Might a lot of this social craziness possibly be a result of a culture that has put materialism and worship of the self at the front for so long, and a poisonous media landscape that amplifies this narcissism and craziness?
I believe to understand this trend you also have to look into who/what benefits from the dissolution of the family structure. Where are those young adults seeking a sense of belonging and purpose after they separate from their families. . .
Some parents are truly toxic, but it is rare to be so toxic that no relationship is possible or desirable at some level. At some point each one of us has to take full responsibility for our lives.
I don't consider myself a toxic person, (agreeing that this is grossly overused as a term, but it has value) but I can clearly see that I have acted in toxic ways to the people I love - partners and my kids. And I have been on the receiving ending of such behavior. Welcome to the human race.
I came to the conclusion some time ago that one is never really an adult until one starts to recognize that their family was kinda crazy, and often not in a good way. That is the perspective of an adult for me. And that I was a part of that craziness - on both sides - giving and receiving.
Yes, we ourselves are experiencing it at this moment. Out of three children we have two from whom we are estranged presently. Though just recently, after five long years, there’s been a crack in the facade with our middle son (and grandson who has been almost entirely isolated from us). We are holding out hope that that relationship will reopen again 🤞
Partly yes. We didn’t drink the c_v_d cocktail and got labelled every {incorrect} name in the book by two of them. As a parent you simply hope that as time passes the water under the bridge will too. It looks like some thaw is happening with our middle son now. We shall see….eight years passed now for us and him, approaching five years for the eldest son. Thank goodness was for our daughter and those two grandchildren who have been a good part of our lives. Maybe 2024, our reunited family grows a bit 🤞🤞🤞
Don't give up hope Dan. I experienced abandonment by my daughter also but all is good now. In fact, we are closer and have a much better relationship. Be open to hearing their grievances even if you don't agree. Wishing you the very best.
Severing family ties was a major fad in the years following Russian revolution. People even posted notes in local newspaper declaring their bold act. For some it was a matter of survival -- you could not expect to achieve anything in Soviet Russia with "wrong" class family background. For many it was purely ideological. "To Hell with you old ways, tradition and religion -- we are going to tear down the old world and build a new equitable society under the banned or Communist party". Well, they thought so.
Whatever reason, family cut-off is as dysfunctional as enmeshment and ego-blending. And mother-blaming is so outdated in psychology I doubt people using it to explain family problems are really psychologists.
Interesting, as Bolshevism, a corrupt and bankrupt ideology and progenitor of progressivism, was the dominant ideology of the cretins who initiated this cruelty. So many roads of human misery trace back to Marx, yet so many still idolize that essence of pure anti-humanism. Humans genuinely are the authors of their own misfortune.
Old Bolsheviks were not cretins (Stalin purged them for a reason). They simply hated Russia and wanted to destroy it. Radical Marxism with a pinch of Lenin's populism was a tool they used. It played well on the strings that every Russian soul has: community, fairness and mercy to the fallen. Surely it was all talk, but old regime was not ready to combat massive propaganda and majority of population was still very, very naive in this regard. That's why Russia had Marxism in acute form and it still very far from complete recovery. Now West has it in chronic form with occasional flare-ups.
Occasional flare ups, you say?😉 The progressive Marxists of our day have never enjoyed more influence than they have at this moment. And their end goal is the same; destroy _______ (insert whatever you like, it’s all a target to todays cretins, IMO). What they envision as a replacement of would fail, like everything they do, simply because they never think of ideas into the third, fourth or tenth iteration. They dream up an idea, say, “that sounds like it would work,” and then they do it.
The real fault of today is that normal, sane, uncrazy people who value safety and tradition have to get off our duff and actually take interest. We have a really bad habit of scoring a win and then going to sleep. Our enemies have no off-switch.
They have never enjoyed more influence than today in Western world. But it is going to be much worse. I don’t think that they are stupid. One doesn’t have to be stupid to make stupid decisions. They are simply detached from reality. Much like late Soviet gerontocracy — not very smart, not really stupid. It’s not like they wanted to ruin their country and make it a giant Wild West pavilion. They thought it’s going to be fine, just like you pointed out. The Market will sort it out, they said. Well, it did not turn out that well for Russia and for them.
Interesting. I think that the technocratic ideology, of which communism is a major branch, seeks to separate everyone from all cultural, traditional, family and ultimately all human ties to community, so that the technocratic masters can mold the new creature devoid of any legacy code. Such human simulacrums are monsters.
