Jaimie's back - and seriously begs for family relationship advice

[Jaimie Richards]

Howdy, gentlemen - it's so good to finally be back on the boards.

Today is the day when I come back to the community - with reasons for my departure and a very serious request for help. The matter that has taken me down for so long is family related - in fact, it is a toxic relationship with my father. I'd be very grateful for any and all answers - even just saying 'hi' makes a huge difference and will be truly appreciated. With your advice, I hope I'll manage to take the reins of my life once again.

Before I begin, I'd like to put a little disclaimer - I apologize for the huge amount of text to chew through, posting multiple posts and maybe chaotic placement of the thread. However, I believe that my problem necessitates providing lots of data for the help to be successful. Therefore, I've decided to divide my post thematically into a couple of parts - each one dedicated to a different part of my story. I've also added headlines and TL;DRs to make it easier to digest and skimmed and trimmed the text to absolute minimum. Hopefully, this thread could later be transformed into a diary of my personal journey and growth - at the moment, however, I guess it's too offtopic to publish it on the journals boards (if I'm wrong, I'd like to ask for the thread to be moved to the more fitting place).

Without any further ado - let me begin... and straight from the heart: please bear with me till the end, because I truly need help. Lastly - all the posts will be published over the course of 24 hours tops so I can place all the last edits.

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Part 0 - Stuff to bear in mind while reading

The problem I'm bringing today to the boards is a really private one as it is closely related to toxic relations inside my family, in particular with my father. The reason I'm bringing it here is twofold.

First of all, I'm yet again fighting depression - this time, however, from very different reason than before... and as I've beaten it once using stuff from Chase's articles, comments and posts, I think I can do it again with some additional intel. Moreover, unbiased, truest psychological input from the members of the GC community is priceless.

Part 1 - The Beginning

(TL;DR: in this part I discuss my family relations and stuff that happened between 2013 and 2015 when we first met on the boards.)

When I frist appeared on these boards over 2 years ago, I did my best to express my gratitude for the help from GC community. I was vague in problem description due to its personal nature. This time, I'd like to shed as much light as needed in order to defeat my nightmares once and for all.

When I was about 12-13 years old, my parents parted ways. It was done in an astoundingly peaceful way and I wasn't harmed in any way in the process, so I'm not resentful about that. Not even a little bit. I stayed with my mother for about 10 years - up until to her sudden death during spring 2013 (unforseen heart attack). I stayed with her gladly - not only she was my best friend, but also I knew she needed me greatly. Admitedly, during that time I didn't engage in serious relationships with girls, because two strong emotional connections in my case would just be too much - so I limited myself to very rare one night stands when opportunities presented themselves. And 100% honestly, I don't regret anything - I did what I thought was the best and I'm happy with that.

What's important - throught that period of time, I was in at best sporadic contact with the rest of my relatives (like once or twice a year with some, with others once per 2 or 3 years - for example with my dad). When my mom died, I reunited with my family. First of the whole bunch was my father - and even from the beginning, there were hostilities between us. Given all the bad stuff that happened at that time, I can accept that and even try to forgive those animosities as they could be, even if just slightly, justified.

Our interactions pushed me to move out and start everything on my own. Throught the next months I stayed in touch with my relatives (dad, godmother/dad's sister, cousins, grandparents etc.) - many things could have been done better, but all in all things turned out pretty OK. With lots of hard work and various help here and there, I finished my studies at technical university in 2015. Up to that point, I had a major success under my belt - I used Chase's stuff to beat depression after my loss and I was mostly OK and kicking when I first entered our community. Sure, there still very mundane problems, but nothing too serious.

 

[Jaimie Richards]

Part 2 - Relationship with my father

(TL;DR: in this part I discuss the toxic relationship with my father.)

From summer 2013 to summer 2017 - that's the period where my problematic relationship with my dad took its toll on me.

