I: Introduction
When the scapegoat of a toxic family tries to confront them about their constant emotional abuse, one of the many forms of invalidation that the narcissistic parent and his or her flying monkeys respond with is to trivialize and minimize the pain and trauma they’ve put the victim through.
One manipulation tactic they may use in the service of this trivializing and minimizing is to say that one cannot hold the abusers up to some lofty and unrealistic standard of moral perfection: the narcissistic parent, after all, was never “given an instruction booklet” on how to deal with every single problem that inevitably comes along when raising children.
Never mind that the victim never required such unattainable ideals of parental and familial perfection. All the victim ever wanted was to be treated with basic, common decency.
As every reasonable person understands, even in the best and healthiest of families, there will sometimes be fighting, there will be moments of frustration, and otherwise beloved family members will have certain quirks and foibles that will drive us a little crazy. There is nonetheless a certain baseline that any decent family will not go under, despite those frustrating moments that are otherwise unavoidable.
I wish to discuss those things that a decent family would never do…or if they every now and then did lapse into such nastiness, they would snap out of it soon enough, apologize, and work hard not to repeat such nastiness. I write this as a guide that I hope will help anyone out there who may be in an emotionally abusive family, or suspects him- or herself to be in one, and who would like to have a kind of yardstick with which to measure whether or not he or she is in a situation sufficiently bad to need to plan an escape from it.
Naturally, as the scapegoat of my own family-of-origin, I’ll be using examples of my own experience of them to illustrate what I mean by those lows that go beneath the level of basic decency that one should expect from one’s family, that it–however imperfect–wouldn’t be a case of lowering itself to emotional abuse.
Families of basic decency won’t be consistently guilty of the following habits:
II: Gaslighting You Into Believing You’re Less Capable Than You Really Are
Your family is supposed to have your back, and while some criticisms of you, when necessary and appropriate, are unavoidable, being truly supportive of you means that they should be, under normal circumstances, helping you to build your self-confidence, not undermining that building of it.
Imagine being in a family with a narcissistic mother who tells you, a child, that you not only have autism, but that the psychiatrists who evaluated you had you do an IQ test on which you’d apparently scored in the early 60s. She tells you such a score means you’re retarded; yet, by “a miracle from God,” you turned out to have normal intelligence, that this “miracle” pulled you out of retardation.
She’s emphatic in stating that the psychiatrists recommended locking you away in an asylum and throwing away the key. She says she didn’t know if you’d even make a good garbageman–as long as you were happy. She says, on another occasion, that prior to the “miracle” recovery, she’d worried about herself and your aging father, decades into the future, having to continue caring for “a forty-year-old moron.”
It doesn’t matter that she said you’d grown out of your “retardation.” The damage has been done: you have been associated with the mentally deficient, and that’s damage enough for an impressionable child to have to grow up with.
Then, decades later, you learn, bit by bit, through therapy sessions with other psychiatrists and having done the Autism-Spectrum Quotient questionnaire, that you don’t, in fact, show any signs of autistic symptoms, not even the mildest, high-functioning ones. (Read this for the story in full detail.) You realize that you weren’t merely misdiagnosed as a child: your mother had been lying to you.
That happened to me. I was about nine when those lies were first told to me. Imagine the effect such lies have on the psyche of an impressionable child…heard from the mouth of my own mother! That’s an example of what I mean by a lack of basic, common decency.
Now, add to this psychological damage that a child suffers the constant verbal taunts, insults, and four-letter abuse coming from the mouths of his elder siblings. He gets called, for example, “You dip!” over and over again…on his thirteenth birthday, right at the party when he receives the cake; and thus begins a constant verbal barrage of being called “dipstick,” and “dork,” again and again, throughout his teenage years, those fragile years when a kid’s identity is just developing. Talk about undermining a kid’s ability to develop basic self-confidence.
Those taunts, of course, are just the mild end of the spectrum, for the kid is also being called “stupid,” “idiot,” “asshole,” and “you little shit!” any time those elder siblings are in a bad mood. And the kid is just a teenager, during an already emotionally confusing time in his life.
Now, while all of this, among other forms of bullying, is going on–much of it right in front of the narcissistic mother–she does nothing to stop it. She doesn’t help the bullied scapegoat, except in the rarest of exceptions, when she deems the bullying has ‘gone too far.’ Somehow, all the ‘moderate’ forms of bullying are acceptable to her. Well, naturally: they serve the same purpose as the gaslighting and lies: to control the victim.
