Leaderboard

I have a lower IQ than you and your girlfriend, so statistically speaking it would probably make sense to let me impregnate her.

Hi all, this is first post here - I am looking for advise from like - minded peope who have been in similar situation. Any tips are greatly appreciated. Thank you. It's been a year since I have been in thereapy and discovered FreedomainRadio - it's been the best year of my life and I never felt more alive. However, with self knowledge come dealing with toxic people in my life (including my family). Especially dealing with my parents is tough and I woudl be greatful for your support and insight. Here is some background that I think is important: My father: he was brought up in communist era, his mother was working since he was 3 months-old and he was put into a daycare ever since. His parents cared about him, but didnt really know him. They preised him for his academic and sport achievements. He always had to be him + some sort of success. There was verbal abuse in the family. Financially, they were doing really well and had a good socio-ekonomic status in their society. My father is very inteligent and succesfull man, however he struggles with proximity. If there is important topic to discuss, he often gets annoyed and agressive - he must win the discussion. He is not used to negotiate in peaceful way. Lately he tries, but the topic / issue is not opened unless someone else brings it up. My mother: was born into family with 8 other children (she was the youngest). Her family was very poor and abusive to the point that my mother was taken away from them (not sure at what age exactly but I think she was about 4-7). Since then she grew up in a childcare facilities. Until this day I am not sure how bad her abuse was (I am aware that she had been beaten / had had cigarete burns and I am not sure if the abuse was of sexuall nature as well, but its possible). She doesnt like to talk about anything realted to her early childhood before she was taken away from her family. She also claims that her past is not important because she is not in touch with her parents or siblings (note, that we have never met or seen any of them and I think she hasnt seen them since she was a teenager). She says that she had a great time in those childcare facilities! and that it has not affected her at all! Its hard to get any sort of inforamtion from her about her past. She can not admit she is/was wrong in anything- ever. Its very difficult for her to apologize. My mother always cared about me and my siblings in terms of having enought food, clean clothes, playing with us and preparing us for school, however, this lasted only until we became teenagers and had our own opinions and created our own personality. She had no idea how to deal with us once we were not dependent infants. She cant deal with anoyone disagreeing with her. The relationship of my parents wasn't good. Their argues got rather agressive, they were not able to communicate and solve issues and in addition, they were cheating on each other. They got divorced eventually (I was 13 at that time). The divorce was not discussed very much and we simply moved out with our mother. My father paid child support and we saw him every other weekend (or more) - he was happy in his new relationship (woman he later married and are still together). In the meantime, the situation home with my mother escalated. Our mother was very nervous and constantly complaining about not having enough money. We started to argue a lot - at one point she told me she hated me and that I was the same as my father (mind: the man she married and had 3 children with)! She started to physically attack me - this confuse me a lot, it seems the parents stop hitting their children when they grow up, but she started to beat me when I was 13 - 15. At that time I knew I could attahk her back but I was afraid that I woudl hurt her! Obviously, she didnt have the same concern about hurting me. Seeing how little empathy she had towards me really hurts my feelings. I havent had much contact with my mother since I was 19 (its about 10 years of very little contact / close to none). Last time I talked to her was about 5 months ago and I tried to discuss what I learned in therapy. She eventually apologized, but it wasnt genuine and she keeps saying I just need to move forward and dont bring the past up. She is quite a bully and doesnt want to work on herself. In her mind, something is wrong with me to bring issues from the past up. I never said anything to my father about the beating and argues with my mother. I think deep down I knew he wouldnt get involved to fix it. Recently I told him and his answer was quite shocking - he said: "I thought something was going on between you and your mother"! He didnt know how bad it was, but he didnt even ask! This makes me angry. On one hand, i woudl like to have relationship with at least one parent but on the other, how can you not care about your children when they are being hurt? My father has done some work on himself and he is able and willing to discuss things. He will be comming over soon. I woudl like discuss it with him. Do you think I am hypocrat for talking to my father but not my mother? Does any of you have similar issue and how you approached it? Did this sort of discussion helped you? Thank you so much - any feedback welcomed.

