. Better to admit that and build trust that they should heed my advice anyway, as a more experienced human, than have them distrust out of spite that I'm the parent and they are the teen.
> every parent is just a human who is mostly winging it
Every parent is doing it for the first time, more-or-less; we're all beginners. Kids are designed to be parented by first-time parents. Thay're amazingly resilient in the face of not-very-good parents.
Of course, lots of kids have elder siblings; I don't mean literally "first-time". But few parents have more than three kids, so what I mean, I guess, is that for most parents, it's the first time they've raised one or more kids.
The way you were parented affects the way you do it yourself; it's the only model you have. Sometimes you will try to do it the opposite of the way your parents did it to you, but I think that is usually rather superficial - the attitudes trickle down the generations, however hard you try to break the chain.
This is a fascinating post to get some perspective from the narcissist side.
In my experience, beyond the suffering and abuse, it is nearly impossible to describe to someone else the experience of extended engagement with someone with narcissistic personality disorder or someone with borderline personality disorder. Friends and family often have no frame of reference in dealing with NPD or BPD. It makes finding help and treatment much harder. Often you have to discover on your own that you have been the target of NPD or BPD abuse. It takes time.
I'm sure there are children who unjustifiably cut off their parents, and the reverse. I can say that I read Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and it rocked my world: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/adult-children-of-emotional... by thoroughly describing my upbringing. I've not cut off contact but I have containerized it and set strict boundary conditions, if you will, and my parents seem not to understand their own behavior, at all.
This book really helped me figure out my parents and my childhood. For my entire life I've essentially thought "my parents aren't really narcissists and they weren't outright abusive, so why have I always felt like something was wrong with my upbringing, and why do I seem to harbor resentment towards them?". Turns out they were / are very emotionally immature. This quote summarizes it pretty well:
> Growing up in a family with emotionally immature parents is a lonely experience. These parents may look and act perfectly normal, caring for their child’s physical health and providing meals and safety. However, if they don’t make a solid emotional connection with their child, the child will have a gaping hole where true security might have been.
If you can admit your own flaws, you can't be that bad. Or at least there's hope for you.
When I pushed my parents bad behavior front and center, I got hung up on. The next time we spoke on the phone the incident was not mentioned - like it never happened.
That thing you're talking about with your parents is exactly how I behave. I did have a big problem with admitting, or rather realizing, many things about myself, even while other people were telling them to me. I didn't realize until this year that I am incompetent as a parent. My oldest kid is 9. Watching her grow up and watching the consequences of my own negative influence on her is what led to realization.
I wish it were as easy as awareness but it's so deep. There was supposed to be some kind of interpersonal development feedback loop accumulated over years and it just didn't happen. Now I can only sometimes get into a mood where I think I can re-develop a personality. But there is no rational basis for that hope.
> Because they probably weren’t allowed to express and integrate their emotional experiences in childhood, these people grow up to be emotion-ally inconsistent adults. Their personalities are weakly structured, and they often express contradictory emotions and behaviors. They step in and out of emotional states, never noticing their inconsistency. When they become parents, these traits create emotional bafflement in their children. One woman described her mother’s behavior as chaotic, “flip- flopping in ways that made no sense.”
I already figured this all out by myself.
The book is only wrong when it says things like "never noticing." I noticed.
> Growing up with an inconsistent parent is likely to undermine a child’s sense of security, keeping the child on edge. Since a parent’s response provides a child’s emotional compass for self- worth, such chil-dren also are likely to believe that their parent’s changing moods are somehow their fault.
This is what I did. On edge. Insecure. Victim of abuse. It's visible in body language.
> Instead of learning about themselves and developing a strong, cohe-sive self in early childhood, emotionally immature people learned that certain feelings were bad and forbidden. They unconsciously developed defenses against experiencing many of their deeper feelings. As a result, energies that could have gone toward developing a full self were instead devoted to suppressing their natural instincts, resulting in a limited capac-ity for emotional intimacy.
The book is wrong in the same way once again. Because I remember by the time I was 16 years old I was entirely conscious of the idea that feelings were bad and had a conscious belief in the pro-active suppression of negative emotion, including through the use of drugs. I remember getting into an internet argument about the topic at that age. The only part I wasn't aware of was how completely fucked up dysfunctional it was.
Yep. You try and explain the arguments or situations, but in peoples minds they apply the model of a normal person that they have in their head to the narc because they look at the narc and see a normal person, and they think well you just explain this to them or just say that to them. They don't understand that their mental models of how someone will behave and what they will feel and say and do are not applicable to the situation, and that trying to apply them will give you the wrong answer. like playing a familiar game with the controls reversed.
Not sure what you need exactly but BPDFamily https://www.bpdfamily.com/ (especially the forums) is a great resource for people with a BPD person in their lives. Good luck.
Or you have the reverse issue, where the child is abusive. I watched my step son berate his mom for almost a decade before she finally was able to end the toxic relationship and cut him off for good.
He was completely spoiled, was never physically or emotionally abused (he did most of the verbal abusing, often calling my wife a terrible mom, an abusive mom, worthless, useless, stupid, etc...). He also often physically tried to abuse his younger brother (my other step son).
If you asked him today why he is estranged with his mom, he would tell you his mom is an awful abusive parent who never loved him and was the cause of all the issues. My wife and I know that he is just a toxic kid who never wanted to grow up (now 20, not in college, no job, his dad pays for everything so he can play video games 24/7).
I think there are gonna be as many situations and nuances as there are people here.
The articles address this, and are not an assessment of the relative likelihood of parents being abusive versus children being abusive (in fact, both can be abusive at the same time).
My older brother was convicted of murder, currently in prison serving a 40 year sentence, physically assaulted my mother and put her in hospital when he was a teenager, theft, drugs the whole lot.
Even though she doesn't want much to do with him, she still can't bring herself to cut all ties.
> I think there are gonna be as many situations and nuances as there are people here.
If you think about it, what is the distribution of parents and children? It's the same with population in general. So all types of people become parents. Same for children, and you get n^2 types of relationships.
The world kind of blows now, I don't fault him for not wanting to join society. The traditional route of going to college and getting a big boy job is not the panacea it was for your generation.
I mean it kinda is the same panacea it was back then no? As in, it's not a panacea, but its a ton better than no job and just sucking off your parents largesse like a parasite.
The world can be pretty rough, but that doesn’t excuse making it someone else’s problem. It’s not like the parents in this situation aren’t operating under the same pressures.
I didn’t read the article. However, personal anecdote, my girlfriend was a victim of parental alienation. She had a child at 18 and everyone in her life conspired against her to separate her from her child. Her mom tried to separate us. She would pull me aside and tell me her daughter ( my girlfriend ) was a narcissist, etc. I knew she wasn’t. She is a loving, caring person who cares deeply for her son. She was undiagnosed high functioning autistic and no one took any time trying to figure out how to interact with her.
If it wasn’t for the fact that my salary affords us the ability to adequately represent ourselves in court she would have lost all rights to her son.
I can't help but connect this to the internet fulfilling it's promise of helping people to find communities of others like them. In the past, I imagine a lot of these parents would have had trouble filling up their life with enablers validating their toxic perspective. They'd have to deal with people around them not taking their side by either facing criticism or shutting up about it. Either way, they'd have space to maybe rethink things.
This kind of thing is readily apparent with people getting together online to talk about politics. But what about other conditions? Are bad bosses more likely to find validation among other bad bosses? Is any of my sociological bullshitting here true?
