To OldatHeart,
I’m a 48 year old American medical doctor who just stumbled onto this site yesterday. I’ve been reading through the forums and have just come across your post. I was pretty sure early on as I was reading that I would join, but having just read yours, I joined so that I could write this answer. I’ll speak more from personal experience than from medical training, though I think what you wrote about your mom might describe symptoms of a diagnosis somewhere. The personal experience that I’m speaking from seems to be very similar to the situation you’re in now… I cut my mother off from any contact about 25 years ago in my first year of medical school when it became clear that I could not continue a toxic relationship with her and still simultaneously get through medical school. Maybe my experience can provide some insight for yours…
My father had been an alcoholic and my mother had had a pretty enormous anger management problem. Among my siblings had been alcoholics, drug addicts, eating disorders and various other bats~~~tery going on.
By the time I started medical school, my mother was no longer threatening murder, but she had become such a master at converting her problems into other people’s problems that she didn’t need to anymore. She, and we, had all become accustomed to the drill: give her what she wants or someone’s going to get hurt. We were all trained, and we all did what we were trained to do. We were ALL her little band of omegas.
Dealing with the amount of toxicity that came off of her and meeting the mental challenge of medical school was beyond my ability to do simultaneously, and the medical school could see it. The medical school wasn’t in the little jerk water town I was from…it was in a major American city. They had experts…psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors… and they did not want to see me wash out.
One of those people asked me about my my family and I told her. She tried to stay professional but I could see in their face how surprised she was that someone from a background this screwed up had actually made it into medical school. I didn’t know how pathologic it was…what I was describing. It was so familiar to me. I just told her the answers to the questions she asked me. To help me understand how screwed up it really was, she listened to me describe some crazy things my mother had done and then she asked me one more question. The answer to that question provided me with the red pill moment. I’ll pass it along and perhaps it will help you also.
She asked me how I felt about that…
I would not trade the next 60 seconds after that for ten million dollars. The first thing I realized was that I was 23 years old and had been surrounded by this big family…all those people who were supposed to care about me…and this was the first time ever that anyone had asked how I felt about anything. My mother’s comfort had been an enormous priority because everyone knew that if she became uncomfortable, who was going to hurt someone.
The second thing was that this person was a stranger being paid to ask. It seems like it should have been someone closer to me. But it didn’t matter, the genie was out of the bottle. That moment ended any illusions I had about how much I mattered to these people. It also became immediately apparent that it hadn’t felt good. But the most important message was that I had not paid enough attention (or any attention) to how I felt about any of it.
That is the million dollar point. Almost everyone on this site was once a blue pill man (hope I didn’t mix up the colors)…trained from the beginning to believe that it was our role to sacrifice ourselves, our needs, our efforts and resources for our wives, girlfriends, etc: Women and children first to the lifeboats, pull out her chair, open her door, buy her drinks, pay her bills, put yourself at risk, sacrifice your money, time, effort to rescue her from her problems. And never ever think or speak about how you feel about anything. Our grandfathers and great grandfathers were taught this. They did this. They did it in mines and factories and on ships and rail yards and in ditches (and countless other dirty dangerous places feminists never speak of when they talk about equal access to the job market). The difference between then and now is that then, it was appreciated and reciprocated. Now, it is most often neither appreciated or reciprocated.
When you hear or read women complaining about ‘where have all the good men gone…?’. What they really mean is determined by their definition of ‘good’. Translated, this means, ‘Where have all the men gone who will sacrifice themselves, their resources, their needs and their money for my benefit in order for me to have a life that feels comfortable to me…?’. Obviously, they can’t say what they really mean, but it’s clear they’ve noticed that there are far fewer of these men around. In fact, if you google ‘where have all the good men gone?’, you will find articles indicating that, while there are only a couple thousand members of this site, there are now a much larger number of women asking this question.
If you are spotted focusing on what you want, how you feel, and what makes you more comfortable, you are likely to get told to ‘Man-up’ or some other similar shaming statement designed to make you feel like less of a man if you don’t financially/emotionally sacrifice yourself to make them more financially/emotionally comfortable. If they succeed this way in defining what makes you a man, then you can’t be one without their permission…and that permission is priced infinitely high.