III: Bullying
The bullying isn’t limited to verbal abuse and constant insults. There is physical intimidation going on, too. At least one elder sibling is threatening physical violence on the victim, if not actually hitting him. Sometimes the elder sibling orders the victim around, even calling him “slave.” Sometimes, the bully spits on the victim, then laughs.
Of course, the bullies will rationalize the awful way they treat the victim, listing his many faults: he ‘doesn’t care about anybody but himself’ (somehow, bullying is an example of caring about others); he’s ‘lazy and poorly motivated’ (hating him will surely fix that). Let’s consider a hypothetical situation: certain children have a problem with rhinotillexomania, which one understandably finds disgusting (will hitting them keep their fingers clean? Incidentally, the filthy childhood habit has been explained [as are other body-focused repetitive behaviours] as one not merely being an ignorant ‘pig,’ but as a way to reduce anxiety…oh, such children would never feel anxiety in an abusive family!). And, of course, there are many other such flaws used as convenient excuses for bullying.
Being mad at the victim for having this or that annoying habit or fault is far from the only reason he is being bullied, though…by the very people who are supposed to love him. The bullies frequently, freely admit to him that they do it for the sheer fun of tormenting him. And the narcissistic mother does nothing to stop the bullying. It’s as if she were telling the bullies, “Go ahead, throttle the little bastard, see if I care.” Indeed, one gets the sneaking suspicion that she’s been secretly fanning the flames of the bullies’ hate.
It’s well-known that narcissistic parents will pit their sons and daughters against each other, goad them into competing–and even fighting–each other for the parent’s (very conditional) love…to seem ‘the worthiest’ one of having that love. Though sibling rivalry is a reality in even the best and healthiest of families, any reasonable parent will do his or her best to minimize any feelings of jealousy among siblings. Narcissistic parents, on the other hand, thrive on that very jealousy, enjoying the ego trip they get from it, and so will intensify that jealousy at every opportunity, pointing out–right in front of the siblings–which one he or she supposedly favours the most.
This inflaming of jealousy can be a powerful motive to bully a sibling. That narcissistic mother I was talking about…mine…who lied about a mental condition I don’t have, who was capable of such mendacity, would have been all the more capable of telling my elder brothers and sister all kinds of lies about not only my faults–either exaggerating them, taking them out of context, or mixing in false faults with true ones–but also lying about preferring me to them, making them want to hate and torment me all the more. If that was true about her, in every detail, and I have every reason to believe it was all true, then she was being especially cruel to me.
Knowing the whole time that the bullying was going on, and doing nothing about it, she’d sigh and act as if it were just an inescapable reality, when a few sharp reprimands from her–given the respect she commended as our mother–my three elder siblings would have chilled right out…immediately. You see, one could make the argument that older siblings’ bullying you when you and they were kids is simply a matter of them having been immature at the time; yet even there, it was still the parents’ responsibility to intervene and stop the bullying. So many years having gone by with this abuse going on, without any substantial parental intervention, is simply a matter of childhood emotional neglect.
It thus still demonstrates a total lack of basic decency.
IV: Teaching a Child One’s Bigotries
One form of emotional abuse that shouldn’t be ignored is when a parent teaches his sons and daughters his bigoted attitudes. Again, an impressionable child is having his or her world view distorted by a parent’s biases and prejudices, thereby stunting the child’s growth and development, making him or her as ignorant and ill-informed as the parent.
I’ve written at length over the years on this blog about how I was emotionally abused by my mother and three elder siblings, with little complaint about my father’s contributions to the problem. In doing so, I haven’t been all that fair. It’s high time I discussed how he, too, contributed to messing my mind up.
He was a right-wing reactionary who justified his attitude with his euphemistic self-description as “conservative.” Just about every “ism” applied to him: racism, sexism, antisemitism, anticommunism, homophobia, etc. He not only had these attitudes, he also expressed them with a bitter, angry vehemence and vitriol. He was, to be perfectly blunt, a mindless, bigoted old fool; he was Archie Bunker with a Master’s degree in history–the one subject that, if anything, should have taught him to have leftist sympathies, had the subject been taught properly to him.
