False Families

False families are primarily concerned with their public image, as ‘virtuous,’ ‘upstanding,’ ‘admirable,’ ‘moral,’ and ‘loving.’ Maintaining this image is far more important to them than actually striving to live up to such ideals, since doing the latter is, of course, far more difficult.

One doesn’t just put on an act of virtue and goodness, while secretly knowing that one isn’t the good family member one pretends to be. These people lie to themselves as successfully as they lie to the public. Contemplating the truth is much too intolerable, an unbearable blow to their inflated egos; so they must convince themselves that the theatre of virtue put on is real.

Conflicts and feelings of resentment are inevitable, even in the best of families, but the better ones will at least try to resolve these problems as fairly as they can. Toxic families, on the other hand, will find ways of ‘resolving’ these conflicts so that they can maintain an illusion of blamelessness for most of the family, while projecting the unavoidable blame on one, or a few, scapegoat(s).

A healthy family will, paradoxically, acknowledge fault, blame, and ill emotional health in all the family members who are at fault in the conflict, and they will reserve judgement fairly and in proportion to how much fault each member involved has. A false family, or toxic one, or emotionally abusive one (whichever name you wish to use to describe them), will dump all or most of the blame on the scapegoat(s), while absolving of blame other family members who may bear much, if not most or all, of the blame, thus maintaining the illusion of family health for the majority of the members.

A false family has a black-and-white view of the family members. Generally speaking, and with at least relatively few exceptions, certain members are seen as largely good: the narcissistic parent (the ringleader of the toxic family structure) and his or her golden children, his or her flying monkeys. On the other side are those deemed largely ‘bad’: the codependent parent and the scapegoat(s) or identified patient(s). Any reasonable person would know that everyone is a lighter or darker grey between the good and bad extremes, but the group narcissism of the toxic family will admit to little beyond the black and white.

This is the kind of family that I had to endure growing up with. To be sure, I have plenty of glaring faults, but I hardly deserved to be scapegoated because of them. In fact, a reasonable argument can be made that the exacerbating, if not largely the origin, of most of my faults was because of the emotional abuse that I suffered under my parents’ mismanagement of the family.

I have already described in detail, in the links given above as well as such links as these, the whole story of how I was bullied, belittled, lied to, and subjected to gaslighting by my late parents and older siblings (my brothers, R. and F., and my sister, J.). If you have either already read some or all of those posts, or if you don’t care to do so much reading, Dear Reader, then please just go along with what I’m saying to you now: that my having gone NO CONTACT with the family for the past seven years (as of this post’s publication) has been perfectly justified, for the sake of protecting myself against being subjected to any further emotional abuse in the future, something guaranteed from those three surviving siblings. When trying to heal from C-PTSD, one cannot do so while in contact with any of the abusers.

One of the family’s chief rationalizations for bullying me and treating me with contempt is one of those glaring faults I referred to above: namely, my self-centredness (something supposedly based on ‘my autism,’ or really their distorted, outdated definition of autism, which is a mental condition I learned from psychiatrists that I don’t really have, but was rather one of my late mother’s many fabrications). As far as I’m concerned, only my wife has the right to complain of my selfishness (which was really the result of my alienation from an emotionally neglectful family), for unlike the family, my wife is truly selfless.

As I said above, the selflessness of a false family is just that…false. It is an outward show, meant not only to impress and fool the public, but also for the false family to fool themselves into thinking they’re genuinely good people. One only has to use one’s instincts, though, to realize that there’s nothing good about bullies and narcissists. Accordingly, highly sensitive people like me can see through the family bullshit, and they as a result get scapegoated…to protect the lie.