I have half siblings like this, who tried to take the family house from me after my father (their stepfather) died. That is, they tried to take my share of it; the will split everything equally. We split the family things up into thirds and they were caught trying to steal from my share. Crazy making it was. So much gas lighting. We are now estranged. TBH even seeing their picture upsets me.
This is definitely something I could see myself being concerned about happening. Any advice RE: lawyers/how to handle the siblings trying to bypass the will? I've been told a living trust is something to consider. Thoughts?
A trust is better than a will. The saving grace is that my parents selected a trustee for their trust who was trustworthy. He also did things extremely slowly because he was terrified my awful half sisters would sue him. My half sisters, no surprise, have terrible judgment in many areas of life, and this was one, so the trouble they started was not likely to end with the result they wanted. They have greed though, so they went for it. If there hadn't been a good trustee I would not have had the will to resist. A couple of things I learned: get your own lawyer. That is important! The best investment of your money. Otherwise no one is interested in your opinion. Also, your parents should set up a trust rather than just a will. If your parents don't know someone who would make a good trustee, just get a bank. They have departments that specialize in this. In a way a bank is better. A bank will not be terrified that the nut job narcissist inheritor might sue them; they have deep pockets.
One more thing. The way things went down totally shocked me. I was a child of my mother's second marriage and I learned the hard way that my half sibs had always resented me. Now that I know that, things about my family make more sense. My feeling is, if you at all feel your sibs may resent you because life gave you luck / looks / smarts / a better father / you name it, proceed with caution.
Your second paragraph definitely is a nail on the head moment. It is something I try and look past often but am hyper aware of it when I'm with my parents and they call to "talk". I'll have to ask them about who their trustee is. Thanks!
Something similar happened when my grandfather died. My father was the executor. The family thought the estate was much larger than it was. There were lawyers, lawsuits, attempts at extortion, at least one attempt at entrapping my father into striking one of them, and probably some other bullshit I was not aware of.
My grandparents had pretty much everything divided and handed out before they died. Two of them were living on property/in houses that were given to them by my grandparents. After funeral expenses, hospital bills, and everything else, there really wasn't much left.
If you want some real advice: Don't count on it. Set yourself up in a way that you aren't waiting for your parents to die. Have absolutely no stake in the outcome. And if you are the executor, be as open and transparent as possible. If anything, it'll make the lawsuits quicker.
People change their wills, sometimes secretly. Maybe your parent favours your sibling, and you didn't know; maybe they want to leave everything to the cat.
Make your own life, and if something trickles down, that's a pure bonus.
Ideally you want a Durable Power of Attorney as well, which gives you the power to handle their affairs while they're living (if necessary). Both for being able to take care of them, and as a trump card in case someone else does influence them into signing a new Will you can question their mental competence without ending up in a world of hurt regarding conservatorship etc.
From my understanding a Living Trust is really just a way of bypassing the Will and probate process, and actually allows for less oversight. This might make things easier, or it might make it harder to get justice.
There are also irrevocable trusts that allow for making designations that can't be taken back, which perhaps may fit your situation. But since they're irrevocable they need to be drafted and planned more carefully.
Of course if they're not looking to you to fulfill such a role or discuss such things, then perhaps it's not your scene no matter how much you think it is. Whatever the case may be, you're better off having these conversations sooner rather than too late.
IME a parent's death is when all those unresolved childhood disagreements come back to roost.
I've done this. I made a will in favour of my two kids; and lasting powers of attorney, to cover the eventuality that I become mentally incompetent, but fail to pop my socks.
The will is scrupulously fair - straight 50:50 split, no special provision for need or whatever. Both kids are named as executors. I bung them some money from time to time, especially if one of them is in need. I always give them both the same amount, even if the other isn't in need. My hope is that they won't fall out over my legacy. I don't think they will.
Greedy, grasping offspring is a thing. I have friends who have that problem. They don't care to spend time with their offspring, because of tedious conversations about money. I'm so glad I don't have that problem. My kids never ask me for money, even if I invite them to ("Are you OK for money?") I never asked my parents for money either - I didn't want to feel beholden to them.
I assume you trust both of them, or you wouldn't have designated both as executors. One of them will have to step up and take the burden (assuming you didn't name them co-executors that need to act jointly?). And assuming they both view it as a burden, they can decide that for themselves.
IMO problems between honest people arise when an estate drags out due to large non-monetary assets like houses, causing legitimate differences in opinion. If they both just want to sell it, that's easy. When one wants to keep it to live in, or if there is a lot of land and someone wants to subdivide to get more money, then you get into arguments. Or other intangibles like if one of them ends up spending a lot of time personally taking care of you, what's that worth post facto.
FWIW I don't know how the probate process is in your state, but you could look into a living trust to keep the process easier and more private. States that have adopted the uniform probate code are pretty straightforward, but ones that haven't can get somewhat tedious even for uncontested estates (eg publishing a list of all your assets in the public record).
TBH you probably have a gut feeling of whether your kids will work together or argue, and if you want to head off problems the only way is to talk about it ahead of time and plan for the things that will cause friction.
> One of them will have to step up and take the burden
Yes. They are not co-executors (they can choose how they divide the burden). And I know it is a burden; some people hire an accountant to do it for them. It took my sister about 6 months to do probate for my father. I'm glad I didn't have to shoulder that.
So as far as I'm concerned, that's up to them. I trust them both. I trust them not to fight. But in the end, even if you've done your best to set things up properly, people can still find a way to generate a conflict.
Most of the legacy happens to be a couple of homes; they'd be hard to divide, but both my kids have their own homes. I imagine they'll just sell both properties. I appreciate your remarks about divisible land legacies; my property isn't easily divisible. At any rate, my will is quite clear; the division is to be 50:50.
I really hope neither of them ends up having to care for me; but if that should happen, I suppose I'd just compensate them for their trouble while I'm still alive.
Trusts can be simple or byzantine. I don't think I need to make a trust at all. My affairs aren't complicated, and there are no secrets. I mainly want to protect my legacy from my two ex-wives, who have each already taken everything they're entitled to.
Incidentally, I was a bit miffed that my Dad appointed my sister as sole executor; but I never mentioned that to anyone. Fact is, she is a competent maanager and administrator, and I'm not. He did the right thing.
I wonder if anyone here has had luck pointing out the bigger picture in these situations.
Essentially they risked never talking to you again, losing a living link with their deceased step father, over what? An end table? A book case? Is this really how you want to play this out?
If this is really about some pieces of furniture, maybe honest misunderstanding that blew up?
After the passing of a grandparent I took some items home that I thought I was saving from being thrown out with the trash, but it turned out a sibling really wanted them and felt wronged that I had taken them without their approval.
I think GP's situation is more serious than this, but in some cases maybe honest misunderstandings plus digging in heels causes some unnecessary grief.
When my great-aunt died, there was some money which got divided up in a simple way; and a number of artifacts - furniture, nice crockery, jewellery. Most of the other heirs were women, so no jewellery for me. For the artifacts, we had a sort of auction: "Who wants this chinese vase?" I would have liked that vase, and I got the fuzzy end of the lollipop in that auction. I went away with a few articles of sentimental value, but no cash value. I reckon I got a good deal.
When my father died, it was even easier; the will was a mess, if you ask me, but my sister was executor, and she did a really good job. He had been in a care home, and had already disposed of most of his personal posessions. My siblings all played very nicely, and edge cases were settled very amicably. In fact, if anything, it brought us all together.
