I’ll add one more thing. In the eyes of my mom and step mom I am by far the golden child (now. I was the black sheep for a very long time). It’s not a two way street.
A relative of mine cut off her father and her brother, over (as I understand it) the disposal of some pretty trivial items from her late mother’s estate. She hasn’t spoken to them since. Her father died last year, and it was doubtful if they (her husband has to take her side) would turn up to the funeral (I gather she did).
The feud doesn’t extend to their children, who talk to both sides.
Both sides turned up to my mothers funeral a few weeks later, but they kept apart.
Sure, in some cases, the kids are the ones being problematic. Kids as well as adults can have mental illnesses or be substance abusers, for example. “Blame the mom” is based in Freud. Longer ago than the last few generations. Parent blaming was even stronger in the 80-90s [when I was trained as a therapist].
In several instances, the young adults seem to have arrived at that conclusion following some counseling.
Sure. Sometimes it’s an accurate assessment, sometimes not, but “My mom wouldn’t let me have a pet rat and that hurt me” is super different from “My mom killed my pet rats as a punishment.”
Do remember that people who didn’t have those experiences or weren’t affected in the same way by those experiences aren’t going to be posting. Restricted range.
I mean, my best friend – not my parents’ best friend, but my best friend – thought my parents were wonderful and wished she had them. Now, bestie and I did not grow up together (we became friends at a residential high school) so it wasn’t like she saw my parents every week or anything, but between one thing and another she did see them reasonably often in high school/college (and she stayed over at our house a few times and vice versa). But here are a couple of things:
a) it was drummed into us from a very early age that one did NOT talk outside the immediate family (even to extended family) about mom losing her temper, it was NOT DONE. Bestie had no idea about this until we had our own kids and I was talking about how in many many ways I was intending to parent 100% differently than my parents did.
b) my sister, as an adult, started seeing a therapist who was appalled by our parents’ behavior and told my sister that this was emotional abuse. Sister told me this and – I’m very ashamed of this now – I completely denied it. I didn’t agree at all, I thought that was ridiculous, abuse meant when you got hit and we never got hit. Then I started reading some more and started realizing that, uh, she had a point.
c) It’s also true that for various reasons, our upbringing affected my sister a lot more than it affected me. When my mom yelled at me for some bizarro reason, my internal response was, “Mom’s yelling at me and that means she’s crazy, because I am objectively a great kid and this is a nonsensical reason to yell.” My sister’s internal response was, “Mom’s yelling at me and that means I must be a terrible kid.”
d) If my mom stopped being hypercritical tomorrow, my sister and I would both be super on board with that. It’s the present, not the past, that’s the problem right now.
e) All this doesn’t change that my parents are actually awesome parents in a lot (A LOT) of ways (I owe a tremendous amount to them and in some ways I have intentionally followed their parenting somewhat), and also they are WAY better than their parents (especially my dad’s parents, omg).
And one more observation that’s not just my parents, but that I tack on here so as not to serial post: I feel like, in my experience, many, many young adults feel like their parents are not understanding enough and hold grudges against them, including young adults with perfectly reasonable parents. Everyone I knew as an adolescent/young adult was a little down on their parents, and if a young person is estranged from their parents I’d say sure, it may not be the parents’ fault.
But once these young adults start having kids, one of two things happens. Either they start understanding their parents WAY more – “oh wow, I never realized how hard parenting is, my parents put up with a lot!” – or they start going, “…wait a second, I would NEVER do to my kids what my parents did to me. Something is majorly screwy here.” In the vast majority of the case I know about, where the no-longer-quite-so-young-adults-with-kids are mentally healthy and in healthy relationships, if they get estranged with their parents after they have kids, that… says something about the (grand)parents.
(I had both realizations more-or-less simultaneously.)
As my wife pointed out a few weeks ago, family estrangements have been around forever. It used to be that you could move to the other side of the country, or hell, a neighboring state, and that was as good as going no-contact. You can’t stand Pa? Leave Ireland, move to Pennsylvania, done!
The Internet has made the implicit explicit. Now, if you want to stop hearing from your parents, Facetime keeps distance from being an effective boundary. Now you gotta make that boundary with words.
Consider that on this (and other things), you, like all humans, may have a flawed and incomplete analysis of what is true or not true. Even if you’ve witnessed things for years. Your biases, assumptions and perception shaped what you saw, and and shape the way you reflect on them.
You also cannot rely on your baffled friends, as their understanding about their own relationship and history with their children is flawed and incomplete in the same way.
You really have no idea what happens when you’re not in the room. And it turns out that in fact, there are a lot of awful parents out there.
Yes: as the author of the blog himself notes, said communities are strongly subject to the Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs syndrome (more levelheaded members tend to leave as a group becomes more radical, resulting in the ground in question becoming more extreme).
