i'm not really here to talk about the politics but I'm expressing the patterns of behavior and gets me frustrated sometimes so I just need to put this disclaimer out before I tell the story, thanks.
Going through my day I had to drop my dad off to the eye doctor. It was going well till the car broke down and we needed to call somebody for a booster. That still was going well but along the way I knew it wouldn't have been that smooth of a ride
We were talking and somehow it got to politics and I said a statement saying a lot of people are upset with the Supreme Court about the Roe versus Wade as if the Supreme Court are the ones making a law when it's their job to interpret the law in the constitution. they revisited the amendment and somewhere along the line they came to the conclusion that the 14th amendment doesn't really cover a right to privacy as it relates to a life inside of you that's a little dicey so it was overturned.
My father got upset and says yes they do make laws and that he was giving me a lesson about how much he knows about politics and he's being a 'know it all' without realizing that what he doesn't know is that I'm currently taking American government class in college right now and this was discussed at length in class.
But it was an opportunity for me to realize that my dad will always pretend to know what he's talking about when he really has no idea and how he has little friends because if he talk like this with people who knew what they were talking about he make a fool of himself, so I didn't say anything anymore.
He seemed pretty aggressive and if a prior blowup about detergent has taught me anything, he gets this way if I didn't bend to his way of seeing things so I learned the lesson and I just let him go and I didn't say much anymore and he just kind of went on and on about how they have the power and the say so and what they say goes and they were all just up there doing what they wanted to hurt the little guys and gals.
I felt frustrated but it was important for me to remain calm and not rock the boat even though it's the wise thing to do I felt like a coward doing it. I wanted to show him how much more I know than him and that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
I have to be realistic and realize that my dad is not in it for facts and sense, he's in it for ego and I need to relax. There's just no getting through to him. He barely realized that I was letting him go on and on because he's just so unaware of himself and he just continue to go on about other political conversations but I pretty much tuned it out l.
It's just as I thought if I didn't know then I certainly know now all he really wants is for me to fall in line and know what he wants me to know , and he doesn't allow difference in thought and he doesn't allow me knowing anymore than he does. I just have to play the role of the person who is dumb and doesn't know anything while he sits back with no high school diploma or any education background and just tell me how the world works. It's so incredibly frustrating and I still feel like a coward for not fighting him on it.
But I understand that and I continued it would've ended much like our past arguments. Where it's not about the topic anymore he starts doing pot shots and tries to shame me and that grows into insulting me and trying to cut deep and bullying me into silence. so anyways thanks for letting me share. at least I can talk to my therapist about this.
Are you me? Lol. My dad does the exact same thing, all of the time. I've always wanted to talk to people about it, but a lot of the issues are political in nature too... which is unfortunate because my issue with his behavior isn't the politics but rather the fact that he thinks he's all-knowing, there's just no real good way to go about that topic while maintaining peace. One relatively tame example is that I am religious and they are not, so it's just not something any of them are educated about at all... yet my dad constantly tries to explain my religion to me and he's always wrong. He just outright makes up reasons why we do things and then gets angry with me if I tell him he's wrong. I just don't talk to him anymore, or if I have to, I give him short or one word responses (this is wrong too because it makes me "unpleasant").
I have a theory on why they do this... it might not apply to all of them, but in my dad's case, I think that he genuinely thinks so highly of himself that he believes all of his hunches about things are objective facts. Like, in his mind he's just so special that his thoughts are authoritative statements. Smaller parts of it might be a desire to keep you in line, a desire to be right at all costs (these people cannot swallow their pride), a desire to be seen as intelligent (my dad loves the sound of his own voice), a bit of a power trip, etc. But I think that having a personality disorder inherently means you have a loose relationship with reality and in most of these cases, an inflated ego - ergo, a suspicion that something is a certain way = pure 100% fact, to the PD person.