Hello all. My first post here, but I can't think of another community on or offline that hasn't drunk the 'family koolaid'. TL;DR: The issue at hand, and I think many of us might have a similar situation, is that my fiancée has an expectation/ desire that my family of origin has a place in our lives together. I think they are really bad people, so damaged that they have no clue how toxic they are. Ironically she wants nothing to do with her abusive mother. I occasionally try to connect with them mostly out of a sense of misplaced duty but I leave every visit angered and saddened. I think I have to explain my feelings towards them by giving some background. As a warning, some of the things I discuss here may provoke either rage, sickness or incredulity so again I warn you and also swear that this is the real truth of my life. My mother grew up as R-selected as you can get: zero male figures in her life, with angry, abusive and neglectful females as her 'caretakers'. This was post-war Germany where sadly stories like this are common. When my mother was 9 her mother died horribly. My mother grew up admiring the USSR and communist ideals, naturally, seeing them as the opposite of the much maligned NSDAP. My mother is extremely foolish as later as an adult some man asked her to have his child and she obliged him even though they weren't married, just assuming he would stay. Naturally he left her shortly after. He died not long after in what is likely a drunk driving accident, leaving my mother with my brother. Four years later she met my father, and older American army officer, himself from an extremely rough background involving whatever abuse and privation you can imagine including frequent familial sexual abuse. He himself I would say now had traits of both autism and sociopathy. I imagine my mother would naturally be attracted to her perfect R-selected match or perhaps to her limited judgement he represented an image of respectability, strength and charm. I don't want to be unfairly hard on them as they essentially experienced hellish lives, but all I mean by that is that I will not exaggerate. I believe cross-cultural matches are dangerous because the language barrier/ culture barrier sort of fogs peoples evaluations of one another relative to their native social context. During my childhood my mother, inspired by feminists in her liberal arts program, decided to divorce my father and excise him from my life. Perhaps it was the propaganda, perhaps it was my father's constant philandering. Regardless of the details, which to this day I can not fully know, I received the wrath of my mother for years as she attempted to indoctrinate me and my brother to believe that everything male was evil, females are 100% good, communism is the ideal society, the sexes are not only psychologically identical but somehow even physically identical (???) as were the races. I was praised as being 'so smart' when I would parrot all this nonsense back to her. The most terrible thing she tried to teach me was that sexual promiscuity was a good thing and a man had no right to expect fidelity from his female partner. Or actually many the most terrible thing was that modern art was supposedly better than classical art -- she literally yelled at me every time I tried to draw a doodle that was remotely identifiable as a real-world object. For fun she liked to invite a series of men of the years to share her bed at the house my father bought for her. She also had zero physical boundaries, often going nude in passing or just barging in when I was using the restroom or shower. I remember just shivering with a feeling of violation as she would demand to inspect my penis' foreskin for phimosis which I know now is a nonsense condition that either resolves itself naturally or may be overcome with simple stretching. No need to slice of 1/3 of my penis which thankfully didn't happen. I had zero trust in her. Compounding this were my own psychological and developmental problems. I couldn't tie my shoes until I was 9, I couldn't really read until I began puberty. I had a violent temper that I would unleash against my pears, hurling invective at them just like my mother would constantly lambast anything American or male related or even anything she imagined was somehow American rather than ubiquitous. I was a small boy for the longest time, skeletally thin or fat and pre-hypertensive due to having little to eat or only junk food to eat (for no good reason as my father dutifully paid child support which my mother used for her own purposes). My mother knew what she was doing and would lie to doctors about the health of my diet. I was always weak and cranky, often nearly passing out upon standing. Ironically my mother was always screaming about how fat Americans were and how fat and calories were so evil. My brother during this time would stuff his face to my mother's criticism while she alternately praised me for how little I took. As I entered puberty, I became aware of my situation. My mental and physical development exploded and I began to assert control over my own wellbeing. I fully recognized that I had grown up deprived of food, sleep, attention, healthy social interaction, community and male role models except for the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Segal, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme. In a very real and also very sad way, these movie men were my surrogate fathers, serving as my most powerful role models, if not perfect, of what a man can and should do in the world to my adolescent mind. I continued to starve until I was too big to be yelled at for fixing myself a sandwich by my apparently psychotic or extremely cheap mother. I became popular