I have blanks in my memories too, where my dad told me he hit me (he apologized for it, like in OP). And I remember nothing after "the triggering incident", like in OP.

I also have very bad trust issues now, to the point where it is hard for me to make friends if they insist on having opinions on my life. Relationships have never worked for me, because it takes me forever to open up.

Childhood trauma sucks. Why people take their anger out on innocent kids just trying to understand how the world works in their own ways, is just beyond me.

There's SOO many more positive and healthy ways to raise a child. And realizing that now makes me genuinely teary eyed about all the neural pathways in my brain that were formed or not formed as a result of my parents decisions.

But I'm kind of glad to see so many of my friends being awesome parents, really caring for and listening to their kids. I'm lowkey excited for the next generation, who will be much more open about their thoughts and feelings, and probably more well adjusted as humans.

My pet hypothesis is this will also why the current/next generation is much more open about sexuality / gender / identity, and I expect this to get only more nuanced as science understands more and as people learn to express more. But that's just something I cooked up. Anyone else feel this way?

I’m a happy cis adult male. I liked painting my nails a lot as a kid. I’m glad my parents just set me up with nail polish and ventilated area instead of bringing sexual identity into it.

[1] https://youtu.be/gbuGMbqjsSw

Video games and reading were my only solace, so I didn't exactly turn out normal. I'm a male who spends all day indoors, has trust issues, and never really embraced gender norms.

This experience builds a thick layer of skin, but it's still pretty shocking to see how easily parents are persuaded to obtain prescription medication and gender affirming surgery for their teenage kids. Sure, many of them may benefit from the medication/procedure. But for those who make a mistake with their gender transition, they will end up carrying more baggage than me.

This is true, but only for a veery tiny minority.

No matter what topic, I always hear this, but I never see it. Could you share a few examples?

> The eager diagnosis of gender identity issues along with irreversible hormone and surgical treatments (great discussion from a former gender identity counselor in this Triggernometry interview [1]) constitute child abuse and medical malpractice in some instances.

But let's not forget the other side: the banning of gender-affirming care with irreversible puberties also constitutes child abuse and medical malpractice in some instances. The question is: which happens more often? And I have yet to see any data suggesting that your description is applicable in more than a handful of cases.

> I always hear this, but I never see it. Could you share a few examples?

Jobs. There are too many white, asian, and Indian males in my company, we're told. So we have to hire others preferentially now to balance out our numbers. Yet if a white male identifies as a woman there's a space for them.

That sounds like an anti-"cishet" and racial bias.

"It is no news that women are underrepresented in the tech industry and even more so in open source. That’s why we are proud to announce the news of the first-ever all-women Open Source Program Office (OSPO). The Comcast OSPO is a geographically, culturally, and technically diverse team of members who identify as women, and who are accelerating in open source leadership, community, compliance, and security. This presentation will discuss the challenges women face in open source and the dynamics of an inclusive team."

Also like really shitty women's lib.

> the banning of gender-affirming care [...] constitutes child abuse and medical malpractice in some instances.

This is where the problem is; what's being banned, the stuff we're told never happens?

Nobody is trying to stop appropriate surgery for children with developmental sexual disorders. Generally the DSD (Intersex) community knows what's appropriate treatment (or appropriate lack of treatment in many cases) for their specific conditions.

The problem is happiness/depression issues being turned into surgical modifications.

> irreversible puberties [...]. The question is: which happens more often?

Puberty isn't child abuse. Pretending that there's an option to puberty is.

Dr Marci Bowers - a leading pediatric gender doctor and surgeon says that - “every single child who was truly blocked at Tanner stage 2 has never experienced orgasm. I mean, it’s really about zero.”

> I have yet to see any data suggesting that [the eager diagnosis of gender identity] is applicable in more than a handful of cases.

Would you consider it proven if doctors routinely ignored pre-existing mental health issues such as autism, major trauma such as child sexual abuse and loss of a parent, and signs of existing issues such as "cutting", and anorexia.

How about if the child's initial gender-identity contact admits to homophobia being their reason to seek transition? Susie Green CEO of Mermaids, "Jack’s favorite outfits were the tutu and the snow-white costume [...] that was fine but not for Dad [...] the conclusion of the sort of years up until she was about two was that I had a very sensitive quite a feminine little boy who was probably gay but Jack’s dad did not approve of our child’s effeminate behavior [...] at six she asked when she could have the operation to make her really a girl".

We forget that children often asked to go to gay-conversion therapy, because they'd been brainwashed into thinking they were failed people with a horrible sinful condition that needed fixing. Jack Green was bullied into thinking that he had to make himself a girl if he wanted to choose his own interests. He "freely chose" to have cosmetic genital surgery to be allowed to be himself.

Isn't it weird how this doesn't seem to be predicated on them being hetero? Could the bias you see have other reasons, given it's not purely predicated on sexual identity?

I don't see a reason to reply to the rest of your comment, given how you're starting with obvious fallacious rhetoric.

