The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
When do you give up your [Family]?
Posts
No. No. No.
They sound like horrible people. No reason to feel guilty about not associating with horrible people. It resonates with me since I have a similar, but less extreme version of the not good enough relation with my mother, and I literally never talk to her or see her more than once a year, and then mainly because I see the rest of my siblings at that time as well.
I'm gonna throw my two cents here with ObiFett's point. My dad has been a jerk. He was verbally abusive/bossy to my mom until they finally divorced, and he would occasionally be so towards my brothers and I. I'm gonna chalk these marks on his personality to what may have happened in his own home life and being a military man. He eventually retired, but I know he really didn't want to; he did because we had established a life somewhere after moving around several times during my early childhood, and hell if my mom was going to allow another move again. Things have improved however since my parents finally don't have to live with each other, and my brothers and I likewise.
I don't go out of my way to spend time with him, however I'll meet with him when i'm in the area for holidays or vacations. As much as I want to minimize my time with him, he still provided a lot of care and support for us where it mattered, and he never did truly foul stuff like cheat on my mom, beat any of us, or become an alcoholic. There was just a clash of personalities where eventually we just weren't able to all live in the same space anymore, but not to the extent where we were compelled to burn bridges.
These people think Love = Dogmatic Loyalty and probably understand the concept of Love so little that the idea of calling into question their supposedly sacred familial bonds, as I'm sure Rick Santorum would call them, makes them so profoundly uncomfortable they need to minimize and demean the experiences of others. After all, if you only talk about it when asked or when the situation warrants some exposition I'd say you've pretty much gotten over it. It's the people who try to use "family" as an excuse for something, good or bad, that haven't really gotten over it. So really it's all projection on their part, don't let them bother you.
Yeah, I can see that.
It works just as well to burn those bridges though.
I mean, I spend holidays with the people who actually currently enjoy my company and have actually supported me more than the state requires in order to not take your children.
And remember! I love my parents. But I don't love their parents. And neither do they! Their parents never killed them, and even fed them and clothed them the amount necessary to live, and sometimes more. But they were also petty, horrible people who hurt their children each and every day because they could.
I can't imagine what benefit spending a Christmas with them is supposed to have. Only beating your kids enough to not get caught, and not feeding them glass shards, isn't enough for me to sit back and appreciate just how much work you put in to raise them. Congrats, you weren't arrested, you're still awful.
I'm lucky the people who love me and my parents overlapped. Some people aren't that lucky. They shouldn't be shamed because of a ridiculous life-debt incurred at birth.
My family is really not that bad, all things considered. But then, My family is rather small. I have no living grandparents, 2 uncles and an aunt. I'm close with one of my uncles, but the other one is the family black sheep, by his choice. My aunt is a psychotic lunatic who hates my father (her brother) and hates me almost even more. I haven't seen or heard from her (or her 2 kids) since her daughters bat mitzvah 9 years ago. We went, we gave money, all contact was cut off.
Now, I know that there is some family drama somewhere on my father's side. Something happened between him and his paternal grandmother shortly after I was born. I still don't have a clear idea of what it was that happened, but it was something to do with me and/or my mother and us not living up to her expectations (I was maybe 2 months old or so). My father told her in no uncertain terms to fuck off and get out of his life. There's been no contact with that side of the family since. None.
My parents pushed me when i was little, "get straight As" and the like. I wasn't allowed to have a job through high school because all my time was meant to be preparing for Uni. They paid for my degree, and i have no student loans. They weren't harsh parents, and certainly not abusive. My worst fear of them was hearing the phrase "I'm very disappointed in you". Terrifying. Even to this day, and i'm 30! My baby brother and I get along fine, so long as we're not together for very long. We're good at the long distance relationships. But if we live together for too long of a period and we have too much contact, we end up really getting on each other's nerves to the point of screaming matches at 2am.
But I love my little brother, and I'd do anything that i could for him. Even if he is an ungrateful little shit with his head on backwards most of the time.
so apparently it is possible to cut off your family, since it's happened twice in mine.