at school as I took the pose of both teacher's pet but also class-clown. During this time my mother acquired another husband, who actually lived with us and off my father's child support payments for a good number of years. This man was a broken shell, a product of a sadistic father and a psychopathic mother. Naturally he was a very malleable doormat for my mother. He was phlegmatic, to a point, but possessed an explosive temper when pushed to his limit, which these days is next to nothing to set him off. Everyone was always screaming: my brother was constantly angry and yelling and slamming doors, my mother with her blood-curdling scream, my step-father a porcupine and me trying my hardest to stay out of the way of these angry, illogical freaks. As bad as this was, this was the least miserable time during my childhood/ young adolescence. As a child otherwise unremarkable or below-average I had been able to speak with adult level sophistication since an unusually early age. Later it really became apparent that I was a 'late bloomer' and my scholastic achievements began to pile up, and naturally my brother, who was always terrible academically, began to hate me. My mother spoke about my achievements to all her friends like she had single damn thing to do with any of it. Seeing myself through my peer's eyes I began over the years to correct my own faults: temper, immaturity, rudeness, fear and to this day I struggle with these behaviors. Having my fiancée with me is a great help in this matter as she is very sensitive and loving -- being with her reminds me of how people are naturally quiet in a library, and our good communication allows me to know when I am unconsciously or even consciously less than fair. I love her so much it brings tears of joy to my eyes. Perhaps it is unhealthy because she is essentially the only psychologically healthy person I know better than an acquaintance, however she has always acted with love towards me and I to her. Besides just her feedback and my self-analysis I make sure to get the correct amount of sleep, avoid blood sugar fluctuations and get plenty of vitamin D and exercise. This continued through my young adulthood. I became extremely intelligent -- so intelligent I wish every day I were an idiot. Workplaces love me -- my peers view me as some kind of sage but I can't connect with them and form real friendships. I built up degrees and honors and pursued my career deliberately in anything as different from art or humanities as I could determine, not because I hate these things but because I hate the people who occupy these fields. My mother took credit and my brother hated me. My mother used my stepfather's eventual relative fortune to buy a series of dilapidated shacks. My brother instead circled the drain of life with expectations completely mismatched to the actions he took. Mostly he partied, drank, slept around and blamed everyone else under the sun why he almost failed out of high school and a third tier state college. He lives at home to this day with my mother's 10 cats, in a pose of codependence, after having lost he job he got through nepotism and that he failed out of through sheer incompetence. My brother especially makes visiting hell because he eagerly consumes pop culture. Every time I challenge him when he brings up a mainstream media anti-Trump or anti-Right smear with widely documented facts, facts my brother doesn't contest mind you, he becomes enraged almost to the point of striking me, accusing ME of starting an unwanted debate and trying make HIM a loser by merely challenging anything he says. His way of conciliation is to demand that I agree that everyone is an idiot, and that I shouldn't try to maintain any beliefs because nobody will ever accept them and that all world views are compatible despite the presence a little thing called state power. What he really means is that I shouldn't directly or indirectly reveal to him how little thought he puts behind things and he doesn't care about right, wrong or even basic societal order. He is also a true-blue leftist. He also criticized me for 'pulling away from the family' -- no shit. Why would I want to spend a second more with three broken gas-lighters so aggressively unintelligent, catastrophically dysfunctional and morally debased that they resist even things like the Non Aggression Principle or the idea that Straw Men are not arguments? I shouldn't be surprised they do given our history. After this rant, the issue is that my fiancée wants my 'family' to participate in our future children's lives. She doesn't blame people for their behavior no matter how long after the initial trauma they maintain the effects. This is probably why she tolerated me during our early days when I was still bad at expressing my feelings productively and took measures to further mature. So basically she is a poor judge of character, luckily and also unluckily for me. But in my family I can't think of people more diametrically opposed to my most cherished values than those people or more toxic to a child that wants to grow up with: objectivity, virtue, a pursuit of belief or non-belief in religion unassailed by ideologues, personal interests, health, safety, joy, comfort, secure love, protection, education and example. What can I do as neither of our families are sane? Can we be just an Island and still be healthy? Especially as a right-wing pro-religion yet paradoxically a classically atheist there are hardly any people like me in our very liberal city. Oddly my fiancée is a recovering leftist from a leftist family but she absolutely loves Ancap ideas when I support them with objective universal arguments and historic evidence that the opposite is demonstrably bad.

