So many here have not had to deal with extensive emotional trauma brought upon manipulations, oversights, ignorance, inexperience, etc. of a parent who was totally a victim too, but THIS DOES NOT NEGATE HOW DANGEROUS they can be.
My own mother whom was beaten and abused by an alcoholic grandmother will tragically never be capable of seeing her own faults due to the trauma that basically arrested her development at the age of 12. She has NPD and persistently bullied one of my sisters for being fat as a child, despite being the parent who kept feeding her McDonalds.
She would never admit how wrong they are to their own assumptions. She bullied and belittled my step-father when he had a medical emergency that forced him back into the family house after years of “mutual” separation.
I eventually figured out she had been lying to me for years and using my “blood relation” as an excuse to triangulate and manipulate my siblings into hating me, and me hating them, with disinfo, seperate sit downs like she was a fucking Mafioso, and other tactics a sick child would make in attempts to show that they “care”.
If you bring 9/11 up, there’s a good chance a histrionic anecdote that has nothing to do with the conversation at hand will pop-up and it will be about her, you will have to shut the fuck up while listening despite yourself being interrupted mid-sentence, otherwise speaking out against a narcissist is forbidden, and eggshell walking is the norm during rare get togethers.
She will instantly fall into victim and paranoid mode if challenged in any reasonable way: you don't really love her if you keep having issues with her behavior RIGHT?! So goes the maddening Cartesian logic.
And yet, according to this article, I should just “let go” of the following: anxiety disorder, binge eating / anorexia, depression, BPD w/ NPD CPTSD features (latest opinion I’ve received at least), the alienation of my family caused by the mother driving everyone apart, and most importantly the distortion lens that comes with being raised and essentially spoiled compared to my siblings, the emotional incest brought upon me when my step-father left at the age of 13 because I was the only man of the house and I guess that also meant hearing intimate details of love lost and her being unhappy and being treated like a therapist for the next 12 years until I was 25, wherein I became so maladaptiveley schizoid while dealing with the persistient and obvious fact that ONE OF MY CARGIVERS WAS ACTIVLEY NOT CARING AND BEING DESTRUCTIVE.
To her credit, she rarely lifted her hand to hit us; lot of reflexes and close calls that are then always minimized as “not that bas” and “you should try growing up in my life, you kids are lucky!!!!” which somehow justifies further incursions because shit, she doesn't drink and is disabled, she must be a fucking Saint in comparison to her mother, especially because of being physically disabled.
She loves to fall on the sword in a conversation about that all of the time. We have only the best parts of Mother Sorporano & Mussolini to thank for this.
She also “forgave” her mother and now all that my grandmother does is fill my mothers head with Trump garbage and YouTube conspiracies that I have to disassemble because she thought bleaching the skin would help against COVID.
So again, forgiveness is fucking trite. Anger about the situation as an adult helped me change my approach and saved me from a further path of self-destructive solipsism and drinking my trauma away excessively.
Anger as a kid was less useful and Was turned inside until another counselor at high school realized what was happening, which sadly didn't help as I quit the school in protest / denial of the chemical and emotional imbalanced brought upon me and my siblings by persistent emotional abuse and neglect.
In sum, she is emotionally manipulative and a vampire, and WHILE her maladaptions make sense in a shitty environment, at some point as an adult you have to take ownership of trauma or it will eat you alive. She will never reach the point of self-actualization and its tragic that she is the only mother my siblings and I will have known.
My sisters and father also deserved so much better than me being an unwitting victim and enforcer of her bullshit when I was too young to know better.
So I agree with any other posts that might more or less say: “fuck forgiveness.”
That must hurt just to talk about. You're lucky to be able to 'bring it out'. I can feel (sort of) what you feel, from experience.
I'm still stuck on 'someone has to pay' and 'it's not fair' although I know these are childish hopes. Pay how... They don't even remember. They don't give a shit. You can pity (they're sick, they did their best) but it gets worse. now you have no-one to blame... No enemy. Left with undirected, unfocused anger.
Oh and the anger on the other parent figures around 'I had no idea', 'I didn't know it was this bad'. WTF?
Forgiveness is hard. Grief is hard. Some of us have a very hard time letting go of those feelings. I can't do those yet. I can't let go of lots of things. I have an unforgiving memory for hurt and it prompts System 1 almost every day, to be on my guard, that something is fishy, I'm about to be hurt. False alarm 99% of the time. Can't work much on forgiveness when you're in survival mode...
