This brings to mind that my friend took care of an elderly lady for years who really became a good friend to her.Took care of carting her around, grocery shopping, everything. The son would have nothing to do with his mom. Not take her anywhere, take care of anything, begrudging financial aid. Friend always said how ungrateful he was, spoiled, etc. I told her that you just never knew what the story was growing up. He may have been a spoiled, selfish brat (yes, a possibillity) or maybe he had reasons that she would never know and to give him a break on the judgement scale.
^^^^ That! My in laws helped a woman and her daughter he has fallen on hard times. She had her license suspended and they gave her rides. It became kind of a symbiotic thing and they became kind of surrogate family. I guess my FIL was particularly nice and MIL was still kinda nasty to her it turns out. When I was in charge of care I collaborated with this woman quite a bit and sent her money to do errands. While I’m sure she’s heard all the stories and we looked like neglectful kids to her, there was just no point in ruining her regard for FIL after he’s passed.
I owe them nothing. As a human being however, I will do what a human being does for another
but I will be sad forever
It’s such a sad subject. I am so blessed, my parents were the best. To feel safe, sheltered, secure and loved is the greatest gift a child can have, IMO.
I really do believe children should be able to cut ties without guilt with abusive parents. Absolutely.
I think that some relationships are so toxic, they can and must be severed.
As the baby of my family , I feel lucky that I was not subjected to my father’s abusive behavior. My older sisters on the other hand have dealt with issues though out their lives. My birth father was not present for the majority of my life. If on a rare occasion he has come up in conversations , he is never referred to as " dad " or any other name…my older sisters refer to him as " diamond Jim " This was a nickname they gave him out of sarcasm since he did nothing to support our family when my mother finally divorced him.
I only have a few memories of him , none of them what I would call pleasant.
When I was about 15 , we got word that he was sick and without anyone asking me or my next closest sister how we felt, he was invited to spend Christmas with our family. I didn’t want anything to do with it or him. I hadn’t seen him since I was 5 , and that experience frightened me.
It was a horrible holiday season for me, being forced to be around him.
Over the years , I have been criticized for the way I was towards him, but I have no regrets.
He passed away when my first child was a toddler , but there was no service of any kind.
I felt absolutely no sense of loss since he wasn’t in my life , but I recall feeling like I was insulted one last time when his obituary listed my sisters and I and my name was spelled wrong.
I considered my step-father my true father.
My father was abused by his parents, physically and mentally. He spent his entire life wishing he had cut ties, feeling he couldn’t, and living with the memories he never addressed with his parents. He was a bitter man. The thing is, it’s hard to how you should handle these things … as much as he wished he had handled things differently, he also felt he could never have done things differently. Personally, I think that if an abused kid wants to cut ties, more power to him … but he will probably need counseling in addition.
One may be able to move on by shoving it under the rug, for a while. But it always comes back to haunt until forgiveness is truly given. Forgiveness is not for the benefit of the one who’s being forgiven. It’s for the benefit of the one doing the forgiving. It means getting rid of the poison.
N.B. – Forgiving is not condoning. Nor would it be, as in this case, having a future relationship with the abuser. It’s an internal thing, deciding not to let it have power over you any more. Until that happens, as @saintfan says, the person who did the harm is living rent-free inside the victim’s head and heart.
Yes, as my dad found to be true.
Still - Im not crazy about the word “forgive” for something like this. It is possible to move on and come to terms without rug shoving and also without forgiving.
Only 20%? That seems low to me.
Something to consider is whether you have siblings and what you owe them.
A woman in my extended family was treated very badly by her father, but when he was elderly and had Alzheimer’s disease, she did her share in a round-robin arrangement where the old man lived with each of his daughters for several months at a time. She said she owed it to her sisters.
In my DH’s case because his parents were Bible thumping pillars of their Baptist church community it was important for him to hold onto his own reality that what they did was wrong. Maybe it’s different if your parents are very public raging alcoholics or something where everyone can see it. DH’s 2 best friends growing up came to the memorials for both his parents to support him and bear silent witness to DH’s personal story. It was an amazing comfort to have them there. He also needed to hold onto a part of the truth and really face up to the wrongness so as not to repeat it. He was VERY conscious of that, particularly raising a spirited son.
I like that definition. I guess I’ve always thought that forgiving had to include “pardoning” the person – accepting what happened and deciding it’s OK. And I’ve never been able to forgive some things that were done to me, so I thought I wasn’t able to forgive the person. But, I stopped letting it take up real estate in my brain a long time ago, so I guess I have forgiven them.
When it comes to my father’s side of the family , I always wondered why mine of them ever showed any interest in my sisters and I. I suppose they all had their own burdens to bear. From what I understand, my paternal grandmother died when they were younger and they were raised by their father…it sounds like there was a history of abuse with that generation too.
As far as forgiveness is concerned…I have been wronged by my husband’s ex and to a certain extent, her parents . I took care of his daughter when her own mother didn’t . I gave her stability when she didn’t have it from her own mother. I took care of her the same way I did my own daughters.
