The Missing Missing Reasons

I imagine that if you're on these forums and you, first, don't recognize your own shortcomings; don't understand or care about how you've emotionally affected those around you; always assume you're the victim even when you're in a position of authority and care; and refuse to acknowledge or accept the other person's point of view - then this is not just a defense mechanism against online criticism, but the actual reason you've become estranged from your children. This is kind of obvious to me, but at the same time parents really do seem to blame their kids, as if it was god who gave them rotten ones instead of accepting the responsibility for making them in the first place.

I thought the thesis about how different people privilege emotion over facts, how emotion is reality for some people, was very interesting:

> The difference isn't a matter of style, it's a split between two ways of perceiving the world. In one worldview, emotion is king. Details exist to support emotion. If a member gives one set of details to describe how angry she is about a past event, and a few days later gives a contradictory set of details to describe how sad she is about the same event, both versions are legitimate because both emotions are legitimate.

> [...] Emotion creates reality.

> In the second worldview, reality creates emotion. Members want the full picture so they can decide whether the poster's emotions are justified. Small details can change the entire tenor of a forum's response; members see a distinction between "She said I'm worthless" and "She said something that made me feel worthless." Members recognize that unjustified emotions (like supersensitivity due to trauma, or irritation with another person that colors the view of everything the person does) are real and deserve respect, but they also believe that unjustified emotions shouldn't be acted on.

Similar phenomenon exists about other relationships with issues - marital, employees, siblings, friends.

Sometimes people talk about them and the stories sound similar. No details, hints or missing reasons, other parties acting completely oddly out of nowhere.

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?

Frank Herbert

I've been robbed! Twice! I went to this wedding and the money we collected for the lucky couple was stolen, can you believe it? *Really?* We put the money on a debit card and the code for the debit card was a secret message on a nice video we made for the couple. *How?* Everyone said something one the video with a number. How clever, then how was it stolen? We send the debit card together with a usb stick and a basket with other gift like hard liquor via the post to the couple. Guess what? *What?* The packet arrived but the usb and debit card where missing. *The debit card and usb are missing?* Yes, those sneaky bastards at the post office only took that and left the vodka, those criminals just know what to get away with. *Who send the package?* Me, I'm going to the police this afternoon the file a report. Hopefully the couple in not too angry at us, like what can we do. *Nothing I guess, you said you where robbed twice?* Yes this morning I noticed my electrified cargo bike is gone. *What a coincidence, you really are unlucky.*

Asking if reality creates emotion or vice versa is like asking if the front of the horse pulls the back or if the back of the horse pushes the front.

Please don't post this sort of high-indignation, low-information post, especially when the topic is inflammatory. It breaks many of the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and degrades discussion.

If your post is rooted in personal experience that you would be willing to share, of course that would be a completely different thing. But simply venting the energy of it like this does nothing to foster understanding.

For the person yes. But others may prefer to build their understanding emphasizing one or the other. (And that might feed back to the first person's presentation and incentives, in turn affecting their person.)

Does We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse deserve a mention here?

I've seen this before, it's a not uncommon link to see thrown around any time someone wants to accuse someone of being disingenuous of the reason for someone else's anger or resentment.

Although even the piece notes that sometimes people are just shitty, sometimes the reason isn't that the estranged did something wrong. And in that case, the estranged could genuinely not know.

And that those who know don't hang around forums like the ones mentioned because they aren't helpful. If you know why someone is estranged from you and you can articulate those reasons, you go to a place that deals with those reasons.

Although I'm curious what prompted you to post this.

Most people and parents are harassers not knowing they are harassers. Most parent treat their child as a possession as well, being the root of abusive behaviours. All of those things are difficult to explain for the average person and difficult to listen to and understand for the average parent.

Harassement and abusive behaviours are a way bigger problem that people think it is. My opinion is that more than 50% of people at least are harassers and abusers to a degree or another. This is just how society used to work not long ago and since the dawn of mankind.

What can be done is teaching kids what harassment and abusive behaviours are. Most people think their behaviours are normal. My mom who has a relatively high education speaks to me in a completely abusive way. As do my father who has 2 engineering degrees.

