The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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This will be a very verbose, haphazard missive that I am composing at 3 AM in my timezone. Proceed if you wish.
I only very recently grasped the full gravity of just how dysfunctional and manipulative my household was. I like to think I'm not a provincial fool and that I'm more cognizant of inadequacies whenever they are present, but I truly believed my family dynamics were the norm. My father is a narcissist, my mother is emotionally unstable and volatile, though I'm unsure if it's faulted by PTSD, BPD, both, or neither. For the longest time, I attributed everything to a cultural/generational disconnect, that my parents were just hard-working Soviet immigrants who were a bit difficult yet ultimately well-meaning. My father studied hard and escaped his desolate Siberian hamlet, learned the English language, found employment at a Global Fortune 500 company, and moved to the US, where I was raised in a financially stable household. Nobody ever had reservations about buying the newest trendy brands of clothing for me, taking me on vacation to Ticino or Waikiki, driving me into town to meet with my pals, etc. Any time I expressed grievances over a comment or behavior I perceived to be denigrating, my parents shielded themselves behind this and would swiftly resort to a black-and-white reasoning and insinuate that I'm saying they're terrible parents. I was ignorant to the dissonance that was being created in my head; my parents weren't consistent douchebags, but they also weren't consistently warm. I had access to plenty of opportunities my peers didn't, so surely I ought to look past whatever trivial shortcomings existed.
Growing up, my father would often use teambuilding activities at work and workout sessions at the gym as a means to abscond from his parental duties. When I was 12 months old, he would tell me I was already a big kid who had nothing to cry about. I was never a picky eater, but there was food that physically made me gag and wasn't merely something I mildly disliked, yet he'd shove it in my mouth. He would comb my hair in an overly aggressive manner, and accuse me of not knowing how to comb properly if what he did hurt. From a very young age, any missteps I made could result in insults and curses. If I ever wanted to understand his line of reasoning behind a certain instruction, he would default to "because I said so", or "find another home if you don't like it here". A few years ago, following COVID, we were forced to relocate to an industrial, blue-collar dump (albeit a particularly prestigious pocket of it) from a densely populated, affluent suburban area where I thrived by being encircled by a milieu of ambitious, curious, and sharp peers. Due to the taciturn and curt nature of my peers here, I was devoid of a social life for two years before things mitigated to a slight degree. I had to carry a knife to school for my safety and I witnessed my classmates nodding out in the middle of class, but in my father's warped mind, all of my frustration was just a secret plot to manipulate him and distract him from his work. He would minimize my deficits by reminding me of how much worse his childhood was and how he simply cannot afford to entertain that my first-world upbringing could be as dismal as I purport it to be. If I said I didn't have any peers at school I could hang out with, he'd tell me he had no colleagues to hang out with either. When I finally joined some uninteresting extracurriculars out of desperation and was assigned at the start of the school year to a new class where students were less actively hostile, I at last found people I could make plans with. In this region, it often meant drinking in the woods or by the beach, summer and winter. My father would act in disbelief that I could show up at home drunk after he refused to give me counsel. Not once have I ever walked out of a conversation with him feeling assuaged and uplifted about any obstacles, but again, I thought that was some cultural disconnect that's not intractable. I was always inculcated not to divulge family matters externally, but when it has affected my quality of life so acutely that I needed to get it off my chest, people frequently tipped that my father may be a narcissist. Having done a deep dive of the various symptoms in the past month, I see a plethora of bullseyes being hit. My father's a brilliant, educated man, who whenever in a good mood, would answer questions to any metaphysical ruminations I had growing up as a child. I thought that I was an exceptionally difficult kid who was exacerbating his burnout and that if I learned to do better, he could always stay warm and loving. Only now did I shake myself out of that delusion and realize that this potential version of my father will never come to be, and I can't look at him with the same reverence. Seven months ago, I found my way to my current faith as a lifelong agnostic, and it has been an immensely effective lifeline, knowing that as a human being I am born with inherent dignity, that there is a long-term meaning to life, that my self-worth isn't contingent on a handful of people's perceptions of me. It is thanks to my faith that I haven't put a halt to my 7-month sobriety journey, despite the temptation.
