Otaku, that sentiment you say, about being selfish not being wrong - I have almost begun to believe it, at the ripe old age of 31. I still have misgivings some times, and my family still pulls guilt trips on me.
As for my family, I don’t know how you could have not heard it. 
I yak about it all the time!
OtakuLoki, you seem to show an awful lot of insight on subjects like these. How do you earn your keep?
Dang, it was really hard not to end that first sentence with “which surprises me.”
Thanks. Even if I did surprise you.
Seriously, I’m a mental health consumer. AKA a severely, and chronically, depressed person. I’ve been in treatment for years. And I pay attention, so I’ve learned a lot. At the moment I’m collecting a VA pension, in part because I’ve not been able to get a job in many years.
So, if you were guessing I were a counselor, you’re a little off base. I’ve just hung out with them a lot.
Slight hijack, but one of the happiest things I ever heard the other day was: my coworker is having some troubles with her stepson. His grades are rock-bottom, he lies about homework, but he’s generally a good kid. So what’s she going to do? take him to counselling!
I think that’s awesome. It’s about freakin’ time we learned that
[ul]
[li]Mental health and well-being is important[/li][li]Being mentall ill, even temporarily, is not a stigma or a sign of failure[/li][li]Talking to someone is not “airing your dirty laundry”, it’s getting help[/li][li]Even teenagers need counselling (the boy’s 14)[/li][/ul]
Now if only Asians could be convinced counselling is healthy and mental illness does not automatically equal batshit insane (and thus, shame for the family).
My mistake, but an understandable one.
I wonder if this explains why so many shrinks are so fucked up.
Why? Because Otaku has been going to them?
No, but I once went to a “party” that was full of them.
Let the good times rolleyes.
I don’t know…I find that depressing. The kid doesn’t do his homework and lies about it. He doesn’t need counseling, he needs a kick in the pants. His parents need to check and make sure he’s studying and doing his homework. It’s a discipline problem, not a counseling one.
And to answer your previous question, we’re “supposed to be so goddamn loyal to our family” because they’re our family…they raised us. My family taught me right from wrong, took care of me when I needed help and is there to give me advice when I need it. They’re the only people I can trust are looking out for my best interests and I have a duty to them. So if they ask me to do something, I do it. If they give me advice, I take it. I call them every week even if I don’t want to. It’s a little enough thing to do.
In my role, today, as a junior counselor - have you considered that what your family does is try to pull guilt trips on you? They can’t make you feel guilty without your own assistance.
What they can, and may well, do is remind you of patterns of thought where you ended up, in the past, accepting the responsibilities that they want you to accept.
It sounds like you’ve gotten to the point of realizing that they’re using this technique to manipulate you, but that you’ve not gotten to the point of recognizing that it will only work if you let it work.
Before I go any further, let me say that I am familiar with the guilt trip. My father’s mother - my Jewish grandmother (who was, I daresay, the model for the Jewish grandmother in all the jokes) - was a past master of the guilt trip. I say past master because she started using a bit too much on my father and he broke that control. So when she started to try to use it on my sister and myself, we had his example of how to keep from letting her run our lives that way.
In my experience, the way that a guilt trip works is usually the one trying to use it on someone else will begin by pointing to a failure or favor that the person being tripped may or may not have done. At which point, the trippee (if you’ll let me use that term) is supposed to feel a need to make amends. Which is a normal and healthy reaction.
The problem with guilt trippers, IMNSHO, is that they never allow the offered amends to be enough. A guilt trip is emotional blackmail. And like any other kind of blackmail - you’ll never be able to pay it off enough to make it go away.
It’s probably impossible to keep you from feeling guilty for things you’ve done, or from feeling indebted to your family. But, in part because family debts cannot be completely repaid, it’s unreasonable to have someone using that as a reason to do force people into doing things.
When someone tries to guilt trip you, take a breath, and separate the two parts of the guilt trip: Accept the blame, or the debt, that they’re trying to remind you of (assuming it’s a legitimate blame or debt, of course.); and then consider what they’re trying to get you to do. Do it or not, as you choose. Do not do it in an effort to make amends for the debt that they’re trying to bring up.
