Mainstream sources often paint parents as beyond criticism, but most men had different childhood experiences than the picture perfect image created by Hallmark. I’ve written about the problems of American childhood before, but I’ve also written about using negative experiences for a positive purpose. Since mother’s day was this past week, many of you may have recently called or spent time with families you do not get along with. Here’s how to heal that relationship.
Who Are You Angry At?
When someone apologized to the Buddha for a previous insult, he said “don’t worry, those people no longer exist.” What Buddha meant was that the person who was apologizing to him now was different from the person he was when he insulted Buddha earlier, and that Buddha himself was a different person than he was when he received the insult.
The Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation is misunderstood. It is not that you travel between lifetimes, but that you actually die and are reincarnated in each moment. If one cell is replaced in the body, you are a different person. Since your body is constantly changing, you are actually a completely new person moment to moment, and every change is a total change.
While this may seem esoteric, for me it was actually the key to forgiving my parents. I began meditating and studying zen shortly after moving out of my family’s house, and needed a way to handle my anger. Over time, I realized that the family I was angry at was not the family I knew now, but the family I had when I was a child.
In the present, I consider my parents close friends, but when I was a child my parents were clueless twenty-somethings with no idea how to raise a kid. After twenty years parenting experience, they’re much better at the job, but when they started they were clueless. The parents I was angry at were not the parents I have now, but the parents that existed twenty years ago.
Furthermore, the “me” that was angry at them was not the present me, but the me that existed when I was a child. At the present, I’m a highly capable adult, who can take care of himself. As a child, I depended on my family for love and survival, and when either need felt threatened I resented them for it, and created negative patterns to compensate. The me that was angry in the present was not the adult me, but stuck energy from when I was a child.
Letting Go Of Stuck Energy
Intelligent men are often tempted use clever rationalizations to ignore what they are actually feeling. Arthur Janov, the founder of primal therapy, calls these rationalizations defenses. Once you understand them, they’re pretty easy to spot. When someone says, “I hate my parents, but…” the “but” is a defense, or a qualifying statement used to avoid feeling the full emotion. It would be easy to dismiss childhood feelings by saying “I hate my parents, but they’re different people now” and use Buddha’s wisdom to avoid moving stuck energy.
Healing any pattern requires two things – becoming aware of the pattern and letting go of it. Our culture has a prohibition against any anger against women, particularly mothers. The phrase”mommy issues” is more often hurled as an insult against men than used in healing context, despite that fact most almost every man and woman I know has some issue that can be traced back to childhood experiences. The stigma against criticizing women and mothers actually silences men’s feelings and prevents them from healing.
Psychologists know that it is not the hurt or anger but the defense against it that causes suffering. If you are experiencing resentment against someone, try allowing it flow through you in a way that does not harm the other person or yourself. Amplify it ten times. Express it fully. Most people cannot maintain fully expressed rage for more than two minutes without it giving way to another emotion or new realization.
There are hundreds of healing modalities and artistic outlets that can move stuck energy. A major misconception about healing work or psychology is that it is all about “blaming your parents” for your life. In reality, it is about taking full responsibility for your life, rather than living the patterns your family established for you. Get help if necessary, and heavily qualify whoever helps your. You wouldn’t let anyone who wasn’t qualified repair your car or run your finances. Hold the person who works on your soul to an even higher standard of care.
Dealing With The Present
Americans are incredibly defensive about any criticism of their parenting skills, particularly when that criticism comes from the recipient of those parenting skills. Acknowledging wrongdoing as a parent means letting go of the narcissistic self-image of being a good parent and actually becoming one. Unfortunately, narcissists often make terrible parents, and we have a generation of narcissists raised by the greatest generation of narcissists.
For this reason, even if you let go of anger against your family, they may not apologize for or recognized the harm they’ve done. In fact, many family members will continue to act out the same negative patterns they established when you were young, and resist any change or personal growth that would cause either person to shift the previous power dynamic.
If you family is continuing to act out old patterns in the present, you have to set boundaries. While moving stuck energy is helpful, if you don’t behave differently now you’ll get more energy you have to shift. Standing up for yourself in the present will not only make your life better, it will affirm that you are no longer a child, but an adult who can protect himself.