Communism defies tradition and natural hierarchy hence its utopian progressivism and obsession with equity. And yes, since families are hierarchical human systems by nature they must go.
Outdated or no, the influence of a mother on her young child is profound. It's simply a fact. Though to continue to blame one's mother for one's adult problems is destructive.
If you mature, you learn to play the hand you're dealt or fold and start a new game of your own invention. Blaming is a child's game.
Mother blaming was a part of mainstream psychology in the decades following the discovery of double bind and schizophenogenic suggestions. Theories of this period misunderstood internalisation. Basically, many psychologists observed clients with critical and abusive inner voices or self-deprecating thoughts. These resembled voices and thoughts of clients’ mothers. But blaming everything on one’s mother does not work. It shifts the focus to one person instead of considering the multitude of systems around the client. It promotes unresolvable conflict because despite one’s best efforts abusive mothers rarely change. And finally it cements internal conflict by blaming and rejecting the part of the client’s psyche that mimics his or her mother’s behaviour in order to protect host from real or imaginary harm. Modern therapists seek to ensure client’s safety but also seeks to resolve inner conflict and restore broken social ties. And maybe this client will become a loving and caring parent and his or her unquestionably profound influence will be benign.
Trish, I can’t resist, this topic is a hobby horse of mine and I am going to comment even before listening to the interview.
Here is my take, which I have been posting all over Substack :
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no distinction between military and civilian participation” Marshall McLuhan.
Notice, he used (50 years ago) the present tense: “is”.
If you want to test the practical implication of this McLuhan quote, have your children read some of CJ Hopkins , or your own Substack posts which talk about woke ideology, and the increasingly totalitarian nature of liberalism. Be prepared to be disowned. World War III is active within your own family. You’ve lost your children. They spent over a decade being proselytized into a perverse religion.
“ For wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the human soul to external reality and the solution was knowledge, self-discipline and virtue. For today’s applied science the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique and in the application of this technique they are prepared to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious.” Sinclair Lewis.
Have your kids been turned into idiots by education:
“The university has been to the nation as the Wooden-horse was to the Trojans.” Thomas Hobbes, 1588- 1679. Maybe it’s not a new phenomenon.
I keep wondering how long ww3 has been going on. It appears to me that the west has been in "hot war" in limited theatres since 9/11, but perhaps the psychological wars have been going even longer.
I came across an excerpt from "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars" and have that book on my ever-growing reading list. I would like to add those that you cite, but I am having a hard time keeping up!
I’d say the world war started in the early 1900’s. Chapter 1 was WW1, then chapter 2, and now we’re in chapter 3. President Wilson, Churchill and others were technocrat elites who intended to run the world (for their masters) and here we are. The seeds of this were planted by Socrates and Plato who believed that superior men were ordained to rule the world. The veil has been removed, yet most people refuse to believe their eyes and ears.
This belief many people have that society's fate is someone else's responsibility, is likely enabled by a crushing school system that taught (teaches) authoritarian values. There's always an expert out there, who can screw it up better than you can. We live in an age of adult fairy tales. We tackle the climate, then run for a touchdown.
Free school - free education - free indoctrination to fit into the system. We are so lucky to have our superiors take care of us. Schools are designed to mold you to fit in and if you don't fit the plan, you are tossed to the curb.
I will have to disagree. There really are families that are so destructive to the whole unit. My 'family' moved from Northern Ireland in 1966 when I was age 7, due to the impending 'Troubles.' Within two years of being in our Toronto apartment, my mother sliced her wrists twice. She returned to Ireland for a while to be with her parents, leaving me and my two older sibllings with our workaholic father and his girlfriend, who moved into our apartment with her three-year-old son. My mother eventually returned to Toronto; although, I have no memory of her leaving or returning. We then moved to Cambridge, Ontario and my parents divorced. My sister left with my father. My mother, brother and I moved two more times to smaller and smaller rental units. So, my mother had to raise my brother and me working at two jobs. No communication ever happened. Just yelling and screaming. I finally disconnected from my mother in my twenties soon after a Professor said, "you have a lot of cobwebs in your head." due to my lack of confidence in my own learning. I couldn't think, process information, write about it, etc. My mother took every opportunity to say, "why don't you just admit you can't do it." This always shattered me further. It took me six years to complete a three-year degree (1987-1993) which I finally did at age 34. I kept dropping out of university and working at low-wage jobs, thereby, reinforcing my worthless low-economic-class status through an inability to strive for more. This belief about my lack of capacity was instilled at a very early age. My former father-in-law said to me, "The Irish are piss-poor protoplasm poorly put together." There I was in another family being treated like the loser I had been raised to be. I now live on government assistance in a province that hates English-speakers, as I try to avoid destitution. When my mother finally died at age 94, I felt nothing and I still feel nothing years later.