For that matter, I ended up taking a certain perverse pleasure in telling my grandmother “You’re right. That was a bad thing I did. What does it have to do with what we’ve been talking about, though?”
Most guilt trippers never want to make the implied exchange explicit - in part because it would imply that you could make amends. Which they don’t really want to allow. 
On preview: Captain Amazing - it sounds like you’ve got a healthy family dynamic going. And a recognition that family obligations are still two-way. (Even if you’re now doing more of the giving than you had been when you were younger.) There are families where that’s not the case. Where it’s all supposed to be one way, in service of one person, or one couple, damn the cost to anyone else.
It’s a mistake, I think, to assume that all families are going to be like your own.
As for the counseling issue - even if it’s only a discipline problem, counseling can still be very beneficial. One of the major components of counseling in a situation such as the one that Anaamika describes is that the counselor will often set up a communication between the parents and the child, while acting as a moderator. Ideas and concerns that often can’t be expressed in the normal family dynamic can come out there, in a controlled manner.
I’m not trying to say that counseling is a magic bullet that will cure everything. Just that it can be used in conjunction with other more traditional parenting methods.
When I got married, and people at the wedding were telling my mom how beautiful everything was, she kept saying, “I know! I’m as surprised as you are! I had no idea!”
Thanks, mom. :rolleyes: To her, I am still a 14 year old goth kid, I swear.
So, yeah, I totally know where you’re coming from.
OtakuLoki, looks like you hit another one clear out of the park. Well done.
The name Phelps comes to mind.
My family does this to some degree - the backhanded compliments or comments on accomplishments that somehow make me feel worse about myself. I don’t play that game anymore. An honest, uplifiting compliment to someone else costs me NOTHING; it doesn’t diminish me in some way to tell my sister that her dinner was very good, and thanks for inviting me over. It isn’t a competition to see who gets the most praise and recognition or something. I have a couple of family members who still like to make negative comments (my oldest sister is the worst for this - I try not to tell her anything that means anything to me because she deflates it with a word), but I still interact with them in positive ways because it feels good to me to be positive to them.
What I’m saying is that this is a habit, and now that you’re starting to see it, you can start working on breaking the habit. Figure out what the negative part of your comment is, and just leave it off. Work on being honestly supportive of people in your life. Work on giving compliments just to give a compliment, with no thought for any gain to yourself or any scorekeeping. When someone backhands you a compliment like your grandfather, maybe you could call them on it right then and there (I’m thinking about trying this with my sister, now) - say something like, “Do you really think I screw up everything I try?” and see what response that gets. It sounds like everyone is just talking out of habit, not out of a real desire to hurt.
And good job on the baby gate.
Mmmmm. Goth kids. :eek:
Seriously? In some ways you are never grown up in the eyes of your parents. It is maddening to me and yet, when in a tragic situation, it is soothing on one level to know your Mom is your Mom is your Mom, and she won’t baby me but she will always care about me, and care FOR me. Sometimes that’s huge.
Cartooniverse
My family never compliments each other to thier face. Now my older brother may tell me sister how impressed he was when I started my own business, to me he says nothing.
Or the kid could have a learning disability, and is trying to cover for it by ducking his homework assignments. In which case, kicking him in the pants is going to help.
Yeah, that’s great, if that’s what your family was like. I think the question in Anaamika’s post was for people whose families didn’t do any of that stuff for them.
What about when your family is like mine? They didn’t teach me right from wrong, they beat me with weapons at the slightest provocation, or none at all. They kicked me out when I needed help, and the advice they gave me was that something was wrong with me. They did not look out for my best interests, they looked for new and excruciating ways to screw me over. What duty do I have to people like this? I will never speak to any of them again for the rest of my life.
No, it is a counseling one. He is her stepkid and it’s fairly obvious to me - and her - that he is acting out because of the divorce and the re-alignment of the family, as he was a perfectly fine kid before.
“Kicking his ass” doesn’t always help. Sometimes the kid is a really good kid to start with and then something happens…and the kid doesn’t know how properly to react, and the parents don’t know, so there’s nothing wrong with counseling.
As for all of the other stuff, they’ve done it. They’ve cajoled. No effect. They’ve punished. No effect. Now it’s on to the next step.
