Triggered as fuck by family members not coping

[Faugxh]

Hi all, I’ve got another one of my lengthy questions today. My dad is 58 years old. He looks like he’s 70. He’s been home the last two years from a job he hated for many years but never quit/changed, first with a physical ailment, but it’s been pretty obvious he was burnt out aswell. He has no motivation, he’s angry a lot and has been for many years. Either that or he is sickly romanticising the old days, clinging to us grown up children as if we were still wee (I’m 33, my sister 29!). He never got over the fact I moved out (1/2 hr drive away, 13 years ago), and that his dad died (10 years). He copes with eating sweets, endless internet eBay browsing for vintage mechanical parts and stuff he claims will be useful but is not needed, and TV. The sweets and TV has always been the case, internet the last ten years. He also smokes quite a bit and is very overweight and in bad physical condition. He will get diabetes 100%.
I grew up in the countryside so there’s always lots to do, lots of work, but my dad fails to enjoy the work, he feels overburdened and shuts himself off. He is beyond nasty and disrespectful to my grandma who lives next door,
and was to me aswell for a long time, now he’s mostly trying to be nice but his clinginess sickens me. He can’t bear people talking about anything in his presence, feels stressed out all the time, then he’ll yell, insult you and or leave angrily. He saw a therapist for a short time but didn’t open himself up and the guy couldn’t help him (he was told that). He is since taking antidepressants and expects them to fix his problems. I am happy they make him feel somewhat better - only they don’t really. He is not taking any responsibility for his problems and his spending all his time with what I now know to be addictive an avoiding behaviours, eating, internet, TV. He avoids everything in the present, he can’t and won’t cope.
OMG I’m sorry this is getting so long, clearly I am very involved in this anyway I’ve noticed my tolerance for his behaviour is approaching zero. It makes me feel bad to be in his presence, it depressed and angers me. I’ve been very depressed for many years, a lot to do with his ways and expectations for me (to live at home forever!) and not letting go of me, so I have my share of experience of what he is going through (and worse, if I may say so). I also know a thing or two about addictions now, don’t I. (I even did internet shopping browsing just like he does for years!) All this as a mix somehow triggers me immensely, and I can’t stand being with him. Normalising his behaviours and avoidance of himself and his problems. I don’t mean it triggers me to want to drink, but I feel like a cocked gun around him, I can’t stand his living like this.

Now, my question is have you gone through periods where your patience with others maladaptive coping / addictions has just run out? I feel bad distancing myself from him even further, I do feel for him and his (unaddressed) pains, at the same time, it is selfish of him to expect the outside world to adapt to him, not disturb him, while he does nothing to better himself. Also, I need to look at myself now, live my life, finally. I blame him a lot for letting himself go and not dealing and putting his shit on everyone else, but with my experiences with depression and alcoholism I feel I should be more graceful and allowing and understanding, cos obviously I know how hard it is. Can youse relate to my moral dilemma here?

[Flamestar]

Yes I can relate to this, very much but probably in a different way.

First of all: thank you for sharing your story and I’m sorry you’re going through this.
I have some very toxic family members myself and a few years ago I cut ties with my mom and siblings. I felt like they had been sucking the life right out of me for 27 years, and I realized that if I wanted to make it to 80 years in life, I needed to take responsibility for my own life.
I know it’s very painful to hear that and to think about that and to actually set boundaries and put yourself first. Every time I spent a whole weekend with my family I actually wanted to kill myself. I never had a sense of belonging.
I needed to leave them to themselves and learn how to love myself.
You are not in any way responsible for your father. Let me repeat that: you are NOT in ANY WAY responsible for your father’s life. You won’t be able to help him if he won’t take responsibility for his behavior. You are responsible for your own thoughts, words and actions. Nothing more, nothing less.

Maybe this isn’t the response you were looking for. But toxic people will suck the life out of you. It isn’t helping you and it isn’t helping him either.
Feel free to message me any time if you want to talk. It took me a lot of therapy (schema therapy helped me tremendously) for me to get that I am not responsible for another person.
Cutting ties with my family gave me back my self respect and self esteem and even though it was the hardest and most painful experience of my life, it was the best decision I’ve ever made.
I even have contact with my mom now again, every once in a while. Nobody has the right to treat me like shit, no matter what has happened to them. What happened to them isn’t my fault. It’s their problem and it’s up to them to work on it. Or at least don’t make it my problem.

Take responsibility for you and you only. You are so worth that! Again, if you ever need to talk to someone, I’m here for you.

[Bomdhil]

@Faugxh I relate, but now I am living not with my parents.
Thank you so much for sharing. Sometimes a way to love others is to break some boundaries when is possible. But I guess we try to live well day by day. It is my little advice: your father maybe will not change but you will do and with a new heart you will see things differently. In my life some situations didn’t change at all but I started to see them with a new light. Sorry if this is not helpful.