It's cis-phobic and het-phobic. Cishet. That's partly sexuality and partly identity.

They were cishet men, they became lesbian transwomen, it's unclear what of that got them hired.

The simple truth is: on average, people from social minorities are statistically significantly under-represented both in well-paying industries as well as in positions of power, which we see in the real world by the over-representation of people from outside these minorities. Can you explain to me how this split could be removed in a different way?

Or is your solution for those minorities to just suck it up and to accept they are forced to stay on the social bottom rungs?

That's certainly something that you can assert. Using hyperbolic and thought-terminating language - "child abuse" - in the following sentence is also something you can do, but I am not sure how useful that is, if you want others to get an accurate representation of reality.

Hmm, thats kind of reaching. Let the kids grow up and decide whether their parents were really up to snuff. Otherwise it is like wearing "I am awesome" T-shirt and then using it as proof that I am awesome.

Or maybe that's just my increased skepticism of throwaway accounts talking after LLMs became popular.

I'm not sure if it's true or not, but it's something I hope, certainly.

At the same time I think a lot of people are stuck in cycles of abuse that they inherited, and which they themselves are going to pass down to the next generation. And I think to some extent this reflects the inhospitality of the societies we live in.

Anyways, I also wanted to say that I felt a lot of the same things you did reading this. Thank you for posting. I hope you will feel more peace as you get older.

I had a different problem with relationships. I opened up quickly enough, but my partners grew up with happy families and didn't understand the level of abuse I had experienced. I felt incredibly alone. If I didn't get extremely lucky and meet a partner who understood how deeply people could be abused, I probably would be single.

In my personal experience, my dad was trying his best but simply couldn't know better. When I think about the challenges he faced -- growing up in the aftermath of the WWII and the communist Revolution, his parents were poor, he immigrated to the US by himself practically penniless, being disdained by white people for being Asian -- I feel overwhelmed by how much he had on this plate. This being said, I am still mourning the happy family I did not grow up with.

I think the current/ next generation better understands that 1.) there is such a thing as trauma 2.) We can work through them so we don't keep harming ourselves and others. I am hopeful that more people can end the cycles of violence they grew up in.

After reading online about what a great book Running on Empty: Overcoming your childhood emotional neglect was, while also feeling like I was running on empty, I decided to read the book. It felt like a biography. It made so much make sense and helped me understand why I've had the feelings I've had most of my life.

Abuse almost always comes with emotional neglect. As time moves forward I imagine most physical wounds heal, but the emotional ones are the wounds that don't heal so easily.

Here is the authors website with a relatively short read and I think anyone resonating with this HN article will probably feel "seen" by it: https://drjonicewebb.com/the-painful-secret-many-people-live...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism

I've found myself to be quite avoidant. I found attachment theory before I heard of neglect, and I found it to explain my relationships pretty well. I actually think I found running on empty while looking into attachment theory. I feel like it adequately explained how I came to be so avoidant. Based on your words, I am pretty confident that at least one of her stories of neglect will hit hard.

If they called it anything else (eg. "unrealized vulnerability") it might have been more digestable.

The book is pretty mechanical and straightforward and generally doesn't include language like that. The voice the author uses in the book is professional voice and not internet voice.

The one exception is this "fatal flaw" idea which is more or less the thesis of the authors book: Childhood emotional neglect results in feeling like if someone really knew you, they wouldn't like you. The author doesn't bring the term out in the first 10 chapters after which it is well founded.

The term itself is used to mean: "a character trait possessed by a hero that ultimately leads to their downfall." And through 10 chapters she did a pretty good job of showing that neglect does indeed lead to feelings which lead to "downfall" like consequences.

It seems like you’ve found the fatal flaw in the fatal flaw definition.

> I’m being sincere here, is this satire?

Assuming the commenter wasn’t making satire then this is not a very polite way to put that, fyi.

The chapter was on the dichotomy of blame and responsibility. You can choose a strategy of blame or a strategy of responsibility for the problems in your life, but only one of them is going to be productive. Blame can help soothe you, but blame is just emotional masturbation. Responsibility is painful, but taking responsibility is the only way to make progress.

My dad deserves blame for a neglectful childhood. He deserves blame for a lot of the experience of depression I have had in my life. He deserves blame for his complete lack of empathy. No amount of blame is going to modify my condition. No amount of blame is going to fill the holes on my life. The only way I will feel better is taking responsibility and being accountable to myself for my own emotions. I can't change the past, but I can change how I act now.

I think psychologists use the idea of locus of control. Does the world happen to you, or do you happen to the world? If life happens to you and you are purely a victim of circumstance, it's hard to imagine putting in work to improve the conditions of your life if you don't have a lot of control over it. Even though you often can't control what happens to you, you can control/influence how you react, and through that it's possible to imagine improving your situation.

Just like you would probably struggle with math if you never learned math as a kid, you would probably struggle with emotional regulation if you never learned emotional regulation as a kid. If a kid doesn't know algebra by college, that's not the kids fault, that is a failure of their education or their parents, the kid doesn't know math is important to their future or that math is missing from their education.

