To be succinct and private… My incubator worked me for weeks to build rapport and trust with me in my younger days, to get me to tell her a something that she would ultimately, and immediately use and weaponize against me and others.
This wasnt the first time I tried to have a relationship with her, but it did finally open my eyes and become the last. In the many many decades since, I’ve not so much as acknowledge her existence when crossing paths.
When I was 15 or so I get home from school and get a AIM message from an account I don’t know claiming to be a girl at my school who has a crush on me, but too shy to reveal who she is. Which was weird all by itself because I didn’t use AIM often.
At first I’m delighted, but she quickly becomes sexual. Talking about masturbating to me in very explicit detail. I get freaked out and stop responding. Which prompts an angry phone call from my Dad saying the account is messaging him now and bothering him at work. How she got my account info wss confusing, but i didn’t even know my dad had an account.
So I respond a few more times, and very quickly “she” starts sending me porn, which then turns to sending CSAM saying I need to masturbate to it too. I’m freaking tf out and block the account. Which prompts another angry phone call. I tell my dad I don’t know this person and tell him to just block the account to stop him getting bothered. He calls me a pussy and hangs up.
When he gets home, I tell him that the account was sending me freaky stuff. He stomps over to the computer, opens an terminal and typed a long string of characters that returns our IP address. “If it happens again, do this and we can catch this freak”. He then abruptly closes the window before I can even read what he typed, much less remember it. He slams his bedroom door and that’s the last I see of him for the night.
Took me a long time to fully understand and accept what happened that night, but I never looked at my dad the same again. There were a few more odd situations where he put CSAM in front of me or sent it to my step-dad getting him fired. But he died before I gathered the courage to confront him.
Wait…
your dad was AIMing you, pretending to be a girl your age? sending you child porn?
What the fuck
Yes. :/
There were other similar things he did but those are harder to talk about. This memory is just so absurd that it feels less personal.
I’m sorry, dude.
When I was around 2 years old I was raped by a family member several times over the course of several months. My parents decided to stay quiet about it, and never mention it again. My mind just kind of decided to shield me from it as best as it could. I shat myself everyday for years (until I was 8 years old, and moved to another country). I could not say no to any figure of authority until I was in my 30s. I had regular nightmares that I could not explain for years. Developed insane social anxiety, and hated (and I mean HATED) my sexuality for years. It took several attempts over a decade to get my mom to even admit that something might have happened. I still don’t really what happened as my mom doesn’t seem to know shit, but my dad just refuses to even be in the same room if I start talking about it.
Wow… your parents failed you and protected the one that traumatized you in some of the worst ways imaginable.
I’m so sorry.
There isn’t enough time in the day to talk about what my parents did and didn’t do that they should have. The breaking point was when I discovered that my mother was abusing my autistic son in the same manner she had me. It made her happy to make him cry and she was cruel in how she did it. May she rot.
Neglect stories… I’ve got a few.
From the time I was six or seven she tried to reason with me (with +3-hr scoldings) and get me to change to her christo-Amway of thinking up till I was 16. Than I has a choice: knuckle under or get out. Being 16 and full of great, well thought out plans I left with three garbage bags of winter wear and clothes. Yes, she and him (my father) agreed that the decision to leave was my own to make. At sixteen.
Fast forward to me being 62. She lies dying in a home, and forgives me as her final act of charity. Yeah, ok, so buh-bye.
And him? Dementia. Game. Set. Match.
Treat your children as precious (if temporarily irritating) treasures and remember you only get to throw them away once.
Recognized for being really intelligent.
Rejected my thoughts and opinions about everything because it scares their fundamentalist religious sensabilities.
That cognitive dissonance still fucks with me.
Oh I run into this very often with friends and family.
“Hey, you’re smart and can figure things out, how do I solve X”
They get an answer they don’t like, and I immediately go back to being a dumbfuck who doesnt know anything.
My dad isn’t religious at all, but is a narcissistic shithead, and everything is dumb except him. Everything he does is smart, everything me and my sister does is dumb. It annoys the fuck out of me and we hardly even talk. I sometimes ask him for advice on some things, just to make him feel better, and every time he says the dumbest shit imaginable. He complqined about his electric bill last year, and i said mine is way lower, even with my heat pump. He said there must be a mistake. And i told him it’s because he turns on the light every morning and leaves it on all day, everywhere he goes in the house, every single day. Whenever someone asks him he says something like: electricity is cheap or he can afford it, or just laughs. He’s a lazy sack of shit, that’s all, and since i told him that’s why, he does it out of spite.
