I once heard him badmouthing the wife of the couple he hates to a friend. Talking about how racist she is, making up lies about her (saying she forces her husband to do things he doesn’t want to do. Not true). I confronted him about this, he said it was ok because the people he was telling this to ‘weren’t in the family’.
Keep in mind he and his wife have badmouthed me to both family members, acquaintances, and people I’ve never met for decades. So he says horrible things to people and its ok because the people he said it to ‘weren’t family members’ and I’m the bad guy for telling the wife. Meanwhile him and his wife will badmouth me to anyone, family or not, and have for years.
Yeah, I’m done.
I will say this, reading up on narcissists and emotional abusers has been very enlightening to not get suckered into their crap.
I mentioned upthread how I’m worried my brother follows my online activity. I suspect this because a week after getting burglarized one of his kids was making fun of me for being robbed. Somehow my brother and his wife found out and his kid probably overheard him and his wife making fun of me for being a crime victim and the kid thought that was ok behavior.
So yeah, I may sound paranoid when I say he may follow my online activity.
For other people whose families have dysfunctional people in it, are the dysfunctional people obviously fucked up, or are they superficially charming to people who don’t know them well?
My impression is a lot of fucked up people are either total fuckups in general and everyone knows it (in and out of jail, constantly drunk in public, getting in fights in public, etc) or they are very superficially charming and lots of people compliment them on it, but behind closed doors with people who know them best, they are totally different people.
Depends on the person. My mom was obviously nuts to everyone who encountered her. They didn’t know the extent of it, but she was known for making trouble. Schools hated her, other parents wouldn’t let their kids over, she just was obviously not right. But her chief problem is emotion regulation, so that’s no surprise.
Adopted father was the hallmark stand up community guy, beloved by all. Only people who got close to him knew something was off. He made a pass at my Aunt once and she had a pretty low opinion of him, but I believed he had my best interests at heart even when he was abusing me. It was only in retrospect I realized he was a manipulative sociopath. I’m not exactly sure what transpired between him and my mother. I observed her being an outright abusive bitch to him many times but it’s clear he was playing mind games, trying to get her psychiatrically committed so he could further isolate me. During one of their last arguments, he permanently disabled her, but it’s not clear exactly how intentional that was, only that after he hurt her, he contemplated killing her and then told her she wasn’t worth the prison time. He is a calculated person, not one who loses control. If he ever murdered someone he’d do it with a plan and an alibi.
When I told people what he had done to me, many concluded I was just trying to get back at my mother, which makes no sense, but the point is, everybody knew about my mother. They were in total disbelief about him.
It’s five letters. It’s one letter MORE. It’s bigger and better. It may even be the bigliest
But to get back on track, I’ve told people “fuck off” and “fuck you” and all the variations. Some people deserve the abuse and don’t understand anything else.
The truly dangerous ones are charming. It’s not that the charm makes them dangerous, it’s that the vicious lack of empathy enables them to turn charm on and off like a switch.
Give me a nasty tempered or obviously unstable person any day.
It is hard to judge how fucked up your own family is, as it is all you know, it is what sets the standard for what is “normal”.
It wasn’t until I was out of the house and had built adult relationships and friendships that I realized just how toxic of a home I grew up in.
I’m pretty sure my brother is a sociopath. He is the most charming and friendly person there is, when he wants something from you. If you are unnecessary to his goals, he’ll step on you as soon as step over you.
He ended up going full on sov-cit, and I haven’t talked to him in about a decade now.
Well yeah. That’s a pretty basic division in fuckups.
My mother and her father belong to the “charming in public, hell in private” kind; one of the biggest differences between them is that Gramps was much better at controlling when he let the mask slip*. I don’t think my mother’s sister has been called charming once in her whole life.
When my mother announced she was going to be my catechist for First Communion, my reaction was “God please kill me now”. But her behavior on the first day was so Evil Stepmother that she actually managed to heal the rift her own actions had caused between me and my classmates: they realized the reason I didn’t stay to play with them after class wasn’t that I was a stuck-up bitch but that my mother required me to run home so I could do the daily shopping and other housework. It’s been more than 40 years and none of my former classmates has forgotten that day.
Gramps only let the mask slip if he’d decided to go after you; almost never in front of witnesses. The few times he did it in front of someone it was to assault a worker at a store to which he didn’t want to go any more, as part of his ongoing war with Grandma: getting banned from that store meant she couldn’t send him there again.
Not sure how I feel about this generalization. My mother fucked me up worse between the two of them. Her instability was terrifying because you never knew what to expect. She was all over the place emotionally. She was not in control of herself.
The way adopted father made it harder was in being taken seriously when I told the truth about him. It also made it harder for me to let go, because I didn’t get what he was doing and I worshipped the ground he walked on as a kid. Coming to terms with the fact that his love was a manipulation tactic was very difficult and has made it difficult for me to trust my own judgment as an adult. It was a really reality-warping experience.
I think after their long overdue divorce, the facade fell apart. He ended up desperate for cash and fucked over some family members and tried to blackmail his stepfather with knowledge about stepfather’s involvement in KKK murders. (yes, everyone in my family is just lovely.) Once that happened, people saw him more for what he was. More people came to my side. This would be like seven years after I told the truth though, so, in the spirit of the thread, fuck them.
As an aside, as I’ve been hanging with the educated liberal crowd for a while, I sometimes forget what a freaking redneck I am. I had two family members in the KKK and my adopted father was actually my mother’s stepbrother (they met as adults when their parents met.) So even after my parents divorced, he was still my maternal grandmother’s stepson. Add in the widespread generational abuse and severe mental illness, and this family never had a hope of being healthy.
I’m glad we’re all getting some good venting in here.
A theory I heard years ago that the reason “four letter words” were considered vulgar was due to the Norman invasion…so it’s a long time it’s been going on. Words like fuck or shit were Anglo Saxon and bad. Fornicate and excrement were Norman and good.
I was more referencing people as an adult. If I were a kid, I think I’d prefer the superfically charming person because those people can at least hold things together. They can hold down a job and pay the bills. The general fuckups usually can’t.
But as an adult, I prefer the total asshole because they are easier to spot and avoid. The two faced ones, you can spend years in their web before you wise up and cut them out of your life. It is easy to be turned into a flying monkey for the two faced ones. They’ll push your buttons to make you fight their battles for them.
If you are as redneck as you say you are, maybe you can teach the rest of us how to make moonshine out of potatoes and how to use necktie to fix a broken fan belt.
My sister. She has once again for either something I did or didn’t do, unfriended me on FB. AGAIN. I have been dealing with her shit since we were little kids.