Karin -- this is a traumatic story. Yes, some estrangements are necessary, including my own, for a time. But your early years sound grim. The aftershocks can be generational. Depression, poverty, addiction. You sound like a brave person and admirable. Thanks for sharing this with us.
You survived. That is an amazing accomplishment. So many don't under similar conditions.
My story is different than yours but the same in many ways. My mother once said to me, "You think you're a piece of cake but you're nothing but a slice of old white bread." Great. And that's just one thing she said. There was so much more that went on for so long.
Like you, I felt nothing when she died except a small relief.
I started reading the bible. Just for myself. I came to understand how much my life had in common with Jesus' life. People kept telling him he was nothing, but he didn't listen.
He knew who he was. God's son. And that was where my story and Jesus' story parted ways. I didn't know who I was for a very long time. Now I know. I am God's child. No circumstance or person can ever take that from me.
I live in poverty as well and have no idea what the future in this world holds for me. People are generally unkind and uncaring, but that's not important anymore. I know who I am. I know what was done for me. I am the love of God made flesh. The rest pales.
When my parents couldn’t come up with anything that was wrong and shouldn’t have happened circa 2020 to 2022 that was the end of it for me. Should have been easy, pick something, the masking of their grandchildren, the cancellation of their extra curricular activities and school, that their son couldn’t travel by plane to his employment as sole income, that businesses were mandated closed by the government.
On some level you have to admire their commitment on their position that there was nothing wrong with what happened, you’d think they could at least lie so that they could see their grandchildren.
I hate what's happened, but am having difficulty figuring out how to relate to someone who is never wrong (and that's not just MY observation), and who is brilliant, by their own admission. The brilliance is used, often, to set up "no-win" situations for other family members
I am a grandmother. I didn't go to university. I attend church. I am not "woke".
I have real-life, "today" challenges. I have not the time or the energy for drama.
I've attempted a middle line by mailing pretty notes with neutral commentary. These have been deemed "insincere".
How in Hell do you maintain a relationship with someone who won't let you love him or her?
This is where I'm at. I've started therapy, where I am NOT being encouraged to break contact, but to find acceptable (to me) work-arounds. Set boundaries.
My daughter did not speak to me for over a year Trish. She was 27 at the time. She did finally come around once she realized she had abandoned her real support system. She is now 34 and things are much better between us. I learned about boundaries and she learned that a Mother's love is unconditional and unending.
Yes she did. First off, I should explain that she suffers from mental illness. She was diagnosed at 16 with bipolar illness and started attending counseling. This is when the problems started. It's a rather long story but it was a combination of her illness and bad advice from a counselor, plus my responses to certain behaviors she was manifesting. She now has a new psychiatrist and has made great strides. I'm very proud of her.
Wishing you the very best with your beloved daughter as well Ann. She sounds like an amazing young woman, in no small part due to your parenting. I've learned that even though I may disagree with my daughter on how I raised her, it is how she experienced it. I've learned to be less defensive and she has learned that even if I overstep at times, she knows I mean well for her and she is able to regroup and come back to me to discuss it with that spirit in mind.
Thank you. And that's exactly what I hope for....some day. I have a feeling it'll happen. I just have to be patient, which is not my greatest area of strength. 😏
Living their truth? Seriously. Kids aren't smart enough to be making big decisions-that's why they have parents. That's another reason kids (16) shouldn't be able to vote. And forget making medical decisions. And just exactly are the parents here? The Kids or the Government?
In 2020 the democrats voted to take GOD out of their party platform. And now, look at what a Godless country looks like. Glad the adults are back in the room. Trump was just treating us to a better life by making america great again. I can't understand why the Donkeycrats hate that so much. Don't they want us to have a better life too?