> . If a person's own writing shows that they lie, rewrite reality, or otherwise engage in cognitive distortions, they're abusive. Period. Instant kill shot.
If you haven't dealt with someone with NPD or BPD, I'd like to clarify this a bit. I'm sure that any of the prolific commenters on HN could be found to have contradicted themselves and/or distorted reality occasionally. This is about patterns of behavior, and it's usually coupled with minimizing any specific examples of the behavior while never engaging with the fact that the problem is the pattern of behavior, not any one example.
I've dealt with someone with eBPD who was unable to get through a 45 minute therapy session without contradicting themselves. They also habitually selectively report facts to distort reality[1]. If the estranged kid(s) really were the ones with personality disorders, I suspect the emotional responses to being cut out would be something along the lines of "Sad, relieved, guilty about feeling relieved."
1: Here's an example with details changed: "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a car crash." Reality, Joe was in the passenger seat, and the driver hit a deer that jumped out in front of them. On confrontation: "I never said Joe drove drunk!"
Also, from context, I believe that's really focused on observable patterns in the forum. If someone is lying and contradicting themselves so plainly on the forum (with relatively low stakes) it's quite likely that they do so elsewhere.
Agree that they're doing it elsewhere, but not that these are low stakes social situations just because they're online forums. They may be very important social scenes in the lives of the participants.
That’s also just what “lying” means. If you make a claim with the intention of deceiving someone that claim is a lie. It’s not like English is a formal language where you can say “ah but my statement technically passed the ‘Truth compiler’ so it’s not technically a lie.”
The recent season 1 of the Wheel of Time television show reminded me of how the Aes Sedai are magically bound "To speak no word that is not true".
Of course, they're all master manipulators, ironically able to lie better than the common people because they can leverage that apparent veneer of truthfulness to deceive even more completely.
It's funny how this is actually how laws and official paperwork works. It is very important to look at every single word. And I don't think you are correct in saying that it is lying. It actually objectively isn't. And whether you'd argue it is or isn't very likely depends on which side of it you are on.
Of course when reading over it in the regular fast way of reading through the comments, one might think there is a contradiction, because you said there would be one and so we read it that way. But there really isn't. It's an evasive manoeuvre. Of course they know what you're asking and they specifically do not want to lie and so they choose words you are going to very likely parse in a particular way.
If you think about it, is the "there's a contradiction in the following sentence" way of stating this any different/worse/better than the original? I would argue it isn't. Same level just on opposite sides of the argument.
Conversations are not legal contracts; if you knowingly and selectively choose your words to give the wrong impression (and abusers are skilled at doing) you are lying.
Conversations can be legal contracts. A verbal contract is a contract. It might be hard to prove that the contract exists, but that doesn't mean that there was no agreement.
FWIW, there are actually two definitions of lie listed in most dictionaries. The first is to present false information with the intent to deceive, but the second is just to deceive. I think perhaps people arguing about whether or not my example is strictly "a lie" are not working with the same definition. I intentionally avoided the word "lie" because of this confusion.
I've had people argue that answering a question with an intentionally misleading non-sequitur is not lying. e.g. "Did you reaearch your topic?" "I went to the library"; they didn't say when they went to the library nor that they did any research at the library. Or more recently: "Have you been vaccinated?" "Yeah, I've been immunized".
To me such non-answers are clearly a lie because it's not really any different than saying "Yes" and then claiming you were talking about the popular rock band from the 70s for no particular reason. I can see how some people would disagree and I'm not interested in arguing semantics, so I try to avoid the word "lie" in general when "deception" seems less contentious.
Reminds me of the NSA dude claiming under oath 'not knowingly'. Apparently he had plausible deniability.
Spies seem masters in this, applying it for the good (of whomever they serve).
Bill Clinton's famous 'never had sex with that woman, miss Lewinsky' also comes to mind.
I think it could also be trained (including with humor, even when obviously a lie), as its basically a subset of social engineering or confidence game. When people succesfully lie, they are telling a truth from a certain PoV (one which benefits them). And, it can be a useful trait, too, depending on your where you stand (also a PoV).
Side note: the word lie is indeed not preferred, a better one is deceptive or manipative.
That being said, BPD was hyped in 90s where a lot of women got the diagnosis, while they were underrepresented in autism diagnoses.
On the contrary, you can’t deliberately deceive someone in the wording of a contract, and you can’t even induce someone to enter a contract by deliberately deceiving them.
This will always be a question of interpretation. There are a lot of situations (contract or otherwise) where you can say something that might imply something else but you chose your words wisely and 'mean them'. Marketing is full of this for example as well. And it extends to contracts.
"Up to 100MBit" in the marketing material as well as the contract. When you complain that you only get 0.5MBit it's basically "buyer beware" because you bought "up to" not "always exactly" 100MBit of connectivity on a shared medium (cable). As long as it's true that the medium actually supports 100MBit there's nothing wrong with this except for it being very deceptive. This kind of thing is all over the place and a lot of people fall for it all the time. And then complain loudly but mostly toothlessly. The internet itself I guess has changed some of this as it's easier for companies to get bad enough publicity out of such things than back in the day but it's doesn't change the underlying facts and mechanics.
This one is more "distorted reality" rather than a contradiction.
They present information in a way to get you to assume things that aren't true to either paint their desired victim in a bad light or them in a good light. And when presented with clarifying data, will try to act like its your fault that you misinterpreted what they said. Even though it's what they wanted.
One tell is someone who seems to collect bad relationships. Who has a never-ending stream of stories of people just being awful to them. And their only admission of having done anything wrong is just some sort of vague platitude. It's always of the variety "I'm not perfect either" never "I shouldn't have cheated".
If you state two facts of equal import, they aren't necessarily linked. But if they are of different levels, and one happens before the other, only people who are implying a connection or who have a clinical condition lump those together.
Yesterday my uncle died and my dog got hit by a car.
versus:
Yesterday my shoelace broke and my dog got hit by a car.
Why am I bringing up the shoelace? And why first? For want of a nail the kingdom was lost? There are people who can't filter events by intensity. That's a separate diagnosis from BPD or NPD, but it's still something to keep an eye on. You either don't know you are saying something salacious, you do and you don't care, or you do and you are enjoying the buzz it creates.
There's really just no amount of message board writing you're going to be able to do to make "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a car crash" not imply, to a reasonable audience, that Joe drove drunk. I get that you can have a lot of fun making a sport out of ever-more-elaborate arguments saying it doesn't imply that at all, or that we can't really know whether an intent to imply it was present, but none of that matters.
Ordinary humans can predict what inferences their interlocutors will make. Their interlocutors know this. Therefore, both parties use this to communicate just as much as they do overt utterances. This being so, they can mislead with inferences as well as they can with overt utterances. This is not called lying, but ordinary users of language do not consider it less morally inculpating. In fact, they may consider it worse inasmuch as it leaves them less recourse when it is discovered.
In reading about neurodiversity I’ve encountered several groups of people who struggle with relevance theory. Not understanding how this works can drive a pretty big wedge between you and the people you’re trying to bond with, especially if you don’t know you’re doing it.
The only fair assumption from hearing either of those two statements is that yesterday contained two events. Either "uncle died and dog hit by car" or "shoelace broke and dog got hit by car".
It's a common tendency to link related subjects together. So people infer that sharing a sentence/utterance means the two are directly related.
Causing inferences like, "Oh, did he have a heart attack and run over your dog??".
It is true that some people prey on these inferences and use them to lie/manipulate but it is also very possible that they are just two things that happened on the same day - related only by their traumatic impact. TLDR: Yesterday sucked because these two separate things happened...