And I'm honestly a better person for it. I miss my cousins, but having not seen them in 9 years, it's a vague distant 'miss'. I have 4 older cousins that I've never met (there's quite a big age difference between my mom and her older brother. Like 13 years difference), but I'm not poorer for it. It is what it is. I have my parents, I have my brother, I have my uncle and his crazy wife. And I have my friends.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
But my experience has been that you still have a relationship with the family member(s) that you 'give up on'. Friends and lovers is completely different - when you 'lose' them that is usually the end, and I have to concentrate to remember them. With my father I still have a relationship, even when I literally didn't speak to him for 10 years. My sister talks about him (she has a slightly better relationship with him than me), my wife wonders about him, and so on. And people have fathers, I expect to have a father. Having a father is normal. So I notice the absence of one.
So, anyway, what I think you have to do is not expect to remove that person from your life, but to choose between two kinds of relationships: the one you have now, or the one where you don't see them and you don't talk to them and they know you think they are shit. You decide which one you want, which one is less damaging for you (and make no mistake, they are both damaging).
Not having my father in my life is hard, but it's not as hard as having him in my life.
I just woke up from probably the most intense dream I've experienced in my life. In it, I was confronting my father about, well, everything, and he was being unapologetic and not turning away from anything that makes him what he is. My older brother was present in the dream, and while he's always made excuses for our dad (despite being screwed over by him most, regarding settlement money from being hit by a car), in my dream he was taking the position of not knowing this is how I'd felt after all this time. My younger brother was also present, but for some reason wasn't his adult self - which is no surprise, I haven't seen him nor spoken to him since my brother and father exiled me out of California. And my step-mother was there too, thankfully taking my side. My last memories of her, since I haven't seen her or spoken to her in just as long, are that she's a reasonable person, just easily frustrated by shenanigans.
It was all really way too real. I think I need therapy. I thought the dream I had a week ago, in which I physically fought my father, was bad enough. But something this involved was just way too much for me.
4 Old Sayings About Family That Aren't Necessarily True
The rest of my family is mainly without flaws and I cannot be grateful enough for them. Whether you people with less than trustworthy and benevolent family members decide to work things out or start distancing yourselves, I think you have a lot of strength for doing something I can't imagine dealing with. Distancing myself from my dad (not fully) was less of an issue than I thought. I just realized one day that I haven't had two parents, just one good mother and a fraction of a father, and that was that.
In answer to the question, you break off with family once it makes sense to. My wife's mother isn't allowed anywhere near my children, for instance; but being a chronic liar, thief and meth addict makes you the kind of person I don't want my children near. Hell, the very mention of her mother used to send my wife damn near into panic attacks. In this case, I think that it's pretty justified to cut that tie, at least until she's ready to start turning her own life around. It doesn't help that my wife's grandmother constantly tries to "arrange" situations where my wife's mother might "happen" to be in the same room as my wife and kids. I think she's stuck on the idea that everything will work out ok if she can just pretend her family is normal hard enough.
While her daughter is stealing her shit behind her back for drug money, of course.
As for my own family, no huge issues, other than never being close to any of them except my mom. I still talk to her occasionally, and if she asked me a favor, I'd gladly do it, but otherwise, I'm pretty apathetic to the rest of the family above or beside me on the tree.
Somedays I wonder where the line is between apathy and sociopathy, though. *shrug*
Apathy is lacking the will or motivation to act. Sociopathy is performing those acts while faking and being unable to empathize with the emotions that would motivate those acts in normal people.
So, it's a question of societal pressure to act. Got it.
I would never advocate purposely cutting off ties with family, if the situation is not toxic to you or your children, but fuck them if they are. At best family is a group of friends that you had no real choice in meeting; on the other hand, family can be a collection of enemies that should be avoided at all costs. It is wrenching to see anyone you care about suffer, but no one is obliged to ruin their own happiness for someone else, or trade a life of good decisions and responsibility for one of shit and stupidity.
Do right by yourself when family goes wrong and just move on.
My own grandmother would have lived nearby at the time... I think I'll send you a PM.