Thank you for your comment. Nice to know i'm not alone and someone gets the frustration. i think you're on to something with what's behind this behavior. My dad makes me feel like even if i was some quantum physicist he'd still somehow shame me into believing he knows more than me and surprisingly i would slightly feel crazy asking myself maybe he does know about this more than me by his sheer dogged stubbornness and unwillingness to give an inch in having a dialogue. it's all "i'm the teacher you're the student" with him and being in his class with his own incompetence is the worst at times. i try to respect him still because that's my dad but he's so belligerent about his baseless conjectures, it's all pretty upsetting.
If there's one thing I have learned in my half century of dealing with a uNPD mother, it is that there is no point whatsoever in trying to educate her. She "knows" what she "knows" and will do what she wants. I am the child - she is the mother and she knows best.
I had to laugh at "if a prior blowup about detergent has taught me anything..." because that is just so typical.
There's an old story about a zen master being accused of something he didn't do, but his only response to the accusation is, "Is that so?" When it is revealed that he did not, in fact, commit whatever sin he was accused of, again, his response is only, "Is that so?"
I think of this a lot when dealing with my PDmil and PDmom, who both assert many things as "fact" when they are far from it. And I too have come to the conclusion that contradicting them directly or getting into a debate is pointless. So this is my new response when they state something absurd or inflammatory as fact. "Is that so?" It's a nice Medium Chill way of making it clear that they have the right to say whatever they want, but I don't have to absorb it or accept it.
Quote from: kethartikt0kb00m on July 28, 2022, 07:22:17 AM
Thank you for your comment. Nice to know i'm not alone and someone gets the frustration. i think you're on to something with what's behind this behavior. My dad makes me feel like even if i was some quantum physicist he'd still somehow shame me into believing he knows more than me and surprisingly i would slightly feel crazy asking myself maybe he does know about this more than me by his sheer dogged stubbornness and unwillingness to give an inch in having a dialogue. it's all "i'm the teacher you're the student" with him and being in his class with his own incompetence is the worst at times. i try to respect him still because that's my dad but he's so belligerent about his baseless conjectures, it's all pretty upsetting.
My parents especially have this tendency with medical things. My dad got angry at me for telling him that he shouldn't have Tylenol, a Theraflu hot drink, and multiple alcoholic drinks within hours of each other... what do I know, of course, the labels on medicine are just for decoration after all, and you should only ever trust your gut feelings about things. :upsidedown: They used to argue with me about some weird essential oil supplement they ordered off of a shady foreign website, they'd take it for literally everything and it made them sick, and I kept telling them that it's not good for them and I think it might even be toxic... what did I know, it's not like you could Google it and quickly find out from authoritative sources that the whole thing was a dangerous scam or anything. I try not to be sarcastic but some of these situations are so ridiculous it feels almost undignified to describe them any other way. But they're always right, even if they're so right they end up in the ER.
Which is another point towards my theory that this comes from them genuinely being disconnected from reality. When someone is willing to mess with their health to prove a point, I'm going to assume they really believe the nonsense they're saying. Most personality disorders come with some level of disconnect with reality. Psychosis of various degrees is common with personality disorders, too. Not even the best psychologists can fully get into the minds of some of these people, I swear.
Another medical mystery/I know more than you do story - Mother has been on high blood pressure medication since she was in her 30s [she's now mid 80s]. Far as I know she has stayed on them, I don't know that they've been adjusted or changed much if any at all. In her late 50s she started having heart issues that resulted in her needing a pacemaker [she now says that's a genetic issue, because her father and a brother also had pacemakers]. I dunno, over 20 years of meds designed to reduce blood pressure just might affect heart function? Maybe it's just me. But I digress ...
Not too long back there was a conversation about over the counter medications, and how certain ones shouldnt be taken if you have high blood pressure, states it clearly on the label and instructions. "But I don't have high blood pressure." Oh! I didn't know that had changed, that doc had taken you off those meds. "They haven't. That's why my blood pressure isn't high anymore." But ... I don't ... You just said .... :blink:
The mind boggles.