To a person who experienced these events, it's completely possible that you don't know people think your uncle ran over your dog. When he actually died in his sleep and your dog was run over by the neighbor.
"Yesterday my uncle died and my dog got hit by a car"
A lot of people communicate this way.
I get the sense that you're on some vendetta against all of my comments for some reason, but I'm not on a weird strike against anything except poor assumptions.
I have taken employment (probably IQ in disguise) tests that specifically look for people making this association (and mark them down for it). I imagine they thought it had some association with logical skills and success in computer programming.
The conjunction fallacy has to do with evaluation of likelihood. It's completely unrelated to the conversation so far, which has to do with interpreting whether a conjunction is meaningful in itself.
No, that’s not absolutely not an assumption you can make. Neurotypical people don’t think that way. Fair has nothing to do with it. If you believe that’s normal, you might want to talk to a professional about whether you’re on the autism spectrum, or if you were raised in an abusive household (ie, by narcissists).
Getting a diagnosis might make the rest of your life easier.
It was not an example of a contradiction (I figured that's well enough understood to not mean an example). It was an example of selectively presenting facts in a way to distort reality.
> I've dealt with someone with eBPD who was unable to get through a 45 minute therapy session without contradicting themselves. They also habitually selectively report facts to distort reality[1].
> 1: Here's an example with details changed...
How is this not supposed to be an example of a contradiction? You pre-empted your "they distort reality" comment with the presumption that there are contradictions, then go on to give an example that doesn't contain any.
It just contains lazy details, which justly lead to incorrect inferences. Whether this is indicative of intentional manipulative behavior or distorted views of reality is hard to say without more context.
I believe the word "also" should indicate that the behavior in the second sentence is distinct from the behavior in the first sentence. There are two behaviors here:
- They contradict themselves.
- They habitually selectively report facts to distort reality
The footnote belongs with the second behavior which is why the [1] was on the second sentence.
You are using a supposed contradiction as evidence that they have a distorted view of reality. Without the contradiction (which I see none), the argument that they are distorting reality lacks premise.
It banks on inferring, "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a car crash." to explicitly mean "Joe was driving drunk". It isn't a completely off-base interpretation, but it isn't rock solid either. More context is necessary before this conversation has any real value.
Once again: I never claimed there was a contradiction in the example given. It may have been unclear in my original comment, but I have clarified this twice now:
> 1: Here's an example with details changed: "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a car crash." Reality, Joe was in the passenger seat, and the driver hit a deer that jumped out in front of them. On confrontation: "I never said Joe drove drunk!"
Continued:
"It was Joe's birthday he got a bit tipsy. He was feeling a bit full of himself and hit on my girlfriend all night. Afterwards I still decide to drive him home so he didn't die. I mean, what kind of friend would let his friend drive himself home after drinking on his birthday? And even then he continued to be a complete ass. I was so enraged that I didn't even see the deer jump out in front of my car"
Hence: "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a car crash" could very well be a valid interpretation of the evening if you consider all possible context. Especially if you are trying not to throw Joe under the bus as a sleazy friend to your therapist.
But also, it could definitely be the drivers fault in this hypothetical scenario. Hard to say.
The problem here is that humans have a tendency to believe they have all the information they need to pass correct judgment (source: life experience, and if I'm wrong about this, that means I'm probably right, right?). Usually, they don't. In my experience, everyone embroiders details to make themselves look innocent, and often without even noticing. It's very difficult to parse truth from people's tendency to simplify and exaggerate based on personal bias.
If there is a conflict there usually is a good reason - but sometimes that "good reason" is based on a misinterpretation that others won't understand.
I can't place fault on Joe or the driver in this situation because: I wasn't there and I don't know all of the context.
The comment you're responding to starts by saying these aren't the actual details; they're trying to illustrate a pattern of abusive arguments that provide misleading narratives, and, when contradicted by evidence, proceed to lawyer out from under the deception. That's obviously a real phenomenon; the example is just meant as an illustration of it. I'm not sure what the point of litigating it is.
If that comment had just used the abstract pattern: "(1) Abuser provides an overtly misleading narrative; (2) Abuser is confronted with evidence that contradicts the thrust of their narrative; (3) Abuser retreats to litigating the clear meaning of their original narrative", would you still see a point in trying to provide counterfactuals? The comment is simply trying to illustrate a pattern common to unproductive and/or abusive arguments; they not really offering you a law school hypo to work through.
1) Why is a therapist qualifying a narrative as misleading, or not? Is this productive therapy?
2) Why would a therapist confront a patient like this? Is the point of good therapy to say, "Ahah! You contradicted yourself. My diagnosis that you are eBPD is correct!"
3) Seems like the patient being qualified as an abuser and confronted by a person who's role is to help them, in this manner, would naturally retreat to a defensive posture.
So no, I don't see the point in trying to provide counterfactuals. Doesn't feel like productive therapy.
A good therapist is there to listen, without judgement.
Just my 2 cents tho. Obviously, feel free to disagree.
> Why would a therapist confront a patient like this?
Well one reason would be that self-contradiction is part of the behavior the patient is seeking to change, and making the patient aware of their behavior can help them recognize it.
"Confront" in a therapeutic context doesn't mean "gotcha!" It just means asking the patient to recognize something.
I see a misunderstanding here. The therapist is not qualifying the narrative as misleading or not and the therapist is not confronting the person. From my example it's either Joe, or the person they told this two who felt like they were lied to.
> Why is there confrontation at all? Why not simply ask for elaboration while withholding judgement? Maybe the person you are providing therapy to is still worked up from the events and unable to explain things clearly.
1. There is confrontation because the statements were to mutual acquaintances of Joe while Joe wasn't present. He just starts to notice that people are asking "let me know if you need help" and suggesting he go to AA meetings and such. Then sometime later he finds more out, the group is divided into people who believe Joe and those who think he is lying to cover up his drinking problem, and the person who stirred up all this trouble can claim guilt-free that they never lied.
2. Again this is about a pattern of behavior. Everyone speaks unclearly from time to time; bad communication is everywhere. This particular person would do it regularly and the miscommunication mysteriously seems to always themselves in a better light. Your original reply is a reasonable response to one specific occasion. It's also why people like this can maintain superficial relationships for so long. If you encounter it just a couple times a year you will think nothing of it and give them the benefit of the doubt.
The point is that you're arguing the metaphor rather than the point of the metaphor.
Your additions are bullshit. They add nothing but to somehow point at the poster and go "ah-ha". Because you're really just making the same point as the poster: Important details that change the story can be left out.
It doesn't matter which party in the hypothetical scenario is actually correct, only that one of them is not because they left out significant details.
It's very concerning how quickly people throw around medical terms like NPD or BPD. The blog seems anonymous so there is no indication of whether the person who wrote it is qualified to diagnose. My guess is no because there are many blanket statements and few qualifying statements. People without training are likely to read about a few characteristics and, well, you see what you look for.
I upvoted this comment, since it's important to retain a skeptical perspective, anywhere. Reading psychology is very liberating as it can be an immense help in understanding your personal experiences, but it can also become a vessel for projecting your preconceptions on those around you. Labeling others with mental disorders is also a way to dehumanize them and certainly not a healthy way to engage with the world. In the end, psychological labels are just shortcuts that help pattern the world in the absence of real understanding.
I agree. On the note of shortcuts, I see one in how we label any obligation outside of debt as “abuse”. That it’s inherently evil for someone else to expect something in return after doing something for them.