Call your family out when they belittle you. Cut them out of your life if they cannot comply. Let them know what behavior is required if they wish to participate in your life, and that they can take it or leave it. Have the same frame you’d have when qualifying any other relationship in your life. You are on your path, and your purpose, and anyone who supports that ride is welcome to join, and anyone who doesn’t is welcome to leave. If this sounds like the same frame to have when handling women, that’s because it is.
Changing Your Family
It’s said that in spiritual circles that “the world is your mirror” and that everyone you meet is simply reflecting your own energy back to you. I noticed when I changed who I was, everyone around me changed as well, including my parents. When I began setting boundaries with my family, and they began showing up differently. Unable to get what they wanted through manipulation, the genuine care my family had for me came through.
I saw that my parents were actually just very afraid I would turn out badly, and thought controlling and scaring me would protect me from negative influences like sex, drugs, and masculinity. Of course, because the energy we put out is what we get back, their fear made me rebellious and angry.
When confronted with the choice between losing me or participating in my life on more loving terms, my family realized how much they wanted to be a part of my life. When I let go of the resentment I had towards the people they used to be, I was able to accept them as they are. Now, I consider my family to be close friends, and enjoy spending time with them.
If you change who you are, let go of past resentments, and set new boundaries, don’t be surprised if your family starts showing up differently. In fact, don’t be surprised if everyone in your life starts showing up differently. This process of can be used on any relationship. Change yourself, and you change your world.
Read More: Taking The Red Pill Destroyed My Family
I enjoyed the post. As someone who has a good relationship with my parents and family I have still had to establish boundaries in my 20’s to make sure that there weren’t repeats of the (rare but present) manipulation.
People forget that family conflict isn’t always a terrible thing, particularly if it allows everything out in the open and especially if it is within the confines of the family (not becoming public).
You can never fully forget your parents unless you become a parent yourself … and then you wish you didn’t bother. LOL
We tend to see our parents as invincible and infallible as kids. Then we grow up and realize they are just as flawed as anyone else. The issue becomes when they still act as thought they are truly wiser in all things just by virtue of being older and more experienced. Never be afraid to disagree or correct them when its warranted.
Baby boomers were the worst generation of parents ever. Baby boomers created all of this evil- feminism, liberalism, fundamentalist Christianity, etc. Baby Boomers ARE the cancer on this planet. I hope to god they all just fucking hurry up and DIE ALREADY!
Blaming baby boomers for feminism and liberalism. Good goyim. My brother Chaim and I agree with you!
Well children should respect their elders.
I dunno why. Cause they’re older?
Cause they’ve failed to do anything worth respecting for longer?
I dunno….no, I do know why. Or else!
Children must respect their elders’ capacity to use violence, threats or coercion to bully respect out of them.
It’s respectable, for the Dark Ages from which we’ve never emerged.
“Read this before Mother’s Day”? Four days too late, son. “Oh, THAT”S why she’s mad!!!!”
I politely and respectively went to the people in my family whose relationship I needed to adjust. I told them specifically what behaviors I did not like of theirs and how moving forward with our relationship if they still want to have one would take place. I told them that If I see these behaviors again we would not speak again, just like a relationship with a women I would withhold my attention from them,or just flat out leave the family gathering if the number of offenses reached my limit. After sticking to my guns all the relationships I’ve had to correct are now going in a positive and healthy direction. The relationships I do have with the family members that truly do want to be in my life are very fulfilling and satisfying. The ones that couldn’t adhere to my boundaries, I wished them the best. My life is 10 times better off then it was, and now I am looked upon as the cornerstone of the family. As a man you set the bar on what you tolerate, your family is of no exceptions.
Great post. I think we need more writing about anger in general around these parts. Sometimes it gets suffocating.
This isn’t about your blog experiences with angry people on ROK, fucknut. This is addressing the internal anger many men struggle with as products of a hyper-feminized 70s-90s upbringing, where mini-van dads were born, and count dracula-type cunt moms dragged the whole fucking family down with their post-whatever “ailments” and tirades.
Amen. When men are raised by beta male mangina fathers and feminist mothers, such boys grow up into very angry young men, because we never had a proper father figure to teach us how to become men. And you see, this is how feminism creates a hyper-violent society full of angry and violent young men, which in turn destroys feminism because society becomes so violent that women are afraid to even leave their homes. So, feminism is a cancer that eats itself alive.
So emotional. Being a dick online won’t make the pain go away. Go talk to your parents.
