Maintain relations with narcissistic low-IQ family of origin?

[cypher_002999281]

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. 
 

 

[Rachelle]

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

 

[S1988]

I wonder if your fiancée thinks the way she does (I'm not claiming to be a mind reader; this is just a theory.) because she has the belief that having kids would change them or that family is important no matter how toxic they are. If she does think that way, that's a very dangerous mindset to have because they won't automatically change just because a new life is born, and it's important to protect your potential children from toxic people, family or not. 

Rachelle is right that they are more likely to hurt their future grandchildren, but there's another possibility that's just as harmful. They may shower them with kindness, but as a way to turn them against you. I've read horror stories on the Internet about how grandchildren were groomed by their grandparents to hate their parents. Spoiling kids while telling them that you and your fiancee are the bad guys is a form of abuse, too.

[cypher_002999281]

Thanks for the replies. 

Rachelle, you likely endured much worse than I did so I don't want to over-emphasize anything. My family was stupid, crazy and un-empathetic. I believe if anyone could recall the detailed bad in their own life and expose it with the frankness and clarity I have, many if not most would have some things to say.

S1988, now after some more discussion, fiancée is supporting my preference to not see the parents and especially brother, who is really just a powder keg at this point. 

[S1988]

On 6/24/2017 at 9:12 AM, mbrothers said:

S1988, now after some more discussion, fiancée is supporting my preference to not see the parents and especially brother, who is really just a powder keg at this point. 

That's wonderful to hear. Your potential children are better off with no grandparents (and no uncle) than toxic ones. However, your families may not let you go that easily.

Have you heard of the word "hoovering?" (I'm surprised that word isn't mentioned on this forum more often. I assume it's because either people here haven't had a problem with it or they're not familiar with the term.)

Hoovering is a tactic abusers use to get their victims to return to them. Read more about it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20111219141505/http://lightshouse.org/lights-blog/when-toxic-people-start-hoovering