It's just another Marxist tactic brought to us by the educators of our children. I had every reason to cut off ties with my family, but didn't. I learned to be tolerant although it was at my expense. My mother had mental problems and deserting her would just be cruel. I also didn't want to influence my children in how they felt about her. They came to understand her mental disorder all on their own. My mother worked hard on me to hate her mother and all her many brothers and sisters. I refused. So, when my daughter started falling in line behind 'Mao's cultural revolution' principles, and ghosting me and accusing me of things I was not - I lost my mind. Things are slowly improving, but I fear she is in line to reap what she sowed from her own children.
So sorry this happened. Don't forget the role of therapists in this. In the 90s they were convincing grown women they had been abused, secretly for years in satanic cults that sacrificed living babies. Some parents were wrongly sent to prison with no evidence. Recovered memory is now out of fashion but it was the fad of the time.
I wonder if some of this estrangement phenomenon has to do with the divorces which skyrocketed in the 70’s. Two reasons. First, there were a lot of men that either walked away or were pushed away from their kids. Second, a child who sees their parents give up on their relationship may be more likely to see all relationships as temporary
1:44:00 If it had been a real pandemic people would have isolated themselves. First month long term care home deaths was an example of this - low paid, part time workers stayed home en masse (rightly -> from the 'information' they had <-) - resulting in a mass death event across the Province (that if you dig in to the Canadian forces report, was undoubtedly horrific on the wards - a massacre).
Children raised by the state, like battery chickens, are unlikely to be capable adults.
Today schooling focuses on ends not means. It is not working. Children are not educated. They are brainwashed and consequently never grow up. Always looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow — they are not grateful or ever gratified. Narcissism manifests in people who know no boundaries … and those with a distorted sense of their importance.
Furthermore, some of the most disturbed are by societies lights, the most successful. One example from my own experience: A woman among my acquaintances is a partner in a law firm. She most certainly is a psychopath. And a narcissist. She has no friends, only associates. For her everything is transactional rather than relational. Everything this woman does is calculated, measured, added, subtracted. She has to be right! She seeks approval and fears disapproval. And, she is proud, so proud. She is like a machine. She is physically stiff. Her laughter is forced and canned. Her children hate her. She is divorced. …And estranged from her entire family. Why?
I don’t know if you are answering my post Ms Wood or not? Who is Miss Markle?
As a young boy I went to a public school — what is know as a private school in Canada.
We were taught the basics. At 7 years old I knew my times tables up to and including the 13 times table. Although known colloquially as “times tables” each expression was called an equation. The equal sign meant something. 6/2=3 is an equation not a times expression.
I do not remember when I could not read. We were taught phonetically. And taught Latin!
We were taught the importance of knowing the subject of a sentence. Parsing endless sentences was tedious — but learning to write meant assembling sentence properly structured. …And to be clear about what it was one wanted to convey.
If one cannot do this one cannot think for oneself.
My impression at a young age here in Canada, where I went to school, was teachers were not taught how to teach but only to preach — they did not know the history of Canada, how it came to be, and had no lenses
with which to see things as they really were. The ancient Greeks and Romans were dismissed by omission — and never considered!
An atlas was handed my first day of school. From this I could see the world both geographically and politically as it was then.
On the other hand my brother was scrabbling around in a sandbox in his classroom at an age when I was solving for X.
Early education free of ideological socialist progressive claptrap focusing on the basic western cannon — reading, writing and arithmetic — the foundations of great literature, the study of quantum mechanics, astrophysics, science untainted by ideology should be reinstituted. Teachers who object to teaching fundamentals ought to be expelled.
Hey, if you do your best to instill proper values into your child and give them a healthy upbringing and they want to turn around and disown you, so be it. Like most kids, they will realize later just how good they had it and will come to their senses.
Might a lot of this social craziness possibly be a result of a culture that has put materialism and worship of the self at the front for so long, and a poisonous media landscape that amplifies this narcissism and craziness?
Yes, yes, yes!
I believe to understand this trend you also have to look into who/what benefits from the dissolution of the family structure. Where are those young adults seeking a sense of belonging and purpose after they separate from their families. . .
blaming one's parents is one of the oldest tricks in the book for not taking responsibiliy for the choices one makes.
Some parents are truly toxic, but it is rare to be so toxic that no relationship is possible or desirable at some level. At some point each one of us has to take full responsibility for our lives.
true. not to mention dysfunctional families either, with its toxic aspects.
I don't consider myself a toxic person, (agreeing that this is grossly overused as a term, but it has value) but I can clearly see that I have acted in toxic ways to the people I love - partners and my kids. And I have been on the receiving ending of such behavior. Welcome to the human race.