How about I beat the fucking dogshit out of you, faggot?
Considering that this post was published three days after Mothers’ Day, it will be a little hard to read it BEFORE mother’s day.
Mike, observe David King’s comments on Avoiceformen carefully. He is a white knight. He seeks to legitimize feminism. He is in MHRA who is pro-feminism.
Read between the lines his comments and you’ll notice he insidiously defends the feminists. He is into men’s issues yes, but he is also pro-feminism.
I tend to agree, and question Paul Elam’s choice to put him in the position he’s in. But that’s his call, not mine.
That makes 5 of AVFM regulars that I know of who are aware of it now. I have been trying for 2 months to make Paul realize it but to little avail. The only positive change I have seen is that Paul and Dean used to thumb up his comments frequently earlier, but now they seldom do. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best. More of us realizing it is in itself a benefit.
Paul Elam is a fucking government agent. Haven’t you guys figured this out by now? The Antifeminism movement is just the second part of the feminist movement. The Illuminati is now using antifeminism to even further divide men and women. Of course women are not innocent but even still, Paul Elam reeks of being a disinfo agent for the Illuminati.
Paul Elam is a Jew. They like to run both sides of the debate to keep it under control.
Surprise surprise.
What are you talking about, mother’s day isn’t for another couple of days, at least a week away (Sweden).
Well Return of Kings primary readership isn’t Sweden, it’s North America. And in North America Mothers’ Day was last Sunday.
Nah. I was adopted by a liberal white family, and I don’t appreciate it at all.
Dad is cool. Mom tried to fuck me up with some left-wing feminist horseshit when I was a kid. Luckily I grew up, went back to China for a year, and Chinese nationalism cleansed me of her influence.
She’ll be eating dog food in some shitty nursing home soon. Feels good man.
Happy Mother’s Day.
Most of us were probably raised by the typical bitch American woman, and so we’ve all experience misandry, man hatred, from the day we were born. And yet these retarded bitches are so goddamn stupid, they will never take responsibility for their past actions. Oh well. Let’s see how funny they think it is when they are unable to marry off their daughters because no younger man wants to get married anymore because of the abuse they suffered from their mothers and other female authority figures as a child.
Let these evil bitches rot in hell. The sooner we replace women with robots and virtual reality porn, the better off the planet will be.
Excellent article Runson, just fix the 3 spelling mistakes.
I always gotta throw a few in the positive posts to the haters have something to comment on.
Grammar/speeling naziing on the internet is a force of nature.
But seriously, very very good article.
Very good article.
You probably can forgive your family but you know what they say. “You are who you hang with”. That and we are all products of our environment. Sometimes bad habits with parents just rub off on you. You realize you can be better and part of taking those steps is cutting your parents and other family members out. I did this and things have worked out marvelously.
Still not close to my parents and not sure if I ever will be. But then again, I’ve always been a lone wolf. Rather continue to build myself and solve problems then to be held back by others
I have female siblings who are typical feminists and I do not hold a grudge but I cannot be around them due to difference of opinions i.e. they are if pro feminist ideologies and I’m a man who has dignity and self respect.
Well my sister and mother aren’t outright feminists, just the typical arrogant misandric bitch American women. I don’t really talk to either one of them, except perhaps twice a year. As for my father, I’ve recently begun talking to him a little bit but I can see that he is still a completely braindead mangina and will never learn the error of what he has done. So fuck him. Once I am financially independent, I think I will cut them off completely and not talk to them anymore. Death to the baby boomers!
I have a special fucking hate for Baby Boomers – a Eddie Bernay’s wet dream. Listening to my parents grumble their mealy CNN/FOX-based talking points over and over the last 30 years has reached it’s end in my book. It’s nothing but a Hallmark Holiday trainwreck every three fucking weeks, crying and moaning about the days gone by. I can’t stand around for this shit. Cheers.
this resonates very strongly with me. They controlled me out of fear of what I would become and destroyed so god damn much in the process. They belittled me, I’ve set boundaries, they didn’t comply, I cut them out. Now I’m sad because I still love them but at the same time I feel and have felt for many years a furious anger against them, especially my mother. Whenever I see them today there is no way of talking normally to them. Too much has been said and done. This is a pattern that surely won’t heal any more.