A lot of people on the internet use that moral confusion to whitewash their ingratitude. Framing their obligator as morally reprehensible or psychologically unfit, by recalling other peoples sob stories, in order to reduce their own personal recompense. It’s like leveraging the legitimate tragedy of a few for the convenience of the many.
And I’m saying this as someone who sponged off my parents for years and didn’t pay them a dime on rent.
Yes, the child can get everything they want from the parent. The parent must sacrifice it all. Then, when they child has no need for the parent, they can find some excuse to call abuse "you birthed me, how dare you" and get rid of their parent forever. It's a convenient view for a convenient life.
I should know; I've been there, done that, and I grew out of it (I think). Something about my future children being as ungrateful as I was really rankles me.
That’s an uncharitable version of what I said, but sure.
My own parents were not abusive, and I wish distance didn’t make it so difficult for them to be a larger part of my family’s life. They’re flawed and have their poverty/alcoholism/death baggage - but I feel really fortunate to have had them as parents.
On the other hand, I have other people in my life whose parents were abusive (including being legally defined as such). Depending on the specific dynamic, most are trying to sort out how to ‘shrink’ the relationship in a way that maintains bonds and contact but with boundaries to soften the negative parts of the relationship. For others, the relationship is actively unsafe, and they’re minimizing contact.
There’s clearly some hard stuff behind your version, but the answer isn’t to swing full tilt the other way.
It’s all messy and fraught - but adult children do have agency over their lives and the shape of the relationship with their parents.
I sympathize with a lot of their writing but their response to “ What are your credentials?” is awfully defensive. I think a simple “I’ve read some books and I’ve made my own observations” would have sufficed.
Informal diagnoses can be useful as hypotheses to present to qualified practitioners, and may even help in cases like those at the linked site to give the affected parties peace of mind and a feeling of insight, but I believe there is something unscientific about labeling people with medical disorders without the qualifications to do so. IMO such diagnoses should always at least be taken with a grain of salt. How relevant that is to this particular discussion is certainly open to interpretation.
"The narcissists I see online don't write about their relationships with their children and close friends; they hardly write about their own partners, except as props in the narcissist's ongoing drama."
The writer seems very confident of their assessment of various people online.
So? Swap "narcissists" with "people who exhibit some specific shared traits between one another that are also often described as part of the diagnostic criteria of a narcissist" and you get the same effect.
It's a shortcut, not a diagnosis. Layperson English tends to be that way, and getting caught up on the different definitions between medicine and "common" speak is likely a waste of time.
Considering that some degree of narcissism is part of everyone's psyche, using it as a label and associating it with extreme cases makes it close to an epithet. I have no doubt that many of the people one might see as extreme or "obvious" narcissists might have the same opinion of those who use that language. It's nearly comical at that point.
Narcissism is something that normal adults grow out of, although they can still act childishly _at times_. But for some people, the growth never happens at all.
"Narcissism" is generally thrown around as an insult and it has a confused history in the psychology literature going back to Freud using it in two different ways that were both confused and undeveloped.
"Narcissism" essentially means "self-love" and it is something that is part of everyone's psyche. Having something wrong with your narcissism is like having something wrong with your heart and there are many things that can go wrong with your heart such as heart disease, heart failure, bad valves, arrhythmia, heart attack, etc. In the middle of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Asuka Langley Soryu makes a passionate defense of self-love ("you are all you've got!")
There is "narcissistic personality disorder" as well as the (widespread) narcissistic disturbance that Kohut talks about which itself is more or less complicated by borderline and other disturbances at more archaic levels.
It is all front of mind for me right now because I was talking to my therapist and volunteered that I was concerned about an incident of "Dark Triad" behavior on my part and she said at one point I was "talking like a Narcissist" (I agreed) yet when I took a
I found I was midrange on Machiavellianism, below average on "narcissism" and close to the bottom of the range on psychopathy. (Hmmm... I felt remorse about what I did so I guess I'm not psychopathic.)
and marked it up with a highlighter and drew my version of Kohut's horizontal and vertical split on my whiteboard. I oscillate between grandiosity and worthlessness sometimes and definitely can point to merger, twinship, and mirror transferences. (It was twinship transferences on two people that got out of hand...)
I'd point to at least some of this phenomenology being widespread and almost normal... I think almost anytime somebody blows up for what seems like no good reason there is a grandiosity -> worthlessness transition going on.
This is the most enlightening thing I've read regarding narcissistic parents in... a lifetime I think would be a good word to describe it.
It just perfectly nails my observations and comes to similar conclusions that were brewing in my mind for the past few years. It's really ... I don't know how to call it - relieving? To read it similar way I would put it in words, but from totally different person.
It also bases many arguments on actual situations that happened on some group - it's not just someone talking about "theory", it's dissecting actually happening discussions and giving insight into what these people might have thought. It helps one to think that this are real people who exist that share similar traits to what one might have experienced, and not just someone making stuff up to make you think that you're right.
This series of articles is... really something I've been needing to hear for a while, despite rationally having already accepted the things inside of it. Thanks for posting it here, Jason.
A problem I see with parents in general and not just personality disorder types, which is reinforced by the state and scientists, is this subconscious bias that kids are the property of their parents.
It needs to stop.
Kids are like AI they learn from the environment around them and prison populations are in part an example of the failed parenting, state and scientific direction, but as usual State officials and scientists never get held to account when they should only the parent.
Add in different belief systems and you have a recipe for disaster which constantly unfurls to one degree or another day in day out. ad nauseum.
And all the while the planet still keeps being more and more over populated. Its like fiddling at the seams whilst Rome burns.
I was with you until that last part. Sorry I'm not really willing to believe John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ and co. could have my best interest in mind when talking about how we should maintain humanity under half a billion in perpetual balance with nature. Sounds more like a world where they will own everything and there will never be enough of "the rest of us" to effectively demand equality https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10
I dont care to a certain extent because it will end with war OR sickness and poverty, if people are not forced to live within their means and make the best of what they are given.
I'd like to see euthanisia become legal so we dont have to be experimented on by scientists who have the audacity to think its acceptable, just like I dont agree with Govt who have the audacity to think they can control our lives through legislation and all that.
You could say the Eugenicist movement has become more persuasive today. We have also had to have our health impaired to make us more docile and to reduce our breeding abilities whilst also increasing the risk of cancer, to the point that something like 50% of the UK population will get cancer in their lifetime here in the UK. TF the NHS is free! I bet Josef Mengele is kicking himself for being too obvious!
Inflation is also stalking the planet right now, its getting more expensive to live, now whilst various central banks can print monkey tokens to keep the natives happy, inventing an excuse or two to print more like Quantative Easing helps keep people in the game and Govt's can invent bureaucracy to keep people busier.
I'm also aware that in the West its been cheaper to offshore some jobs to parts of the world with lower labour costs. That last point may or may not also entail poorer working conditions like we see with Foxconn and Apple.
Now its also clear that we have a form of global communism imposed on us by global business giants under the guise of global capitalism only its not a govt but a board doing the communism bit limiting our choices of what we can spend money on. What govt would want to distance themselves from domains previously under their control like telecoms spying?
But in all of this, there is a new entrant, artificial intelligence, chipping away at the middle class jobs and some working class manual labour jobs which has opened up a new angle of attack that previously hadnt existed in human history.