I came to the conclusion some time ago that one is never really an adult until one starts to recognize that their family was kinda crazy, and often not in a good way. That is the perspective of an adult for me. And that I was a part of that craziness - on both sides - giving and receiving.
thank you for this comment, well put. as long as there's space, and time, for contemplation we might at least learn from past mistakes.
I truly believe that’s why we’re here - to learn and evolve. Becoming better.
good one! being our best is the only way to better the world.
Yes…..
Yes, we ourselves are experiencing it at this moment. Out of three children we have two from whom we are estranged presently. Though just recently, after five long years, there’s been a crack in the facade with our middle son (and grandson who has been almost entirely isolated from us). We are holding out hope that that relationship will reopen again 🤞
Oh, Dan. I'm so sorry. Play the long game. Do you care to share the issue? Was it political?
Partly yes. We didn’t drink the c_v_d cocktail and got labelled every {incorrect} name in the book by two of them. As a parent you simply hope that as time passes the water under the bridge will too. It looks like some thaw is happening with our middle son now. We shall see….eight years passed now for us and him, approaching five years for the eldest son. Thank goodness was for our daughter and those two grandchildren who have been a good part of our lives. Maybe 2024, our reunited family grows a bit 🤞🤞🤞
Don't give up hope Dan. I experienced abandonment by my daughter also but all is good now. In fact, we are closer and have a much better relationship. Be open to hearing their grievances even if you don't agree. Wishing you the very best.
With you both literally and spiritually. I keep holding the door open. Meanwhile, as Diva Moore said, I love on the kids who are here.
Severing family ties was a major fad in the years following Russian revolution. People even posted notes in local newspaper declaring their bold act. For some it was a matter of survival -- you could not expect to achieve anything in Soviet Russia with "wrong" class family background. For many it was purely ideological. "To Hell with you old ways, tradition and religion -- we are going to tear down the old world and build a new equitable society under the banned or Communist party". Well, they thought so.
Whatever reason, family cut-off is as dysfunctional as enmeshment and ego-blending. And mother-blaming is so outdated in psychology I doubt people using it to explain family problems are really psychologists.
Interesting, as Bolshevism, a corrupt and bankrupt ideology and progenitor of progressivism, was the dominant ideology of the cretins who initiated this cruelty. So many roads of human misery trace back to Marx, yet so many still idolize that essence of pure anti-humanism. Humans genuinely are the authors of their own misfortune.
Old Bolsheviks were not cretins (Stalin purged them for a reason). They simply hated Russia and wanted to destroy it. Radical Marxism with a pinch of Lenin's populism was a tool they used. It played well on the strings that every Russian soul has: community, fairness and mercy to the fallen. Surely it was all talk, but old regime was not ready to combat massive propaganda and majority of population was still very, very naive in this regard. That's why Russia had Marxism in acute form and it still very far from complete recovery. Now West has it in chronic form with occasional flare-ups.
Occasional flare ups, you say?😉 The progressive Marxists of our day have never enjoyed more influence than they have at this moment. And their end goal is the same; destroy _______ (insert whatever you like, it’s all a target to todays cretins, IMO). What they envision as a replacement of would fail, like everything they do, simply because they never think of ideas into the third, fourth or tenth iteration. They dream up an idea, say, “that sounds like it would work,” and then they do it.
The real fault of today is that normal, sane, uncrazy people who value safety and tradition have to get off our duff and actually take interest. We have a really bad habit of scoring a win and then going to sleep. Our enemies have no off-switch.
They have never enjoyed more influence than today in Western world. But it is going to be much worse. I don’t think that they are stupid. One doesn’t have to be stupid to make stupid decisions. They are simply detached from reality. Much like late Soviet gerontocracy — not very smart, not really stupid. It’s not like they wanted to ruin their country and make it a giant Wild West pavilion. They thought it’s going to be fine, just like you pointed out. The Market will sort it out, they said. Well, it did not turn out that well for Russia and for them.
Interesting. I think that the technocratic ideology, of which communism is a major branch, seeks to separate everyone from all cultural, traditional, family and ultimately all human ties to community, so that the technocratic masters can mold the new creature devoid of any legacy code. Such human simulacrums are monsters.
Communism defies tradition and natural hierarchy hence its utopian progressivism and obsession with equity. And yes, since families are hierarchical human systems by nature they must go.
The only hierarchy permitted is political in a technocratic system, although technocrats will deny it with all their energy.