Quote from: moglow on July 28, 2022, 03:54:46 PM
Another medical mystery/I know more than you do story - Mother has been on high blood pressure medication since she was in her 30s [she's now mid 80s]. Far as I know she has stayed on them, I don't know that they've been adjusted or changed much if any at all. In her late 50s she started having heart issues that resulted in her needing a pacemaker [she now says that's a genetic issue, because her father and a brother also had pacemakers]. I dunno, over 20 years of meds designed to reduce blood pressure just might affect heart function? Maybe it's just me. But I digress ...
Not too long back there was a conversation about over the counter medications, and how certain ones shouldnt be taken if you have high blood pressure, states it clearly on the label and instructions. "But I don't have high blood pressure." Oh! I didn't know that had changed, that doc had taken you off those meds. "They haven't. That's why my blood pressure isn't high anymore." But ... I don't ... You just said .... :blink:
The mind boggles.
My husband also has a PD mom (and grandma but she's admittedly not
as bonkers), and he has a severely disabled younger sister. All of his sister's disabilities developed before birth and they're never going away. However, his mom thinks that feeding her a special diet she found on the internet is a magical cure for these disabilities and she will not hear anything else from anyone. His mom and grandma
constantly criticize our completely normal food choices, and if we tell them this is rude and we don't like them saying things like that, it's "oh, so you two think you have
everything figured out, huh?". Pretty rich coming from a lady who thinks "ancient societies used to wash gluten out of flour which is why they didn't have autistic children" (funfact: when you wash flour it increases gluten content because the starch washes out). His mom's not quite like my mom, but all PD people have some degree of disconnect from reality and this nonsense is hers. And she wonders why we don't tell her anything anymore.
As for my parents, they also won't hear anything about how to take care of a dog. When I still lived with them, they would feed her things dogs aren't supposed to have. I remember once I had to rush her to the emergency vet because I had no idea how many grapes she ate, and they wouldn't hear that grapes are toxic to dogs. Their solution to get her to throw up after she ate something she wasn't supposed to was to
make her eat something else toxic for dogs. Another time, they fed her more peaches than she's supposed to have dog food in a day (like two big peaches for a cat-sized dog)... it must have done something terrible to her blood sugar because she peed every couple of minutes for the next two days, I was so worried. I told them that they can't give my dog that much sugary fruit and they're like "What? There's no sugar in fruit. Fruit comes from
nature" in the most smug, condescending, "you're an idiot" way imaginable (local PD man astonished by fructose). I printed out a list of food dogs aren't supposed to have and put it on the fridge... they ignored it for the remainder of my time living there. Thankfully my dog never became diabetic or worse when I still lived with them.
Quote from: easterncappy on July 29, 2022, 08:38:05 AM
"What? There's no sugar in fruit. Fruit comes from nature."
:rofl:
I was told that purchasing sea salt was going to desalinate the ocean and kill all the sharks. And that windmills were "using up all the wind."
These probably aren't so much PD things as "ignorant" things, but perhaps the complacent confidence... no, I know a lot of non people with a surfeit of complacent confidence. Anyway, I'm glad to learn that there are no artificial chemicals like sugar in our fruit.
Quote from: Starboard Song on July 29, 2022, 10:08:14 AM
Quote from: easterncappy on July 29, 2022, 08:38:05 AM
"What? There's no sugar in fruit. Fruit comes from nature."
:rofl:
I was told that purchasing sea salt was going to desalinate the ocean and kill all the sharks. And that windmills were "using up all the wind."
These probably aren't so much PD things as "ignorant" things, but perhaps the complacent confidence... no, I know a lot of non people with a surfeit of complacent confidence. Anyway, I'm glad to learn that there are no artificial chemicals like sugar in our fruit.