If not my friends, who else am I to rely on? This may lead to a hijack, in which case I’ll open up a separate thread, but I should make clear that I do rely on my friends to be honest with me. That’s what I seek in a friend–a commitment to telling me the truth. None of the people I’ve described were very eager to bitch about their kids to me, but I ask questions or make observations (“I haven’t seen Jocko when I visit lately. Is everything ok with him?”) as friends do, and my friends can’t or won’t tell me lies. In fact, thinking a bit about it, that’s really the basis of most of my friendships–we’re honest with each other, we ask each other tough questions, we go beneath the surface. If these friends are being grossly dishonest with me, it would be a first (and a friendship-breaker) for me. If they’re being dishonest with themselves, I think I could pick up on something being very wrong.
Also please remember that I’m basing my perceptions not only on what they tell me, but my own observations. if they’re putting on an act to fool me, as I mentioned in the OP, they’re Marlon Brando’s rivals in acting skills. I’ve watched these kids grow up, I’ve spoken one-to-one with them, I listened to their boy/girl problems, I’ve spent weeks with them over the years on joint family vacations–if it’s an act, it’s a fantastic act.
I’m also one of the more skeptical people I know. I’m not friends with a lot of people because a lot of people set off my built-in, shockproof bullshit detector, but these parents are lifelong close friends of mine who’ve never lied to me before they had kids, and they’ve given me no reason think they started lying after they had kids. As I mentioned, they’ve asked themselves and me some very difficult questions: could I have abused my kids and repressed it? Have my beautiful, well-adjusted kids lost their minds? Have I lost my mind? One friend says that he wrote to his daughter asking for a chance to apologize for the things she’s angry about, sincerely, but added that he can only be sincere if he had a clearer idea of what she’s angry about. No response. Nothing. This doesn’t sound to me like someone capable of abusive behavior. Also, none of these people know each other, so if I’m being bullshitted by friends in the same way and being fooled by all of them, I’m far more gullible than I’ve been in every other aspect of my life.
I did have one older cousin who was a bit of a prick, a very wealthy guy in the film business, who was borderline abusive to his kids–for a few years, just to sound clever, he would refer to his younger son as “Numbnuts” (as in “Hey, Numbnuts, you want a sandwich?”) and his daughter as “Princess”, not in a nice way (“Hey, Princess, you wanna get off your butt and help your mom in the kitchen?” ) and his kids didn’t like him very much. When he died a few years back, they were reluctant to help him, but they did travel to the hospital (less often than I thought a dying parent deserves) and they speak of him resentfully to this day. I think the kids (a few years younger than me) have a good point: he was a pretty shitty dad. (Left each of them a fortune, but money doesn’t equal love, as many have pointed out here.) Which is to say that I don’t as a rule side with the parents across the board, and I’m a pretty fair judge of character, I think.
You’re still not getting it. They think they are being honest. Many — I won’t say most, but many, certainly — people are in denial, and/or obliviously blind to their own faults. Very, very few people are objectively accurate reporters of their own character and history. Go back up and read the bit about the parent nitpicking their child, being shocked when the child blows up at them, and then recounting the incident to their friends as the child being unreasonable. That parent thinks it’s a true and accurate description of what happened. They aren’t lying to you. They aren’t Marlon Brando. They’re just wrong.
I’ve long said that deal breaker numero uno for me, should I meet a man I would wish to date, would be estrangement from all of his children. One child? It could be the kid’s fault, but all of them? Look in the mirror, dude.
Oof, made me immediately flash on an old acquaintance (who was frankly nuts) who walked out of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple with his wife shortly before it decamped from San Francisco to Guyana because of a sermon Jones gave in which he trashed the bible. Crazy, but not quite full crazy.
In cases like this, no one? The thing is you are an outsider to their relationship, you can’t really perceive what hidden fault lines may have developed over years behind closed doors. Could be the parents aren’t quite as straightforward as you perceive, maybe the family relationships you saw was a facade, Maybe the kids really are the ones that are the issue - narcissism problems or drugs or what have you. Though I will caution that when multiple children cut ties instead of just one, that is at least a hint in which direction more of the underlying blame may lie.
But regardless, interesting as the reasons may be this is probably nothing you can tease out yourself. If these people are good friends to you, shrug and keep treating them as good friends. People can have toxic relationships with one party and very good relationships with another. It’s pretty human. If you ever find out they (or their children) have done something unforgivable to your moral code, that’s one thing. But otherwise it is just going to be one of those inexplicable family things. It need not be anything serious - as noted above sometimes incompatible people just can’t get along. Who’s more at fault, Olivia de Havilland or Joan Fontaine?
I was just talking to one of my siblings about this yesterday. Out of the blue, they asked what GPA I had deliberately lowered my performance to in order to survive. In my case, I went from 3.9 GPA in intermediate school (grades 7 and 8) to 3.0 in high school. Our older sister kept hers at 3.4 and this sibling was around 2.7.
My father had such terrible self esteem that he must have felt devastated by any success of others, even his own children. Consequently, any time we had grades that were too good, he would give lectures on our lack of humility and such, and the psychological pressure was too great.
I remember making the conscious decision to do worse in high school. I even told my mother, who got really upset and told me I should tell Dad, which is laughable because something like that could have been fatal. Father was abusive, mother was unable to protect us.
