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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.

Here is an article from the December 2014 issue of ELLE magazine on a 35-year old single mother needing food stamps with a master in avant-garde poetry. She barely makes enough to feed herself and her disabled son. The article is currently advertised as a "must read" #1 on the top of the Elle.com frontpage. She had some unfortunate, difficult events in her life: she was adopted, a former boyfriend got murdered and her son is disabled, but should not some responsibility be attributed to this woman for the life she is currently living? I did not find one sentence in the article that does attribute some responsibility to her. If you study only english literature and deliberately decide to be a single mother, should you not anticipate that you are having a lot of challenges ahead? HYPEREDUCATED AND ON WELFARE: http://www.elle.com/life-love/society-career/debt-and-hypereducated-poor Some excerpts from the article: "When I see couples who have jobs," she says, "couples who look perfect, I want to ask them: 'How did you do it?'" “Brianne Bolin thought her master's degree in English would guarantee her at least a steady income.” “She just learned that the woman and Finn's father, a blacksmith, are getting married in a few weeks, and they won't be able to take care of the boy during that time. It's all on her, again.” “At the moment, she has $55 in the bank and $3,000 in credit card debt. “ "My dreams did this to me." “I was living an extended youth." “Then, at 28, she got pregnant, the result of a random hookup with a 20-year-old in a band she liked. “ “She knew she'd be raising her child mostly on her own, but Bolin says she never considered not having the baby.” “She has thought about supplementing her income with some kind of retail job, but Finn's child-care costs would eat up her paycheck.” “Being poor takes a huge amount of mental work. There is a constant need to weigh the merits of spending even the smallest amounts of money. … The point of the social-psychology research is that when so much mental activity is devoted to basic survival, little is left to engage in long-term thinking or to muster willpower—which Bolin well knows.” “Lately she's been looking into work as a campus union organizer, to capitalize on her interest in improving adjuncts' lot” "I need to smoke to relieve the pressure," she tells me as she feverishly rolls her own cigarettes one evening when I take her out to a bar, where she also finds relief in the form of plentiful margaritas.” “She's self-medicating, she says; other times, she uses Xanax for anxiety. She also takes a daily antidepressant” “She stops in a feminist bookstore, wishing she could spring for a book on sex and feminism.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am not really surprised by the tone of the article, but I find this is a sad example of "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." This reminds me of the following video by Stefan hosting the Peter Schiff Radio Show where he talks about a similar situation, beginning at 14:22

Hi this may have triggers for certain people, it deals with sexual abuse and mental abuse and physical abuse. My name is Daniel I have an ACE score of 10. I am the only child of a black single mother. I have been to therapist after therapist and I have found them all to be quite destructive. I have seen many since I was very little, none of the child psychologist confronted my mother on anything but blamed me for my anger issues which was me just reacting to children in my class who were making fun of me for being overweight. I know I was medicated when I was very little but I don't know what drugs, my mother never gave them to me in pill form so I am guessing she crushed them up in my food. I found out about the drugs over hearings her talk about me throwing up all the time due to the side effects. My mother mollested me and made me take showers with her every morning until I was 11 or 12 until I refused to go into the shower with her. I was constantly bullied at school for my weight, no matter what the other kids did I was the one to get into trouble. I remember when I was in first grade defending this mentally handicapped boy in the school yard from about 5 other boys constantly fighting them and I was the one to get into trouble. Everyday when I came home I was beaten by my uncle , because the teachers complained about me, they knew he would do it and he joked openly with them about beating me and one time threatened to beat me in front of my class. I also had a cousin who is 5 years older and is very violent and hurt me a lot. My situation right now , as an adult I have been to 3 therapists and they have all been abusive in their own ways. My first one told me not to trust my feelings and to keep abusive and destructive relationships, he offered only crappy chit chat and was very manipulative to think at the end of each session I got something done. I ended things with him after he had my mother come and I confronted her just about my cousin who is violent and threatens and has tried to beat me up multiple times and why she lets him stay and she claimed no responsibility and then I kept asking and my therapist asked me why did I bring her here if I was just going to beat up on her. Right now I am still living with the violent crazies and I do fear for my life, I have constant anxiety attacks and I go into psychosis and I start to hide in closets and my mind goes to the times of when I was about to be beaten by my uncle. I have no friends to stay with, I do have a job but it's part time and I am trying to get a second one to help leave. I did used to go to a for meetup but I felt isolated and not wanted, little empathy, I did make one friend that I still talk to there though. I have emblem health insurance and I wanted to know if anyone knows any good therapists as good as Daniel mackler or nathiel Brandon that I can speak with or if anyone has any advice. It would be very much appreciated, I really desperately need help. I have read Daniel macllers last book, listened to hundreds of podcasts, I read about 1/3 of real time relationships and I read the psychology of self esteem and how to raise your self esteem by Nathiel Brandon. I just want to also say i will get through this and I will get better no matter what because that is my goal and I want to become a doctor and help research empathy and how we can grow it. I forgot to say I live in New York , queens New York. Also just to correct I have read Daniel mackler's book. To clarify I have been to more than 8 therapists throughout my life. After a while after the third therapist as an adult , I gave up on therapy for a while, thinking psychology the field was bullshit and that if medical doctors lol of ability was that of therapists lots of people would have died already. I still think very poorly of most therapists but I am not looking for most I am looking for a Nathaniel Brandon or a Daniel Mackler, a good therapist