Now, I want to be very clear before I start this topic. I do not believe that most Muslims are radicals; however, there is a myth spreading that only 0.5-1% of Muslims are radicals. This is false. Perhaps only 0.5-1% have committed or helped others commit acts of terror. I don't really know where the number comes from. It's not really important. What is important is that the number is wrong. Why? First, I think we need to answer a couple of questions. Do we believe that neo-nazis who have committed acts of violence in the name of their ideology are radicals? And do we believe that neo-nazis who have NOT committed acts of violence in the name of their ideology are radicals? If you're one of the 99.99% of the population who believes, like me, that neo-nazis are radicals because their belief system is radical, then you have to ask the same questions regarding all radicals. I'm not going to compare Islam to neo-naziism. That's not fair because there are a majority of Muslims that do not condone the kind of violence that neo-naziism does. BUT, I will compare terrorism to neo-naziism as I think that is a more than fair comparison. For brevity, I'm going to define terrorism as anyone who commits an act of violence against an innocent person to achieve an ideological end. With that definition in mind, do we believe that terrorists are radicals? Do we believe that people that SUPPORT terrorists are radicals? Well, according to 2005 pew global polls (the numbers are probably slightly different for this year but these are the latest numbers I have), of 6 Muslim majority countries that are considered pretty moderate, between 18-88% of the population in those countries believe that violence against civilians is justified. This is the same as saying they support terrorism. I mashed the numbers together, so some support it "rarely". Quite frankly, if you support violence against civilians ever then you support it in my opinion. You can see the numbers by country here: http://www.pewglobal.org/2006/05/23/where-terrorism-finds-support-in-the-muslim-world/ Now, if you don't accept the fact that people who support terrorists are radicals you either have to say that neo-nazis who don't commit violence are not radicals, and have fun defending that point, or you have to question how much you are affected by cognitive dissonance. Thoughts? Are there flaws in my logic I am not seeing? I'd love to hear your thoughts as, even though it logically makes sense to me, it does go against what society has raised me to believe. Note: I think that Muslims that want to immigrate to a western country are less likely to support violence against civilians (though, I question whether refugees are less likely to support it as they are usually a better representation of a local population). I also think 2nd+ generation immigrants are even less likely to support violence in a western country but numbers are harder to find because western countries. Even further on that point, I think experiments like the Stanford Prison Experiment prove that if you put someone in a fascist situation they will probably become fascist. Some countries in the middle east are certainly fascist even though PC culture prevents most people from admitting it). I think with this in mind, the 1% figure quoted earlier may be closer to reality in places like Canada and the US, but this is certainly not the case in middle-eastern countries. Of course, that number being closer to true is just speculation without numbers and may be more or less.