When my mother was dying of breast cancer, she was nonetheless healthy enough to tell me a slew of lies online (see the links above for details), after I’d already known of other lies of hers (e.g., the autism lie mentioned above). When you know someone has lied to you, you cannot trust the liar ever again–this is ancient wisdom. I, living on the other side of the world and already refusing to communicate with her for fear of more manipulating, had no way of knowing if the messages by phone or email about her dying were real, or just another fabrication to make me feel guilty and manipulate me into making a visit to Canada that I vowed never again to make.

My brother R. wanted me to phone Mom, who was in hospital and on her deathbed, to make regular phone calls and chat with her, something I absolutely didn’t want to do, especially given her ever-impenitent attitude. R. wanted me to put on a show of love, which I refused to do.

He later stumbled upon a YouTube video I’d made about seven years before her death, in which I bitterly recited “This Be the Verse,” by Philip Larkin. The combination of my refusal to call her with my recitation of a poem with a four-letter word made him (freshly grieving over her death) so angry that, instead of letting himself calm down and then later asking me, in the comments section, what Mom had done to make me so mad at her, he made a snarky comment to the effect that I’m apparently mentally “disturbed,” and that I should be ashamed of myself for not loving a mother who, apparently, “loved [me] more than anyone else on the planet.”

No attempt was made at an investigation to find out what happened between Mom and me: there was just an assumption that she was ‘all-good,’ and that I am ‘all-bad.” This is the typical attitude of the false family, which idealizes the narcissistic parent and his or her golden children/flying monkeys, and a further vilifying of the family scapegoat.

The way I acted at her death, combined with my continued enforcement of the NO CONTACT rule, is essentially the family’s motive for never trying to contact me since, save for two or three puny attempts by my sister J.–the number one golden child of the family, who is obligated ‘to love’ her younger brother (for the sake of a show of family virtue, remember)–to contact me by email, Facebook, and Twitter. I never responded to this hoovering, of course.

The thing is, for the great majority of the family, save J. and Mom when she was alive, there was never an interest in contacting me, with ever so few exceptions, for the whole time I’ve lived in Taiwan. R., my other brother F., and all the others have never needed my reaction to Mom’s death as a reason never to contact me.

In our family, the word love is meaningless; the words like and dislike, however, do have meaning. Love for them just means family obligation. While love is supposed to be unconditional (i.e., we can be mad at or resentful of family members because of certain faults of theirs, but we won’t stop loving them for that), this family is selective about whom they care about. R., F., and J., and their spouses and kids (minus any new scapegoats intended to replace me and my cousins) are loved and cared for because they are liked.

As for us scapegoats, though J. pays lip service to caring about me (and is convinced that her fake love is genuine, as was Mom), we could all rot in a leper colony for all R. and F. care. I grudgingly respect my brothers’ attitude to me, since at least there’s a dram of honesty in it.

I’ve known the truth of the above for years, but recently I’ve discovered further proof to consolidate the accuracy of my judgement of them. This new proof lies in their total non-reaction to the growing crisis between China and the US regarding my home here in Taiwan.

It doesn’t matter if the family believes the lies and propaganda being spewed from the mainstream Western media about China wanting ‘to invade’ the ‘nation’ of Taiwan, or if they know the truth that I’ve known, which is that the American government has been trying to provoke China into invading, the way the US and NATO provoked Russia for years into invading Ukraine. My home is in danger of becoming a war zone, in which my wife, her family, and I could suffer and die.

…and my ‘morally superior’ family hasn’t lifted a finger to contact me and offer to get us to safety.

[It is totally unfeasible for me to return to Canada, since apart from my estrangement from the family, my limited skill set–teaching English as a second language–will not find me much of anything in terms of employment there; the vast majority of such jobs, teaching immigrants, are presumably already snatched up. My wife and I moving to Canada would almost guarantee us a future of homelessness. In any case, I have high hopes that the American empire will crumble before it even has a chance of bringing about a war with China.]

Now, a number of objections to what I’ve said need to be addressed and put into proper context. I haven’t exactly made it easy for the family to communicate with me–such is the nature of going NO CONTACT. I blocked them, for example, from sending emails to me; and as I mentioned above, I refused to answer J. in her attempts to contact me through Facebook and Twitter.

