March 13, 2023
"Changing a dysfunctional relationship will invariably require you to say hard things to a family member...."
"People often put off difficult conversations because they are searching for the 'right' words. It’s OK to say something like 'I don’t want you yelling at me anymore,' she offered as an example, adding, 'There’s not a more "beautiful" or perfect way to say that.... We have tricked ourselves into thinking that we’re supposed to always feel comfortable, so even as we’re saying hard things our goal is to say it without the other person feeling upset or mad or wanting a further explanation.... And that’s not realistic.'"
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Usually yelling "What the hell is wrong with you?" works wonders.
To change the relationship you have to stop caring so much about their emotions and reactions. People who are adults can manage -- should be able to manage -- their own emotions with little (or no) help or input from you.
I find that too many people don't hold this truth closely enough.
"Fuck off" is handy. "Fuck" indicates sincerity while, curiously, not meaning "Fuck." It replaces some other verb that you can't be bothered to search for at the moment, perhaps a precise verb that does not exist anywhere.
Love this: We have tricked ourselves into thinking that we’re supposed to always feel comfortable...
No. No "we" have not. Instructors from elementary to grad school have been doing that and like Stanford's crybullies demonstrated just last week the kids are ENCOURAGED to view possible future discomfort as a reason to protest someone else's free speech, even though human history shows words don't actually physically harm anyone. Need more proof? Check out the Spectator's story about the Phoenix school that illegally banned conservative Christians from being student teachers because "they might make some students uncomfortable." In reality, the board is stacked with woke transactivists that "are uncomfortable" around Christians who "believe the Bible" but will accept "denominations that do not hew to traditional Christian doctrine." So a "religious test," if you will, even though over the long association with a Christian teacher college the district has never had a single complaint about those student teachers.
I'm sure the next step is to get as many complaints on record ASAP to cover their asses, but it is still an illegal religious test for new hires. So no "we" don't have a problem, Doctor, but the Woke certainly do.
In my experience I don't have to communicate hard things very often but if I try to say hard things it's usually the end of the relationship. Guess my relationships are mostly dysfunctional...
"How to Set Boundaries With a Difficult Family Member/It’s tricky but doable, says Nedra Glover Tawwab, a therapist and best-selling author. Here are her strategies for getting started"
"Tawwab" means "repentance."
Maybe that's as good a place as any for somebody to start.
feeling uncomfortable, safe spaces, empathy, sympathy, DIEversity, etc.
How many psychiatrists, does it take.. To Change a Lightbulb?
Only One... But, it Takes a Long Time.. And, the Lightbulb has to Want to Change
Or, you Could just say.. SCREW THIS! and change it Yourself
If you want to toss gasoline on a heated argument, just say: "Calm down!"
@rhhardin
"Fuck" indicates sincerity while, curiously, not meaning "Fuck."
Can confirm it works. In the army you drop F-bombs in almost every sentence, reflexively, without even realizing it. But once you do, and you start to minimize its use with subordinates or people that are familiar with your leadership style, and you quickly notice a change in effectiveness. "Fuck" works...it just fucking does.
The Spanish and Portuguese have an almost identical word, "caralho", which is equally effective, and works well on English-only people without skipping a beat once they figure out it means the same as "fuck"...but it's slightly more elegant. I always used it with higher-ranking field-grade officers who appreciated the nuance, although some thought I might be secretly latino somehow, which is definitely not the case.
I keep a "Quoteable" file of profound remarks seen on interesting internet forums. rhhardin's
12.01 has been added.
Very important information in this post. Setting the boundaries is the key to relationships continuing. But be ready to create another circle of relationships when the old one excludes you. In fact create the new one first.
I don't believe that we are "supposed to" always feel comfortable, but I prefer to feel comfortable.
So I just have less and less to do with people that make me feel bad.
Problem solved, if you're willing to narrow your group.
So are we the difficult family members? Or is it Althouse herself!
If someone is yelling at you a lot then you need to separate yourself from that person because the kind of people who yell at you a lot are the kind of people who have "issues" and chances are they are not going to react well to you telling them to stop yelling at you all the time.
“All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.” — Sigmund Freud
...until you put a stop to them
This is absolute and utter bullshit. "Changing a dysfunctional family member" is the first fail. YOU CAN'T. You can only change yourself.
For me, it depends on whether the other person is carrying. If they are not, the comment "what the fuck" is my standard go to expression. If they are (carrying that is) I tend to start off with "can we discuss what's bothering you" or words to that effect.
I was with my ex from 1992 to 2018. Met my femme fatal at Eastern Illinois University in the summer of 1991. We were functionally dysfunctional. The good times were the best, and the bad times were the worst.