I used to think this was normal, that every kid got this.

He'd punch me in the arm, in the chest, smack the back of my head to 'toughen me up'.

One night I had a car accident, I called him from hospital (I was fine) he asked how the car was, how bad was the car? Who did I hit? It dawned on me that he'd never asked if I was ok. I hadn't said anything but "Dad I crashed the car".

Years of abuse that I would hide and no one would know about, except my mother who put up with it and never stopped him.

Now he has very serious dementia, in a care facility on his own, still healthy but completely not himself. He cries and my heart breaks. He asks me to help him die because he forgets who I am, but I remember everything.

Part of sadistic narcissists is building these mind games where you only get options for how to lose, never any to win, so you feel helpless and trapped.

The only winning move is not to play.

Didn't say a word, always felt the alternative of foster care was much worse

Now, I'm paying for my mother's husband's rent

Doesn't help that saying the word abuse has men ostracized in my community

sigh

The recovery process will necessarily pass by trusting people again, and making yourself vulnerable to them. That is the only way you can experience that they behave like normal human beings who won't exploit your weaknesses.

“You do this thing where you don’t think you can ever be forgiven, so you don’t apologize, but I can’t forgive you if you don’t say you’re sorry”.

An apology is only hollow if it's not followed up by any action.

I went through lot of anxiety after that. But i realized where it was alll coming from, it's as if I always knew how to act better in hindsight but when I was facing the situation I almost always couldn't do anything good.

Not that she wouldn't have left if I was good, people leave all time for whatever reasons. But I could still have been nicer to her I feel, she was also similar to me so it's not like she was always nice to me but I could have shown her better.

I had to do that too. Stay strong.

I am grateful to my wife, and for my son. We are doing things better for sure.

One memory sticks out that perfectly encompasses his malady, is when my wife cooked a big meal for a gathering which included in-laws, friends, and neighbors. When she announced dinner was going to be served, he filled a plate with food and ate by himself at the table, before anyone else had sat down or been served. When asked later why he did that, he came up with a few reasons which essentially were “I was hungry”.

I’m leaving out all manner of physical, emotional, manipulative, financial abuse he inflicted but the above anecdote is such a pure distillation of the lack of social grace combined with intense self-indulgence.

For those treating patients with NPD, the diagnosis provides a framework for understanding and treatment.

Most with the disorder will not seek treatment, as they don't think they have a problem.

Of course, diagnosis from afar is fraught, as is diagnosis by non professionals. But I think the former president provides a good frame of reference for how people with NPD behave, but taken to an almost surreal extreme.

Also cut off all contact due to it too.

I grew up in a Muslim country where I and everyone else I knew received the same level of physical punishment as part of the general parenting strategy. Some call this normalized child abuse - when I moved to a Western country for work and discussed this type of upbringing with others, they claimed I was abused and oblivious ("repressing"), and they seemed shocked at the fact that it didn't bother me or that it hasn't affected my relationship with my family. If I had been the only person receiving beatings and everyone else at my school was telling me I was being abused, I may have also deemed my father to be a monster, but I assumed the punishments were justified.

Someone may take this to imply that whether you see your parent as a monster or not depends on the context (on whether it is culturally acceptable or not) and that there is nothing inherently damaging about receiving beatings. Others may conclude that cultures where beating children is acceptable are barbaric and their children do indeed suffer lifelong trauma but manage to cope (if they do not seem to have been affected). I don't have enough data to draw any conclusions myself.

However, and this is my man point, a charitable view of the issue may at least make a distinction between parents who are intentionally hurting their children because of their own issues, and parents who believe physical punishment (or any form of a strict, stern upbringing) is a valid method for raising your children. Is it possible that the father of the OP, being Chinese, thought he was doing the right thing at the time?

One interesting thing I noted is that even in Western countries, beatings are more common and accepted in certain groups. Some Black and Hispanic friends of mine have joked about how hard their parents beat them, but I have yet to meet a White person who thinks of beating children as anything more than abuse.

Leading the witness...

I once had to fight with a therapist who tried to coach me into admitting similar when nothing remotely of the sort even happened. It was surreal, and happened right around the time of the Ramona "repressed trauma"/"false memory" mess (same school of thought?). The Ramona one must have been the only therapist brazen enough to be caught doing it because she certainly wasn't alone.

From what I've seen since, "repression" has become the retcon of psychology...commercialized gaslighting and externalization.

If you're deluded enough to think your parents didn't abuse you, that's just because you're not remembering it right. For just $150 a session, I'll show you how your parents are to blame for all your failures.

However, in every culture where this kind of beating is common there are parents who do not engage in it, who recognize that violence is the weakest form of authority.

The field of psychiatry exists to collect this kind of data and draw conclusions. Doctors agree that physical abuse is traumatizing to children. Not all of them certainly, but a significant amount.