Out of context, these are just moments of ignorance. But the reason I brought them up is because the people who were saying them to me were so convinced that their total nonsense was correct that they were willing to be verbally abusive towards me (and others) about it, or they were willing to risk the health of an animal or another person to prove a point. I think that's what makes the behavior disordered. Something I've seen over and over on the internet is PD grandparents giving their grandchildren foods that they have a diagnosed allergy to, because they just don't believe in allergies or think the child or their parent is "making it up for attention" and they won't even take it seriously if the child ends up in the ER with anaphylaxis. My own mom once said that "people make up food allergies because it's trendy"... well, either way, if someone tells me they're allergic to nuts I'm not going to trick them into eating nuts! The problem with this is that they think they know better than doctors or people do about their own bodies... or pet owners know about their own pets. And they will not hear anything else ever. Their feelings are hurt if you bring up facts or don't agree with them.
Normal people will just be like "oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know dogs can't have grapes! What do we do to fix this?". Or if they have a disabled child, they'll get treatment from doctors and therapists and not random people with internet blogs. Or if they know someone has a food allergy, they'll probably be on the lookout to make sure they don't accidentally offer that person food that is bad for them. If you disagree with them, it doesn't mean a torrent of abuse is imminent. They don't think every disagreement is secretly a power struggle and you're just being stubborn... they can swallow their pride and say "I'm wrong". PDs, on the other hand, don't process reality the way we do.
Our dog has a very sensitive stomach. If he eats literally ANYTHING out of the ordinary (his regular food and treats), he gets sick. We have explained this to PDmil about 1000 times, and she still asks if she can give him food off her plate when she visits. Every. Time.
QuoteNormal people will just be like "oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know ... " If you disagree with them, it doesn't mean a torrent of abuse is imminent. They don't think every disagreement is secretly a power struggle and you're just being stubborn... they can swallow their pride and say "I'm wrong". PDs, on the other hand, don't process reality the way we do.
I think this is the crux of pretty much any interaction where we/others have a difference of opinion, experience, education etc. The PDI seems unable to grasp that differences aren't bad and it doesn't mean we or they are "wrong." There's no acceptance of differences, seems to be very much "my way or the highway" inflexibility across the board. Trying to discuss damn near anything becomes an unnecessary issue of monumental proportions. And then they wonder why we shut down.
Quote from: Cat of the Canals on July 29, 2022, 11:19:33 AM
Our dog has a very sensitive stomach. If he eats literally ANYTHING out of the ordinary (his regular food and treats), he gets sick. We have explained this to PDmil about 1000 times, and she still asks if she can give him food off her plate when she visits. Every. Time.
I think they think rules are something that you use to punish people. Which is why they think that rules expire, when the "punishment" is over. "Don't give my dog something that will make him sick" isn't about the dog, it's about a power play, because that's how they use rules. Also, they personally don't get why greasy meat makes the dog throw up, which means that it doesn't actually make the dog throw up, because their feelings dictate reality. Or when I tell my mom "don't you dare ever bring your sex abuser husband near my daughter, my husband, or my home", she pretends to get it and respect my boundary for a little bit... and then a week later "can
we come over and see you?". In her mind, I'm just being difficult, stubborn, and trying to assert my authority when I tell her to not do things that make me and my loved ones unsafe.
Quote from: moglow on July 29, 2022, 12:05:27 PM
QuoteNormal people will just be like "oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know ... " If you disagree with them, it doesn't mean a torrent of abuse is imminent. They don't think every disagreement is secretly a power struggle and you're just being stubborn... they can swallow their pride and say "I'm wrong". PDs, on the other hand, don't process reality the way we do.
I think this is the crux of pretty much any interaction where we/others have a difference of opinion, experience, education etc. The PDI seems unable to grasp that differences aren't bad and it doesn't mean we or they are "wrong." There's no acceptance of differences, seems to be very much "my way or the highway" inflexibility across the board. Trying to discuss damn near anything becomes an unnecessary issue of monumental proportions. And then they wonder why we shut down.
:yeahthat: :yeahthat:
"Yeah that" to both of you.Spot on.