[Matt]

I’m so sorry to hear about how frustrated you are interacting with your father. It is exasperating to look at someone and see the space between what we have (a strained relationship where we’re often in conflict) and what we wish we had (something better).

I hear you. For a time I was deeply frustrated with my own father, whose inattention to his money has him in a position now where he is 75 years old and owes more money than he has a hope of repaying. I remember dropping dry comments here and there in conversation, and even in talks with my brothers (who at times reminded me that there were probably better ways to handle it). In time I realized that he was my father, nothing would change that, or his history, and I didn’t actually want to. What I needed is to understand. So I have scheduled a week’s vacation with my father, this October, to visit his birthplace and then the city where he grew up. I will document these and learn more about his own family and childhood, which I know were traumatic for him.

You are in a hard spot. You look at your father, and at your relationship and interactions with your father, and it sounds like you wish deeply that they were different.

I hope you can find a way through this. I actually believe you can transform something about this. But first and most important, I hear you. I understand. And you are not alone

[Dan531]

I can relate. My mother is a hardcore alcoholic/opioid addict. She has always been self centered as most addicts are. I lived a fucked up childhood til i moved away from her at 13. I hold no resentment against her for it because in the end i believe it made me better. I’ve helped her through the years, given her a couple of cars that sort of thing.

I haven’t talked to her in over a year at this point. It’s not healthy for my kids to have her in their lives like she is. My youngest who will be 5 in June wouldn’t know her if she walked passed him. Point is I’m not responsible for her actions or her life and I’m not going to feel guilty about her failures. Sure if she could clean up I’d like to build a relationship but I’m not hanging around waiting. Im certainly not suggesting that you abandon your relationship with your dad. Im just saying that you’re not responsible to fix him, you’re just responsible to fix you.

[Meggers]

Damn girl, I certainly hear you. My father refuses to look at his own shit, big time! The other day I was asking him for help with some massive computer issues I was having. Computers and being too smart for our own good are the only things we relate on. He kept talking about how much anger and stress I was going to go through and I was so fearful. I used to have a bottle of whiskey next to me when I worked on computers, then just quit working on them altogether. This was the biggest computer project I’ve EVER taken on (had to rebuild the whole thing) and the first real project since getting sober. I kept wondering if it was a good idea, if it would stress me out too much or make me too angry and trigger me big time. Well, it ended up taking about 6 hours from start to finish (like 20x less time than I thought it would) and was completely underwhelming and anticlimactic. It was EASY! I had let his fears and insecurities affect me once again. Then, after I called him a gloated about my success, he was talking about how he is trying to work on his anger… Like, he is 64 and ruined our lives with his anger, and I’ve heard him talk about working on it before, and it just never seems to happen. I simply said, “yeah, that would be good. Anyway, I gotta get going, need to do some tweaks of the PC.” That was it. I realized in that moment that IM NOT HIM ANYMORE! I haven’t been him for like a decade! I actually worked in my shit and am way better for it!

How did I achieve this type of relationship with a father that had the highest expectations for his smartest daughter? I moved across the country (the US, so really far away) when I was 18, cut him completely off for about a year, and have learned about codependency and solid, healthy boundaries.

Now, I know you aren’t running 2500 miles away. BUT, you can still achieve healthy boundaries. Boundaries make it much easier to deal with parents who stubbornly refuse to let go of their toxic security blanket.

If I may, I recommend the book Codependent No More. It was a soul shaking read for me, and had been the single most important book I’ve read, ever. And I’ve read a lot of books. In the meantime, put yourself first. If that means cutting him off for a while (doesn’t need to be forever), then do it. Parents feel consequences as well as we do. Level the playing field.

In the end, I ABSOLUTELY hear you! It’s so fucking frustrating! Just like he is doing, you have to put yourself first. And by NO means does that mean you are being like him. It means that you are respecting yourself. And the only persons respect that matters at the end of the day is our own.

I’m here if you need anything. I get it, I totally do.

[Faugxh]