Think about whether you’d want to perpetuate this kind of treatment onto your own children. Would you hit them knowing that there’s a non-negligible chance they’ll be working out that treatment decades later with a therapist? What would you actually gain by doing that? There’s no productive reason to hit children. If the only justification is “I was beaten too”, then you have the power to stop the cycle.

We all just grow scars and being traumatized by ever new experiences whole life. Which was worst?

You will have immediate reply to what will say here. I was beaten - not too hard in my early youth. It was common in our times/area my parents weren't hard on this. I don't blame them.I'm completely fine with this. I didn't beat my already teen children.

What I remember more was schaming by peers and or aunt's, whole catholic environment and other variations of minor - would would say - psychical violence. I was very shy and awkward for most of my life most probably thanks to this and not few beatings. But beating is easy to name, detect and measure.

Physical violence is easy to beat boy in whole spectrum of violence.

Edit: typos on phone

There is research on emotional abuse, too, actually. And generally, it has a bigger and more lasting impact than physical abuse alone (but they often go together).

Fifteen years ago the common opinion there was "well it didn't hurt me because everybody got it". Only, people realized that it actually did hurt them, they just buried it deep down. They realized that the "strong hand" of their elders was actually a sign of weakness. If you cannot guide a kid without beating them, you are an utter failure as an adult.

While interactions nowadays are rarely negative, I've resolved to cut of communication at some point in the future, after I've alleviated my own guilt by "repaying" them monetarily for all they've done in raising me.

I get yelled at most days still, though.

Most of the electronic devices I've owned over the years have been broken by my dad smashing it after getting frustrated over some aspect of schoolwork related to my usage of such devices. Curiously, this seems to happen after he's had a few drinks.

> I get yelled at most days still, though

I get the feeling that most outside observers would still classify these interactions as abusive...

You don’t owe them that. “They put a roof over my head and fed and clothed me” isn’t a parent doing good for their kids, it’s the minimum allowed by law. You make a choice when you have a child, and these costs are part of that choice.

Something that I’ve been discovering is that I have two sections of blanks in my memory: the anguish of her being so sick for years, and the times she lost her cool with me.

Both sets of memories have been trickling back decades later. I’m not sure what to share about it in particular, but in general it has been a fascinating and oftentimes horrible sensation. To suddenly have a memory activate for no apparent reason.

I’m incredibly thankful that my wife is the person she is. I’ll randomly come into the room holding back tears and she immediately knows what it is and what to do.

I think it’s important to speak these things aloud to help further normalize our talking about them.

my dad used to hit me until one day i realized i was heavier than him, and threw him onto the couch and raised my fist to hit him, but didn't. he never tried again.

my relationship with them is fine now (i'm middle aged) but i still don't listen to a god damn thing they say about life advice. quite frankly they don't know their ass from their elbow about how america really works and less than zero about growing up here. most immigrant parents don't, even though they pretend to, for some insane reason.

as for me i'm not having kids, and i don't really do long-term monogamous relationships either (i date plenty). i'm sure my parents are disappointed but quite frankly i don't give a shit.

First thing: Your condition is not your fault. I'm going to say that again, because you may need to hear it more than once: Your condition is not your fault. You don't need to feel shame for what it not your fault. It's misplaced.

Please, overcome your reluctance to see a therapist. You deserve more than slowly sinking until you drown. You deserve to heal, to live a life that is actually living.

Is there anyone at all, from work or a bar or a church or a neighbor or anyone you can turn to, and say, "Please help me find the strength to go to a therapist. Please go with me to the office the first time so I don't back out. Please help me remember that this is not my fault, and that I don't need to feel shame in seeking help."

If there's nobody else, tell us your location. Someone here will probably be around, and willing to go with you, if you're willing to accept help in that way.

Please, please, please. Find a way to get help. You're worth more than this.

[1] Yes, I remember the author's username. I'm withholding it out of respect for their privacy.

I would similarly struggle to remember specific events, and at one point I even started voice recording them yelling. But showing them later only lead to more attempts at gaslighting and victim blaming. However, it was eye opening to see 3+ hour long runtimes on the voice memos that I couldn't remember anything about.

Emotional abuse is every bit as harmful and affects your brain in the same way as other kinds of abuse.

I hate people that try to apologize or convince you that they deserve forgiveness because they meant well or "they're your parents/family". It gets hard to push back without being disrespectful. And regardless of how old you get, the power dynamic of parent and child follows you. After a while you stop sharing completely.

Separating their behavior from who they are as a person is the hardest thing I've had to do. But it's the first milestone in rebuilding a relationship and helped me seperate myself from their behavior. Being aware that their behavior is a consequence of their upbringing earned empathy from me, but I think forgiveness requires empathy in both directions. I think it's equally hard to accept that you hurt someone you love.

Cultural norms can cause a lot of people to stay quiet, even if they decided to cut all contact, because talking poorly about your parents is seen as one of the worst things you can do. Regardless of what that thing was. I couldn't finish reading it in one sitting and I still had to skim parts of it. But I appreciate this being writted and shared publicly.