I know EXACTLY HOW YOU FEEL. I’m sure many of us here grew up with man-hating bitches of a mother who treated us like shit. Even worse if you have an older sister too, who also treated you like shit. I also feel a rage towards my mother, sister, and father (who was such a pathetic weak beta mangina that he supported them in their abuse of me) that will never, ever go away.
But in the end? I’m happy and married to a nice Asian woman. My sister hit the wall at age 30 and became very fat and ugly and now no man wants anything to do with her. So it’s satisfying to see such smug bitches get what they deserve in the end.
As for my mother and father? Fuck them both to hell. I hope these baby boomer scum die a very slow and painful death.
“Living Well”, while not popular as an opera plot, really is the best revenge….
À bientôt,
Mistral
Don’t forget the CIA, NSA, and other alphabet agencies that have been asscocking America since the sixties were largely started by or run by boomers. Boomers voted all this Orwellian shit in. The Non Profit scam is a good one too. Appoint yourself director of some pie in the sky charity and pull down $300k plus bennies to ride around in a benz giving speeches and attending luncheons.. Or how about the bloat of government jobs so that the lazy fucks and their bovine wives can have cushy jobs with lifetime benefits, at all of our expense. Then the craven fuckers pull up the drawbridge behind themselves, with affirmative action multicult horseshit, ensuring that their white sons will never get a decent public job in their lives. They invented no-fault divorce, and spawned “latchkey kids” while they boozed and cavorted. A sorry lot indeed.
Boomers are scum.
You are not alone, brother. Hang in there. You seem like a compassionate person who’s virtues will end up taking flight somewhere, somehow when you least expect it. I am struggling in the same ways you are. Cheers.
I have lot of due animosity towards my parents and in general fucked me in head in my younger years. Up until I was 16 my dad had no problem hitting me and my siblings. He also liked to incorporate objects such as steel toe boots, wooden rods and switches. My mother thought it was a great idea and decided to use a switch on my sister, who wasn’t even 2 years old, when she would cry excessively. My father smashed a wooden cabinet into my brother’s face causing him to get stitches. I lived in fear most of my young life in school I wouldn’t say much, during recess I would walk around by myself hating that I would have to go home soon and deal with my parents. I became quite the loner and vag. I didn’t defend myself when being picked on, once a classmate wouldn’t stop bothering me after I asked him not to (like the teachers tell you to do). He didn’t, so I punched him in the face giving him a bloody nose. The school and the kid’s parents got involved and that had me end up with several bruises (none easily seen though) and a sprained finger given to me by my dad.
My mom was a self hating cunt in all ways possible. She refused to talk any of her family. She forbid my grandfather from talking to me in Spanish, “This is America, he doesn’t need to speak Spanish.” She cried and pouted when my siblings and I were not dressed properly or rocked the boat, “what are the other people going to think seeing my children act like this, they’ll think I’m a bad mother”
In addition my parents tore us down at any chance they had. Making fun of acne as a teen, calling one of my sisters fat, calling one of my brothers stupid. They were happy to take shots at our self-esteem and continuously criticize us for wanting pursue interests outside of school.
READ THIS IF ABOVE IS TOO LONG.
MY PARENTS WERE MANIPULATIVE, PHYSICALLY & EMOTIONALLY ABUSIVE ASSHOLES THAT RUINED MY LIFE WHEN I WAS YOUNGER. THEY INITIALLY TURNED ME INTO A BETA: AFRAID OF LIVING, LACKING ALL SORTS OF CONFIDENCE AND SELF-ESTEEM. THEY WERE HAPPY WHEN I WAS UNHAPPY AND GLAD TO SEE ME GIVE UP THINGS I WANTED TO PURSUE BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T APPROVE.
I gave them a chance, I really did. On my 21st birthday I decided if they called to wish me a happy birthday (they never remembered my birthday) I would let things go and start from a clean slate. They didn’t, they decided to go to Italy instead during that week. I never received an e-mail either. From there it was clear that I was never important to them. Nor did they give a fuck about me.
MOM, DAD fuck you. Thanks for never letting me meet my cousins or aunts or uncles. I realized I don’t need you or anyone else to get by and do my own thing. GO FUCK YOURSELVES.
Well said. The horrifying thing is how common your story is but humans exist in a permanent state of denial in recursion.
Refusing to identify with the truth is how cycles are perpetuated.
Jonny, thank you for the acknowledgment. I would be lying if I said it doesn’t affect me to this day. I know there are people/kids that definitely had it worse than me. This is usually how I quash most of my negative memories.