There was a time when step-daugher’s own parents wanted her to be removed from the care of their daughter. I have carried the things they told me ( that would have easily raised red flags and possibly had DYFS intervene which might have resulted in her being removed from mom’s care )
Twenty odd years later, I have been kind to the woman when she is on her death bed. In some ways, done more for her than her closest relatives. She asked me into her home and I actually got an apology from her and she expressed her gratitude for what I have done for her in the last couple of months…odd how things work out sometimes
If you have a parent with narcissistic personality disorder or any other similar disorder, then it is often best to cut off that relastionship as they are usually extremely disfunctional.
I thought personality disorders just made people seem neurotic.
I don’t know anyone that couldn’t be viewed as neurotic depending on the lens and the circumstance.
My mom’s sister had hat I guess would be a common la husband type figure who abused my to female cousins. I don’t think she knew but probably should have. Their dad was killed in a car accident when they were very young. Anyway, she died when the kids were in their very early 20s and she married him just before she died. There wasn’t any money but as it stood he would have gotten the house that she and her husband purchased before the kids were born. My mom came in with an attorney and guns blazing (after we told her the situation) and they shamed and legally threatened him into giving up shares of the house to the 3 kids.
They were garden growing, chicken raising, coop shopping, quaker prayer circle attending hippy dippy love everyone people and in that sphere to be told to forgive is another way of saying just let it go and the universe will realign and the energies will shift and it will magically all be better. It is all about letting people off the hook and letting things go that need to be called out and condemned. They came to their peace with their mother’s memory but aren’t about to forgive the creep she married. They are not hung up on it, but he doesn’t get off that easy.
There are a few other hippy dippy folks on that side of the family and for them forgiveness is all about conflict avoidance. Well . . . sometimes the world needs a bit of conflict. Going with the flow is how they were put in that situation to begin with. They also needed to know in no uncertain terms that he was NOT a part of the family going forward and if they chose to carry on some kind of relationship with him they would bear the burden of condoning what he had done. Direct abuse it not like just a bit of dysfunction or indirect strife based on substance abuse. It is an act against another person and in this case children. Somehow the forgiving people were glossing those facts over in their minds. No, we didn’t care if he felt left out when he wasn’t invited to my sister’s wedding
Others kind like the word “forgive” if they want to but it isn’t some magical requirement for self-actualization. I figure their God can forgive whenever they get to where their going if they go anywhere at all.
I don’t even know what that means.
If you have dealt with someone with a personality disorder, not just a neurosis or various quirks or imperfections, you know the difference. It can be total hell.
neurosis
[noo-roh-sis, nyoo-]
Spell Syllables
Examples Word Origin
noun, plural neuroses noo-roh-seez, nyoo-. Psychiatry.
1.
Also called psychoneurosis. a functional disorder in which feelings of anxiety, obsessional thoughts, compulsive acts, and physical complaints without objective evidence of disease, in various degrees and patterns, dominate the personality.
2.
a relatively mild personality disorder typified by excessive anxiety or indecision and a degree of social or interpersonal maladjustment.
Apparently neurotic can be a type of “mild” personality disorder.
I guess I think of borderline or narcissistic personality disorders as the “Big ones.” They are impossible imo.
It is one of the hardest things kids can face over the years. With my parents, specifically my father, it wasn’t abusive behavior per se, but there was a point where I had to set some firm boundaries with him to save my own family (long, tangled story, lot of it had to do with my dad not understanding how families work, how you seperate from your family of origin when you have your own family).
On the other hand with my wife, it is a very different story, with her parents it was really, really dark, I won’t go into the details,but it was horrible, and her mother was a piece of work in a different way, combination of mentally ill and a very warped perspective on things thanks to her religious beliefs…in any event, working through this the therapist told us that it was important to forgive, and they claim it is how you heal, you let it go and so forth. I don’t know if that helped my wife, but quite honestly, did nothing for me, I personally think that often is just the recycled religious idea of needing to forgive those who trespass against us. It depends on how you hold onto your anger, you can let it eat you up, or you can use it to drive yourself forward. Some people get a benefit of forgiving someone and moving on, I don’t work like that. I have to add that the worst at this are often clergy, especially more traditional ones, who will tell an abuse victim, I am talking horrible abuse, that their duty is to forgive the offending parent and then it is their duty to take care of them, the whole “sacred parent” stuff to me is crap, it isn’t about forgiveness helping the victim, it is about some crazy idea that the offending parents have to be forgiven because that is ordained or some such swill…(and yes, I am very emotional about this, if you saw the damage that was done, saw the wounds, that took a long time or in some ways never healed, you would be too). It is hard, because no matter how abusive the parent was,there is always natural emotions that tell you you should do something, that no matter how bad this was still mom or dad. I have to admit that I admire people who can forgive their abusers and even help them, because I cannot do that.