The first is For Your Own Good (1981), in which she describes the "poisonous pedagogy" of emotional and physical abuse passed down from generation to generation, and how we minimize and turn a blind eye to it because we want to follow the 4th commandment "Honor thy father and thy mother" (or in this case, a Confucian equivalent) -- at tremendous cost to ourselves, our own children, and society at large. It is one of the most eye-opening books I have ever read.

The second is her more recent The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting (2005), which is more therapeutic and focused on how people's physical pain and sickness can dissipate when they are able to finally stand up for themselves and their own emotional needs, rather than continue to pretend their abusive parents were actually good.

Alice Miller's first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979) is her best-known, but in my opinion, the above two books show her understanding evolving to become even more sophisticated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)

The sad reality that Miller outlines in her most popular title is that you'll probably never receive this want even if you communicate it constantly. That book really hurt to read. But it is the truth.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/True-Drama-Gifted-Child-Phantom/dp/....

The timeline here is important -- her son was born in 1950, and her first book wasn't written until 29 years later.

I think it's much fairer to view her work as a heroic attempt to atone for her own sins. She was abused by her own parents, did the same to her children in turn, and then dedicated her entire professional life to figuring out how to break that cycle. It was too late for her own kids, but she was able to help others instead.

So it's unfair to judge her by saying she didn't practice what she preached, because they came at different times. What she wrote about was sadly informed by her own personal experience.

The Body Keeps the Score (by Bessel van der Kolk) is another great book, but it's about trauma generally, and especially things like PTSD. It doesn't focus much on specifically parental abuse the way the blog post, and Alice Miller, do.

Of the memories you have gathered up, do the vivid ones center around loud, violent interactions (like yelling)?

I ask because I don't remember a lot of my childhood, except some vivid memories around things being my fault. Being blamed for things.

I love my parents. They did everything for me. But my memories of happiness are in photos and more recent events. Decades ago are just, well, empty. Take lots of pictures, y'all--and recordings!

Thank-you.

Some memories though, physically stop me for a second. I have to blink them away, like phantasms to dispel. Those I would want to face head on. I always promise myself I will conquer them by writing or drawing them; someday I should have a certain list of them.

More and more, I'm feeling sorry I didn't keep a daily journal.

That is how it feels at least. Much closer to a dream. Perhaps instead dreams and my earliest memories are one and the same.

"But we've already been there!"

"Yeah, but not in real life you haven't."

Or, instead of brand new places, people relive the same ones with different--injected or modified--memories.

You ask about yelling, I vividly remember how when my father shouted at me/my brothers, the glasses in the kitchen would vibrate against each other and make a clanking noise whenever he finished a sentence, and we'd just sit in silence. Sometimes even the doorbell would start making noise from his voice.

But I also have a lot of good memories, and I can luckily say that my father has turned around when I got a bit older. I think my parents lacked the maturity to have children at their age.

When the books are teaching (or admonishing, in my case) both of us, it's better than nothing I guess.

Instead of "problems" as "opportunities," it could become "trauma" to "healing."

Just something they can feel like they own and can be interested in. Folks around me have their thing, and I'm just floating around. I have books for most things, but haven't dived into most of them.

Who knows; maybe reflecting on one is a doorway to others...

But, thankfully, I got out. And I am never going back. The only person in my entire family that I trust is my eldest sister. She's the only reason I tolerate the rest (from far away). Otherwise I'd have left the country and cut all ties with them. All I needed to hear was "It's ok to go against the wishes of your parents". My counsellor told me that in the second of our 8 sessions when I voluntarily checked myself in a psychiatric hospital because I'd been depressed and suicidal for the last decade (since I was 14). I've never looked back since.

My childhood has left a massive imprint on my personality. I have severe trust issues, generalized anxiety, repressed emotions. But I can say with absolute certainty that my life has exponentially improved since I left my home behind.

In my case, I feel comfortable trying to make amends with my dad because 1.) I feel pretty certain about my boundaries and 2.) I think he actually wants to improve. But he didn't want to improve until I had shown him firsthand that I could completely cut him off without looking back.

I think there are many parents who, even if are backed into a corner and given chances to improve, will not. It sounds like your stepfather is one of them. I wonder what his childhood was like, and what pains that he endured, in order to treat you so terribly.

I think what matters most for any individual person is getting ourselves to a state where we feel okay and happy about ourselves. How that process unfolds depends on the person.

Take care.

I don't know how to interpret your father's apology, but I do know how I would interpret my step father's (if he ever got around to giving one, he's a textbook narcissist). I'd never accept it because he will never truly feel sorry for his actions. He will apologize because he'll need something from me and this would be the only way to get it. Or to build his public image of being extremely pious, true, dedicated, sacrificing father. I will turn 180° and run.

I sometimes see kids screaming back at there parents. If I had ever done something like that there would be a funeral.