Yeah. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
🎯
Outdated or no, the influence of a mother on her young child is profound. It's simply a fact. Though to continue to blame one's mother for one's adult problems is destructive.
If you mature, you learn to play the hand you're dealt or fold and start a new game of your own invention. Blaming is a child's game.
Mother blaming was a part of mainstream psychology in the decades following the discovery of double bind and schizophenogenic suggestions. Theories of this period misunderstood internalisation. Basically, many psychologists observed clients with critical and abusive inner voices or self-deprecating thoughts. These resembled voices and thoughts of clients’ mothers. But blaming everything on one’s mother does not work. It shifts the focus to one person instead of considering the multitude of systems around the client. It promotes unresolvable conflict because despite one’s best efforts abusive mothers rarely change. And finally it cements internal conflict by blaming and rejecting the part of the client’s psyche that mimics his or her mother’s behaviour in order to protect host from real or imaginary harm. Modern therapists seek to ensure client’s safety but also seeks to resolve inner conflict and restore broken social ties. And maybe this client will become a loving and caring parent and his or her unquestionably profound influence will be benign.
Trish, I can’t resist, this topic is a hobby horse of mine and I am going to comment even before listening to the interview.
Here is my take, which I have been posting all over Substack :
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no distinction between military and civilian participation” Marshall McLuhan.
Notice, he used (50 years ago) the present tense: “is”.
If you want to test the practical implication of this McLuhan quote, have your children read some of CJ Hopkins , or your own Substack posts which talk about woke ideology, and the increasingly totalitarian nature of liberalism. Be prepared to be disowned. World War III is active within your own family. You’ve lost your children. They spent over a decade being proselytized into a perverse religion.
“ For wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the human soul to external reality and the solution was knowledge, self-discipline and virtue. For today’s applied science the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique and in the application of this technique they are prepared to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious.” Sinclair Lewis.
Have your kids been turned into idiots by education:
“The university has been to the nation as the Wooden-horse was to the Trojans.” Thomas Hobbes, 1588- 1679. Maybe it’s not a new phenomenon.
I keep wondering how long ww3 has been going on. It appears to me that the west has been in "hot war" in limited theatres since 9/11, but perhaps the psychological wars have been going even longer.
Sinclair Lewis published That Hideous Strength in 1945 and Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of the last man in his 1885 fictionThus Spoke Zarathustra.
Stripped of Christian values, the critical theory religion is now wreaking havoc on society.
I came across an excerpt from "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars" and have that book on my ever-growing reading list. I would like to add those that you cite, but I am having a hard time keeping up!
I’d say the world war started in the early 1900’s. Chapter 1 was WW1, then chapter 2, and now we’re in chapter 3. President Wilson, Churchill and others were technocrat elites who intended to run the world (for their masters) and here we are. The seeds of this were planted by Socrates and Plato who believed that superior men were ordained to rule the world. The veil has been removed, yet most people refuse to believe their eyes and ears.
This belief many people have that society's fate is someone else's responsibility, is likely enabled by a crushing school system that taught (teaches) authoritarian values. There's always an expert out there, who can screw it up better than you can. We live in an age of adult fairy tales. We tackle the climate, then run for a touchdown.
Free school - free education - free indoctrination to fit into the system. We are so lucky to have our superiors take care of us. Schools are designed to mold you to fit in and if you don't fit the plan, you are tossed to the curb.
I will have to disagree. There really are families that are so destructive to the whole unit. My 'family' moved from Northern Ireland in 1966 when I was age 7, due to the impending 'Troubles.' Within two years of being in our Toronto apartment, my mother sliced her wrists twice. She returned to Ireland for a while to be with her parents, leaving me and my two older sibllings with our workaholic father and his girlfriend, who moved into our apartment with her three-year-old son. My mother eventually returned to Toronto; although, I have no memory of her leaving or returning. We then moved to Cambridge, Ontario and my parents divorced. My sister left with my father. My mother, brother and I moved two more times to smaller and smaller rental units. So, my mother had to raise my brother and me working at two jobs. No communication ever happened. Just yelling and screaming. I finally disconnected from my mother in my twenties soon after a Professor said, "you have a lot of cobwebs in your head." due to my lack of confidence in my own learning. I couldn't think, process information, write about it, etc. My mother took every opportunity to say, "why don't you just admit you can't do it." This always shattered me further. It took me six years to complete a three-year degree (1987-1993) which I finally did at age 34. I kept dropping out of university and working at low-wage jobs, thereby, reinforcing my worthless low-economic-class status through an inability to strive for more. This belief about my lack of capacity was instilled at a very early age. My former father-in-law said to me, "The Irish are piss-poor protoplasm poorly put together." There I was in another family being treated like the loser I had been raised to be. I now live on government assistance in a province that hates English-speakers, as I try to avoid destitution. When my mother finally died at age 94, I felt nothing and I still feel nothing years later.