Thank you so much, @Flamestar, for your reply, it resonates with me very much. I’ve never labelled my relationship with my dad and mum as toxic, but if it means sucking the life right out of me, that’s what it is. I have old memories from right after I moved away (from the countryside into the city) where I would return home to my shared flat from visiting my family and just sit and cry for ages. cry and drink. this behaviour really continued on until 8 1/2 months ago, though I never saw the continuity this clearly (how could I not?!).
what you say about learning to take responsibility for oneself. learning to love oneself and setting boundaries that benefit and secure me, all hits right home! It’s amazing how fundamental and universal these things are, right. Bafflingly even to myself, I have only most recently even started to comprehend that I may, leave alone must take responsibility only for myself, that his and my mother’s pains are not mine. I had not even known about these concepts until maybe three months ago! I have been brought up to believe otherwise, have actively been blamed a lot during formative years for causing them suffering and pain and their entire future and the future of porperty and stuff we own was placed on my shoulders, which I didn’t want, and I guess never let myself realise that I got stuck with these believes, I didn’t see and couldn’t challenge them, and that has very damn near ruined my life.
I agree with you on “lots of therapy”, I am doing psychoanalysis. One of my explicit goals is to become emotionally more resilient, to not take everything I am presented with by anybody else right into my core and let it absolutely rule me. My therapist has let on I often surprise her with my subconscious belief that I am not allowed to set secure boundaries and put myself first at all, that other people’s business is my fault and responsibility. I am working hard on making this false belief conscious, and refuting it. But it is slippery and difficult to work with and it helps to have it spelled out for my stubborn stubborn mind, so thank you very much for that!

One thing I left out in my OP is that I visit their place fairly often to take care of my beloved grandma who lives next door, shared yard… although she also has a problem with respecting any sort of boundaries, she has been one of the brightest lights of my life even in dark times, my only real role model in terms of self-respect and -acceptance and a real fucking joy to be with for many years. she is also my responsibility, in a way, cos we are so close and get on so well, so things are a bit muddled. this makes just not seeing my parents ro cutting ties with them very difficult. I limit contact when I’m out to see grandma, but am really only coming to realise how much I’d rather not spend time with them at all, cos they make me feel miserable really.

[Faugxh]

Hello @Bomdhil and thank you for your reply. I also do not live with them (thank god), but visit fairly often as my grandma who I am very close with lives there too. I do think that I will learn to see things differently, as you say, to let him be a bit more, as what @Matt alludes to: he will always be my father, no matter what. The new light I am seeing this situation in currently is turning out to be: I can’t be involved in this. and I am struggling to accept this. Ironically, my father is the absolute last person who would ever want anything to change. That’s the whole problem.
I hope I will reach greater wisdom or something, and our situation can be less tense. thank you!

[Faugxh]

Dear @Matt, thanks for your message. It feels good just to be acknowledged. Jeez that also sounds taxing with your dad’s money issues! at least he’s older though!, he has earned the right to be a weirdo!, haha, JOKING
my sister has definitely reprimanded my comments towards his sugar intake, but at the same time she and my mother are coping the same way, all overeating (i struggle with it too), all overweight.
The thing with my dad is, he doesn’t just need me to understand and take him as he is (though I should certainly do a bit more of that, take a leaf from your book!), he needs for me to take care of him, his problems, his shit. he has said many times to me, it is because I am not there that he is lonely, it is because I moved away he’s got anxiety about the future. because we are not living under his roof he’s watching TV all the time and because there’s only crap on TV he is frustrated. you get the picture.

yes, I wished we had a better relationship. at the same time, I am in a place in my therapy and my personal development where the need to be accepted by him and the wish for harmony are for the first time ever eclipsed by a sense of that I deserve better, that he is doing me wrong with this and that I need to stand up for myself. I have had if anything too much empathy in the past, my commiseration and self-blaming have totally messed up my inner compass and had me stuck in this place for years. I feel like we both have a LOT of learning and growing to do before we can have a better relationship. :-/

[Matt]

I hope so too. One technique I learned in meditation that has helped me with things like this is: every thought and feeling (annoyance, attraction, aversion, hunger) is like a ship on a river, and I am seated on the bank. I can get on a passing ship, or let it pass. They all invariably pass though. For me, the question is whether I want this feeling or emotion to be my story for the next little while.

You have the power in you. You have the peace you need. And you always, always have the power of choice.

You are a capable & worthy woman who has the right to set boundaries that work for her. I know you can find them as you process this. I’m sure you’ll find what you need

[Faugxh]

Hi @Dan531, thanks for taking the time to reply and relate, it helps! I find your story inspiring. you must have come a long way from your childhood home to now being a parent yourself and not in contact with your mum cos she would be toxic for your family. I have always felt like I could never even consider having kids, I always felt there was something fundamentally lacking in me which one would really need to teach children, and I am beginning to grasp what may be… you are right and I agree with you, I am taking fixing myself in both hands these days. and trying to take a step back from allowing my family to put responsibility for them on me, trying, it’s very difficult - so It really helps to hear this message, thank you!

[Matt]

Geez that whole “complaint cycle” sounds annoying. I’m sorry you’re going through this.