That said, though, attempts to contact me are far from impossible. Since they know my internet/pen name, they could contact me here in the comments section. They could contact the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, who in turn could contact me by email or phone. The family could phone me themselves! A simple Google search of Mawr Gorshin could bring up a slew of websites where I can be found, and if I never answer their messages, they can pester me over and over again until I finally relent.

It’s not that they can’t contact me. They just don’t want to.

Please don’t misinterpret my meaning, Dear Reader. I’m not saying that I want them to contact me…No! I’d find such attempts at communicating with me to be nothing less than triggering. But this isn’t about what I want: it’s about what they want.

If my mother were still alive, to her credit, she would have stopped at nothing to break through my defences and get to me. My siblings’ attempts have been less than feeble…and they imagine themselves better than I, a mere scapegoat.

The point I’m trying to make here is that this lack of a response proves that they don’t really love me. There is a continuity between this callous disregard for my safety here in East Asia, and back in the day when I was a kid, when F. used to spit on me and hit me, J. played disgusting games with me when I was about eight or nine, and these two and R. shouting one four-letter word after another at me, usually over minor things I’d done to annoy them.

It simply doesn’t occur to them that I am a human being, with a heart and feelings, who has the same basic rights as everyone else. I’ll bet that R. and F. would smile at the thought of me trapped in a war zone…those two fucking bastards! J. calls them ‘brothers,’ by the way. Anyway, all of this only further justifies my continued estrangement from them.

Another objection to the conclusions I’ve drawn is that the family may mistakenly believe that I’m dead (from Covid, presumably–a virus the vast majority of those having died from being either people in their 70s or 80s, or people who had other health problems, neither of which apply to me). After all, J. sent me her direct Twitter message around that time, and as I said above, I never responded to it.

Aside from the overblown media hysteria around Covid, though, why would my not responding necessarily mean I died? Does J. think someone hacked my Twitter account? All she has to do is follow me there, find my many blog articles posted there, and read some of them to know, by my idiosyncratic writing style (and photo at the top!) that it’s really me. My politics have changed radically since the days when we were still talking to each other, but changing one’s political opinions (in my case, from centre-right to hard-left) is surprising, but far from impossible.

But again, this issue leads back to my argument before: if they really need to know if I’m alive or dead, they can just keep pushing and nagging online until I finally respond, or get the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office to contact me. If I’m dead, have they received proof of it? Did they get a death certificate? Has a corpse been produced?

Merely assuming I’m dead is just an excuse not to try to find out for sure. Again, it’s not that they can’t find out for sure. They just don’t think I’m worth the effort…these people who routinely bullied and belittled me when I was a kid, who deliberately undermined my ability to develop self-confidence, and whom Mom never reprimanded for it.

…and it justifies my estrangement from them all the more.

Their reason for not loving me is not because of my faults: everyone has faults, but some people’s faults are put under a magnifying glass (mine and my cousins), while others’ faults are swept under the rug (R.’s, F.’s, J.’s, and our parents’). It’s a vicious double standard, and it’s proof that my family is a false one.

Now, what I want to say to you, Dear Reader, is that if you find yourself the scapegoat of a false family, know that it’s not your fault that they don’t love you (though they may pretend to); it is their fault. They are supposed to love you, and it is their failure, not yours, that they don’t truly love you.

So give yourself heaps of love, to compensate for what they so cruelly denied you, because you’re worth it.

[Postscript: If by chance any of my elder siblings, or anyone else in the family back in Canada, should contact me here in the comments section, my response would be a quote I heard from my condescending sister decades ago: “You’ve left it a little late, haven’t you?” The US has been banging the war drums against China for years now. It’s been a hot item in the news for at least about a year, since Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan last summer…and only now do they contact me, if they ever plan to?]