Karin -- this is a traumatic story. Yes, some estrangements are necessary, including my own, for a time. But your early years sound grim. The aftershocks can be generational. Depression, poverty, addiction. You sound like a brave person and admirable. Thanks for sharing this with us.
You survived. That is an amazing accomplishment. So many don't under similar conditions.
My story is different than yours but the same in many ways. My mother once said to me, "You think you're a piece of cake but you're nothing but a slice of old white bread." Great. And that's just one thing she said. There was so much more that went on for so long.
Like you, I felt nothing when she died except a small relief.
I started reading the bible. Just for myself. I came to understand how much my life had in common with Jesus' life. People kept telling him he was nothing, but he didn't listen.
He knew who he was. God's son. And that was where my story and Jesus' story parted ways. I didn't know who I was for a very long time. Now I know. I am God's child. No circumstance or person can ever take that from me.
I live in poverty as well and have no idea what the future in this world holds for me. People are generally unkind and uncaring, but that's not important anymore. I know who I am. I know what was done for me. I am the love of God made flesh. The rest pales.
God Bless you.
Thank you. I find your story deeply moving.
I'm so glad. It's the story God gives to each of us. Whether we deserve it or not is not the point. All we have to do is want it. He will do the rest.
Wow! That reminds me of the story Angela’s Ashes. Glad to see yore taking care of yourself and beating back the demons at the gate 👏🏼👏🏼🙏
"...in a province that hates English-speakers"
I can corroborate that. Your perceptions are quite accurate.
When my parents couldn’t come up with anything that was wrong and shouldn’t have happened circa 2020 to 2022 that was the end of it for me. Should have been easy, pick something, the masking of their grandchildren, the cancellation of their extra curricular activities and school, that their son couldn’t travel by plane to his employment as sole income, that businesses were mandated closed by the government.
On some level you have to admire their commitment on their position that there was nothing wrong with what happened, you’d think they could at least lie so that they could see their grandchildren.
I hate what's happened, but am having difficulty figuring out how to relate to someone who is never wrong (and that's not just MY observation), and who is brilliant, by their own admission. The brilliance is used, often, to set up "no-win" situations for other family members
I am a grandmother. I didn't go to university. I attend church. I am not "woke".
I have real-life, "today" challenges. I have not the time or the energy for drama.
I've attempted a middle line by mailing pretty notes with neutral commentary. These have been deemed "insincere".
How in Hell do you maintain a relationship with someone who won't let you love him or her?
This is a great question. Keep trying but detach lovingly for your own mental health. ANd hope she comes around.
This is where I'm at. I've started therapy, where I am NOT being encouraged to break contact, but to find acceptable (to me) work-arounds. Set boundaries.
My daughter did not speak to me for over a year Trish. She was 27 at the time. She did finally come around once she realized she had abandoned her real support system. She is now 34 and things are much better between us. I learned about boundaries and she learned that a Mother's love is unconditional and unending.
I'm so glad. Has she explained why she did it?
Yes she did. First off, I should explain that she suffers from mental illness. She was diagnosed at 16 with bipolar illness and started attending counseling. This is when the problems started. It's a rather long story but it was a combination of her illness and bad advice from a counselor, plus my responses to certain behaviors she was manifesting. She now has a new psychiatrist and has made great strides. I'm very proud of her.
I love your last line. May it be so.
Wishing you the very best with your beloved daughter as well Ann. She sounds like an amazing young woman, in no small part due to your parenting. I've learned that even though I may disagree with my daughter on how I raised her, it is how she experienced it. I've learned to be less defensive and she has learned that even if I overstep at times, she knows I mean well for her and she is able to regroup and come back to me to discuss it with that spirit in mind.
Thank you. And that's exactly what I hope for....some day. I have a feeling it'll happen. I just have to be patient, which is not my greatest area of strength. 😏
Living their truth? Seriously. Kids aren't smart enough to be making big decisions-that's why they have parents. That's another reason kids (16) shouldn't be able to vote. And forget making medical decisions. And just exactly are the parents here? The Kids or the Government?