Of all the things that will draw the ire of these women, making a statement (or a decision) openly based on how you feel or what makes you most comfortable is what draws it most furiously. They have had generations of men sacrificing themselves and benefiting enormously from it. They’ve gotten a legal system and a mass media to go along with this. It’s been a great run for them.
If you look at the covers of their magazines and books, the headlines consistently are about how they feel about something… comfort foods, comfort clothing, comfort friends. Watch talk shows for women and it’s the same: all about how they feel. They are the only one of the two genders to get this treatment, which carries another silent message about why we don’t. Go to court and watch a woman cry about how unhappy she feels in a marriage and see what happens… Nobody has, or is going to ask about, or talk about or write about how men feel about a damn thing… The underlying message is that how you feel or what you are comfortable with doesn’t matter.
But how I felt mattered. I just didn’t realize it. It mattered then and it matters now. It matters so much that I can make decisions about people and relationships and situations that I might participate in just because of how I feel about it. How you feel matters too.
I’m not suggesting that you turn into someone who sits around all day in a snuggie watching Oprah and getting in touch with your “feelings”. But how your mother treats people doesn’t feel good to them. They know, but she’s acted as if how other people feel (including you) doesn’t matter, and possibly convinced them and you that this is the case…and this s~~~ needs to be addressed.
Here are some new rules I’ve followed for the last 25 years that got me out of the crap I was in at the time, and have kept me out of a boat load of other crap along the way since then:
1) I do not owe a relationship to anyone based on having the same last name as me, or for any other reason. (Neither do you).
2) All healthy relationships are voluntary from both parties. In order to meet the definition of healthy, it has to be bilaterally voluntary. And for anyone to volunteer for a relationship, it cannot feel miserable, unreasonable, dangerous, insulting or hopeless to either side. If it isn’t something you’d volunteer for, it isn’t healthy. Some sense of obligation, or being told it’s what your supposed to do, or otherwise being cornered is not healthy. That volunteer test will serve you well when assessing any potential relationship. I wish someone would have explained this to me when I was your age.
3) I can abandon any relationship, at any time, for any reason…or for no reason at all…just because I feel like it. (read this again…it’s what your mother, and legions of immature, irresponsible, selfish potential girlfriends and wives DO NOT want you to ever realize. They want you to be a ‘real man’ or a ‘good son’ or a ‘loyal family member’ and just mindlessly sacrifice your comfort for theirs.)
So, to answer your question about wether to cut off your mother (or any other women who don’t seem to be behaving very well), I suggest take a break for 30 days and see how it feels. No calls, no email, no visits. Ignore what people have always told you about what you are ‘supposed to do’ or ‘expected to do’ regarding your mother/family. Just take 30 days and see how you feel. If you realize that you were getting something out of the relationship with her that was valuable and good for you and you miss that (and it’s worth the price of accepting the things that are not so good) then go back and visit or call her. If you don’t miss her and you feel a little better and more comfortable not having her involved, then take another 30 days and see how that feels…
Now, I’m not so dense as to tell a future US Marine to get all mushy and start being preoccupied about all your feelings. It already sounds a little gay. And like other straight guys, I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about how I feel about s~~~. My point is just that women can do all manner of things based on how they feel and they get a pass cause all that s~~~’s important. But if we really are all equal (as most women and all feminists say), then you and I can make all kinds of similarly selfish decisions and credit it to ‘how we feel’ and that gets the same priority…
I hope this helps, and think that it will. But I’ll warn you that you should not expect women who’ve regarded you as disposable to willingly cooperate with you abandoning their interests and comfort to prioritize your own. Remember however, that doesn’t mean they can stop you. About all they can do is bitch and whine, so expect then to do that as loudly as they can. But, follow these boards and you’ll see variations of my advice here come up over and over again from other men on other topics who’ve figured it out and are no longer sacrificing themselves for the benefit of people who don’t appreciate it anymore, and may never have deserved it in the first place.
If you or anyone else is interested, I’ll post more about how these rules have worked out for me over the last 25 years when I have more time to type. For now, be assured I have had about 23 years without these rules, and about 25 years with them, and I am never going back to living without them.
Look, it's not my fault that tornado dropped a house on your sister. Now get back on your broom and get your ass out of here... and take your monkeys with you
TYE 5 years, 1 month ago.