As a young man with liberal tendencies at the time (in the early 1990s, as I was attending university), I tried to resist his reactionary thinking, which even included defenses of evangelical Christian fundamentalism (not that he ever attended church or read the Bible for moral guidance, mind you; it was all just an excuse for supporting authoritarian thinking). But just as mainstream media saturations of bourgeois propaganda sooner or later tend to influence the thinking of the masses, I eventually was swayed, for a time, to his way of thinking…not completely, but to far too great an extent, anyway.
Indeed, from about the mid-1990s to about the late 2000s, I went through a period of lost years, growing increasingly reactionary in my own thinking, in part due to my own personal frustrations at the time, but also due in great part to his toxic influence. First, I became stridently antifeminist. Then, during the early 2000s as a reaction to 9/11, I went full neocon for several years, even supporting the Iraq invasion and Israel (yes, I sank pretty low).
It took a slow, sad and disappointed realization, confronting how the Bush administration had lied about Iraq’s “WMDs,” to turn me around; their bailing out of the banks in 2008 was the last straw. Since then, I’d slowly resumed a socially-liberal/fiscally libertarian stance; and after Dad’s death in 2009 and some temporary grieving of him, I felt psychologically liberated from any need for his approval of my political beliefs, and I thus embraced leftism.
And here I am now, a total commie red, with no qualms about it at all.
V: The Toxic Influence of the Petite Bourgeoisie
One thing related to my father’s bigotry, and also linked to my family’s toxicity (as well as, I imagine, the bigotry and toxicity of many families out there), is the issue of class. I’m the only member of my family–to my current knowledge–with any left-wing sympathies (and recall, my own sympathies in that way are only a little over a decade long as of this writing, and I’m 56 going on 57); none of the rest of those in my immediate family has a socialist bone in his or her body, which should tell you something, Dear Reader, as far as their empathy levels are concerned.
As owners of a Smitty’s Pancake House restaurant in the 1980s and early 1990s, my parents were petite bourgeois, and with that social position come the values and politics of such a class. The worker was looked down on by my father as a “lazy lout” (his exact words), and anyone receiving welfare was just mooching off the government and taxpayer. Just as my dad had tried to influence my political thinking rightward, so did my sister, J., though more liberal herself, try in the early 1990s to stamp on my identity that I’m “an upper middle-class young man.” No, J.: as a teacher of English in East Asia, I’m a worker, a proletarian.
When I was a teen and doing some of my first work in the mid-1980s, which in this case was some jobs here and there for the family restaurant, I was working for…$1 (Canadian). My father tried to drive into my head, “Oh, if you wanna make that dollar, you have to work really hard for it…” as if that precious dollar was a mint of gold or something. Later, as a young man and without work with sufficient pay that would allow me to leave home and live independently, my father, rationalizing that “You have to pay your way in this world,” made himself my landlord, requiring me to give him some of the meagre pay I was making for ‘rent’ each month. Granted, it wasn’t as high a ‘rent’ as one normally would pay, but still, this was my father, with his Attila-the-Hun right-wing mindset. One normally expects a more charitable attitude from one’s own family.
My mother was also somewhat more liberal than my father, though as a comparison to him, “somewhat liberal” isn’t saying much. She fiercely supported Israel to the point of flipping out on me one day in the restaurant for appearing there wearing an Arab scarf, something I’d bought on my university campus and–being too young and politically naïve to know anything about the Israel/Palestinian conflict–was wearing it just to be fashionable. In her hissy fit, she shouted that the scarf–looking like Yasser Arafat‘s black-and-white keffiyeh–made me look like a supporter of the PLO; she spoke of how awful it was that Palestinians throw rocks at the IDF, yet it didn’t matter at all to her how the latter have always brutalized the former, with state-of-the-art military technology provided by the US and other countries. My father had nothing kind to say about Zionism, of course, but that was because of his hatred of Jews, not from sympathy for the Palestinians, whom he called “murderers.”
Getting back to my sister, I mentioned in another blog post (I forget which one) how she was annoyed with the politics in Bruce Cockburn songs, in particular, “Call It Democracy.” She’d sneer at the title, imagining the singer “takes himself way too seriously.” Well, J., if you’d ever gone to Third World countries like Guatemala, as he did in the 1980s, and seen the appalling poverty there, caused in no small part by US imperialism, you’d understand why “democracy” in the West is and always has been a sick joke.
