(no subject)

[flamingsword]

"Abusers are intensely criticism-avoidant, so they don't teach their children healthy ways to handle criticism, and their authoritarian punishments fill their children with such a sense of shame and powerlessness that some children grow up unable to admit to any wrongdoing without being flooded with shame and powerlessness all over again. At the heart, #abuse is #authoritarianism is criticism avoidance.

From Down the Rabbit Hole - The world of estranged parents' forums.

Comments

[sabotabby]

Reading that made me so glad that my father sucked at technology.

[flamingsword]

All four of my grandparents were abusive in that way, so nobody in my family talks to each other very much, and nobody knows how to be wrong about anything except the two who have been to therapy. I had never considered this as the vector for those behaviors and I have some thinking to do about it now.

[havocthecat]

Oh yeah, no, I am not going down the rabbit hole of that particular link again, but it can be useful to people who haven't read it. It was very useful to me once upon a time, though, and is a good piece of reading.

[flamingsword]

It explains a lot about my family, and it means that I may still have more work to do on myself. It also helps me understand my friends.

[feotakahari]

I guess this explains how my aunt wound up the way she did. I’ve read When Rabbit Howls, and it talked about how the various alters in Trudi Chase’s head would swap in for anything the others refused to acknowledge. Their usual fronter couldn’t even go to the bathroom without swapping out to someone else who could withstand the feeling of disgust. My aunt Susan is devoutly Christian, and very invested in the idea of herself as a good person. So when she lashes out in anger, or flirts in order to manipulate someone, she swaps out to Sue or Suzie or one of the others*, and then she swaps back and has no memory of having done such a thing. Susan lives in perpetual innocence, because anything that would make her not be innocent is carefully redacted by her companions. . .

Holy crap; I finally understand why some people hate Ender Wiggin so much.

*I’ve never figured out how many of them there are. It was my mother who pointed out that they answer to different names, and I haven’t picked up enough of the names to match them up.

[flamingsword]

Tbf, people also hate Ender Wiggin because it was a good, formative series of books, and then one of their favorite authors turned out to be a hateful homophobe who wanted them to not exist.