Wow, what an incredible amount of trauma you experienced, I'm sorry. It's amazing that you survived and have grown as much as you have. One thing that stands out to me is that you described how your mother didn't have or allow any physical boundaries to the point of molestation (in my opinion). The reason is stands out is because I myself have been making progress in creating healthy boundaries in relationships. They've been more emotional and mental than physical, but nonetheless it's been on my mind and I've realized the importance of healthy separation from another person's life. I don't believe you are being supported in this and are actually being encouraged by your fiancee to establish or reinforce healthy boundaries with your abusive family. There are no lines being drawn and protected, instead you are being told that you should open yourself and your children up freely to people who have done you great harm and will do so again if given the chance. I know you said that your fiancee was sensitive, and perhaps she is in other areas but it is extremely insensitive for her to want you to bring your family into your life and the lives of your children, especially because she knows what they have done to you. This honestly makes me quite angry, not only because it's cruel to you but because innocent children will be knowingly offered up to evil. For what reason is child sacrifice on the table? What would be bought at the cost of your children? I would seriously dig into her motivation for this(she likely doesn't even know the deeper reason) and get to the root of it because if I were you I would be very concerned about the future safety of my children if she is not only okay with her children being around abusers but actually actively invites them in. You say she decided to invest in you when you say you weren't in a good place/had destructive patterns you wanted to change, that only affected her, that was her choice to make and risk to take, just because you've made choices to live a healthier life and break the cycle of abuse does not mean the same will happen with your other family members should she invest in them. If it was just her and you and it was something both of you wanted to take a risk on, then fine, I wouldn't advise it but it's your choice, but that's not the scenario being put forth here. You're talking about your children who will not get to choose whether or not to take the risk, you will choose for them and they will suffer any consequences. Perhaps you should ask your fiancee if she would like to experience everything that you went through at the hands of your family, and if her answer is no then ask her why she wants to her children to experience it. Do you have to be an island? I don't know, maybe you do right now but I doubt that would be the case forever, perhaps you can move to a place that has people who share more of your values? Look into different communities, sate your appetite by talking with people online until then. At the very least I'd suggest not investing in a dead end, which based on what I've read sounds like your family and try investing in other people who you at least don't know whether or not they're dead ends yet. Imagine how confusing it would be for your children when they're abused by your family and they know you're the one who took them there or that you invited these people to your home. You would be teaching them not to value themselves and that these abusers are their masters, the people with power. That was my experience anyway, when I was offered up to my grandparents in a misguided attempt for my mother to gain parental affection. I didn't appreciate being sold or abandoned for however many days, I doubt your kids would either. You listed many good values. If you truly do cherish them then protect them, yourself, and your real family (the one you choose/create). Please be safe, it would be extremely sad for you to go back to hell when you've fought so hard to get out

I also face the same things in conversation. I had worked with two male colleagues for years, and spent lots of time in the hills and high country with them working on weeds. We would talk about life, plans, our pasts and then one of them became engaged. We started to talk about parenting and they both joked about being spanked as children and the good it did them. I asked if they were planning to spank their future children and they both said 'of course'. I said that I would never hit a child because it damages their brains as reported by research. They both got angry and asked me if I thought they were brain damaged. I said that I thought they were both very bright, intelligent people but that it was possible they may be even smarter without the spanking in their pasts. They got more angry and told me that children who were not disciplined ran out of control. I was not able to get through to them the idea of discipline or coaching without hitting. I failed here too and the conversation was shut down. I think I could see little explosions happening in their brains that meant what I said was challenging their worldview, their view of their parents, their view of fathers. I agree with Holgerson that it is mentally fatiguing. I suppose in answer to the question - how to stay strong? Think of the world you want, the calm rational work without violence, with children who are safe and respected, and then act out of that conviction. Gain strength from the vision of the future. I know that's not completely helpful but it's what I'm trying to do.

Always felt this graph was was pretty telling to show a distinct trend. Moreover though, I remember seeing stats one time that showed based on polls a pretty large number of muslims supported radical action even if they did not take part in it themselves. Not all but much higher than 1%. I think the number was closer to 12 or 13% on average across all muslims (though much higher in certain places as the stats in your link show) said that radical action was sometimes justified and over 50% believe that Sharia law should be enforced in all countries.

No More Mr Nice Guy! by Dr. Robert A Glover - is a book that helped me recognize many of the dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors I learned about dating and relationships. Why You're Dumb, Sick and Broke... and How to get Smart, Healthy, and Rich by Randy Gage - wasn't so much a revelation as a confirmation of what I have learned over the years with respect to causes of dysfunctional behavior and what and how to change.