My mother, due to some experiences in her childhood, grew up with an abject fear of abandonment, only amplified by my father's antics. "Splitting" is one of the scariest things I've had the horror to witness throughout the duration of my life. She can initiate a normal conversation, ask me how my day has been, we get a conversation going, then I accidentally spill something in the kitchen or fold something incorrectly and she lets out a curse word or raises her voice, I ask her politely not to, and she tells me I'm trying to command her what to do, and the long train of gut-wrenching insults unfolds. Growing up, I've been unfortunate to have several not-so-compassionate pedagogues as my teachers, many of whom obtained their teaching licenses after a bachelor's from a 100% acceptance rate school, and tried to get me diagnosed for a certain neurodevelopmental condition my psychologist later informed me that I either do not have, or have it at such a high-functioning level that the opportunity cost of the tedious diagnostics process is not justified. My mother frequently vacillated between either the teachers being a bunch of unprofessional pricks who witch-hunted me with nothing to elicit it, or me being such a nightmare of a child. She weaponized terminology she could not define against me, even after I believed we agreed to close the case. She told me she was skeptical to my psychologist's conclusion, and I told her that either she could go the route of soliciting a second opinion, or close the case, but that the degrading way she threw the term around as an insult was unacceptable. She would often treat 16/17 year old me as a marriage counselor after her argument du jour with my father, go on hour-long tirades only wanting to be heard, with no desire for proactive input. I've invited her to come to my church since she complains about lacking a social life in her new area and being stuck in the toxic environment at home, but she musters any possible excuse when I throw that out there. She's had 20 years to step away from this nonsense, but she tells me that she always wrongly thinks that this time things can improve if she does something differently. They never do, and I'm faced with the fallout of it all. One time recently, when she sat me down to talk she asked for examples of what she’s done in my childhood that I found hurtful, when I began providing examples she dithered between “that’s not what I actually meant” and “when you’re throwing it all in my face at once you make it seem more severe than it actually was”. She told me that nobody outside of my immediate family will ever show me unconditional love, that all other relationships are transactional, and that as I get older I will come back running to my parents with a greater understanding for why everything turned out the way it did. I gave her examples of philanthropists, humanitarian workers, international legionaries in Ukraine jeopardizing their health and career prospects, adoptive parents, etc. She began pointing to some isolated incidents of adoptive parents abusing their children to try to rescue the merit of her argument.
I'm just exasperated from it all. God knows how I managed to pull through to this day. I have two months left until I move out for college. What keeps me going is knowing that this is the very last stretch, and that I'll be a much better father. I hope this post wasn't written in vain. If anybody wants to share any advice or their experiences with me and how they've dealt with it, please do. Right now, I feel as if a breakdown is impending.
Your dad reminds me of myself. That's about all I can say.
If you could retroactively tell him to modify his behavior in a specific way, what would it have been?
Apologies for the late response, I was away on a camping trip.
Articulating it in one sentence would be challenging, it's the culmination of the small unpleasantries that really took their toll on me. Truth be told, I believe he had no business being a father. He lacked the baseline temperament and compassion necessary to care for somebody, and to be a teacher as well as a reliable shoulder to lean on through the vicissitudes of life. He grew up in a wooden two-story apartment building in a remote Siberian hamlet, which was hardly even outright poverty by the Soviet Union's standards. Nevertheless, he was raised by an alcoholic father who drove his first wife insane which led her to escape the family she started with him, and not the slightest effort was made to resuscitate that relationship. He was the scapegoat child who was neglected and humiliated. He tells me I never hear him bitching about his upbringing, what he does instead is he takes his anger out on people through his actions. Clinical narcissists feel an immense sense of shame where they can't decouple a wrongdoing from their identity, so to compensate for that and feel better about themselves, they have to retroactively justify their wrongdoings by shifting the blame on others, and seek to influence and dominate other people's actions. Seeking professional help requires an admission of fault, which is a major hindrance for him. Oftentimes, it requires hitting rock bottom and feeling tangible consequences of their antics, or mellowing out over the decades as they get older and lose the energy required to sustain the powertrips.
Like I said earlier, I do not believe he is a rational actor. If it was as easy as giving him feedback, I'd tell him to quit viewing all relationships as transactional and expect constant genuflection, I'd tell him to quit letting his desire to influence other people take precedence over their needs, I'd tell him that the most brilliant thinkers and innovators are receptive to correction and a change of calculus and that there's no reason why he should be above that, I'd tell him to use the spoken language he was given rather than expect people to mind-read, I'd ask him why he can't always pretend to care about people the way he does when it's obviously expedient for him, etc.
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