All of these examples show the connection between the microcosm of family toxicity and the macrocosm of toxicity in capitalist imperialism, the political gaslighting involved in the narcissism of capital. Capitalism causes alienation, causing in turn the lack of empathy easily seen in toxic families ruled by narcissistic parents. Accordingly, the use of psychological aggression by parents on their kids in the US (the bourgeois country par excellence) is almost universal, according to a study.
VI: Explosive Anger
Now, speaking of “psychological aggression,” one of the defining features of emotional abuse in toxic families is the propensity towards explosive outbursts of anger, happening all too frequently, and typically provoked by only minor offences. Everyone flies off the handle every now and then, even the best of people; but in toxic relationships, frequent explosive anger is a tool of control, meant to terrorize the victim to keep him or her in a state of timid submission.
I’ll now give some examples of sins a victim may have committed “to deserve” to be yelled and screamed at psychotically by a narcissist:
- Being late with a birthday gift.
- Interrupting someone.
- Treating someone’s birthday as if it were of only minor importance.
- Not bringing a bottle of milk home.
- Eating all of the cereal (on multiple occasions).
- Failing to respond when called to make tea for someone.
- Slamming doors a few times too often.
- Opening a package of ice cream incorrectly.
- Rhinotillexomania (and messing up the furniture with the greeners).
- Failing to wash the dishes when required to.
- Failing to say ‘thank you’ for a ride to school.
- Listening to music that others don’t like.
- Saying someone does nice things for others only to get attention.
Granted, it isn’t easy to be patient with people who do these kinds of bad things, but surely one can deal with such problems in a healthier manner than by yelling and screaming at the offending party. Such excessive reactions won’t improve the behaviour of the offender by a long shot, either; in fact, the bad behaviour is likely to get even worse.
Such over-the-top reactions demonstrate clearly a lack of basic decency.
VII: Making the Bad Even Worse
That yelling and screaming at someone will make his or her offending behaviour, in all likelihood, worse rather than better leads me to my next topic.
The rationalizations often used for pressuring the victim in a toxic relationship to conform to more desired behaviour is that it’s meant “to help” the victim, “to improve” him or her in some way. Yet it is the very nature of abuse, abuse being by definition doing bad things to someone, to do the diametrical opposite of helping or improving somebody.
A common tactic used in attempts to deter undesirable behavior is to dump shame on the offending individual. The–frankly–Neanderthal logic behind using shame is that the offender will not want to be thus shamed, and so presumably he or she will be motivated to break the bad habits.
A modicum of understanding of human psychology, however, will demonstrate that the very opposite of the desired effect will result from shaming. The fact is, shaming the offender will only cause him or her to feel such self-loathing that he or she believes that it is in his or her nature always to be of such a defective nature…so the bad habits can never be stopped.
Object relations theory helps explain how one’s early experiences with caregivers and others in a child’s everyday life create a kind of blueprint, or template, if you will, for how just about all of one’s later relationships will be with others. So a healthy and happy early relationship with one’s parents and siblings should generally result in similar relationships with most other people, and the same goes with negative, abusive relationships. Such relationships become one’s “normal,” and anything different from that tends to be shunned, whether good or bad, because one isn’t used to such a contrast in human dynamics. Not being used to it means not being comfortable with it, so it is shunned, even if it’s good.
So the abusive way of dealing with unwanted behaviour, far from correcting it, will instead usually reinforce it, because it feels “normal” to be in such a negative social interaction. Instead of learning to depart from the undesirable way of behaving, one believes that it is an indelible part of one’s nature, thus perpetuating it.
I’ll give some examples from my family-of-origin. My eldest brother, R., was performing badly at school when he was a teen, probably far more because of difficult, emotionally confusing issues he was dealing with rather than a lack of intelligence. Our father’s Neanderthal way of dealing with R.’s poor academic performance was to shame him with notions that he was “too stupid” to do better. Shock and surprise!…instead of pulling up his socks and studying harder, R. ended up dropping out of school and leaving home; he was made to believe he could do no better. Our father took a bad situation and simply made it worse.
Several years later, when R. was at the end of his tether and could do more as a worker without even a high school diploma, he was finally motivated to come back home, go back to school, and study hard…all of which he did, and he succeeded–not because of Dad’s shaming, of course, but from sheer desperation to turn his life around.