I feel for you.
I hope we can both move on one day. Dog knows I'm trying. The anger is not good for your health, I'm learning now...
Even if you do not want a relationship with someone, forgiveness is a way to feel better yourself. It's not about making some one else better, it's about your quality of life.
After ten years I'm almost there, but it got better after my first step of deciding to forgive, still get panic attacks though.
I forgive myself for being naive and uninformed. Why would I need to forgive myself for someone else's actions and consequences? Fuck all of that.
I sleep more soundly with each day that I remind myself "This other person does not live in reality, move on". Long stopped having "panic attacks" 10 years ago. Coincidentally, right around the time I began to question the abuser's facade.
And you do want a relationship with these people. But ideally one that doesn't make you want to stab your eyes out constantly with ice picks because they keep digging up the past and weaponizing your own failures against you in everyday fucking conversation.
Peace be with whatever nonsense you're on about.
Reason, rationality, empiricism is what brought clarity. Forgiveness is low hanging rotten fruit.
>"This other person does not live in reality, move on".
That is basically forgiveness. It's not a gift you give them, its not letting them off the hook. To forgive someone, they do not need to be aware you have done so. It's you taking control of the damage they did to you, and moving beyond it hurting you further.
Perhaps. I disagree with the general assumption associated with notions of forgiveness that this also means letting go of anger, however. Anger gets shit done.
I get your point, but I don't get how it diverges from what was described in the article. Based on what you wrote, it looks to me that you are actually very advanced in the process of forgiveness: telling your story, expressing your feelings, seeing your childhood through the eyes of yourself as an adult, focusing on your well-being in the present and in the future.
> they keep digging up the past and weaponizing your own failures against you in everyday fucking conversation.
I know that. You have no idea how much your post hits home. This kind of behaviour is exactly what I try not to replicate, because it is the best way to dig one's own grave. There is nothing good which can come out of it.
I think you have an issue with the word "forgiveness", and maybe it is not the right word. What I understand from its use in the article is being able to let go the hatred (way stronger than anger), and being able to focus on yourself in order to improve your well-being and to bring positivity into your present and future life.
Not a single PhD, degree, etc listed. A track record yes, but Pepsi and Coke both have their consumers despite anyone's individual preference over the other.
Sorry but hatred is a perfectly rational thing to feel towards an abuser. Letting it motivate you to take retributive action is of course not something to do if one wants to escape the cycle of abuse, but regardless: the body keeps the score https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/01...
People are just afraid to recognize facets of human behavior that they don't see as normal. When people talk about schizophrenia they might say it's "difficult" or there's no easy solution or that they're still thinking about how to heal them, but the reality is that maybe these people can never be completely helped in a lifetime, to the point where they're accepted as "normal" again. Maybe there are some classes of neurodegenerative brain disorders where the tissue allowing for fudamental human capability is gone forever, and the functionality can never be fully restored. On one hand we strive to treat everyone equally, on the other some people will end up giving up on their dreams because those dreams will never be within their ability. Or, far more devastating, they will stop being able to realize they could even have dreams to begin with. I remember reading about the tragedy of the co-founder of Cloudflare, and the top comment by a person featured in the article that said there was nothing more to be done for his condition. And it was that much more painful because everyone believed he was still "normal" for the longest time, that his behavior could be explained in terms of human sociability or wit, until they realized that the only reason he acted the way he did was because of an underlying condition of the brain.
Is a certain degree of extreme childhood trauma simply a fork in the road in a person's life that is never completely reversible? Does that kind of harm cause the person to be trapped in their own mind with the mental damage it causes? I personally believe it can in some cases. There is only so much you can do if you have the mental equivalent of your limbs being dismembered.
If my definition of "forgiveness" is giving someone else something of mine, then there are some people I will never forgive so long as I'm alive.
But if forgiveness is just acknowledging mistakes and moving on, never letting them take anything more from me, then I've completely forgiven them instead.
>Is a certain degree of extreme childhood trauma simply a fork in the road in a person's life that is never completely reversible? Does that kind of harm cause the person to be trapped in their own mind with the mental damage it causes? I personally believe it can in some cases. There is only so much you can do if you have the mental equivalent of your limbs being dismembered.
This accurately describes having an attachment disorder from early age methinks, and the fork being realizing it after examining the evidence or never realizing it and being stuck in a hell of self-blame.