It sounds though like you’re at a watershed moment in the development of your sober self and sober identity. You’re not running from life but learning to set healthy boundaries. Actually, I think this is a very significant, and good moment in your life. You are facing pain and loss (maybe even betrayal or at least deep disappointment, that the parental figure who was supposed to be the adult has essentially been a child alongside you) - loss that you have been burying for years. It’s good you’re facing it and putting it in its (healthy) place. You will come out of this stronger

[Faugxh]

wow Megan, thanks for this awesome reply and sharing your story with me here, I really appreciate it! I can very much relate to this experience of realising things are not as bad as it’s been ingrained into you they are, will be. I’ve always always heard and learned from them how frightening, insecure, difficult things are. the universal response I get from my parents when I tell them anything has always been “oh god! another thing! oh my god! you won’t manage that! don’t do that” I am beginning to realise it is their own fears and worries, nothing much to do with me, and I am beginning to wonder what really made them to fearful in the first place, I am beginning to have compassion with them alongside more belief in my own abilities, but I do regret they didn’t have more/any encouragement for me growing up. jeez, I can’t even tell them about my holidays, cos my bf and me go hillwalking in scotland a lot, we have lots of experience but my parents cannot handle to even consider that we sleep in a tent. so we can’t talk about it. it’s the same with pretty much everything, ridiculous really!
I am very happy you had this experience of self agency and accomplishment so recently fixing up this PC! I know exactly what you mean, you aren’t him, you are you! and I deeply know how important it is to feel this, how positive and empowering! <3 I will continue to work on those boundaries everyone here is so on point stressing to me!

thanks especially for the book tip, will 100% check it out!!

I am also “the smart kid” and bookish, but as the only one in my family had intellectual interests. (i used to be very arrogant about it too, not proud of it now.) which is probably why my parents placed so much hope in me to make everything right for our family though. they have struggled with this fact and told me many times they don’t understand how I can be so different from them, as I come from them and should rightfully be the same as them.

thanks again for reaching out! you are an inspiration.

[Faugxh]

thank you for your kind words and support, it really really means a lot! I try to see it and tend to see it as you put it, a neccessary part of this journey, an important and meaningful part of my recovery and becoming the person I am supposed to be. I am going through it all full steam ahead and all senses alert and brain and heart wide open, so it is a lot. but I am appreciative of it all very much too. thank you Matt!

[NealRecoveryCA]

I can totally relate to this. Coming from an addiction riddled family, I have plenty of examples like this.

White knighting is one of my character defects and addiction triggers. I try to “fix” someone to avoid working on myself. The more resistant to change they are, the more I want to fix them. The best way I’ve found to help others is by example: living a well-adjusted, healthy life.

There’s a reason the flight attendants instruct passengers to put our own mask on first before helping someone else with theirs. We’re not much help to anyone if we’re not well ourselves.

[Phoebe]

What a great thread. I had to disengage from my mom/family many years ago in my early sobriety. I also moved across the country (us) to get a job and that helped. After a few years we were able to work things out. I have better boundaries and learned to stop telling her things she could throw back in my face. The biggest revelation was that I am not responsible for anyone else. I need to take care of myself and help others. But there are definite limits to that. Keep us posted on how you r doing. Take care and stick with the winners.

[Roundkick]

Hello. Your story sounds like it would leave even the strongest individual emotionally exhausted. I am sorry for your pain. I will say that it sounds like you have a healthy perspective inspite of how difficult this is. Sometimes life lessons come in big packages, for sure. I don’t have anything more to add from what @Matt shared. I completely agree with, and relate to that thought process. You have some kind people on here wanting you to be well. I am in the process of a divorce from a relationship that I can finally admit has been toxic to my spirit. Sometimes the best thing you can do is remove yourself from the toxicity as the karma you will produce with a healthy mind will serve you best. My best to you!

[Faugxh]

Thank you for your experiences shared. That is a great saying, stick with the winners. My boyfriend just said it’s probably a good sign for my recovery I can’t deal with other people bullshitting themselves anymore as I’m cleaning up my own mess, that it’s probably healthy.
Not being responsible for others is the exact opposite of what I learned growing up into adulthood. It’ll take time for this knowledge to always be readily available to my conscious mind and acting and “natural” to me. You guys are all giving me hope it can become that though, many thanks!

[Faugxh]

Thank you for your kind wishes and acknowledgement. I was stuck with my story for a very long time and severely depressed. My friends shook their heads for me but where unable to offer any help, nobody knew what was going on or how to put it in the right terms even. It’s only recently and with 8 months sobriety and therapy I am starting to see the light, that is, things for what they are, a bit more, the way I’ve put them above. It’s still new and endlessly relieving to me, this new narrative or perspective which actually holds the option of a happy ending for me. It’s still amazing to me, I’d lived without a perspective for so long. Sorry I am gushing, I’m just really really grateful for this shift in my mind. It is true I got many amazing replies and support here and feel a bit overwhelmed by that even and very grateful to youse all!

I wish you all the best for your journey too, @Roundkick. Your last sentence will go into phone to that place where I keep the gold for later.

[Roundkick]

Checking on you. How are you doing today?