You get addicted to that roller coaster lifestyle, always out on the tempest, never floating calmly in the harbor.
But damn it was fun sometimes. A lot of times. Plus she was really hot which feeds the dysfunction. Hot women can make you chase clouds, try and catch the wind, tilt at windmills. Especially one that creeped into your soul.
Paywall.
In my experience, almost any vehement expression by a grown male in a slightly raised voice is taken by females as "yelling."
And I would wager that in the author's world, dysfunction and anger are rooted in men who don't share her political views.
My former wife and I had a contentious marriage. Went to counseling. Were encouraged to respect boundaries. Only one of us could manage that.
For a decade I was emotionally, verbally, and physically abused (to the point of injury) when my wife of 15 years had what must have been a long-pending mental breakdown after I busted up her fervent attempts to become pregnant by her boss. Even though at the time we had a wonderful adopted infant daughter !! When the baby began to express some of her own will, she, too, began to be abused, including baby-shaking.
The bias against men in family court is ferocious, and I knew I would never be believed. Thus I endured years of abuse which I could only accept and receive whilst quietly documenting it all contemporaneously to third parties and interposing as best I could to protect my daughter. Leaving was not an option, for I am a farmer and live at my sole source of revenue.
My wife did not believe my quiet, sincere warnings that if she did not stop, there would at some point be legal consequences. Finally she physically abused the child in a way which easily could have had fatal consequences, injured me significantly when I interposed to protect the child. When she was gone the next day I called the cops, let my daughter speak for herself for an hour in my absence, before giving my own report. The next day, my wife was arrested, removed from the home, and convicted of Domestic Violence.
Family Court has been a three-year horror show. The Guardian ad Litem of all peoplr [the court-appointed attorney for the child] told me that without the DV conviction, a terrible psyche eval, and a county social service intervention with Child Protective Services, my wife would have been awarded 100 percnt custody, instead of the 50-50 she was able to get despite a mentally-ill mother with a DV conviction.
Something is very wrong.
Bob Newhart's depiction of a psychotherapist using his tried-and-true two-word solution works best.
Bart Hall, very sorry for your situation, especially for your daughter. for the last eight years of our marriage, I hung on, declining divorce specifically because I could not prove the abuse and thinking that I was in a better position to protect our daughter at home than I would be with shared custody. My daughter was 17 when I filed and she was able to decide with whom to live. She went on to finish HS and college and is doing pretty well and also going to counseling.
A girlfriend in college once told me of an argument she had with her boyfriend in high school. Apparently, she was quite agitated during the argument. The boyfriend decided he would calm her down by saying, "Easy, hornet." It had, to put it mildly, the opposite of the desired effect.
You need an instruction book for this shit???
We're due for a reset in all of this. What we're doing isn't working, and shows no signs of being at all repairable.
Time was that things were unbalanced and unfair to all parties, mostly skewed against women. Now? They're still unbalanced and unfair, only skewed the opposite direction. Instead of some semblance of balance and justice, what we have on display in most so-called "family courts" is vindictive "restorative justice" meted out to people who had nothing to do with the things they're subject to reprisal for.
This isn't how you fix things.
Time was, I was raised by the women in my life to believe a certain set of things, most all of which would be synonymous with "woke", these days. I was fully on board with it all, believed every word of it.
Then, I went out into the world and had the unpleasant realization forced upon me that the women in my life had basically lied to me about the nature of the world, and that most of their worldviews were dramatically just... Wrong.
People are bastards. You can't trust strangers. There are people out there of the "victimized minorities" who will live down to and exhibit every single malign stereotype connected with "their kind". What I've come to recognize, against my best intentions, is that those-there old-timey bigots often had things a lot more "right" than the enlightened "woke". It's an unpleasant realization, when you've been conditioned to reject every one of those bigoted views, but... It does make for better outcomes when you do embrace them. You at least go into situations with other people prepared for them to behave like animals, and when you don't experience it, it makes for a pleasant change of pace.
I still like to think I don't demonstrate all the wrong '-isms' when I'm out and about, but the fact is, I've had so much confirmatory experience over the years... That I probably do, and I can justify every bit of it based on actual ugly events. I used to be proud of my open mind, and open-handed 'un-bigotry'. These days, I look back on where that got me, and I just have to ruefully laugh at my naivete. I'd have done rather bitter to have listened to the bigots.