In my family, you couldn’t succeed and you couldn’t fail. I always say that it was like having to ice skate across a steep frozen roof. If you don’t do anything or not enough, you will fall, but if you do too much you will also fail.
My father would suddenly get violent over trivial things and you never knew what would set him off. We grew up in a state of constant anxiety.
This was just a sample of the abuse and neglect. Both my parents are / were narcissistic and unable to comprehend the world from others’ perspectives. My mother is heartbroken that she doesn’t have close relationships with her children.
Mormons are pretty close and the majority of the congregation showed up for my father’s funeral. The bishop talked about what a “happy” person my father was and so many people told me how wonderful he was as and how lucky I was to have his for a father.
People just don’t see what goes behind closed doors. Even among siblings, the dynamics are different and each person has their own relationships.
One of my dad’s colleagues did what would ordinarily be a very kind thing. He got a bunch of former and current co-workers to write emails with remembrances and and then gathered them all and sent them to us. A lot of it was about how he mentored the young engineers. Well I was a young engineer once and he didn’t give a shit. Mentoring me wouldn’t have helped his career.
Oh, I like that!
And this is the core of the problem. People who aren’t exposed to controlling people likely don’t see this huge potential red flag and don’t get a gut reaction to this.
It’s possible that your friend is sincere and genuinely interested in understanding his daughter. It’s also possible that it’s not.
Your friend completely misses how controlling this approach is, or could be perceived.
The statement could be taken as: “I’ll withhold my true apology until you do the actions I require.”
If my father had said that, I’d have done exactly the same thing the daughter did.
Another problem is that trauma can result from not only direct abuse but also emotional neglect.
OTOH, just as there are toxic parents there are toxic adult children. My younger brother is one such individual.
Don’t assume people listen to phone messages or read letters or emails. Emails can bypass the in box and go straight to deletion, for example. If someone has said they’re done, they may well trash any communication.
@TokyoBayer, I had the exact same gut reaction you did to that line. I’ll add that it has the additional (potential) subtext of “and once you tell me what you’re angry about, I’ll argue with you about why it doesn’t make sense for you to be angry about it.” (Like you say, it’s possible it comes without that subtext… but it’s also possible that it does.)
And yeah, as you say, I keep posting about my experiences with toxic parents, but there certainly also are toxic children as well. And as @StarvingButStrong pointed out, parent-child relationships that are toxic even when both individuals don’t intend to be.
I have a friend who has five children, four of whom she has a good relationship with, and one of whom she has a very contentious relationship with and where she says she feels like she is always walking on eggshells. This friend is very extroverted and always has her fingers in everything, and four of her kids are fine with that, and even like it. And… it’s pretty clear the fifth kid thinks that it’s really bossy and controlling.
I have some friends I have known for over 50 years. Their daughter broke contact with them in her 30s during a very emotionally upheaving time in her life. From the outside, it looked to me like her parents were supportive and she was just overwhelmed with her personal problems. A few years ago she wrote a book about her life. In it she talked about how some times her father hit her and her mother was verbally abusive and how that affected her as an adult. I was shocked. I’d watched her grow up, spent lots of time with the family. I never saw anything to suggest these things were happening. She has reconciled with her parents and they gave her their blessing when she wrote the book, so I assume it true. I have never talked to them about it because it’s none of my business. I kind of wish I hadn’t read the book, though.
You just can’t really know what is happening in someone else’s family no matter how well you think you know them.
I haven’t read this yet, but it’s from The Atlantic.
But six years after her Mother’s Day shout-out, Franke’s image had crumbled. In February 2024, she and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were sentenced to at least four years in prison after both pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse following the discovery that they had been starving, beating, and physically restraining Ruby’s two youngest children.
ETA:
The two relay how their mother’s desire to project blissful domesticity had strained the family well before news of her abuses turned the internet against her. These remarks echo some of the criticism in Shari’s new memoir, The House of My Mother, which challenges the notion that parent-child relationships are unbreakable bonds. Shari’s disinterest in rekindling a relationship with her mother, and her insistence on referring to her parents by their first names, pushes back against the expectation that children express unconditional gratitude for the parents who raised them. This cultural belief leaves children particularly vulnerable to abuse at home, the memoir suggests, because it reinforces a hierarchy in which parents hold absolute power.
I emphatically agree with this and with @raspberry_hunter who noted the same thing. This is blatantly controlling behavior, and it’s unsurprising that it was ignored. It should be ignored.
“I feel I need to apologize” — fine. Great.
“And here it is. Two or three pages in which I lay out exactly how I believe I’ve fallen short, without making excuses or blaming you. Then I express the hope that at some point you might be able to forgive me. However, I put no obligations or expectations on you, and I leave it entirely to you to make your own choice, which might include continuing to maintain no contact, as is your right.” That’s a healthy apology.
“And I want you to make yourself available to me so I can apologize” — No. Bullshit. Fuck that noise. That’s using the claim of an apology as a fig leaf for the real intent, which is to demonstrate that the so-called apologist can reach into the other person’s life and manipulate them into doing something.
If someone truly wants to apologize, they just apologize. They don’t hold out the offer of an apology inside a wrapper of horseshit.