In 2020 the democrats voted to take GOD out of their party platform. And now, look at what a Godless country looks like. Glad the adults are back in the room. Trump was just treating us to a better life by making america great again. I can't understand why the Donkeycrats hate that so much. Don't they want us to have a better life too?
No, they don't.
100% truth - it's precisely the opposite.
It's just another Marxist tactic brought to us by the educators of our children. I had every reason to cut off ties with my family, but didn't. I learned to be tolerant although it was at my expense. My mother had mental problems and deserting her would just be cruel. I also didn't want to influence my children in how they felt about her. They came to understand her mental disorder all on their own. My mother worked hard on me to hate her mother and all her many brothers and sisters. I refused. So, when my daughter started falling in line behind 'Mao's cultural revolution' principles, and ghosting me and accusing me of things I was not - I lost my mind. Things are slowly improving, but I fear she is in line to reap what she sowed from her own children.
So sorry this happened. Don't forget the role of therapists in this. In the 90s they were convincing grown women they had been abused, secretly for years in satanic cults that sacrificed living babies. Some parents were wrongly sent to prison with no evidence. Recovered memory is now out of fashion but it was the fad of the time.
I wonder if some of this estrangement phenomenon has to do with the divorces which skyrocketed in the 70’s. Two reasons. First, there were a lot of men that either walked away or were pushed away from their kids. Second, a child who sees their parents give up on their relationship may be more likely to see all relationships as temporary
1:44:00 If it had been a real pandemic people would have isolated themselves. First month long term care home deaths was an example of this - low paid, part time workers stayed home en masse (rightly -> from the 'information' they had <-) - resulting in a mass death event across the Province (that if you dig in to the Canadian forces report, was undoubtedly horrific on the wards - a massacre).
Children raised by the state, like battery chickens, are unlikely to be capable adults.
Today schooling focuses on ends not means. It is not working. Children are not educated. They are brainwashed and consequently never grow up. Always looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow — they are not grateful or ever gratified. Narcissism manifests in people who know no boundaries … and those with a distorted sense of their importance.
Furthermore, some of the most disturbed are by societies lights, the most successful. One example from my own experience: A woman among my acquaintances is a partner in a law firm. She most certainly is a psychopath. And a narcissist. She has no friends, only associates. For her everything is transactional rather than relational. Everything this woman does is calculated, measured, added, subtracted. She has to be right! She seeks approval and fears disapproval. And, she is proud, so proud. She is like a machine. She is physically stiff. Her laughter is forced and canned. Her children hate her. She is divorced. …And estranged from her entire family. Why?
Are you talking about Miss Markle? Very similar. I feel sorry for her family.
I don’t know if you are answering my post Ms Wood or not? Who is Miss Markle?
As a young boy I went to a public school — what is know as a private school in Canada.
We were taught the basics. At 7 years old I knew my times tables up to and including the 13 times table. Although known colloquially as “times tables” each expression was called an equation. The equal sign meant something. 6/2=3 is an equation not a times expression.
I do not remember when I could not read. We were taught phonetically. And taught Latin!
We were taught the importance of knowing the subject of a sentence. Parsing endless sentences was tedious — but learning to write meant assembling sentence properly structured. …And to be clear about what it was one wanted to convey.
If one cannot do this one cannot think for oneself.
My impression at a young age here in Canada, where I went to school, was teachers were not taught how to teach but only to preach — they did not know the history of Canada, how it came to be, and had no lenses
with which to see things as they really were. The ancient Greeks and Romans were dismissed by omission — and never considered!
An atlas was handed my first day of school. From this I could see the world both geographically and politically as it was then.
On the other hand my brother was scrabbling around in a sandbox in his classroom at an age when I was solving for X.
Early education free of ideological socialist progressive claptrap focusing on the basic western cannon — reading, writing and arithmetic — the foundations of great literature, the study of quantum mechanics, astrophysics, science untainted by ideology should be reinstituted. Teachers who object to teaching fundamentals ought to be expelled.
I was referring to Meghan Markle....it was a jokey reference.
Ahhh!
Hey, if you do your best to instill proper values into your child and give them a healthy upbringing and they want to turn around and disown you, so be it. Like most kids, they will realize later just how good they had it and will come to their senses.
Daycare