One big problem of mine is when I witness a kid being smacked around or abused by their parent, I literally go crazy and start losing it. A while ago, at a walmart, I witnessed some fat, stereotypical, ghetto black woman punch her little daughter in the face. Literally, the cunt wound up and punched her daughter in the face because the little girl was “annoying” her. As the little girl began crying she wound up again telling her she “was gonna get it” if she didn’t stop. Well I freaked out slapping the fat ass cunt in her face and shoving her to the ground, I also took the child to front desk and told them what happened requesting them to call the police. Ironically, I was hand cuffed first, the fat ass cunt tried to claim I abducted her kid. After the police viewed the security footage they eventually let me go. It was quite the fucking mess afterwards: going to court, giving statements, getting a lawyer and other bullshit. But no charges were ever pressed against me.
A great source of private shame I carry is that, when I’ve witnessed kids being smacked around, I’ve failed – without exception – to assist them. There is something so infuriating about bullies that beat up on the defenceless and mothers are just allowed to bully their children mercilessly. It’s one of the few things that I get really emotional about, as I was one of the surely billions of children lucky enough to have a Christian mother who knew best how to put the foot down to persuade. She didn’t know best how to answer questions like “Why?”, so when I asked, I had to expect an answer in the form of backhands across my face – turning my other cheek, literally back and forth. It wasn’t the answer I was looking for but it certainly clarified her position.
I believe the entire species has been enslaved by infantilised, objectified, slut-shamed and abused / abusive emotional Toddler women who use violence, lies and shame to crush the independent streaks in toddlers, taming us and saddling us in their clothes. I understand their need to undress to impress but I don’t think they should be imposing their need to turn tricks with clothes onto innocent children. Toddlers aren’t perverted, their Toddler mothers are the perverts.
I get furious, depressed, indignant….but I do nothing. My never-ending source of shame. I fucking hate bullies but only my mother has ever really bullied me.
I imagine most children would be in the same position but they’re good BOYS and good girls. They were born wearing clothes. They’ve won victory over themselves. They love Big Mother.
tl &dr version? Baby boomers were shitty parents that basically fucked up our world and destroyed our planet and their own children’s futures due to their short sighted choices. The sooner the baby boomer generation is dead and gone, the better off this world will be.
I have always said it… Boomers were given the best economy in the history of modern humanity and they devoured it and gave into immorality and starting destroying what took so long to build. But our generation will make it through. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
We have to make it through.
Yup… they had the greatest nation handed to them on a silver platter. They never needed to suffer the depression.
I am a baby boomer, born in the last term of the Truman administration. An undersized male, from a broken home, raised on the streets of two large northern cities. I barely made it out of high school and knocked around before masculine maturity set in. I got married, started a family, picked a career that while not particularly financially rewarding was one I loved and did well. Then came the Volcker/Reagan recession and I went from compiling reports for major clients to bagging groceries for minimum wage. For 15 years after that I worked, went to school, worked two jobs, worked two jobs and went to school. Got two undergraduate and one graduate degrees. Worked myself right into an ICU barely alive. Not once, but twice in a little over 3 year period. I haven’t worked for anyone but myself since. My generation started coming into the workforce just when the Golden Age of the American Economy was ending. We faced stagflation, a declining pool of living wage jobs, a deteriorating workplace environment and all the left wing goodies like radical feminism and affirmative action that stifled the careers of many white males. Having one wage earner and one stay at home parent was impossible for most of us. A lot of my generation were wiped out in the recent Bush/Obama/Goldman Sachs massacre. So BBH you can go fuck yourself. We came on board when all the rules suddenly changed. I did my best to raise my kids in the stable environment I never had. Most of my kids generation and those even younger are far to the left of me.
You want a cookie?
You moron, he was responding to an attack against Baby Boomers (which is a pathetic excuse for people today). All that BS about Baby Boomers undoing some utopia is ridiculous. Why is it that ROK authors and posters think that by asserting themselves on a thread they’re being alpha (a flawed oversimplification itself). Get a life people! You really don’t need this highly entropic crap (not to mention wishy-washy and assumptive in the wrong places) to live well and according to your values.
Why did you have kids? It sounds like you were in no position to be taking care of life.