I just remember going to a friends place and being bewildered at overflowing trust and joy in their normal interactions. At first, I thought it was because I was there as a guest. But turns out they actually enjoyed being with each other. Really opened my eyes up to what a family could be.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

-Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse

***

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
      They may not mean to, but they do.   
  They fill you with the faults they had
      And add some extra, just for you.

  But they were fucked up in their turn
      By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
  Who half the time were soppy-stern
      And half at one another’s throats.

  Man hands on misery to man.
      It deepens like a coastal shelf.
  Get out as early as you can,
      And don’t have any kids yourself. [0]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asVf8Zpw1tA

They read you Peter Rabbit, too.

They give you all the treats they had

And add some extra, just for you.

They were tucked up when they were small,

(Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke),

By those whose kiss healed any fall,

Whose laughter doubled any joke.

Man hands on happiness to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

So love your parents all you can

And have some cheerful kids yourself.

- Adrian Mitchell

It is worth 5000 self help books.

My mother once said to me "When you were a child I thought you'd grow up to be the next Adolph Hitler.".

My father's version was "You couldn't have had a brother because we couldn't have another one of you.".

Both punished me for not being the person they wanted me to be, not only was there very little overlap between my personality and what they wanted, there was bugger all overlap between what the two of them wanted individually.

I ended up with a compromised façade of a personality that I'm still trying to peel away.

ITB > Were you a troublemaker ?

I might've been a bit of a disagreeable cunt, but I was never fucking Hitler.

Put your pretensions about the sacred nature of life aside and understand that children are a pain in the arse to have, and the disagreeable son of disagreeable parents even more so.

But I maintain to this day that I was never really an arsehole.

Also, if people stop having kids we're going just as extinct as if we have too many. Learn a bit of moderation.

Considering that, we need to make having kids a more viable option than it is (and for a lot of the most useful people in society).

same goes for some of the good things too.

but i hope that i manage to skip some of the bad things i experienced from my parents and add some good things that they didn't do so my kids have a better experience than me. and i hope the trend continues.

Then we'll navigate interpersonal difficulties as they inevitably come.

Compare that to the situation where you saw some idiot kid fuck himself up at school, and immediately learned not to do that.

Why learn from the latter but not the former? The stakes in either situation are equally high.

As to how we act, in the negation of what not to do there is the freedom to think and be creative; just be reasonable about it.

Questions made in bad faith generally get rebutted (and downvoted) but bad faith arguments are really only fundamentally uninteresting if they've already been so thoroughly rebutted that there's no further conversation to have.

And the fundamental truth about it is that our society isn't even mature enough to ask the questions - which is why they even work as bad faith rhetorical devices in the first place.

But either way, I wouldn't go as far as asked in bad faith - his comment was more snarky or snide.

But either way, not uninteresting.

If the discussion goes on long enough, one of the more interesting conclusions is the classical ethics question, what kind of net benefit will justify an evil act? Not really on topic for HN though.

https://fee.org/articles/why-the-ethics-of-would-you-kill-ba...

The question of why we are the way we are and (even intergenerationally) we seem to be unable to do anything about it seems interesting enough to qualify to me.

Might be wrong.

Because fact is, even when the kid is difficult, telling them stuff you wrote here makes everything worst. It is not about teaching them better behavior or otherwise working on them. It is adult taking revenge so that adult feels good.

The situation is never going to change if you refuse to consider the contributing factors - a stubborn child is hard to deal with, especially under resource restricted circumstances.

Denying that reality does nothing to improve either the child's or parent's behaviour or the manners in which each responds to the others.

And that is the issue with this argument - perfectly normal kids gets treated badly and blamed for perfectly normal behavior. Yes, kids with issues end up being abused more often, but you do not even describe yourself having adhd or autism or some other hard issue.

-------------------

When I became parent, I became less tolerant of these "maybe the kid was just too hard". Because, I realized that decision between abuse or not is fairly often conscious choice. Adults say hurtful things to manipulate kids into what they want or to vent their emotions. They know full well what they are doing, they just think they are entitled to do it. Or they genuinely think that the kid is not entitled better treatment and deserves it.

It is not always inability to do otherwise in technical sense. It is unwillingness to do so and sense that it is just to hurt the kid.

When I became parent, I gained some insight into some of what my mom did. More understanding did not lead to "parents were actually right I see now" nonsense. I became retroactively angry, because I realized how much of "bad stuff" was knowing and intentional. (It was not even abuse, nothing that bad. More of, stuff like insulting me to manipulate me into something. That sort of more minor stuff. But still, conscious.)

I don’t know what I want to call this fallacy. Maybe tit-for-tat fallacy.

One person’s bad behavior doesn’t “annihilate” or vacate the other’s. They don't “cancel out”.

The tactic is (reflexively) used to derail the interrogator and change subject.

“Yes, it is true I am also verbally abusive but right now we're talking about your verbal abuse.”

It's not that this line of reasoning works with the abuser but at least it's a reminder to oneself what's being attempted.

