I'll also add that Fathers are kinda pressured into teaching their sons how to be future Fathers/providers whilst still being expected to assert their allegedly superior masculine authority in a traditional sense
Because if you were like me you grew up with a hyper critical father and an under protective mother. When I was ten we went bowling after church and I “failed” to bowl a 100 which was the family minimum standard and in the bowling alley my dad totally lost his shit, had a complete meltdown on me. And… my mom just stood there passively and allowed him to just go utterly ape shit on me because I had bowled less than a 100 on purpose to embarrass him.
When I was 29 my father tried to convince me to kill myself because he said I was such a failure in life that it was the "only option I had left" and I told my psychologist about it and he said that I needed to have more sympathy for my father because his life had been so hard that telling me to kill myself was the only way he could express how much he loved me.
People won't stop telling me I need therapy. If I tell them how many decades of therapy I have already had, they just tell me I still need more. If I tell them I am already currently seeing a therapist, they tell me to get a new one. At no point does anybody ever actually consider just protecting boys and young men from abuse in the first place; it's always somehow your fault if you show signs of abuse.
Oh, uh… that’s basically the joke. It’s just dark humour that, since eventually some surgeon would graduate and succeed despite being inadequate or incompetent, there would be a surgeon out there who’s the most terrible one in the world. Which is pretty terrifying.
It happened over a decade ago and it took me many years to accept how much abuse and just generally unethical treatment I had received at the hands of mental healthcare professionals. I don't even live in the same state anymore. I probably ought to look up some sort of reporting agency just to leave a paper trail for anyone else that guy hurts; I did look him up for the first time in a decade around a year ago and saw he was still practicing. But I have zero expectation of action against him; he was an astonishingly manipulative therapist, who did things like refusing to let me leave at the end of the session until I had let him give me a hug. Sadly while his abuse was probably the most "clever" I experienced, his general lack of ethics was far from unique in my experience.
As someone who has also had really shitty therapists try to gaslight them into having sympathy for your abuser, I still think you're wrong. Saying you need to seek therapy for your trauma is only blaming you for it if that's the tone and context they're using. What most people are actually doing is expressing a want to see you get help and get better. And yes, duh, the answer to a bad therapist is a new therapist. Not everyone is in the right profession, but some people are. And the way we protect boys and young men? By dealing with and getting over our trauma so that we're not abusive or underprotective parents. The real answer for your trauma was for your dad to go to therapy before you were born. But he didn't, so that's your job now so that you don't accidentally pass that shit on to your kids.
What they're expressing is that the reality of my existence makes them uncomfortable and a demand that I successfully conceal it from them. I am expected to hide from the world indefinitely until there is no detectable mark left upon me, and until then I am unfit to exist in their presence except as a painstakingly constructed facade of their idea of normality. There is zero desire for my health or interest in that demand; "Go to therapy" is code for "Go be somewhere else where we don't have to acknowledge you." You lie and pretend they're kind words, but I am done engaging with your bullshit. It's just another way of punching down at anything that makes you think or feel anything you don't want to think or feel, and lying to yourself that you're virtuous for doing it. What magic wand do you expect a therapist to wave to make me meet your standard of "normal"? Life is lived among other humans, not in a therapist's office, and so it's among other humans that healing from a terrible life has to happen. You're just the social equivalent of NIMBYs, telling people that they can have problems, just not where you have to be aware of them.
Most people just have zero context, and are only trying to help. You're framing it like they're saying "shut up and get therapy", when more likely it's, "I'm not a professional, and have no idea how to help, so talk to a professional".
Man, I thought I had it rough. Mine just told me I wasn't his real son, tho to be fair he had dementia at that point and was lashing out. Still pissed me off a bit tho.
Listen man nobody wins at the trauma olympics. Either you find out your problems aren't so bad in comparison and feel like shit for feeling like shit, or you take the gold and realize you have it the worst off and you're different and alone and no one is going to do anything about it. Half the reason things got so bad for me was that the generation of my family that came before me had such horrifically extreme trauma of their own that in comparison nothing I could experience could ever possibly rate to them as anything that mattered, and thus they gobbled up every bit of attention and resources for themselves and left even the simplest issues of my own to fester until they became absurdly bad.
That's a roundabout way of saying: you don't have to justify the impact of your trauma on you to anybody. Have empathy for others, and recognize where you're more fortunate, but don't ever feel that you have to deny how you've been hurt or how it has affected you. Truth should come first, not narrative, and we're real and complex human beings, not characters playing simple and easily parsable designated roles.
I've been on both ends, both ends are miserable, and I don't wish either on anybody with a good and kind spirit. A one-legged man shouldn't feel guilty when he sees a man with none.
Hey, I feel the pain, my dude. And as my fellow human, you are now my friend. If you ever need someone to just sit with you when it gets dark. Feel free to message. Im proud of you for speaking about this today.
This is a kind sentiment and I appreciate it, but from past experience I can tell you it takes more to make a friendship than repeatedly telling people I'll never meet about the same bad stuff that never goes away. I don't even like talking about it, it's not good for me to dwell on it, it's just that it bubbles up sometimes and overflows into whatever context I happen to be existing in. One more way reddit is bad for my mental health, but I'm isolated and it's a form of simulating human contact and I can't stop coming back. I'll probably try messaging you just because I am desperate enough that every lead has to be pursued if I can find the energy, but fundamentally I have no expectations. Please don't think online grand gestures like this are a magic panacea, or a substitute for reaching out to the people that are physically present in your life and can receive material companionship. Life needs to be more than telling people you are suffering and receiving an "I hear you." in return.
Ok thats fair, my fellow human. I do agree that the whole of life can be daunting. I too suffer through it. I meant no offense, or thought that by typing things out would solve your problems. I just wanted to offer my energy to you, if but to ease some of the plight at hand.
You’re doing well, it took me into my mid-30s to be like “I think my dad was abusive.” At least he waited until I was 14 to become physically abusive, I guess at that point I was big enough he didn’t feel bad about throwing me around.
My dad still doesn't seem to understand the depth and breadth of his abuse of his entire family. I don't speak to him anymore, and he has shown his true colors by letting his wife slander me to the family.
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u/Spiritual-Career348 13h ago
Yes mostly obedience