Nearly always (extreme cases excluded), the best thing to do is to simply decide that your parents did the best they could with what they knew (even if they didn’t) and leave it at that. You don’t forgive your family because they deserve it, you forgive your family for your own mental health. Rage, unless properly channeled and dealt with, can be a hugely damaging emotion–whoever said that resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die was dead-on.
Once one is independent of one’s family, one can then dictate the terms on which one interacts with them. Cultivate friendships so that one has a strong social network, and then explain to your family (or at least those persons who insist on being troublesome) what is and is not acceptable behavior towards you–Law Down the Law, and then stick to it. If they don’t get it, or think that somehow civilized norms don’t apply to them, then take your balls and walk the fuck out the door. Sometimes the cancer can be cured, but sometimes, you have to cut the cancer out.
Once you have created the new paradigm, don’t let anyone backslide into old habits. The more poisonous among them will always be looking for an angle to exploit. There are two steps to handling this:
1. Always Say What You Mean…
Be firm and be clear that you will not tolerate any disrespect of yourself and any other persons who are under your jurisdiction (wife/girlfriend/kids/etc.) Give fair warning, then enforce your will.
2. …and Always Mean What You Say.
When any of my relatives hears me say to them, pointedly, “Hey, why don’t you start a fight?” they know that (a) I am not asking a question, and (b) the next thing coming their way will be Massive Retaliation. Because I have been so consistent with doling out punishment, when deserved, with the Mistral Shithammer, I haven’t had to use it in years, and my life has been more happy and tranquil as a result.
Rule Your Own Kingdom. Once you Establish Yourself, the cool members of your family are going to defect to the New Administration, b/c the old administration sucks. Continue onward with them to the happy, sunlit uplands and leave any dead-enders to choke on their own poison.
À bientôt,
Mistral
Well said, mate. I was taught this formula for success and put my own spin on it for my situation, and it works just as you mention. This is really the best possible advice for those facing resentment toward family after having opened.
“Nearly always (extreme cases excluded), the best thing to do is to simply decide that your parents did the best they could with what they knew (even if they didn’t) and leave it at that.”
That’s what I did. Having kids of my own also made me more sympathetic to their struggles and fuck ups.
Heartfelt and honest, a great article.
Thank God I was raised by my Irish Catholic parents. I’m the youngest of 9, and we’re still all tight knit and close to my parents, who did a pretty fine job. All this angst and broken-home-related misery repeated here is pretty eye opening. I don’t always count my blessings, I guess.
What is family? Family is not the people you are born with, family is in fact the people whom you choose to relate with. family is the people who love you UNCONDITIONALLY. Don’t think that your parents or your siblings would love unconditionally, the current state of the world is changing towards the worse. Conditionality exists in every relationship, that is why attachments are useless. That’s exactly what Buddha meant when he said ‘let go of attachments”. Because he understood the conditional nature of attachments – even if they might be parental or fraternal. The only family you have are the unconditional loving relationships in your life. They can be your friends, your own ‘family’, your girl or anyone else. The thing is: forgiving them is not necessary, because they’d understand how not to hurt you in the first place.
All attachments are evil. The Buddha’s light is natural, pure attachment to Self. Only with Self will you be safe to be around. If you need, you become a very – very – dangerous person to those you need.
Need blinds the mind to reality. All attachments are malicious evil leaching.
I’m fairly new to the manosphere; had my heaviest doses of red pill truths handed to me beginning about two years ago. The deprogramming of worthless instruction from decades past has been both an empowering and emotional experience, as the suppressed anger towards the many manipulators (manginas and lost women) became unbridled rage and resentment. Finally getting the guidance I needed as a man, from men, I realized I bore a lot of a that resentment for my family: single mom, typical western sister-harpies, and without the obligatory alpha patriarch.
However I knew that I only resented them because I had finally been unplugged and wanted desperately to take back time lost being a beta simp. Another red pill truth was learning that such a thing was impossible, and that only women and manginas hold on to poisonous self destructive emotions. I immediately sought guidance from my alpha mentor on how to move past it and learn from the experience, and his advice was fairly similar to the idea expressed in the article, but without the esoteric Buddhist philosophy. I’m proud to say that coming into my alpha self saved my relationship with my mother and all but one of sisters. Her mastery of feminist gobbledygook and law manipulation (read false accusations and playing the victim) nearly landed me in the slammer when I began calling her out on her BS. Consequently, as the article suggests, she was promptly cut out of my life. I do feel sorry for my niece and her chump of a fiancé; their lives are destined to be ruined and I can’t protect them.