Now its doing three things, its improving quality like we see with robots building German cars and its also forcing Govt to get creative with their bureaucracy which is why the security services "hack" via these global entities with court orders. Muddying the waters to keep us busy. Bread and Circuses been going on since Roman times and all that.
Its also discovering new attack vectors for all sorts of areas of life, but its also undermining the pillars of society authority namely the State and religion.
"we have a form of global communism imposed on us by global business giants under the guise of global capitalism"
Dear Americans
Can you please stop calling everything 'Communist'? Now we have articles by BBC 'is the Pope communist', you have posters 'Race mixing is communism', 'climate change is communist'.
What is this, communism of the brain? Do you not have other words?
Chairman Mao didn't invest 'global business', you own this problem lock, stock and barrel.
I think my two favorite examples of this from personal experience are when people have said to me:
- Marxism is communist!
- the Nazis we’re communist!
What you are noting is something I find really personally interesting. We like to think otherwise but words are very socially defined.
What you’re describing isn’t people referencing an actual definition of communism. It’s more akin to a pointer for “bad”. Communism has been maligned in the US for so long and the label of communist/m has so long been used to malign other things (labor rights) that it is not used to refer to the economic theory in the general patience. It’s basically just a mother word for “bad” often specific to something someone perceived as related to power and economics but can’t describe. Socialism is the new version. The demands of “keep the government out of my government run healthcare” from a few years back is telling.
Yes you are right to say people are referring to things portrayed as bad but I dont know why people given up critical thinking to a democratically elected representative. Democracy seems to be the ultimate con trick besides Royalty and Religion. The latter two were enough and now we have govt's taking 3rd place, but another way to look at it is its convenient for Royalty and Religion to let Govt exist as it takes some slack and responsibility off of them.
They don’t realize they are. From many peoples perception of their own thinking (meta cognition) whatever’s they do to cognitively engage with an input is critical thinking. If you give them information they construct meaning from it. If that information is facts, it’s facts. If it’s someone else’s conclusion or interpretation, it still gets treated as information received.
One of the best parental tell-offs ever recorded on film:
You listen to me. You say you don't want to tell me how to live my life. So what do you think you've been doing? You tell me what rights I've got or haven't got, and what I owe to you for what you've done for me. Let me tell you something. I owe you nothing! If you carried that bag a million miles, you did what you're supposed to do! Because you brought me into this world. And from that day you owed me everything you could ever do for me like I will owe my son if I ever have another. But you don't own me! You can't tell me when or where I'm out of line, or try to get me to live my life according to your rules. You don't even know what I am, Dad, you don't know who I am. You don't know how I feel, what I think. And if I tried to explain it the rest of your life you will never understand. You are 30 years older than I am. You and your whole lousy generation believes the way it was for you is the way it's got to be. And not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs! You understand, you've got to get off my back! Dad... Dad, you're my father. I'm your son. I love you. I always have and I always will. But you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man. Now, I've got a decision to make, hm? And I've got to make it alone, and I gotta make it in a hurry. So would you go out there and see after my mother?
I suspect that we are at an inflection point in history, and the United States has the factors for perfect storm. Traditional gender values meeting the pill, and Baby Boomers (the "me" generation) grappling for a last bit of control, while more progressive generations come of age. I also think that Boomers' drinking culture is relevant, as alcoholism and narcissism are correlated.
Being trans and the family scapegoat, I personally got out town as soon as I could, but that was not the end of the story. My narcissistic, abusive family conjured up a special blend of threats, saccharine and passive-aggressive letters, stalking involving the media, and misgendering/deadnaming/outing me in the will when they did croak.
The boomers represent the biggest social change of any generation in centuries. The pill rock and roll women in the workplace divorce MLK JFK Malcom X etc.
Everything past them is an echo and Im not even sure it's on the right side of history.
Churchill drank 12 ounces a day that was normal before boomers. They are not heavy drinkers historically speaking.
And they did not have access to material goods like we do.
The ME generation is every generation from here on in so long as consumerism expands.
If we're going off pet theories, mine's got to be the lasting effects of a lifetime of lead poisoning[1]. Difficult adult personalities[2], emotional regulation[3] and emotional intelligence[4] are linked to childhood lead exposure. I'll be the first to admit that this is a strong stance, weakly held, and that we're probably never going to have conclusive evidence as to the likely infinite factors at play, but it's still fun to try to explain the clear patterns of behavior associated with these people.
I don't see any popular evidence that Boomers were different in inherent personality, rather there were enormous social changes afoot brought about by inevitable historical shifts, which puts them in a different context.
Younger people also don't have little living memory of those before them for a basis of comparison.
My Great Grandparents were disowned from their respective families because one was French Catholic the other English Protestant. That wold have been 'normal' for the time. That's not even the tip of the iceberg for 'estranged family'.
My German ancestors would not attend my Irish ancestors wedding reception (they did the ceremony, but not afterwards), because they felt the Irish were brooding alcoholics. Which would itself be a bit of racism, but it was essentially true, I mean, the stories I've been told ...
Some of the casual Boomer bigotry I see on other Social Media and TikTok especially is fairly shocking, it's as though people have no insight into what happened in the last century, especially the later part of it.
Maybe it's possible that lead poisoning had something to do with it, but I wonder if it would have changed things that much.
We no longer have any living memory of the holocaust, the introduction of mass media / TV, life before vaccines, serious adversity, life before plastics (!), birth control, antibiotics, vast infant mortality, real war (Vietnam being the last), or overt and institutional racism (i.e. the bank policy says 'no loans to blacks'), or direct segregation (this fountain is for whites only) or when almost everyone 'went to church' as a cultural event, not so much for overt religiosity, but wherein it was an more or less just a community activity that 'people did'.
In terms of material possessions, safety, opportunity, legal recourse, and focus on self ennoblement and aspiration, we live in an age like no other. We are collectively like the children of a 'Very Wealthy Family' - some a little better off than others.
Hating on an older generation is a perennial pastime, it's the lack of context that's a bit disturbing.
Finally, I believe that every individual story of social malaise is 'very complicated' where there are generally few true heroes and few true villains.
Fantastic comment. People who cannot wrap their head around this can look at developing countries where generational change over the last few decades has been even more drastic. When you cannot figure out why certain practices came to be, it behooves you to look at the environment more closely.
I remind myself that even the broad use of Acetaminophen and NSAIDs as OTC pain relievers only came about sometime in the last 100 years. While the raw ingredients that go into pain control have been known for hundreds of years if not longer, their formulation and dose was not standardized until very recently, and you certainly couldn't get 100 pills for $10 from the grocery store. As someone who uses these drugs semi-regularly, I cannot imagine having to do without them. OTC analgesics improved QoL and productivity by orders of magnitude. This is something even Churchill's generation did not have.
To me it’s funny when people loudly shout the progress a generation made themselves while at the same time saying “and no further!”.
The truth is most of the older generations right now not only don’t want to understand what the struggles are of the day they live in, they insist on keeping as much power and influence as possible. They’re now learning (or not) the lesson that they taught the generation before them.
> In terms of material possessions, safety, opportunity, legal recourse, and focus on self ennoblement and aspiration, we live in an age like no other
This isn’t true by practically any metric other than violent crime rates.
My grandparents were born on farms without plumbing or electricity and they were not 'poor' relative to those in the region, they were about equal to others in nearby farms and villages.
