[eastbound]

> This, along with the “lying still game” and many other “games” ensured hours of peace and quiet for adults trying to

It’s funny how fathering is about using a thousand tricks to make kids go through life even when they don’t want. And another part is politeness rules teach kids to be convenient for the parents, for example “don’t play with food, there’s kids in Africa” was never about African kids and more about cleaning up the floor.

Whenever I cried, my father would say “Don’t put your mouth in W”. How can you not laugh at that. We’ll it doesn’t teach to negotiate, I don’t remember my parents bending for anything, they’d use gimmicks to get out of the situation. If it’s not good to let kids get spoilt, bending from time to time teaches them how to use a little seduction to ask for things.

I also remember my father coming back from a disabled-school visit, and he’d tell me that a kid taught him in sign language “I - love - working”, and that’s the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. Or seen.

So that’s it, I don’t know how to complain properly, don’t know how to seduce, and I work all the time. I became deadweight for my parents at 40, since I’m single, millionaire and incel, but at least they had nothing to worry concerning impregnating women, doing drugs or not working enough.

[guntherhermann]

> I don’t know how to complain properly

Oh I don't know, I think you're doing a fine job of it.

All of those things you complain about not being able to do, you know that you can't do them.

If you know you can't do them, and want to do them, then you can learn how.

Alternatively, you can lay your issues at your parents feet and mope about how hard your life is as a millionaire.

[TheCapn]

Ignoring the moping millionaire part he's got some truth to what he's saying. I'm confronting this now as a new parent while thinking about how I want to raise my son vs. how I was raised by my father.

OPs point to all the distracting tricks rings true for me. Very much a "my way or the highway" household I grew up in, and although I don't feel there was major harm from the upbringing, I can see where the gaps in my development originated. Like OP, I don't do confrontation well. I don't have a healthy grasp of expressing desire or wants. I find it difficult to have healthy debate with others. It's mostly a habit of avoiding the conversation because I was taught during childhood/teens that things will be done like this so there's no point in arguing.

It isn't so simple as that overall though, but I do heavily look at the type of upbringing I was given and how it contributes overall. I want to do better for my son, and avoiding the easy "tricks" to get kids to quiet down and behave (be less like kids) is something I'm aiming to avoid.

[guntherhermann]

Oh, I completely get it. I think those of us who are new parents are of a particular generation.

I was brought up with "Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about", my parents would get angry that I didn't know how to do something (well you're the teacher, how is it my fault you didn't teach me!), and shouting. A lot of shouting.

It has definitely affected me, even now if my wife shouts me from downstairs get that feeling of being a child again, waiting to be smacked for something I've supposedly done wrong. I think it will always be there.

However, my parents had it much worse than me. They were born into poverty and their parents were dysfunctional, raging alcoholics who didn't provide for them. As a child my dad had to break into abandoned warehouses to pull up floorboards to use as firewood, because HIS dad was too busy pissing away his money in the pub and on gambling.

That they managed to come out and raise kids in a more loving environment than the one they grew up in is a testament to them.

I think most of us want our children to have a better life than the one we had. People are human, people make mistakes.

I forgive my parents for the mistakes they made, because I know that even for the things they made me do that I still detest and think they are wrong for making me do, they did it for the right reasons, they still loved me. And I love them

[ska]

> I want to raise my son vs. how I was raised by my father.

What many (most?) people do is overcompensate to not make the same obvious errors their parents made, and thereby make a different series of errors.

[TheCapn]

Oh, certainly. I've sorta tried to tune into the generational "style" of parenting I've seen and it swings like a pendulum. Overprotected parenting, absent parent, etc.

My parents had different parenting styles from each other (they ultimately separated) and my friends had different experiences from their parents too. My wife had an abusive upbringing while mine was both neglectful in some ways and overbearing in others. The wife and I joke at times about what type of broken our son will end up being but recognize we're trying to fix what we see as generational trauma while still providing a foundation for him to grow from.

So for me it is about repairing the emotional stunting I've developed. I want my son to be able to express himself in healthy ways without being afraid of confrontation. My wife recognizes how her upbringing lead her to hide and avoid her family, to be self-reliant and forced to navigate the world without a support structure to fall back on. What will develop after that? I just hope he is able to grow confident and know he is loved. What branches out from there is to be figured out when the time comes I suppose.

[eastbound]

>> I don’t know how to complain properly

> Oh I don't know, I think you're doing a fine job of it.

:D If I knew, I would address the issues with the right person and solve them.

So I ended up speaking to computers instead. The rest is so dark that I shouldn’t tell it online, but honestly, you should stop being hateful towards anybody. Any human. Anyone. Don’t do that. Hard no. You are creating hate when you hate people. And man millionaires can be as violent as any other man, as uncaring, as ... We’re no special race. Wasn’t born with a silver spoon either, I was making the point that it was hard work and no life balance that led me here, not privilege or inheritance, just good sustained work, moving until it worked, and lacking social attachment. So I’m gonna go back to my computer and try forgetting about how people like you intentionally ruined my life.

Don’t.

[guntherhermann]

> you should stop being hateful towards anybody.

Explain to me how I am being hateful? I do not hate you, I do not know you. I am merely pointing out that you are complaining about problems you know that you have. If you just want to complain, that's fine, but if you want to fix these problems then it might be good to seek out counselling, a psychologist, a medical professional, someone who can help you

> Wasn’t born with a silver spoon either,

I never said you were.