@easterncappy, I don't know your parents, but they may have given your dog toxic food for the sole purpose of hurting you! As for me, although I have very few memories of my childhood, I do have memories of my uBPDM threatening to have my dog euthanized just to hurt my feelings. And whenever my dog had a slight health problem, she always said that it might be better to euthanize him and replace him with a younger, better looking dog :stars:
Quote from: Maxtrem on July 29, 2022, 12:47:16 PM
@easterncappy, I don't know your parents, but they may have given your dog toxic food for the sole purpose of hurting you! As for me, although I have very few memories of my childhood, I do have memories of my uBPDM threatening to have my dog euthanized just to hurt my feelings. And whenever my dog had a slight health problem, she always said that it might be better to euthanize him and replace him with a younger, better looking dog :stars:
Perhaps... I've never really thought of it that way, but I'm not sure. For context, I paid for the dog and everything associated with her (except maybe one or two bags of dog food). Nonetheless, my parents threatened to take her to the shelter if she did something they didn't like. They'd coo over her and they'd treat her like a baby... and then, she "misbehaved" (a lot of the time it was a reaction to their behavior - like yeah, she's gonna snarl at you if you keep touching her belly when she's made it clear she doesn't like that), and it was "I'm going to leave you at a pet hotel for three months so you learned what you did wrong", as if the dog would even understand a punishment like that. :stars:
Sorry for getting off-topic. It's very easy to get carried away when talking about these people. The logical connection between "I'm always right, correctness is a power play and not about facts, it hurts my feelings if you don't agree with me" and child and animal abuse is definitely real. Lol
Yeah You can never be right. It is something I am extremely sensitive to lately.
They are always right always. They are a God you are a mortal.
The mouse story- I told my mom about a mouse I found dead in the laundry room. "They come in for the dog food". No mom I think they come in for the warmth - the dog food is in the kitchen. I was running around with a real estate agent who also said yes warmth laundry room and even a zip code magazine had a story about field mice this time of year - warmth laundry room.
So 3 sources!!! Didn't matter. You have mice because of your digesting dogs and their food.
Own reality.
Quote from: Cat of the Canals on July 28, 2022, 11:10:45 AM
There's an old story about a zen master being accused of something he didn't do, but his only response to the accusation is, "Is that so?" When it is revealed that he did not, in fact, commit whatever sin he was accused of, again, his response is only, "Is that so?"
I think of this a lot when dealing with my PDmil and PDmom, who both assert many things as "fact" when they are far from it. And I too have come to the conclusion that contradicting them directly or getting into a debate is pointless. So this is my new response when they state something absurd or inflammatory as fact. "Is that so?" It's a nice Medium Chill way of making it clear that they have the right to say whatever they want, but I don't have to absorb it or accept it.
Gonna use this! Thank you.
More solidarity here. When I was a kid, my parents were not very political. I’m the scapegoat daughter. As I developed my own ideas and opinions as a young adult, as one usually does, I became more conservative on some issues. My parents suddenly became flaming across-the-board liberals. It would sound crazy to most people not on this board, but I really think it happened as a reaction to my politics!
Cordelia says x. X is part of the conservative platform, therefore Cordelia is far far right on every issue. Cordelia is wrong by definition. Therefore we will be far far left. That’ll put her in her place! Or something like that. Again, the mind boggles.
"But I understand that and I continued it would’ve ended much like our past arguments. Where it’s not about the topic anymore he starts doing pot shots and tries to shame me and that grows into insulting me and trying to cut deep and bullying me into silence"
:yeahthat:
As a kid I would definitely tune it out. I suppose he took my disengagement as agreement. Or more likely he never thought about whether I agreed or not, as disagreement is unthinkable. As a young adult I would refuse to discuss but I would no longer concede to his bullying. As I continued to have my beliefs and practice religion my own way and dress the way I wished... well that was just all food for narcissistic rage and constant scapegoating until I married and got far, far away. But I wasn't forgiven. Not by a long shot. The rage was always only barely under the surface. My disagreeing with him in any way whatsoever is a personal insult and morally, ethically, WRONG and it's only his duty as a parent to make it RIGHT. So it got to taking pot shots at random opportunities, staging a "Come to Jesus" ambush from his narc clergy friend, and that kind of crap. For years until I went NC.