R.’s successful bouncing back (he got into computers, and he’s surely the most successful family member now, having proven his smarts, now that he’d gotten past those adolescent emotional problems) came with some nasty side effects, though, much of which got taken out on me, who’d had a somewhat better relationship with Dad (from somewhat better grades at school). R. had come back home with a great big chip on his shoulder, imagining we all saw him as “the idiot of the family” because of those old bad grades (Really, R.? Ever get called “retarded” by Mom? You haven’t even got a clue!)
So R. had a motive (envy of Dad’s somewhat better evaluation of me), totally unjustified, for joining my other two elder siblings in bullying me. R. was too out of touch with his feelings to realize it was Dad he was mad at, not me, and he was too much of a coward to confront Dad with that anger, preferring to take it all out on me (then a shy teenager going through emotional problems of my own), which was so much easier for him to do.
As for me, there were many things I did that the family, of course, didn’t like me doing, but instead of finding constructive ways of making me stop doing those things, they shamed me for all of it, causing me to do those things all the more.
Apart from having been bullied regularly by my elder brother, F., when I was a little kid, I had to move with my family from the Toronto area to Hamilton in 1977, making me leave my best friend, Neil McIntyre: I was emotionally devastated from not being able to be with him anymore, and the pain stayed with me for years. Research has been done to show that such adverse childhood experiences as bullying and relocation can be traumatizing enough to cause a child to do such things as self-isolate and socially withdraw–it’s a trauma response.
By the late 1970s, my family was growing more and more concerned with my habit then of playing all alone, what was actually maladaptive daydreaming. Granted, they should have been concerned that I didn’t want to go out, find friends, and play with them; but their methods to get me to stop the maladaptive daydreaming were all poorly thought out, and they only served to make me do more of it. Rather than trying to understand why I self-isolated and showing compassion, they shamed me for my maladaptive daydreaming; me elder sister, J., coined a pejorative expression, “tooka-tooka,” to describe it and make me feel foolish for doing it. Such toxic tactics only increased my self-loathing, and made me do more of the maladaptive daydreaming.
My mother exacerbated my problems exponentially with her autism lie, which served only to make me feel as though I could never fit in with social groups. I’m convinced her reasons for pinning that label on me were outright malignant, a wish to make my life harder and undermine my ability to develop self-confidence. Other motives that I suspect she had were to act as if she were some kind of expert in psychiatry (she, while having training as a nurse, had no psychiatric training whatsoever), and fancying oneself to have abilities and knowledge one lacks is a narcissistic trait; another motive I suspect in her was to project her narcissism onto me, since her characterization of autism was by the original use of the word, meaning an excessive involvement in oneself (Sounds rather like narcissism, doesn’t it?), a retreat into one’s own private, inner world, as opposed to how autism is understood to be now–characterized by difficulties in social interaction and in communication, and restrictive, repetitive behaviours.
Needless to say, all of these things the family was doing to me were making my dysfunctional behaviour go from bad to worse, for, far from doing anything to help me, as they imagined was their intention, their true intention was to try to control me and make me into something they wanted me to be. This leads me to the next topic of what makes a family lack basic decency.
VIII: Forcing Conformity
A healthy family will want each member to grow and become who he or she really is and aspires to be, nurturing and encouraging one to be, in the parlance of our time, ‘the best version of oneself.’ In a toxic family, though, this is not so.
Instead, one is expected to become, if you will, the best version of what the toxic family wants one to be. One of the key components of emotional abuse is having power and control over the victim, and so forcing conformity is part of the abusive nature of the toxic family.
Now, of course, it’s perfectly reasonable that a family will want to deter any member from doing genuinely bad things, such as getting involved in crime, doing drugs, or performing badly at school. But the kind of enforced conformity that I’m talking about is of a far less reasonable sort. Healthy families don’t set precise agendas for their members, making them extensions of one’s ego (we see examples of this in the film, The Graduate).
As far as examples from my family are concerned, I already mentioned how my mother’s agenda was to trick me and manipulate me into believing I have a mental condition that I don’t have, so that–as I suspect–she could, via projective identification, split off and expel the narcissism in herself and impose it on me, a kind of exorcising of her personal demons (a plan of hers that never worked, for she stayed narcissistic to the end). I also mentioned how my father tried to push R. to become a superstar student, and in his frustration at teen R.’s having failed to do that, Dad shamed him for it. Now I’ll discuss some other examples.