Hearing the author's dad apologize to her made me happy (and, if I'm honest, a tad jealous). I hope the apology is genuine and, on top of that, he takes action to make amends.

Every time I read something like this, it's a wave of sadness and empathy, then it's a wave of anger. I'm a generation older than the author, and went through a similar experience with my mother. I witnessed my cousin be thrown against the drywall so hard, he broke it. I'm convinced he has permanent brain damage today due to the abuse he suffered.

I learned from my uncle recently that my aunt and my mother were the product of horrendous and similar abuse from my grandmother. My grandmother, who my mother made out to be a saint.

Every fucking generation, this filial piety bullshit repeats itself.

She suffers from my father's abuse (father who also had troubled parents) and accepts everything cause she has no other solution in her mind. She hates violence and thus doesnt want to fight back(she tries more these days though)

Of course i'm also fucked up. We all try to analyse and understand our parents wounds.. even though it seems fruitless.

A good enough family lineage is a rare form of wealth.

It's not uncommon for aunts/uncles to turn a blind eye to child abuse. They just don't care because they see it as some sort of rite of passage, or because they view it as something that could never compare to the horrors of the motherland.

My father beat me so I went to my uncle (non-blood) for help and you know what I got? Another ass beating. The culture just doesn't view it as abuse unless you end up in the hospital, because at least you aren't starving to death.

To be clear, you are both welcome here and welcome to share your experience. But please do it without crossing into personal attack or flamewar. There's plenty of room to share your experience without those things, and doing so will increase the odds of you being heard correctly.

I simply wanted to make it clear that the pattern of abuse is not a cultural thing, it is a human thing.

I worry that my adding "but you probably know that" came across wrong and I wish I could go back and edit/delete that part. I added it because I thought my comment that non-Asians can show patterns of abuse was kind of obvious and I was acknowledging that it was obvious. It reads to me now like a snarky attack on your motives but it was not intended to be.

I'll take your word for it though that this is a prevalent pattern in Asian culture. I have worked for 26 years alongside Asians in the Bay Area, 50% of my managers in my career were Asian, I hosted an Asian as a foreign exchange student for a year ... I have never heard of this darker side of the culture.

While it may be prevalent among Asian cultures, it is absolutely not specific to them. To defend, and even praise an abuser is a common, human, cross-cultural response to abuse. It's a coping mechanism people use to justify the things that have happened to them, so they can carry on without having to face their awful experiences. It helps relieve them (temporarily) of the "double burden" the abused feel -- they had to suffer the abuse, and then they have to do the work to move past it. Easier to insist the abuser was right, and they themselves are at fault.

To insist this is somehow confined to Asian families negates the experience of people everywhere. The original post was about an Asian family, but unless everyone in here is also Asian, these comments only serve to reinforce the breadth and variety of people for whom this resonates.

I'm not saying this to be contrarian, and I believe neither was the other person who responded. HN is not a place where people care about internet points.

https://www.undispatch.com/here-is-how-every-country-ranks-o...

Was that the criteria? I assumed we were talking about being beaten by your parents — of which I, non-Asian, know something about. (And parent was beaten by their parent....)

(I've never given a shit about internet points.)

Is filial piety a part of Western Culture? No, not even close. Honor thy mother and father is not even comparable to the level of filial piety. Poverty, lack of education, substance abuse - that is universal causes for abuse. However, filial piety is another cause and unique to Asian cultures.

Incredible to me how this is lost by so many here.

What's not inevitable is attacking other people. That's not allowed here. Much better is to keep the possibility of misreadings and misunderstandings in one's attention, and use it as a device to help one remain neutral, or at least respectful, in responding to people.

My conundrum is that I simply don't feel like I'd be able to cut off my parents, especially my mom. I simply can't imagine a world without her. I would feel lost without her. Even though she may have sexually abused me. Because in the end, who else do I have?

Their comments on "hurt" rather than bad, and their feeling that they couldn't fight back unless they became "dirty", or just as bad as them, were especially resonant.

Their comments about their dad living through the cultural revolution made me remember the scene in the Three Body Problem where Ye Wenjie confronts the three communist youths that had killed her father many years after the revolution, and they explain that their own suffering and how it brought along her fathers death.

I can perfectly imagine that friend saying "you're making excuses for him," and the frustration both the friend and author have at not seeing the situation from the same vantage point. I can feel the friend's frustration at the gravity of the situation somehow not getting through fully to the author. (As well as the author's frustration for the friend not grokking the complexity of the relationship!)

The thing is, there may well be feelings and contradictions that the author must-- when they are ready and willing-- sit with and somehow start to confront and understand, regardless of what those feelings are. As someone who hasn't dealt with physical abuse, not only would be it difficult to know how to help a close friend through those feelings, but there's a good chance I'd actively guide them away from confronting them. "You're nothing like him," or, "but you were just defending your sister," etc. I don't want a friend to feel those things! And even if I knew they need to go there, how in the world would I know when it's time or how to safely encourage them to confront them?