There are so many things.
After I was in a car accident in college, my mom convinced me that it was too risky to take my car to a shop in the city where I lived, so I let her take it to her own mechanic.
Months went by, and every time I asked about it, she claimed it was still at the shop and she had no idea why it was taking so long.
After I lost both my jobs because I didn’t have reliable transportation, I found out that my mom hadn’t taken my car to the shop.
She had been letting my younger brother, who still lived at home, drive my (unrepaired!) car to community college so she didn’t have to give him a ride.
I bet they’d been looking for an excuse for years to nab your car and give it to him.
I suppose most folks would consider my breaking point to be unwarranted.
0000
About four or so years back, a parent fell over. They are heavyset, requiring firemen to be lifted off the floor. They were nude, so I asked the fire department to send same-gender fighters, if that can be reasonably done. My parent threatened to have me thrown out of the household, out of embarrassment.
While that ultimately didn’t happen, it was a great breach of trust for me. I don’t have enough of an income to survive without a home, and quite frankly, I will take my life if I can’t enjoy it. Far as I am concerned, the threat of homelessness and poverty, isn’t much different than having a gun to my head.
I realized that this parent, like the other one, didn’t love me. The affection I held for them was fading over the years, but this is what broke the chain for me. I don’t love them anymore - they are like a rock or any random thing. They just exist. I won’t hurt them, but I also stopped going the extra mile. I ceased patrolling to check on their health, nor did I try to cook real meals or ask if I should fetch restaurant food for them. I simply made TV dinners at the appropriate times, and didn’t speak to my parent anymore.
My relationship was simply one of going through the motions.
Point clarification: the firefighters ended up not being necessary?
And yes, like training an LLM, you’ve taken in negative feedback to not do this, not do that, maybe some positive feedback along the way on how to do something right, and when things really mattered and someone was in danger, you engaged the LLM part of your brain to think two steps ahead…and it gets thrown back in your face.
Your breaking point is completely warranted, because you hit a point where you realized that no amount of messing with internal weights and trying to guess what they want would ever work, so why bother stressing over it anymore?
The firefighters were necessary, and falls of this nature kept happening at an increasing pace. That parent, simply isn’t able to walk safely anymore - and they have a stubborn streak of not asking people to help them. This residence I am in, also has many hoarded items of that parent, that are not allowed to be thrown away.
Fortunately, they are now in a elderly care facility.
Congratulations on getting almost all the way out. It sounds like the hoarded items thing will come up at some point, but you knew that.
Your reaction is a lot like that of people who’ve been parentified when they were younger (forced to take care of younger siblings). There’s a similar reaction out of the parents when the child doesn’t carry out the portion of The Plan devised for them.
There’s more honesty in a parent/child relationship where the parents tell the children they’re out the door on their 18th birthday so the children have time to plan. At least that way the children know for sure where they stand.
Sad to hear in several ways, sorry for the situatuon.
Apologize this might be a rude question but how did your parent make thier livehood while being in that condition?
Savings. Helped run a business, until they divorced from the owner, about 15ish or so years ago.
Openly not believing in my academy career, which was a failure for the lack of motivation.
My dad was a rush limbaugh guy in the 90’s then moved to info wars, my mother who he married when she was 16 dotes on him due to his history of being abused as a child, so my dad never grew up, never learned any hard lessons, and she never made anything of herself but to be his voice box when I refused to debate him on politics.
My mom then only called to relay her struggles, or to nudge me on politics, I would call her on holidays and gift them lavishly with my nice IT job, especially after my dad was forced into retirement during Covid.
Anytime I mentioned a challenge in my life they would turn it around and tell me how they had it worse, when I told them good news, it barely registered.
The last straw was when she called me just before the last presidential election to strongarm me into voting for Trump. She crossed a line and I hung up. Haven’t talked since, and finally have peace in my life, well some peace anyway.
Congratulations! I mean it.
Mum was taking emails from Republican shits, even though we lived in Australia.
Eventually, between all the shit going on, I decided to go no contact with her over it. It took so long to deprogram myself from a shitty Mormon upbringing, plus systematic abuse throughout teenage years. I wasn’t willing to go through even more crap all over again.
She died six months later.
enabling parents, causing failure to launch in thier children(for whatever reason) causing rifts in the family and relatives, is a common theme im seeing in multiple posts online. also the parents being financially irresponsible with thier planning of retirement. alot of parents assume/expects thier children to be thier retirement plan. i see alot of contempt/resentment as a result.