You are wise to refuse to engage that dynamic anymore. I hope you can take good care of yourself.
Quote from: Call Me Cordelia on August 04, 2022, 07:02:25 AM
More solidarity here. When I was a kid, my parents were not very political. I'm the scapegoat daughter. As I developed my own ideas and opinions as a young adult, as one usually does, I became more conservative on some issues. My parents suddenly became flaming across-the-board liberals. It would sound crazy to most people not on this board, but I really think it happened as a reaction to my politics!
Cordelia says x. X is part of the conservative platform, therefore Cordelia is far far right on every issue. Cordelia is wrong by definition. Therefore we will be far far left. That'll put her in her place! Or something like that. Again, the mind boggles.
Me too!
My mom is very suggestible. The last decent-sounding explanation she has for something will be what her opinion on that topic is for the day. She's incapable of defending any position without immediately getting 100% emotional and accusing others of xyz. My parents both have a lot of beliefs that aren't coherent, don't make sense when combined together, are very emotionally charged, fluctuate on a weekly basis (my mom goes from super liberal to super conservative within a matter of minutes regularly :blink:). A week's worth of my parents' opinions will represent the entire political and ideological spectrum, because different things make them feel good at different times.
I don't think they understand that a person's opinions are supposed to be what they genuinely believe is correct. To them, an opinion is something you hold because it feels good... you can use it to punish someone, to manipulate a situation, to get something that you want, etc., and then when another one is more convenient you discard the old one, which is why they've never understood why I've held onto opinions even if they were uncomfortable or inconvenient to me - simply because I believed that the truth doesn't depend on my feelings, like non-PD people do.
Sometimes I feel that they think that I hold certain opinions out of anger, so to "fight back" at that, they have the opposite opinion. Like it's a contest or a power play. Everything is a power play, all of the time. No one can just be human and have thoughts and opinions that aren't a part of some great scheme. Ugh.
Example of what I meant in the previous post:
Without getting into the COVID thing too much, my dad once found a video on Facebook of a person in a lab coat claiming to be a doctor talking for 20 minutes about how it's all a hoax or whatever... he demanded that I sit down with him and watch the whole video. "No offense, anyone can buy a lab coat and upload a video to Facebook, claiming to be Dr. So-and-so. I really don't want to watch this video or talk about this at all". Cue immediate angry outburst and cussing at me (you wouldn't believe how common of a reaction this was in our house). It's not about the COVID situation specifically, it's about the suggestibility, the belief being emotionally charged, demanding that others play into it because it's secretly about power, getting angry because someone isn't bending to your will, etc. Could be about any topic. Of course, his beliefs on the COVID thing fluctuated occasionally too... and most of the time, they were just mean-spirited and edgy (regardless of which direction he was leaning in that week), because being that way makes him feel good.
** MOD NOTE **
This has been a great discussion. Everyone has been doing a great job of incidentally referencing some hot button issues without letting the thread devolve into politics, or claiming PDs believe a certain way, or diagnosing any celebrities or politicians. All of these would be guidelines violations
Thank you all for that discipline, and your support of one another.
Keep it up.
** WE NOW RETURN YOU TO YOUR THREAD ALREADY IN PROGRESS **
Haha thanks, Starboard! It can get awkward to dance around any concrete reference to the actual issues under fire with our PDs.
Another thing that occurred to me that my dad used to do is ask me "isn't that right, cappy?" after he expressed some personal opinion or another. If I didn't answer, he'd go "...isn't that right?" again. The angry storming off with cussing happened often if the response was "no, you're wrong", not answering made me "unpleasant", so the only correct answer was "yes, you're right". A lot of the times the personal opinions were rude comments about other people... one specifically was him saying something extremely cruel about like, a maybe three year old boy he saw playing with empty display boxes at a store. I didn't even know what to say to some of the things he said, since they were so mean. Even if they were normal opinions a normal person would have, they'd be expressed in a really vile and bitter way. But he often made sure to put a little plea for validation and agreement at the end.