This relationship, IMVHO, is the epitome of toxicity. To get the gist of it - some stuff experienced throught the years covered in part 1, some just after part 1 and up to this day - please take a look at the list below:
- typical behavior of my father is strictly tied with anger outbursts - he can be triggered by almost anything, almost any time;
- he enjoys quarreling for the sake of quarreling - the angrier the other party gets, the better;
- during such quarrels the only important factor for him is to win such an argument - no matter the cost;
- significantly, it doesn't matter who's right - even if you manage to outgun him and win despite all the odds, you've only wasted literally 3+ hours as topics to fight about never even seem to end;
- assuming you win, you have to bear in mind that all your words will be remembered and used againt you at convenient times, for example:
/ if you don't show any emotions, he will keep pushing until you show any sign of being affected - therefore, even if he loses the whole conflict, he has won at least one battle;
/ if you show any emotion, usually the stuff you say will be affected by those emotions and therefore, susceptible to being used againt you (you can bet your head on that);
/ if you manage to win somehow, keep in mind that the stuff he seems to accept now is only this way temporarily - taking things out of context and using it later against you in another quarrel is a given as it is his forte;
- throught the discussions, to me, it looks like he has too low amounts of empathy (however, he can express some amounts of compassion) - when with me, he doesn't ever consider the other side;
- it wouldn't be as bad if he wasn't hypocrytical - due to the fact that everything in our world has more than one aspect, he's always able to find the view opposing to yours and hold it fiercely... even if during last argument about this very same topic he held exactly the opposite stance;
- the apogeum of his hypocrisy is that he does the things he hates the most, for example - he says that Schoppenhauer's book about winning in the arguments is "whore's shit" (no spelling mistake, the closest thing in English to its Polish counterpart) while also employing the vast majority, if not all, the tactics described in it (my honest bet is that he doesn't even realize what he's doing);
- everything he does, be it good or bad, is always perfectly justified and you're just too stupid to understand;
- everything I do is always wrong - forget about hearing anything that even closely resembles a compliment, and in those rare instances something so crazy happens, it looks absurdly insincere;
- in fact, sending any major approval in his eyes is completely unnecessary;
- talking honestly about what you think is noble and it would be A-OK, but he doesn't think about the things he says;
- moral shaming for anything I do is to be expected;
- excluding myself, none of the family members realizes that the thing he does notoriously is a guilt trip - he remembers all the even remotely bad stuff done to him and even the best intentions don't matter;
- on the opposite side, he doesn't remember and/or value high enough the support he receives from other family members;
- he's not the one to forgive - wrong him once and you'll hear about it till either of you dies;
- if I was to make a value balance in any of his close relationships (just like I would do a financial balance for economic analysis or an energy balance for physical phenomena in order to analyze them), I'd dare to say that at best one fifth of them is a zero sum while the rest are mostly strongly negative;
- I suspect some kind of social vampirism in here as to me, it looks like my dad is getting nourished by the value he extracts from social interactions;
- the caveat in here is that he almost always skips the "empowering" part of vampirism, so I'm not sure if it's proper emotional/psychic vampirism or something else yet similar;
- minor stuff like heavy abuse of curse words and namecalling (to his own son - stuff like "broken dick", polish close relative of english "dickhead") I mention only pro forma as it seems almost negligible.

The best example of his behavior I've saved for the last example. So, one time when he stayed at my place for a couple of days, he was genuinely concerned about my mental downward spiral and asked if I truly wanted my behavior (lack of action) to lead to a situation in which he will have to help me and "relieve me of my suffering" the same way he would if I was an accident victim bound to be paralyzed/in coma for the rest of my life. I think you get the meaning.

(That's not to say I feel/felt threatened - empty threats are also his thing. For example, up to now he's declared three different times that I should get the fuck out of his life and stopped talking to me after storming out from my place. In each instance, he took minor stuff on my part (like something stupid I said), blew it out of proportion and spent between 2 and 3 hours (each time) yelling and expressing his negative emotions, anger etc.)