Mine was a cold, brittle narcisst. Any good I did, she had done… frequently with stories how someone had told her she was the best they’d ever seen. A less stupid version of Trump.
Sadly, she was actually quite brilliant in her field (biochemistry), while simultaneously being so ardent of an adherent of a panoply of new age crap (psychic healing and the like) that she literally prevented me from getting surgery for a TBI. Instead of much needed medical assistance, I got veggie smoothies and visits to her weird friends. My head still hurts.
There was so much more crap after that, but it was such a revelation as an adult that she would rather I suffer than admit her ‘genius’ wasn’t the solution to all problems.
She died in December. I shrugged.
That is so often the case, that people who are competent in one regard, take that confidence from their one narrow field of knowledge and end up with the undeserved, unwarranted belief they are competent in all regards… and end up being some of the most narrowly brilliant but broadly imbecilic assholes around.
So glad to see you put words on this phenomenon.
I have seen it all to much.
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She delighted in making others feel lesser for being less ‘intelligent’. And as she aged became decidedly anti-science… quite likely the cause of her death.
She ignored exceedingly high blood pressure and cholesterol, ‘treating’ then entirely with herbs and diet. Preventive dietary changes can work wonders on health, but modern medicine still has valid use cases. Yet she was so far up her own butt in this delusion of omni-competence that she was certain she knew more than any doctor.
She had a massive stroke in 2023 and died from the flu last year. Of course she was anti-vaxx, so that may well have been an inciting incident as well.
theres a reason half of all people died before the age of 35, before modern medicine started to come up and around.
This one may seem silly compared to the things I’ve read.
My parents gave me a strange eating disorder that it took a while to get over.
Mom refused to accept that there were foods or perhaps ingredients that I was either unwilling or unable to eat. As an example, Onions are horrible and they literally make me sick, whether its whole chunks of onion or powdered onion. But she kept sneaking onion into stuff she made because she just knew I’d like them if I just tried them! It wasn’t a matter of “like” it was the fact that if I ate some I’d end up doing a technicolor yodel over the toilet while she told me I was being dramatic. Sometimes if I was really unlucky I wouldn’t make it to the toilet which would make her even madder. So Id get spanked after puking.
This caused me to be really mistrustful of food that I didn’t prepare myself. I also had problems eating in front of other people, because mom (both parents really) would get upset over how I was eating, and it took me until I was in my 30’s before I was comfortable eating with other people around. Which did wonders for my social life in my 20’s.
Your mother feeding you food that makes you vomit, then beating you for vomiting, isnt silly my dude…
Yeah that occoured to me after I typed it all out. ☹️
That’s incredibly fucked up and I’m sorry you had to deal with that.
If I wasn’t a good as her, I needed to do better, try harder, stop being lazy etc. If I was better than her at something she would pick out the most miniscule flaw she could come up with and give it to me as a back handed complement then slowly work it into random conversations until it became my insecurity.
The thing that sticks with me the most though, she had me absolutely convinced I was far too fat to wear shorts in public, let alone a bikini. Finally was convinced by my group of friends that I was in fact, normally sized and literally handed one and told to wear it.
I was not expecting to see my Mom between getting dressed and going to the pool. She asked me if I was really going out like that and how I was going to handle everyone making fun of me then highly suggested I go change into my 1 piece. Said she wasn’t going to feel bad for me when I came back crying
That broke me. Of course I believed her. She was my Mom she just wanted what was best for me right? I can still see the look on my friend’s face when I came back in the room to change and she said “you know that’s not true right? There’s nothing wrong with you. This is about her.”
Took me years and years to realize she was very wrong. I didn’t let anyone take pictures of me for awhile after that but I saw some recently of 3 years later when I had “gained some weight.” Holy fuck, there is zero chance in hell I was fat.
Anyways, she had a horrible, long {9 years), and painful death and probably got abused pretty bad in the nursing home. Good riddance to that piece of shit. Because I got off easy with just emotional and mental trauma. What she did to my siblings was significantly worse.
I’m sorry.
She can’t hurt me anymore. Wish she stuck around long enough to pay for my therapy though 🤣🤣 not that she would’ve.
But thank you.
Vote for Trump a third time. Fuck you, mom. You’re officially a Bad Person™.
Visiting the family next month and I forbade them from telling her we’re coming. I said they can tell her whatever they want after we’re gone.
Same here, except it was my Dad and his family. My mom is the only one opposed, but that doesn’t stop her from maintaining relationships with the bad people. She doesn’t like being told she has Stockholm’s syndrome for staying with a misogynist, but it’s true nonetheless.