What basis do you have for concluding that the number is more than 50%? Is there any data that suggests that?

I'd agree that these kinds of dysfunction are common enough to be visible, but I've never seen any actual numbers about the prevalence of this kind of behavior.

My own observations. (note this could highly vary from country to country as well)

Thanks for your comment. My guess would be you are just not trained to see those behaviours.

edit: note this is surfacing in the game and movie industries right now. This is entire companies crippled by harassment and abusive behaviors (not only sexual ones).

edit2: an example. Your boss doing what he do to keep his position is using harassment. To a degree or another. Though it feels normal to you and me, like it used to be normal to joke about different people.

There's a big correlation between parents who cause a lot of damage to their kids, and parents who are incapable of honestly addressing their own failings.

The common cause is that these parents have some kind of disordered personality, mostly in the "Cluster B" direction (NPD, BPD, etc)... They tend to display a lot of shitty behaviors, generally, because they lack the self-awareness to change.

Actually, my own personal observations would tend to agree with you... I see dysfunction everywhere I look, and my social & family circles are brimming with people who've suffered from family dysfunction. If I took my own observations as a fair random sample, I would definitely believe your conclusion.

I come from a dysfunctional family background. I've spent a lot of time in therapy & recovery, and learned a considerable amount about this kind of behavior.

I'm also aware that my own experience biases me toward seeing this behavior, everywhere. If anything, I tend to over-pathologize people around me, as an artifact of practicing the kind of thinking that I needed to do in order to get better... And my personal sample of observing the human race is pretty heavily weighted toward other people who definitely have pathologies, because I've spent so much time with them in meetings and groups.

It's really common for people with this kind of history to feel like "Everybody I meet turns out to be messed up... All my friends, family, and romantic partners seem to be dysfunctional, too." This isn't an accident, though... Messed up people are drawn to other messed-up people, for a lot of reasons.

Anyway, point being... I have to work to maintain awareness that my personal observations are probably not a fair, random sample of the population. I don't trust my intuition in this regard, because I know that I've been so hyper-focused on it, my whole life.

Well... You're not wrong, anyway. These forums are filled with dysfunctional people who have caused a lot of pain and suffering to their children. They're not good people, by any metric.

But I disagree that it's an uninteresting topic. The adult children of these parents are often struggling in their own lives with problems that directly tie back to their dysfunctional parenting.

For those adult children, it's critical to the healing process to come to an understanding that their parents behavior was not OK or normal.

If this isn't interesting to you, personally, that's OK... But then wouldn't it make more sense to just sit out of the discussion, and find another topic to comment on? By dismissing it, you run the risk of coming off as insensitive or disrespectful to the people who do benefit from participating in this kind of discussion.

Oh I think I have a method for you. Ask yourself the following question at least once a day for 5 days: is it pleasurable in my head right now? Just ask yourself that question, this is the method. It is magic. It will activate your natural abilities to snap in a good mood (like if you were given a good gift for example), to get yourself in the now, understand your dysfunctions, accept all situations and so forth. It will also tell you if you need meds (when your natural abilities dont trigger anymore). Also dont forget that you need chaos, some of the times, so don't whip yourself about it.

is it pleasurable in my head right now? Just ask yourself that question, for 5 days.

edit: please post back here in 5 days to give me your feedback if that's ok to ask

That's a neat idea, thank you for the suggestion. Where did you pick that up?

> My guess would be you are just not trained to see those behaviours.

Or you could be inferring them where they aren't.

And I don't understand the boss reference.

Maybe they're not there for enlightment, but to vent and to support others who vent.

My point is that that goes both ways, children can also cause damage to their kids. The piece even admits that.

Basically, All X are Y, but not all Y are X. Shitty people become estranged parents but not all estranged parents are shitty people. Estranged parents who frequent forums specifically for estranged parents are a subset.

But it is a popular piece. Partly because it can be used to explain certain patterns of behavior. Partly because it's easy to weaponize. Now, if you are genuinely unaware of what you may have done to cause an issue, or if you actually haven't done anything worthy of a response, someone can whip this out on you to accuse you of being vague to hide how shitty you truly were.

So without any context to frame this piece, I was curious as to why the poster posted it.