> So I’m gonna go back to my computer and try forgetting about how people like you intentionally ruined my life.

If you view people who critique your opinions as "ruining your life", then that problem lies with you, not them. You are giving them power over you that they do not really have.

It is nobody's responsibility to make you happy. Only you have that power. You are the master of your own destiny.

Here is a youtube channel I highly recommend, I implore you to watch this man's videos. I found them enlightening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UeJzbx1iu0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1G4JFuLlO8

[wruza]

If you know you can't do them, and want to do them, then you can learn how.

Some people learn how and just do it.

Other people learn how and just do it.

You can’t see a difference until you get in these “other” shoes and realize how much unreasonable, irrational, disorienting discomfort they give. But minds aren’t shoes so you can’t just try on that.

[guntherhermann]

Assuming they are otherwise physically and mentally capable, they can do it if they want to do it.

The hardest thing about life is not knowing.

Once you know that you don't know something, then you can try to know it.

I am talking as someone who spent a significant amount of my life thinking that I had to live and was consigned to living in one particular way, because I didn't know any other choice was open to me.

[wruza]

Right, but the assumption in this argument is too narrowing. When people get anxious of e.g. complaining, it’s their mental inability, not just lack of a proper method. People get anxious and procrastinative (which may be a result of unnoticed anxiety) a lot. It’s not something affecting only around 1%.

[ambicapter]

Well this comment took a turn in the last few minutes.

[homonculus1]

How slow do you read??

[fritztastic]

I can't speak to everyone's experience or abilities, but I can say that one of the hardest things about overcoming abuse is identifying what reality is and distinguishing the difference between what is true about who/what you are and something you are gping through as a result of the experiences you had.

Between the inflexible authoritarian way my parents were, and the coping mechanisms I used to make it through the years I lived with them, it was a many-years-long journey later on in my adult life (and still ongoing) to work back through the layers and shift the foundations from where they were involuntarily built to where I wanted them to be.

I have a particular grief, for the time in my life I could have been more like who I may have been had it not been for abuse and trauma. The years of lost experiences and mistakes that may have been much less arduous had it not been for the coping mechanisms I adopted for survival. When you say you don't know how to complain- I think it may be more accurate that you may have trouble with communicating with/relating to other people, or you can't find the proper way to articulate how big of an impact or determine at what point something is really part of you or a mindspace you find yourself in.

I spent a long time trying to deal with it on my own, but where I really started to make traction was talking to a professional and actually being honest, painfully so when it came to my dysfunctional way of dealing with intimacy. After some years I was able to begin admitting where I was the source of my own anguish and forgiving myself but also taking accountability of putting in the work to change what I could so I could live life more functionally and really be able to experience things without that weight I hadn't realized I had been carrying all along. To an extent I had become attached to it and it became an extension of me, a part of my identity.

My family in general was (in some ways still is) incredibly problematic, and I've come to realize a lot of the problems started with a desire to be validated and/or accepted by the parental figures. Not saying this is the case for everyone, but it is possible to forgive people (and still love them, if you wish) who caused a lot of harm, and work to heal. You deserved better, and future you can find what you yearn- it's not an easy road working through all that but there is hope to be found in the process which may not have felt feasible otherwise.

[bfoks]

Can you share which therapetic techniques were most benficial for you? EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, something else?

[centilliard]

Imagine you're a function whose implementation body is written over time by you (the conscience). Your function is invoked once at your birth and seizes to execute when you die.

* You don't control what arguments are passed to your function

* But you do have complete control over the implementation

It's OK to verify your arguments, but then, once you realized you've been given less-than-ideal values, you don't have to continue processing them. Stop writing code that depends on these inputs and write your own implementation as if those arguments never existed. You're not the product of your input values, they're just there and it's your decision whether to use them or not.

Also, how are you dead weight if you're a millionaire? This would mean your parents are carrying you. Buy a house and GTFO then. Visit your parents once in a while. Call your mom.

[wruza]

Man this resonates. My parents (who were grandparents) were 1) industrial electronics hard worker type, 2) stay away don’t speak too much something might happen what can you do type. Guess whom they raised.

[class4behavior]

>And another part is politeness rules teach kids to be convenient for the parents, for example “don’t play with food, there’s kids in Africa” was never about African kids and more about cleaning up the floor.

Seriously? You don't see the problem in nurturing the (subconscious) view of African standing for the malnourished, poor, disadvatage, and so on?

[salawat]

You don't see the utility of pointing out that being in a position to "play with food" is not a given, paired with a real life counterexample?

Stop seeing racism in everything. If you keep holding ypur mind like that, it'll freeze that way.

[class4behavior]

The need to educate a person not to waste food or about one's privileged life has absolutely no dependence on your example, nor is the latter inherently about racism, unless that is your actual motivation, or a real life counterexample. You just pointed to a convolution of stereotypes about a continent, which is quite the irony when you wish to teach about privilege.

And your lame counter-accusation is basically a common rebuke of your average actual racist.

[eastbound]

More over, the original “don’t waste your food” trope hides hypocrisy, because those parents don’t necessarily care about African children. They care about cleaning up. Some actually care about Africa, but it’s disjoint from keeping kids clean.