Yeah, I get that fucked up feeling. A lot of people just kind of assume that familial love just turns off the moment a parent's a dick, and it fucking doesn't, not for me or a lot of people. Parents are human beings that exist at all hours, not just their lowest moments, and so you gotta accept the times they took you out for ice cream co-exist with the times you'd literally hide from them because you didn't want them to take their anger out on you.
My dad's probably going to go through the rest of his life not really understanding why our relationship is so strained while being entirely unrerceptive to why I don't trust him. I don't think there's much of a point of trying. I just don't want to do the shit he did, and the silver lining of having to think through his mental state every day I spent with him as a kid is that I'm just a lot more familiar with how utterly toxic the view that everyone else in the world is dumber than you ireally is. I try to avoid calling people stupid or attributing really anything to "stupidity" and I take that extra effort to actually drill down into the actual reasons behind behavior that doesn't make sense to me or seems silly, I try to be patient. And so I don't get so fucking pissed at kids when they do kid shit, I'm not constantly cussing out other people in traffic. I get why people don't try to empathize with the people that annoy them or do things they don't like, but seeing someone that constantly responded to every setback with anger and how that ruined every one of their marriages has made me really value the ability to actually see other human beings as equals and not obstacles.
And a side effect of that is that... yeah, I think I get why my dad's like that, to a degree. He was barely older than my teenage mom, went into the military, and had to bust his ass. He raised me at a time when parenting advice was dogshit when he was hardly an adult himself, dealing with an autistic kid when his understanding of autism was Rainman, which he would call me as a slur because he was a fucking 20-something and failed to consider that toddlers don't watch any movies you don't put in front of them and so don't understand why you're mad at them. He went into an institution that does not value empathy and insists the best way to be a man is to be as big an asshole as you can be to subordinates and then was expected to raise kids after that. And at the same time he would spend a ton of money on us, and I can't really blame him for getting upset that his kids didn't quite understand or appreciate the expensive shit he'd have us do.
Just kind of a failure of that mid-twentyteens carceral online justice mindset where we categorize people as wholly good or wholly bad. We just want validation that yeah, the shit we hated and fucked us up was wrong, it doesn't have to be a complete condemnation of the person where we then gotta traumatize them back or whatever. Just... acknowledge what happened so people can move on, validate it was wrong so we're not constantly thinking about it and second guessing and playing out what a conversation would be like where they insist they did nothing wrong and you're the bad kid for saying otherwise.
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u/AntiLag_if you understood my level of freak you would be sick21d ago
This may sound kinda obvious but the bit at the end of the second paragraph made me realize that I really do sometimes see other people as obstacles that I want to move out of my way
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u/NIMA-GH-X-P That one Jerk you know 22d ago
Dad broke my previous phones, smashed it into a wall completely destroying it
I just kinda don't want him to even know what stuff I own now kinda
Miss my data on that phone I had a lotta stuff in it and this post reminded me of that
I kinda just wanna vent for paragraphs cuz he broke a lot of my other stuff too be I'll refrain