There are things that feel wrong that are part of the right process, and plenty of things that feel right which don't help you heal. A therapist who specializes in child abuse can help the author by guiding them through this, with practical experience and without judgment.

It’s possible to help these memories fully process, which changes the recall into something less vivid and overwhelming. For example with EMDR or somatic experiencing.

Trauma and Memory by Peter Levine explores this, as well as The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk.

> “But I promise you, your mom and I never wanted to hurt you. I thought I was trying my best. I’m truly sorry.”

This is when you have to realize that the person is a sociopath who will say anything to get what they want, even pretending to apologize. When they seem earnest they're still pathologically lying because the malice goes beyond intentional but becomes casual, as that's just who they are. And people wonder why we have trust issues.

The unfortunate reality is that these sort of people also get very far in life, since nature and society love go getters without morals or conscience.

When you cut a person out, you are removing their power over you. They apologize to get power over your emotional state back.

The narcissist doesn't feel empathy for you. The apology is meant as a transaction, not an expression of guilt or an admission of wrong doing.

That's why when you test the apology ("you'll stop this behavior that results in me feeling bad") the test fails.

The reply from the daughter was an attempt to set a clear boundary while also showing appreciation and support for his change. I think setting boundaries like this is a perfectly healthy thing to do, including/especially towards family members.

I'm completely fine for my comment to prompt people's own takes, as you gave in your second paragraph, in response to my observation.

People are entitled to set and enforce boundaries. Given that dad is abuser, this one is very healthy one, because it allows the daughter to keep her freedom.

My father would alternate between verbal abuse, physical abuse and the worst, emotional abuse. This started when I was very young, in primary school. Coming from an Asian family, we were all expected to be our best and to do our best in school, and getting anything less than the best grades was considered unacceptable. The consequences would often be harsh verbal beatdowns, curfews and extra classes.

Physical punishments were common, and they would usually involve a cane, stick, or belt. I was convinced I was getting away easy because the 'crime' I had committed was always super-serious, a grave and punishable offence, something like telling a lie or not doing my chores, so yeah it would be the death penalty were it not for the large-hearted compassion of the man administering the punishment.

It later turned more to emotional abuse as I had learned to start tuning out the pain and feelings and switch to a sort of zombie-mode when it came to the punishments. The emotional abuse would pain a lot longer and eventually started triggering mild to severe depressive episodes. As a male child we were told to tough it out and be a man.

As an example, the expectation on me was that I would study in a particular medical program after school. I was not remotely interested in medicine, I didn't do well, and did not get through. I chose another discipline that I liked. I am in my fifties now, but I still remember this incident very well. The summary of the comments was "I am ashamed of you, you are a failure, you have made me lose face." That stung harder than I would have expected, and it still takes a bit of effort to let go.

He had this way of changing his personality depending on the audience. To our close relatives, he would appear as the model father doing everything in his capacity (and beyond) to do good for his family, and that narrative was unquestioned and accepted by all. This was not completely without a basis, since he had supported his four siblings through a difficult childhood. The mask would drop when there were no outsiders around. Even after he died, everyone who came to pay their respects had good words to say.

As I graduated, I decided to quickly move out of home and leave the country, so I took the first chance I got and left. The abuse turned mostly emotional after that, and there's a lot I am leaving out here. I still had to keep in touch with family due to other reasons but by then I had evolved my way of coping.

The man is now dead and gone, I have not a single photo of him, nor any of the letters he had written to me. Later when I hit my late forties and would have a few deep conversations with mom, she would slowly tell me how hard it was to have lived with him for nearly six decades. She had many career opportunities that she was made to give up in order to "be the mother that a family needs", it was for the sake of external appearances. There was no physical abuse towards mom, but there was so much emotional abuse I couldn't deal with. Perhaps I took the cowards' way out and left the country, but in my early twenties I didn't know what to do.

I still have dreams (nightmares?) where he and I are face to face, arguing vigorously, stirring up all the wrong emotions, but there's not much I can do about that except to remind myself that it's just a dream, and to let it go.

So yeah, this type of abuse can really mess a person up. I'm coping now with proper guidance, letting go, meditating, and staying aware of unwholesome thoughts as they come up. It is a hard journey but I (we) need to make that decision and take charge of our feelings and actions.

I have dreams about my dad as well. Just last night I dreamt that he was beating me, and I kept screaming "help me, help me!" in my dream, except no one responded. Always hard to remind myself it's just a nightmare in the moment, when the scene is so visceral.

I think you hit the nail on the head with coping being a hard journey that is still in our locus of control. I wish you (and me!) lots of grace in navigating the Asian kid journey. Think I'll always be navigating it.

One thing I wonder about your dad is what his childhood was like. I wonder what sorts of pains he grew up with, such that he took it out so violently (physically and emotionally), on you and your mom.

Thank you for reading through and for writing such a thoughtful comment. I'm really grateful for it.

Not everyone that can procreate, should. Stories of parental abuse enrage me to hyperventilation and I had a good childhood.