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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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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