In just a few generations we have: cars, electricity, ratio, air travel, safe air travel, plastics (just consider how pervasive that one is), dishwashers, washing machines/dryers (fundamentally changing domestic work), microwaves, 'all season' produce, vast array of selection, home ownership, consumer finance, credit, TV, the internet, access to information instantaneously from around the world, educational access (in 1930 about 4% went to College, now it's 40%), insulin, outpatient heart surgery, antibiotics etc.. Walmart, the Dollar Store, Target, Costco and Amazon have exploded consumerism far even beyond those things: you can buy any little trinket for a few dollars, and have it delivered from China to your door.
We live in an age of unparalleled material abundance, really, it's not even an argument, so it says more about perspective than anything.
You can draw the line probably anywhere from 'Silent Gen to Millenial' but there is no doubt, from here on in, the pluarity of people in Wealthy Nations have completely surpassed any concept of 'material need'.
You could also pay for housing healthcare and college with a part time job. This is like saying Rockefeller wasn’t rich because he didn’t have an iPhone. Individual economics for recent generations in the US is much more dire than you make out, though yes creature comforts are more abundant. Income inequality is already at levels of the 1920s. The ownership classes are making away with all the assets and the security of common people has gone down drastically.
Seems like you have the generations mixed up. Boomers are born 1946-1964.
JFK, MLK, and Malcom X were not Boomers, they were all born during the Greatest and Silent Generation. Most of the Boomers were children when those men died.
Rock and Roll was invented before most of them were born.
The birth control pill first became available to their mothers before half the generation was/wasn’t conceived.
Divorce law changed before many of them could be married so they were more likely the to be the first generation to have divorced parents.
You're conflating the pedantic aspects of an aspect of cultural epiteths such as 'when people were born', with the materiality of their impact.
All of the things I've mentioned 'came of age' during the Baby Boomer era - those are cultural epithets of their generation - not previous generations.
It doesn't matter when Malcom X was born - he was a figure of the 1960's 'massive shift in social justice' which is a definitive characteristic of the Baby Boomer generation - the were the one's out on the streets.
'Divorce' did not start happening in a material way until that time. Baby Boomers were the first generation to start to experience it as children - and then - were the first generation to do it themselves at rates never seen in history.
Baby Boomers were the first generation to embrace Birth Control as socially normative. Sex without babies.
Both of those things alone - Divorce and Birth Control - those are enough to make a very unique generation in history, but the Boomers had so much more.
You know the song 'The Age of Aquarius'? Well, they were not wrong, it was the dawn of a new age.
I recently saw some film footage from Manchester, 1907, with what seemed to be all sorts of happy children in the streets, though most of them were literally homeless. Children. All over the streets. Maybe it's a fact we are 'aware of' but seeing it live is visceral and shocking. If Gen X/Y/Z could be exposed to those things that are almost within living memory, I think they would have a different view of themselves. Gen X grandparents could tell them about a lot of that. Fewer Millennials and almost none for Gen Z.
I think you’re right about the impact of many of these on the Baby Boomers especially divorce and birth control.
I also feel like in your defense of Baby Boomers you’re taking away from previous generations, especially with regards to the civil rights movement which my grandparents were involved in and experienced first-hand when my parents were too young or weren’t alive yet and my parents are Boomers.
Same with music like Rock and Roll. No doubt Boomers grew up with it but the people at the first shows weren’t Boomers.
The civil rights movement had the most impact on the Boomers, but how could they be on the streets when most of them weren’t born or weren’t old enough to be involved?
This is a really weird way to respond to someone who suffered real abuse from a narcissistic abuser. You might get more sympathetic ears choosing to defend boomers in a thread not about abuse from predominantly boomer-aged parents.
"they are not counter-culture or friends of Rock,"
Boomers are almost 100% 'Rock' listeners, I don't know a single one who isn't. And of course - they created it.
The 'Satanic Rock' issue was a tiny blip in history, the extreme side of what is frankly an artifact of over conscientiousness and it really wasn't a big deal at all.
It was absurd for parents to be concerned about Swing, Jazz and the Beatles (but they were!), but for 'Satanic Rock' it's not completely outrageous.
It's actually rational for parents to be concerned that all of a sudden, children are listening music, reading about, and dancing around to people that sing about 'Satan' - who is ostensibly a bad character.
That hadn't happened in history, I can imagine it putting some people on edge.
It takes a second order awareness to understand that those things were not inherently destructive. It took some time to process.
Much like hyper realist and violent video games, where you go around mass killing and cutting people's throats - there was (and is) some fuss around that because it's not unreasonable for people to think that that could be really influential, and desensitize people to violent acts.
"they are not counter-culture"
Many of them were counter culture, but that's not really the point though ... being 'counter culture' is not synonymous with being moral, better, enlightened or anything really.
Calling the satanic panic rational is quite a statement. Nor a blip - it was a formative part of large amounts of the millennial generation, along with DARE, purity rings and the Christian Right legislating lessons into cartoons.
The problem is that people are speaking of two different groups of people when they speak of the boomers (and the boomers were more than two groups of people):
1. the activists who, in their heyday, brought about enormous social change and
2. the reactionary non-activists who later tried to tear that all down
The people who loved disco and the people who hated it were of the same generation.
I agree that people should avoid ascribing characteristics or assigning blame to entire generations like this. It just pisses people off and drives them into camps.
Narcissists have admiration for themselves but they need others around them to mirror these feelings - to say they're great basically, because they're a bit broken inside. To do this they go to extraordinary lengths to keep people in their orbit tied to them somehow, and they can be very good at making people feel inadequate so they stay in their orbit and to convince themselves they are better than everyone else. if you haven't experienced it then consider yourself lucky they have a talent for warping reality so that everything revolves around them. The site talks about children of narcissists and how they are screwed up to make the parent seem better - the phrase "you're always a disappointment" or an embarrassment is something a narcissist parent would say to their child for example.
Questionable whether narcissists really even admire themselves. Covert narcissism seems more about believing you're a victim and your feelings are the only important ones because of that. Even overt narcissism is more like deep insecurity than self-admiration. Self-centered and self-important for sure.
Narcissists here really means people with narcissistic personality disorder. There are numerous personality disorders. Personality disorder is a kind of arrested development, a failure to grow up and develop a normal personality. Narcissism is one particular failure mode. Narcissists victimize and abuse people all the time and then impose on others the ego defense mechanisms that they employ internally to deflect information that would help them mature. I.e., they deny reality to themselves, and gaslight others.
I’m sure this is true in many, or even most cases, but there are also cases where the grandparents do have the grandchild’s best interest at heart. Obviously those grandparents would not be on some forum where they get to expound on their sense of entitlement. Here in the UK, in the last month alone we’ve had the horrific cases of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, 6 or Star Hobson, 1.5, both viciously murdered by their parent’s partner with the parent’s full complicity. In both cases the grandparents alerted social workers but were brushed off, with tragic results.
This series of articles spends a lot of time and energy differentiating ordinary estranged parents and grandparents from those who spend time campaigning on forums for estranged parents, and expands on a bunch of concerning reasons why parents can become estranged through no fault of their own; for instance, children can fall into drug addictions. It goes on to make the point that these forums seem to be actively alienating to those kinds of parents, who presumably seek support from forums dedicated to parents estranged due to addiction.
The thru-line for the whole series is that participation in these forums is a powerful clue, all on its own, that abusive behavior is involved in the estrangement.
I understand, hence my caveat that the grandparents were not on those forums. What I worry about is when the undeniable existence of abusive grandparents is assumed by CPS or social workers as a universal and cause valid warnings to be overlooked.