An attachment disorder feels like the organ for interpersonal relationships is impaired or amputated, and it occasionally feels like having emotional schizophrenia, particularly when one is triggered.
>If my definition of "forgiveness" is giving someone else something of mine, then there are some people I will never forgive so long as I'm alive.
>But if forgiveness is just acknowledging mistakes and moving on, never letting them take anything more from me, then I've completely forgiven them instead.
I suspect a lot of my millennial peers deal with it a lot.
Many of us made "surrogate families" and group houses well into our 30's out of our groups of friends probably for similar reasons. A few grew apart for similar reasons (i.e. one or more people having un-diagnosed personality disorders and/or un-dealt with emotional trauma that hampers their interpersonal relationships).
So many here have not had to deal with extensive emotional trauma brought upon manipulations, oversights, ignorance, inexperience, etc. of a parent who was totally a victim too, but THIS DOES NOT NEGATE HOW DANGEROUS they can be.
My own mother whom was beaten and abused by an alcoholic grandmother will tragically never be capable of seeing her own faults due to the trauma that basically arrested her development at the age of 12. She has NPD and persistently bullied one of my sisters for being fat as a child, despite being the parent who kept feeding her McDonalds.
She would never admit how wrong they are to their own assumptions. She bullied and belittled my step-father when he had a medical emergency that forced him back into the family house after years of “mutual” separation.
I eventually figured out she had been lying to me for years and using my “blood relation” as an excuse to triangulate and manipulate my siblings into hating me, and me hating them, with disinfo, seperate sit downs like she was a fucking Mafioso, and other tactics a sick child would make in attempts to show that they “care”.
If you bring 9/11 up, there’s a good chance a histrionic anecdote that has nothing to do with the conversation at hand will pop-up and it will be about her, you will have to shut the fuck up while listening despite yourself being interrupted mid-sentence, otherwise speaking out against a narcissist is forbidden, and eggshell walking is the norm during rare get togethers.
She will instantly fall into victim and paranoid mode if challenged in any reasonable way: you don't really love her if you keep having issues with her behavior RIGHT?! So goes the maddening Cartesian logic.
And yet, according to this article, I should just “let go” of the following: anxiety disorder, binge eating / anorexia, depression, BPD w/ NPD CPTSD features (latest opinion I’ve received at least), the alienation of my family caused by the mother driving everyone apart, and most importantly the distortion lens that comes with being raised and essentially spoiled compared to my siblings, the emotional incest brought upon me when my step-father left at the age of 13 because I was the only man of the house and I guess that also meant hearing intimate details of love lost and her being unhappy and being treated like a therapist for the next 12 years until I was 25, wherein I became so maladaptiveley schizoid while dealing with the persistient and obvious fact that ONE OF MY CARGIVERS WAS ACTIVLEY NOT CARING AND BEING DESTRUCTIVE.
To her credit, she rarely lifted her hand to hit us; lot of reflexes and close calls that are then always minimized as “not that bas” and “you should try growing up in my life, you kids are lucky!!!!” which somehow justifies further incursions because shit, she doesn't drink and is disabled, she must be a fucking Saint in comparison to her mother, especially because of being physically disabled.
She loves to fall on the sword in a conversation about that all of the time. We have only the best parts of Mother Sorporano & Mussolini to thank for this.
She also “forgave” her mother and now all that my grandmother does is fill my mothers head with Trump garbage and YouTube conspiracies that I have to disassemble because she thought bleaching the skin would help against COVID.
So again, forgiveness is fucking trite. Anger about the situation as an adult helped me change my approach and saved me from a further path of self-destructive solipsism and drinking my trauma away excessively.
Anger as a kid was less useful and Was turned inside until another counselor at high school realized what was happening, which sadly didn't help as I quit the school in protest / denial of the chemical and emotional imbalanced brought upon me and my siblings by persistent emotional abuse and neglect.
In sum, she is emotionally manipulative and a vampire, and WHILE her maladaptions make sense in a shitty environment, at some point as an adult you have to take ownership of trauma or it will eat you alive. She will never reach the point of self-actualization and its tragic that she is the only mother my siblings and I will have known.
My sisters and father also deserved so much better than me being an unwitting victim and enforcer of her bullshit when I was too young to know better.
So I agree with any other posts that might more or less say: “fuck forgiveness.”