There's no real reward for being the better person, and taking your bootheel off the neck of those that 'your kind' have long oppressed; it gains you nothing but their contempt, and their belief that you're weak enough that they can put their heel to your neck. You can't make peace with a large enough percentage of those 'formerly oppressed' that I now consider the entire enterprise to be a waste of time. I believe Lincoln had the right of it, TBH... If he had repatriated every former slave in the US back to their homelands, we'd all have been rather better off. That's the course that likely should have been taken; you cannot share your house with those you formerly kept shackled and sold as chattel. Likewise, you cannot ever accept freedom and liberty as a gift; you have to fight for it yourself, and that's the essential thing lacking from most of the 'formerly oppressed': They were given their freedom, never earning it for themselves. Because of that, they don't value it, and can never be proud of it. You can see the difference in between the Haitians and American blacks... The Haitians threw off and slaughtered their oppressors; the American black had their freedom handed to them on a silver platter, by people that looked a lot like their oppressors. And, for that? They can never forgive them. Time we all recognized this set of facts.
Big Mike said...
"So are we the difficult family members? Or is it Althouse herself!"
There is one. See if you can guess who it is.
"In my experience I don't have to communicate hard things very often but if I try to say hard things it's usually the end of the relationship. Guess my relationships are mostly dysfunctional..."
I think the theory here is that when the relationship is familial, ending it is not always an option. Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in.
No problem for an Italian family off the boat in Ellis Island and settled in US like my Grandmother and grandfather. You screw up bad enough you are banned and "dead to the family "PAPA DONT TAKE NO MESS!
I’m astonished that The New York Times published an entire article on dealing with a difficult family member without once mentioning Trump, MAGA, or right-wing.
What’s the world coming to?
rhhardin @ 12:01: "...It replaces some other verb that you can't be bothered to search for at the moment, perhaps a precise verb that does not exist anywhere."
Astute comment. I would add, that using "F***" in this manner --as a kind of lazy universal-- reinforces the idea that you cannot be bothered to look for a better word; that the person to whom you direct the message is simply not worth the effort.
Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) @ 2:25: Wow. What a harrowing experience. My sympathies to you. Hope your daughter is OK...
The dysfunctional person often has a commitment to a self narrative that is unchangeable, preventing that person from seeing what is actually occurring, and adapting to changing circumstances. That's bad, because everyone can benefit from occasionally interrogating their own narratives of meaning and identity. That's less difficult for some than others. For some, it's impossible.
In my experience, almost any vehement expression by a grown male in a slightly raised voice is taken by females as "yelling." LOL. Yep.
My wife and I rarely argue. But she used to accuse me of yelling when I simply raised my voice.
"I'm not yelling. THIS!!!!!!! is yelling!!!!!!"
That accusation stopped.
Is this therapist telling us that people will be surprised to hear that someone does not enjoy being yelled at?
Establishing boundaries is great, but the people who don't know that being yelled at isn't pleasant (or who don't care) will just see it as a challenge. It's also okay to go low- or no-contact with boundary-stompers.
Just so we’re all in agreement, this is about Chuck, right?
I’ve been there Bart, it’s sucks. My mentally-ill ex got custody of our two kids but 18 months later gave them up to me because she couldn’t handle it. I was a single Dad in the Air Force for 5 plus years, did the best I could. Ex ran away to Alaska. Decades later my now 40-something y/o mentally-ill daughter seems to have inherited her Mom’s disease even though she’s a LtCol in the military. Guess what type of HR job she has. Her two ex-husbands will talk to me, she won’t. I haven’t seen my grandkids since 2020.
When you’re dealing with the mentally ill that “changing a dysfunctional relationship” crap goes out the window, believe me, I tried.
The fundamental disagreement is sometimes as to which person is dysfunctional.
Jim- that’s how I was raised- quiet force- and how we raised our kids. Occasionally, they would accuse me of yelling when my voice was stern, not raised. I always answered as you did your wife.
Sadly, I am accused of not preparing my kids for the world out there. A sheltered life. A life w/boundaries and Mass on Sunday mornings. We’re a fading cultural touchstone up here where I live- along w/family farms.
Oh well…
Blogger Big Mike said...
So are we the difficult family members? Or is it Althouse herself!
I think we know what she thinks the problem is.
In response to farmgirl - Here in NW Montana our two young grand children (both girls) are growing-up on a fifth-generation cattle ranch, attending a rural one-room school and learning about the values that define, guide and propel life in the local ranching/farming community. Yes, in much of the country the values of this culture are slowly fading. But in this time and place the fading is less evident. Our daughter (who never raises her voice and has calm almost Socratic conversations with her girls) is working with her husband to inculcate her children in the strength and beauty - majesty even - of their often hard and trying agricultural life. There are calves to see born, horses to ride, ranch/farm equipment to operate, mountains to ski, reservoirs in which to swim, deer to hunt, community events to enjoy and friends to help. People look out for one another. It's been this way, in that ranching community for probably a hundred and twenty years. May it go on and on. And if there's another form of an American Great Awakening it might well start on a ranch in Montana.