Another thing the articles repeatedly observe is the proclivity of parents on these forums to abuse these shared concerns about valid warnings in order to weaponize CPS and social workers against their estranged children. Examples include instances where the parents admit publicly that they lied to CPS in attempts to punish and control their own children.
I believe there was a reddit thread one time about some family in New York that cut ties from their parents or grandparents, and due to some age old Kinship law, the elders could take children to court for not allowing them to see grandchildren or something of the like.
It's fascinating in the US that we've gotten to the point that families can break contact entirely and be successful but due to completely out of date institutions baked in to law, we're stuck with arbitrary reasons to engage with hostile people. As a judge, why would you ever grant rights of a grandparent willing to take their children to court to see their grand children short of an abuse related situation?
This doesn't sound like some misinterpreted archaic law. It sounds like the law prevented exactly what the drafters intended - parents cutting grandparents off from children. Whether that's a stupid law is another question.
> Grandparents' rights groups are one step forward and one step back. One step forward, because the majority of the people who are interested in this cause are the people grandparents' rights were meant to help: grandparents who lost touch with their grandchildren through the parents' divorce, incarceration, or some other rupture in their children's families. However, it also brings out the people who think they have more rights over their grandchildren than the children's own parents do, the people who want to force a family reconciliation through the courts, the people who want to take custody of their grandchildren to punish their children.
Ok. My parents never abused me. Just so you could hear the other side.
I’ve heard too many horrifying stories of parents abusing their children, typically many decades later. Fuck those parents. Cut them off. You will only be happier for it.
The raised by narcissists sub has 750k subscribers. Reddit has ~500m monthly active users. That's 0.15% of reddit. If 0.1% of people actually are raised by narcissists, that is an accurate number.... 750k people in a single place is a LOT, but it might still be representative. so yeas, it seems like there is an "epidemic" but it's more about "if all the people raised by narcissists were to be grouped in a single place it would be a lot of people". That's just a testament to how the internet brings groups of people together.
If you had a great childhood with great parents. Good for you. Not everyone has. and I don't think that 0.1% of reddit is some sort of epidemic.
It’s estimated that 0.5% to 5% of the US population has NPD, so I don’t see why it would be the least bit unexpected that 0.15% think they had a narcissistic parent.
The "epidemic" is in the real world, you're only noticing it now because now it's in your face on the internet. Must be shocking to see that, if like most people you had normal parents, but those mad asshole parents are sadly very real.
This mostly comes down to parents who have more traditional cultural values than their children. It’s like watching two sports teams argue about who broke the rules, but they can’t agree because fundamentally one team is playing soccer and the other is playing baseball.
Ultimately the role of parents is to provide their children the means to become successful and self-actualized adults. Their traditional values and feelings have little to do with that if their kids are opposed. If you decide to have kids, you owe them everything. Your needs, values, feelings, hangups, etc. now take a backseat to what your kids need. If you're unwilling to do so, the reasonable response from the child is to cut you off to some extent, from making certain topics of conversation off limits all the way up to complete no contact.
That's a nice way to look at the world, but you have to realise that it's a biased view of the world.
Try to to step out of your own skin for a second and look at childrearing like an anthropologist might.
A key insight is that before modern countries and governments, there were essentially no pension plans. Some companies offered them, but in general they were rare.
Your pension plan was literally your children.
When you got too old to work in a field, swing an axe, or chase after animals in the forest, your kids would feed you. When your teeth fell out, they would chew your food for you.
You still see remnants of this in less well-off, or more "primitive" cultures. Families aim for about 10 children, end up with about 2-5 surviving to adulthood. Their culture has a very strong focus on children supporting their parents, far more than in developed, Western nations. You see this with Asian kids that work 12-hour days, 7-days a week to send money back to their parents. As do their siblings. Each might contribute only 20-30% of their income, but between a bunch of kids it adds up to enough to support the parents.
For more than half the planet's population, kids absolutely are raised primarily to support their parents, not the other way around. The kids in turn will eventually get support from their own kids, etc...
An alternative but roughly equivalent model is that in a hunter-gatherer society, a male human maximises their own safety and comfort by having children. Kids take very little calories to raise, but can be a multiplying effect on overall productivity. A lone hunter may be on foot for days, during which he can't take care of his "stuff". But a wife with kids has many little hands to collect berries, dry meat, repair baskets, etc...
(PS: Where this "fails" is that once a country's medical system advanced to the point that not too many of the kids die, everyone ends up with 10+ kids surviving to adulthood, and the population explodes. The older generation doesn't "hold back" on reproducing because this is directly contributing to their own wealth in retirement. The younger generation is screwed, but that wasn't obvious at the time they were born. This is happening right now in the Philippines, as a random example.)
I don't disagree with you from a very materialist, evolutionary, and anthropological point of view. But we're humans and we can rise above this base analysis.
I am coming at it from more of an ethical point of view, largely utilitarian, I guess, although I don't necessarily describe myself as a utilitarian. Nobody chooses to be brought into this world. To be wrenched from the void into consciousness. It's something inflicted on them by others - specifically their parents. It's the heaviest, most serious ethical decision most people will make in their lifetimes.
I think that by having children you are implicitly saying one of two things "I believe that I will be able to provide this new human I've decided to create the resources, skills, and life such that, on the balance, their joy will outweigh their suffering." or "I care little to none for whether their joy will outweigh their suffering. I want to perpetrate my genes and culture and I need another body to help with the work and secure my comfort in my old age."
I think the former, if carefully considered in an honest way, can be an ethical decision. I think the latter is wholly unethical and more or less amounts to a desire for filial slavery.
Love doesn't work when you treat it like a bank note, to be collected by the creditor when due. No one is the debtor, no one is the creditor. If you love your children, you don't do things that cause them to cut you off. Likewise, if you love your parents, you don't cut them off when they they don't do what you want. You forgive.
Every day, you choose to be a part of each other's life, and help each other get through life. How you do that changes through life. Not every child will be successful, self-actualized or achieve anything near their potential. Not every parent will make good choices, be successful, or even be worthy of respect. People mess up. They make mistakes. The way love really works, is you forgive. And keep forgiving. You keep the relationship alive. You celebrate the good, and you sympathize through the bad. The greatest gift a parent can give is loving their child despite it all, and the greatest gift a child can give is loving their parents despite it all.
It is, of course, possible to love and damage a child at the same time. When that child becomes an adult, they have every right to recognize that the power dynamic has shifted, and they can establish any boundaries they see fit - including cutting them off.
In non-western countries the norm is filial piety, which means showing respect, devotion and obedience to one’s parents. The West is really the only region that has shifted to the values you describe.
I believe there are advantages to the Western way. But the claim that any other way is abusive seems quite ethnocentric to me.
You have no fucking idea what you're talking about me. None. This is about abuse, not cultural values.
This website describes my parents to a T, and myself and my siblings have all had periods of no contact with them. Their cultural values are completely irrelevant, they were simply extremely abusive and refuse to acknowledge it. They tell me that my siblings and we made up our childhood abuse.
My parents cultural values and political leanings are actually extremely liberal (and extremely similar to my own). Everyone in my family of origin are atheists. This is about abuse.
Call it what you want. If you believe someone owes you something for the rest of their lives just because they exist or you exist, you're wrong, period. I don't care if it used to be the way of the world.
I would point out that while cultural mismatch can certainly cause problems, normal functioning people will either resolve them without estrangement, or self-select out of these forums.
This series of articles makes a very clear case that something more than cultural mismatch is going on here.
http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html
http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems-whittling-yo...
http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems-qualities-th...