This is a very thoughtful article which I think is also deeply true. Personally, I can relate to a lot of the things in this article in relation to re-working boundaries with my family, including in relation to some very current issues which still really rankle.
Runsonmagic seems to be suggesting that working out constructive relationships with our families (or cutting them off if absolutely necessary) should be the basis of all of our relationships. Child psychologists vary these days in the importance they attach to the family, or particular care-giving relationships (not least because they’re mostly scratch-the-surface-marxists) but it seems like a truism to say how you relate to your family, the type of attachments you develop (i.e. secure, insecure etc i.e. Bowlby) is going to be the model for relationships outside the home, and in your future, so if you get this right at ‘home’ then hopefully that’s a good basis for getting things right with everyone else.
The Buddhist aspect isn’t going to be for everyone, but I found it insightful. There is a strange blending of past and present here as in “I hate my parents, but they’re different people now”. There is a lot to unpack here, which isn’t really possible here, but I will return to this article again because there is a lot packed into this
The Buddha was the most anti-family truth-speaker in history. He knew. The family is the plantation.
But then it always has been, even on the plantation. Massa can only work with what you give him.
good quote. Dependency and whatever creates it should be resisted. I am still a bit patchy on eastern philosophy so don’t want to say too much
My parents screwed me up from the get go.
A mixed race, depressed antisocial bunch that got together for all of the wrong reasons. It was a disaster in the making. What’s worse is my father is deeply religious and believes deep down that I should wallow in the same misery that he created for himself instead of venturing out and striking it in my own. He married an asian woman for the sake of his own ego and shortcomings and he still can’t get over the fact that the world is beyond his control. He wants me to suffer like he does and pray that jeebis will make the world more of a better place and that jeebis sent him his wife when in fact it was nothing short of mega hypergamy.
That was a great post.
Closely approaching my thirties, I am starting to develop a new kind of relationship with my parents.
As you mentioned, I as well noticed these negative feedback loops generated by anger and resentment towards them.
But these days I am starting to see my parents for who they are to everyone else. Just like they were my friends. Not just ‘mom’ and ‘dad’.
I realized I put a lot of pressure on them to do a good job (although I didn’t know what that was myself). And they did as well towards me.
Letting go of that negativity was a great thing for me to do.
We have a better relationship because of it.
Posts like this are what the manosphere is all about.
Anyways, thanks for sharing this. -dcl
I am a baby boomer, born 1951, enjoyed growing up in the ’50’s and early ’60’s. I had good and responsible parent born ca. 1920, with most of their generation’s virtues and few of its vices. I had some health problems that have troubled me throughout life, but I saw my cup as half full. Life was reasonably good and I was committed to making it better.
I was in college in 1969 – 1973, when things in the USA were really starting to fall apart in the wake of the leftist racial and social legislation of the mid-’60”s and the social upheavals centering on 1968. Even the “prestigious” campuses were dominated by leftists, feminists, “diversity” racketeers, you name it. The stupid liberals and “moderates” running the colleges should have expelled the leftist troublemakers like Eric Holder, but didn’t. They awarded them degrees and thus conferred the prestige of the universities on seditious fanatics. Leftists on the faculties were granted tenure. When I objected to all of this my classmates lectured me – I needed to be Tolerant, hear Opposing Viewpoints, avoid Racism, and on and on.
What I want all of you to know is that some of us baby boomers opposed the new (un)holy pseudo-religion of the Left and did what we could to undermine it. And Leftism amounts to a religion that seeks to beatify the whole world through political means – just like communism. It will fail, of course, but at the cost of how much suffering. I barely recognize the country I grew up in.
Just make me one of the judges when the trials start.
Tolerance is so illogical, it makes my head hurt like recursion.
What is tolerable doesn’t need to be tolerated.
Why would one want to tolerate what is intolerable?
Whenever I hear some religious creep call for tolerance, it reminds me of those girls who are all like, “Don’t try to change me. I am who I am.”
Stupid whores. No one is demanding favours from them. They’re merely demanding cessation of malice. To women, that’s an intolerable demand.
I could not trust them. It felt like they were scheming to manipulate me into something. Some fucking honesty would have been helpful and effective.