I've done the THIs IS YELLING! thing on occasion. Now my wife is so hard of hearing I have to almost yell just to be heard.
I enjoy hearing from farmgirl, and the rest of you non-city slickers too.
Yelling at a family member is abuse. But in the competitive world of men the rule is that the loudest voice in the room has claimed the authority in the room.
So never raise your voice until they do. Then to paraphrase Crocodile Dundee ,show him “That’s not a loud voice, this is a loud voice.” It lets the SOB know that you don’t fear him nor embarrassment. But avoid vulgar language that can be used against you.
This post by Althouse has been a joy to read. Ann set it up and her readers hit it out of the park. I've spent many a summer vacations in Montana and I admire the comment by Sheridan. But most of all, posters have offered honest and heart-felt replies. Ann is great and so are her followers.
Jupiter said " Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in."
Robert Frost. Death of a Hired Man, I think. My mother studied with Frost for three years, and she introduced me to him in 1960 when back at Middlebury for her 20th reunion. He asked me if I'd ever read any of his poems. I told him my favorite was The Runaway [about a colt left too long on pasture and afraid of the season's first snowfall] He took my hand and said, "Boys your age understand colts better than we grownups do." He autographed a copy of his complete works my mother had brought along for the occasion.
Almost 60 years later my wife quite conspicuously threw that book into the fireplace insert, because she knew how much it meant to me. Then she stood there and sneered, "If you so much as touch me I'll call the cops and you'll never see [daughter] again"
Sheridan @ 8:40: Sounds pretty much like Paradise. Sure: rough edges and sorrow and uncertainty: but you guys are doing it right and, I hope, are happy. Best of luck; stay safe; stay sane. After the Crash, we will need all the help you can spare.
The boyfriend decided he would calm her down by saying, "Easy, hornet." It had, to put it mildly, the opposite of the desired effect.
The very worst way to calm someone down is to say, "Calm down!". Everybody knows this, but nobody can ever resist saying it.
Almost 60 years later my wife quite conspicuously threw that book into the fireplace insert, because she knew how much it meant to me. Then she stood there and sneered, "If you so much as touch me I'll call the cops and you'll never see [daughter] again"
And then the man rolled up his sleeves and said, "Well, I guess I better make it count, then."
Sheridan: Amen! Montana ranching- incredibly rugged.
We’re in the NEK- NorthEast Kingdom- in VT. Our cows aren’t lopsided where we live(one set of legs shorter than the other caused by hillside grazing;0).
Thank you, Althouse. For the forum, the photos and the ability to speak freely. And by speak- I think you know what I mean, even if the word isn’t correct (a lá tape, footage, etc)
Damn, Bart.
If mere yelling at family is abuse, my family was full of abusers. We bellowed, at times, veins bulging and fists clenched . . . but after the age of 12 or 13 we (four boys) never actually hit each other.
@farmgirl 3/14/23, 5:39 AM:
Sounds as if you and I grew up very similarly, though I was a little west of you in Lamoille County. Both my parents had full time jobs, but in addition we had large gardens to tend, Herefords to raise (every spring a new calf or two was born) as well as turkeys to be fed/watered and eventually slaughtered. Not to mention the endless chore of prepping wood for a winter's worth of heating.
When I was old enough to get a part time job the rule was that Sundays were for family. Either Mass on Saturday afternoon or Sunday together as a family. I'm still teased (good naturedly) by my husband that my childhood was very "Little House". I guess so, but when the SHTF I know we won't go hungry!
"Narr said...
In my experience, almost any vehement expression by a grown male in a slightly raised voice is taken by females as "yelling." "
Leaning OT, but it's obligatory.
Tone of Voice.
SHTF lol. I had to google that!!!
I’m planning on canning more this year. I get together w/friends and we share the time, the wealth &the work. It makes me feel useful &helpful to my friends &my family. Apples into pie filling, pickled beets and cukes.
I’m not either of my Grandmothers, not even close. Yet- I feel closer to them when I’m domestic.
I know right where you were(almost). I have a good friend who lives down by your hometown. Pretty sure you’re on C;0) as opposed to the stretch towards Stowe. I’m very glad to have met up w/you- here.
Isn’t Althouse great? ;0) the Blogger &the blog
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