Okay, I'm sorry for double posting, but the memories are rushing back. TW for gun violence but with the passage of time, my dad's reaction to this has gone from heartbreaking to kind of funny, because it just symbolizes who he is as a person so well, and I've just sort of accepted that he's stuck this way. It's long, but bear with me, I'll make it make sense.
A couple of years ago, I spent a night in a rough neighborhood with some friends that my parents knew (which is the only reason they were okay with it lol). At some point during the night, I was woken up by a barrage of gunfire. Literally like, three sets of at least 20 shots fired, and someone else shooting sporadically with a pistol. Right outside of the window of the room I was in. I was terrified, I crawled to and hid in the bathroom, I called the police, and then I spam called everyone in my family because I was convinced I was going to die. Well, I didn't die, but I spent the rest of the night peeping through the blinds at CSI picking up shell casings and I didn't sleep for a couple of nights. I didn't go back to the neighborhood again, and this was the second time I was caught up in gun violence (the first time made international news!).
The next day, I drove back to my parents' place (I lived with them at the time). Instead of showing like, basic empathy towards his only child who had a near death experience, my dad decided to use this opportunity to brag about our nationality and debate me on what kind of gun was used. For context, we're all originally from a country known for manufacturing and exporting firearms (but we live in the US now). He started pulling up random pictures of semi-automatic rifles manufactured in our country and going "now this is a good gun, it could have been one of those..." and "oh, it was probably this one, it's a real work of art". I kept telling him that I had no idea what kind of gun was used and I also didn't care because that was for the police to figure out and he just didn't stop and he continued to get angry and argue with me about it. Even my mom had to tell him to stop using this as an occasion to be right all of the time, and she pretty much categorically took his side in every situation.
At the time, my heart was shattered. How could my own dad not even give a single crap that I almost died? Why did he have to argue with me about what kind of gun I thought the violent criminal used to amplify my PTSD for the rest of my life? But now... LMAO. :roll: That is so him. In fact, now that I remembered it, it's going to be my default story for "why I don't talk to my dad" because it's a great demonstration of his horrid character and disordered personality, but it omits the really gruesome parts of who he is and what he did to me.
Here's the takeaway: kethartikt0kb00m, you are not alone.
So many of us see the pattern you describe. The over-confidence. The fake expertise. The insistance that you musty agree with them. The belief that disagreement is a sort of war, rather than no-big-deal.
You hit the nail on the head with your first example, and it clearly resonated with a bunch of us. Thanks for starting the thread.
Quote from: kethartikt0kb00m
It's just as I thought if I didn't know then I certainly know now all he really wants is for me to fall in line and know what he wants me to know , and he doesn't allow difference in thought and he doesn't allow me knowing anymore than he does. I just have to play the role of the person who is dumb and doesn't know anything while he sits back with no high school diploma or any education background and just tell me how the world works. It's so incredibly frustrating and I still feel like a coward for not fighting him on it.
Man, do I get that. I don't so much feel like a coward, but.....just frustrated. It is just so wrong to have to sit and take. Be strong. Remember, your goal is not to be right, and definitely not to persuade him. As you know, it is to
maximize your peace.
We are proud of you, and it is brave to know how that is done and do it.
The contranian. Yeah that is my guy. I could say sky is blue and he would say no sky is white. I would try to meet him halfway / empathize/ see his perspective. Well yeah the clouds are white. It would end up in an argument if I did not lose and say yeah sky white. I think this is a lot of the issues of Personality Disorders. Never being right. Statistically one out of every 2 times we should get a win sometimes right.
We took some personality tests (The Big 5 one) he was 98 percent agreeable. I was only 50 percent. So he is always in agreement with the powers that be they are always right. It drives me bonkers. I am much more suspicious of motives.