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A new article, where I answer a very common question: should I talk to my parents about my painful childhood experiences? Link: http://blog.selfarcheology.com/2016/03/q-should-i-talk-to-my-parents-about-my.html

Part three in the series I'm doing on the fear of rejection: what you can do about it and what could be the result of that.

Part 2 on the struggles of setting personal boundaries, especially with toxic people. The main theme here is learned dependency. Setting Boundaries with Toxic People (Part 2): Learned Dependency

Hello everyone.I'm currently 22 years old and I've got problem. I'm not sure how to go about carrying on into the future of adult life. My parents are causing a great deal of frustration for me, but because of how I've learned to communicate with them, it's impossible for me to be verbally persuasive about my feelings and my needs. It's very important to me that I make the right decision so I'm going to detail this situation in the best way that I can. I've been unemployed for 3 years, and I've never had a non-temporary job. The process of applying for jobs inspires nothing but apathy in me, to the point where, even if I got an interview, I've already stopped caring. I want to chase my passions in life and try to earn money that way. I've chosen that I'd most love to become a blacksmith (more specifically an armor smith) and to sell my works. There is a market for these products so that's not even relevant to this topic. The perdicament I have right now is how I choose to go about reaching that point.Currently I have no formal education. I have a GED, and I'm not particularly good at anything in life aside from the ability to retain lots of knowledge. I have no professional skills yet. My family is supportive of my career choice and is willing to financially support me in acquiring the education and tools necessary to make a living that way on my own.However, my parents absolutely refuse to take responsibility for the way that they have raised me. They blame all of my problems, and all of their parenting mistakes, on the claim that I have aspergers syndrome (or some kind of mental disability), a notion which I strongly disagree with, and feel is a massive cop out. There are huge voids in my relationship with my parents. My father is abusive, and though my mother didn't let him physically and verbally abuse me very much as a child, she completely enables him to do so now, with the mentality that I have no right to have my feelings considered because i am a grown man who is still dependent on his parents. They never taught me how to be self-reliant. They never gave me the skills for that, as they argue that it's something I was supposed to just automatically know.My mother thinks that the reason why I don't have a job and stay at home all day is because she failed to "discipline" me, but she thinks that discipline is not compatible with peaceful parenting, which is what she claimed to have tried.My memory of my childhood is very limited, but I never had any friends, and I was extremely anti-social beginning from my 3rd year at least. I used to bite people constantly, especially other children. Not seemingly for any reason, it would just sorta happen, but it earned my family a bad reputation with other parents, and it earned me nobody to socialize with. My parents refuse to believe that they have anything to do with my nature as a child, or any of the ways in which I psychologically developed. So if I stay with my family for a couple more years, I will have the support i need to become a very capable blacksmith, but at the expense of living with people who make me feel extremely frustrated, and extremely angry.My father is going into counceling, and I'm thinking about giving counceling a chance because he wants to fix the relationship he has with me (because it really wasn't a relationship at all) but I am very doubtful that he will ever apologize for any evils that he made me suffer. If I confronted him about these things verbally right now, he would literally scream at me and threaten me with violence for disrespecting his authority as my caregiver. If I defend myself verbally or physically, he will think he is completely morally justified in battering and bruising me, and then literally throwing my limp body out of the house afterwards. He has done it before and he would do it again. He is basically a slave to his emotions, and would disown me as a member of his family if I didn't appeal to his preconceived notions of "respect" which he apparently deserves for providing for me. I have no money and no friends or relatives to fall back on, so my only other option besides living with my parents is becoming homeless and then trying to find a job in that state of living. Is there anything I'm missing here? I feel incredibly distressed.