Typical comments coming from someone who will never get it because they have a good family. I’m glad your family was so good to you. I’m going to list the traits of your family and compare them to mine:
1. they raised us
Yup, they sure did this. And I’ll acknowledge that I never lacked for anything material.
*2. taught me right from wrong *
My parents taught me it was OK to lie. They taught me to never be friends with anyone who couldn’t give me anything in return. They taught me blacks are violent criminals and rapists and Muslims are all assholes. They taught me gay people were freaks of nature. They also taught me I was ugly, that I had nothing whatever to offer to the opposite sex. Shall I go on?
3. took care of me when I needed help
When I needed help, they kicked me out of the house. They said I could come back if I agreed to have an engaged marriage within the next two months, with a man they chose.
*4. was there to give me advice when I need it. *
Oh, they’re full of advice. To this day I am careful not to say anything negative about my life - not even “my car’s breaking down” because they will pour advice on my head, most of it about how I am a lousy person to start with. “If you just made more money/woke up earlier/were dating an Indian man…”
*5. They’re the only people I can trust are looking out for my best interests *
I know that my parents are not looking out for my best interests. They are looking for ways to save face, so they can point to their daughter, and say, “There walks my daughter, a proud upholder of the Indian (read - their version) tradition.”
Look, generally I let comments like yours slide. And I’m not picking on you. But I am so sick of every person who had a wonderful family and a wonderful upbringing thinking that somehow it’s me who’s fucking up. No - sometimes family, and parents, are egomaniacal assholes who never should have spawned in the first place.
And this is just my adoptive parents. My birth father told my mother to throw me out on the street because he didn’t want a baby girl. My birth mother would have absolutely had an abortion if she could have and if it had been the norm. I fucked up her whole life just by being born, and she made me pay for it.
So please keep your sanctimonious comments to yourself. Please? I’m not that upset, really, I just find your comments…woefully naive.
Ok, separate post, to address two other things:
Otaku, about the guilt trips. I have gotten much, much better about this. I even started letting my aunts back into my life, a little at a time. I found in the interim they did something that made them ostracized as severely or even more as I was in the community, so suddenly they have a little fellow feeling for me. Just a little. So I give to them, a little, and I ask for a little in return. I will never have a normal family dynamic - telling you, I love having two mothers and not one “mom” :rolleyes: - but this aunt and I have gotten really close.
About counseling. This is what I feel about counseling. That it should not be shunned just because of some stigma. In Indian culture mental illness is unheard of, if you’re mentally ill you’re in the attic, tied to a chair, because everyone is ashamed of you. Wife-beaters, alcoholics, druggies - none of these are addressed mentally in any way.
In the States it’s getting a little better. And we are starting to feel that at least some of the time there are motivations behind the dumbass things we do. However no parent can be expected to be able to understand everything. If you never lived through a divorce and never were a stepchild, and you find yourself at a loss to talk to your child, who is resentful anyway, then there is less harm and more benefit in going to see someone outside, who may help you at least address your concerns better.
I don’t want to see us going the way of old, people. I am pretty sure if my mother and I could have gotten counselling after our traumatic event things might have been a little better between us.
I love my mother. She is wonderful and I adore her. She is well-balanced and contributes a lot to the world.
Having said that…
She sometimes has offhand ways of complimenting me. When she does, it’s usually about my weight. She has a problem with overweight people in general, and tends to see it as a moral failing.
A couple of years ago, we were touring an island, and the tour guide was talking about some native trees. She talked about how they always lean in a certain direction, and how the bark is different on the leaning side. She then asked if anyone knew why that was. I piped up with “Because of the additional weight on that side.” My mother said to me “Good one! And that’s something you’d know a lot about. Weight.”
WTF? Excuse me? I’m fat, therefore a tree expert?
Yeah, well, my mom may still be my mom, but she didn’t much care for me and still doesn’t. I’m learning to get over it but it’s hard not to let the dial fall back to “bitter” sometimes. Therapy helps a great deal - for the longest time I thought I only hated my dad because he was the physical one. It is only lately I have come to realize how much my mother undermined me from early childhood verbally and mentally - and she’s still doing it!