Just as my mother wanted to project the worst or herself onto me, so did she manipulate J. into embodying what Mom saw as an idealized version of herself. The golden child of the family, J. was pressured into being the perfect daughter, the perfect sister, the perfect aunt, and the perfect mother–the perfect ‘family woman.’ Totally enmeshed in the family dysfunction, J. was required to give her whole life and identity to the service of the family. On any occasion that she tried to go off and do her own thing, all for herself, there would be hell to pay.
Now, this doesn’t mean, of course, that she never did anything for herself–it’s just that she’d have to prioritize the family over herself. One time, though my memory of it is vague, it’s enough to illustrate my point. We as a family (I was a teen) were in the car doing something we had to do together (I forget what specifically), but J. wasn’t with us. We arrived at the restaurant, where we saw her walking about, doing her own thing. Mom and Dad viciously bawled her out, reducing her to tears.
On another occasion, Mom and Dad had come home unexpectedly early one night, and they found J.’s boyfriend undressed and in her bed (again, I was a teen at the time, and in the basement, hearing the whole ensuing fight, so she, five years older than I, was a young adult). Mom freaked, screaming, “I’m ashamed of you!” at her repeatedly, again, reducing J. to tears…and all for doing something that, by the mid-1980s, was standard for a consenting young adult couple. J. had failed to be our mother’s ideal.
Since Mom forced conformity on J., tricking her into believing that such ‘guidance in the paths of righteousness’ was Mom’s way of loving her (this was J.’s trauma), my sister in turn tried to make me conform to the kind of person she thought I should be, imagining she was loving me and guiding me with her ‘wisdom,’ rather than just using me as an extension of her ego, as Mom had done to her.
J. carried this ‘guidance’ to some rather ridiculous lengths. In her ‘humble’ opinion, I can’t do anything right. I don’t dress the ‘right’ way, I don’t have the proper, ‘enlightened’ political beliefs, and I certainly don’t listen to the ‘right’ music.
Oh, the absurd attempts she made to deter me from listening to the music I liked! She’d berate me for it, dismissing its often experimental nature as “weird” and “strange” (note: we always label the things we simply don’t understand as “weird” and “strange”–her words were really more of a comment on her musical ignorance than they were on my idiosyncratic taste in listening). I was a teen at the time, though, and teens identify with their music: so in calling it “weird,” J. was calling me “weird,” another form of emotional abuse.
Needless to say, none of her attempts to shame me and discourage me from listening to progressive rock, jazz fusion, 20th century classical music, and other forms of experimental or boundary-pushing music ever worked. If anything, I got even more interested in that kind of music. So if listening to that kind of music was bad, then her tactics were just another case of the family pushing me from bad to worse. In any case, her “weird” labelling of my music, and by extension, of me, was just another way that that family gave me a complex.
Though my brother, F., was the worst bully of my three siblings, he imagines he tried to do me a good turn by teaching me how to play baseball. Actually, he forced me to play a game I wasn’t interested in playing; it may amaze him, but not every little kid is interested in playing sports, and that’s okay. And again, if he didn’t like my childhood habit of maladaptive daydreaming instead of going out and finding friends, then he should have made the link between his bullying of me and the harmful psychological effects it had on me as a kid…and if he was too young himself to make that link, then it was the job of our parents to help him understand that–which, of course, they never did.
On at least one occasion during that ‘teaching of baseball,’ he not only bad-mouthed me (about 8 or 9) to a girl neighbour of a similar age, which only increased my feelings of alienation and loneliness, discouraging me all the more from seeking friends, but he at the time also threatened to hit me, if not actually did (I don’t quite remember what exactly happened: traumas often cause memory loss). In any case, I went home in tears that day, and instead of getting any comfort from my parents, my mother loudly barked at me from another room, saying, “Take your bath!” I remember lying in the bathtub in a daze, stunned at the lack of love I was getting…and my mother’s last words to me before dying in 2016 were to tell me that, during those very childhood years of mine, she’d given me “the most love.”
It can be argued that Mom simply didn’t know what had happened, yet her attitude made it plain to me that she simply wasn’t interested in even listening when I tried to tell her. You see, we’re not talking about a few mere flaws in an otherwise basically good family here; we’re talking about a lack of basic decency. Family is not supposed to treat you this way, and the refusal to listen to the victim’s cries for help leads me to my next topic.
IX: Not Listening
If your family loves you, they listen to you. Period. It’s the same as in any other relationship.
Toxic families don’t listen. They preach. They pretend that their long-winded speeches are edifying for you. They aren’t so at all–they’re just annoying, an insult added to the injury of all their emotional abuse.
None of this preaching is for your own good, no matter how much the toxic family claim it is. It’s really about glorifying their egos.
This mentality was Mom’s an J.’s, all over. Just as my mother imagined she was a natural born psychiatrist, with no need for training or education in the field, so did my elder sister fancy herself a life coach of some kind for me.
J. imagines she has this huge treasure-trove of life wisdom to impart to me…actually, as I said above, she’s only five years older than I am: how much more could she possibly know about life than I do? On the other side of the coin, she imagines that I know nothing substantial about life, or about much of anything else, for that matter. This arrogant presumption of hers dovetails with what our mother had said about ‘my autism’ and being ‘mentally defective’ in general.
In fact, if J. and I were ever to switch roles, with me sharing any of my own thoughts on how to live one’s life, she would get outright snotty with me, as if I had the gall to break rank with her and be ‘insubordinate.’ I recall a couple of occasions when I was a young man, when I’d made comments, not at all serious, and she thought I was pretending to know more about life than the great philosopher did.
On one of those occasions, she’d expressed a rather snobbish annoyance at someone speaking ungrammatical English. I joked, “Sometimes in life, we all meet people who don’t talk good [sic].” She redirected her snootiness at me and said, in all sarcasm, “Oh, really? Tell me about life.” Her sense of ‘superior wisdom’ was so great…and her listening so poor, she didn’t even realize I’d merely attempted a joke–a silly one, but a joke all the same, not a serious lecture on life. So, what I’d unwittingly done was offend her narcissism, and I got needlessly hurt once again.
As I said, instead of just being quiet and listening to me, which is what I so desperately needed during those years I lived with the family, J. preached to me. She always thinks she needs to teach me something, that her words of advice will ‘guide me on the straight path.’ No, J., that’s not what I need; people can learn the lessons of life the normal way–by trial and error, through experience. Her words don’t add much to that.
Allowing people to talk, however, is very therapeutic. Allow them to get their pain off their chest, what’s called “the talking cure.” When an analysand free associates, the therapist just listens and takes notes, linking the themes that appear again and again in the patient’s endless talking; after enough themes are connected to show a consistent direction in the patient’s thinking, then the therapist may speak, giving an interpretation of the analysand‘s thought processes, which–it is hoped–will be an insightful one, helping the patient understand him- or herself better, thus leading to improvement in the patient’s mental health.
J., no more a therapist than our mother was, fails to understand the importance of listening. Instead, if I start to explain what’s troubling me, she breaks in and gives me a speech that, supposedly, makes visible the ‘larger philosophical perspective’ that I don’t see. Actually, what she typically says has little relevance, if any, to the subject at hand.
I’ll give a few examples. Once, when I was about 18 or 19 years old, I tried to tell her about a time shortly before, when Mom had yelled and screamed at me like a maniac for the unforgivable crime of having interrupted her. All J. had to do was listen. Instead, she interrupted me, saying, “Yeah, and I applaud Mom for it!” Then she went on about some nonsense about teenagers arrogantly thinking they know everything, which had nothing to do with Mom’s then-craziness or my attempt to remain calm as she’d spoken so hurtfully to me. That J. thought she knew everything about what had happened was lost on her, of course; I’m guessing she’d heard Mom tell her about our argument, misrepresenting what had happened and painting herself as the innocent victim, and me as the bad guy.
Another time, shortly before Mom died, I tried talking to J. on the phone about how Mom had lied to me so terribly (<<parts 5 and 6) that I didn’t want to communicate with her and put up with her manipulation anymore. Again, instead of listening to me, J. lectured me about how mothers ‘don’t have an instruction booklet on how to deal with every single family problem.’ Again, apart from J.’s typical condescension, her ‘perspective’ had nothing to do with what I was complaining about! Constant lying isn’t just a minor character flaw: it’s a serious personality problem, causing one to feel no longer able to trust the liar. It’s shows a lack of basic decency–not something to be endured. Actually, J. was enabling Mom’s emotional abuse by lecturing me the way she did, and this leads me to my next topic.
X: Enabling the Abuse
Many might read what I’ve written about here and think that I’m wallowing in the remote past like a ghost. Oh, those things you complain about happened so long ago, Mawr, decades ago! Get over it! Let it go!
First of all, those things happened in my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood–my formative years, when my personality was only developing, and so the experiences would have a profound effect on the rest of my life, the same as anyone else’s experiences of childhood trauma. Such issues, thus, should never be trivialized or dismissed.
Second, the emotional abuse I suffered from that family was not limited to those early experiences. Once a toxic family, always a toxic family. After I left Canada to live in East Asia, the family could still communicate their nastiness by email or long distance phone calls…and they did.
Not content to have implanted the autism lie in my head when I was a child, my mother modified her lie by saying I have Asperger’s Syndrome: no need to have me tested by a psychiatrist during one of my visits home…my mother, the rank amateur psychiatrist, just ‘knew.’ I argued with her about this new label during the 2000s, and she wouldn’t let it go. It didn’t matter to her that she lacked the authority to give me, or anybody, psychiatric labels of any kind. Her presumptuous arrogance was just that brazen.
Of course, enabling of her emotional abuse came from her #1 flying monkey, J., the golden child, who in an email from the mid-2000s told me to “let this go” (i.e., stop arguing with Mom about the Asperger Syndrome label, and stop wallowing in the past). I was also instructed by J. not to reply, for I obviously have no right to tell my side of the story. Mom’s ‘version’ of the truth, in which she is blameless and I’m the bad guy, would suffice for J.
Another thing that had upset me at the time was how, when J.’s husband was terminally ill from cancer, my wife and I had offered to make a visit to Canada to see him one last time. My mother, in her usual condescending tone, said I shouldn’t come out of a fear that my ‘tactless and insensitive’ nature would cause me to put my foot in my mouth and say something to upset J. and her husband. Oh, those Aspies sure are tactless, aren’t they? Never mind how tactless and insensitive my Mom was being. My wife was every bit as offended as I was.
Indeed, I was furious, arguing all the more vehemently with Mom about it, thus leading to J.’s “let this go” comment. And around this time, I was beginning to have truly anti-Mom thoughts. I go into detail about all of this issue here, so if you’re curious about it, Dear Reader, you can go there, as a full explanation is beyond the scope of this article.
J.’s wish that I “let this go” must therefore be seen in the context of these more recent outrages of Mom’s, as was J.’s comment in 2016 about Mom’s ‘not having an instruction booklet to deal with every family problem,’ as discussed above. J.’s enabling of the family’s emotional abuse wasn’t just something from my childhood–it’s recent, too. J. claimed in a tweet to me a couple of years ago that, in spite of my having gone NO CONTACT with the family, she still ‘loves’ me: if so, her having read some of my blog posts on the family’s emotional abuse and having felt saddened by what I’d suffered, why has she–as I can safely assume–not pleaded my cause to R. and F. (if she had, and succeeded, surely they would have tried to contact me on Twitter and sought to make amends, wouldn’t they have)? The enabling of the family abuse, then, continues to this day–her ‘loving’ me was just an attempt to hoover me back into the family dysfunction.
XI: Conclusion
So, to summarize, families with a basic sense of decency will not allow the following problems to go on unchecked: gaslighting you into thinking you’re less capable than you really are; bullying you; teaching you to embrace bigotry and a petite bourgeois mentality (which can lead to fascistic attitudes and bigotry, given the right material conditions); explosive anger; making problems even worse instead of solving them; forcing you to conform to their way of doing things; not listening to you; and enabling their abuse of you.
These issues are not the result of minor, forgivable character flaws in otherwise basically good people. These issues come from people with serious personality problems. If you’re in a family with people subjecting you to this kind of abuse, don’t let them gaslight you into thinking that they’re ‘okay,’ but just a little flawed, and that you are ‘not okay’ for not tolerating their b.s.
They are the ones who are not okay. You are right to call out their abuse and demand better treatment. If, after your demands are made, they still won’t change, get help and get out. You deserve better than to be treated that awful way. Don’t let them guilt-trip you for setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health over them.
By getting away from them and their toxic influence, you’ll truly get a chance to heal. Do what you need to do to be well.
Infinite Ocean 
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