Fundies: I Hope This Breaks Your Hard Hearts

Posted on August 9, 2017 by luckyotter

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A training manual rests on a shelf in the library of my church. It claims there is no such thing as poverty in the United States. Evidence point? People defined as poor in the United States own and use cellular telephones and other modern conveniences. People who own such things cannot possibly be classified as poor. Therefore, no authentic poor people live in the United States. True Biblical poverty exists only in foreign countries, and it looks like this photograph:

Poverty in Africa

This training manual was prepared and published by The Heritage Foundation, apparently for use in American churches. Some person unknown to me brought this despicable, God-hating training manual into my United Methodist Church and sneaked it onto a library shelf. Best I can tell from flipping through this training manual, it is designed for adult Sunday school teachers so they can teach the members of their Sunday school classes…

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HBO documentary about social class.

Posted on June 13, 2017 by luckyotter

“Class Divide” is a fascinating documentary that takes a look at the sharp socioeconomic contrasts in the quickly gentrifying Chelsea neighborhood in New York City between the wealthy students who attend the very expensive Avenues private school and their like-aged peers who live in the projects directly across the street. Their stories and those of their families and neighbors interweave and the real story emerges — that these kids are not all that different from each other in their hopes, dreams and aspirations.

A Modest Proposal: Euthanasia of the Poor

Posted on March 11, 2017 by luckyotter

I admit I have reservations about this, but this blogger does make an excellent case about this controversial issue. The right to healthcare and pain relief for those in great pain who lack the funds to pay for healthcare is also addressed in this post. No one should have to ever be faced with the choice of whether they should end their lives, if pain relief and a peaceful, natural passing is possible. We are aghast that animals should suffer; why do we think it’s okay for human beings to suffer unnecessarily?

Of course, no civilized society should deny healthcare to the poor and the “right to die” shouldn’t even have to be a question. Many conservatives value the life of the fetus and want to outlaw abortion, but their concern for human life seems to stop at birth. Babies and children die every day because their parents are too poor to afford quality healthcare for them. Things will only become worse if their access to Medicaid is removed. We already have a shamefully high infant mortality rate here in America, one of the highest of the industrialized countries. But these same conservatives who want to force all women to carry their pregnancies to term care nothing about helping these same women take care of their newborns. “You’re on your own,” they say. Or, “you shouldn’t have gotten pregnant.”

A poor person who is dying and in great pain should be offered palliative care at no cost or and morphine or some other strong pain relieving drug to make their passing more tolerable.

My Soapbox

The End Game?

Does society really value human life? How much.

What is euthanasia for humans?
The term Euthanasia originated from the Greek word for “good death.” It is the act or practice of ending the life of a person either by lethal injection or the suspension of medical treatment. Because of this, many view euthanasia as simply bringing relief by alleviating pain and suffering.

Theory. In the TV series, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, a large claim is made for the moral value stbuffy of human life. Of course, that fantasy world consists of vampires and demons whom the “virtuous” kill because they are evil and a danger to humans. But, Buffy, who slays vampires and demons every day, maintains, there is a big difference between being a “slayer,” one who kills vampires and demons, and a “killer,” who murders human beings. Another group that is adamant about…

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Family estrangement.

Posted on December 4, 2016 by luckyotter

scapegoating

Psychology Today has an interesting article about why family members become estranged. In most cases, it’s an adult child between the ages of 25 and 35 who initiates the severing of the parent-child relationship.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/domestic-intelligence/201512/the-persistent-pain-family-estrangement.

“A difficult parent is that which the daughter or son experiences as being at the cusp of rejecting the child, or casting them out as a result of disapproval, disgust, or disappointment. When a daughter or son made the difficult decision to sever the relationship, it was usually because they felt that maintaining it was too emotionally costly, that they had to distort their soul into shapes that did not feel right to them in order to please or pacify a parent.”

In other words, No Contact. I think most cases of an adult child severing their relationship with their parent(s) are due to feeling as if they have already been rejected or emotionally abandoned by the parent, so there isn’t as much guilt over severing contact as there might otherwise be. But there is still sadness and grief involved, especially during holidays and possibly on birthdays. The grief isn’t over what was lost so much as what never was or what could have been.

Tragically and unfairly, there is stigma against adults who lack family support or relationships. Most people don’t really sympathize with you if you are estranged from your family, because they don’t understand it. Most people think family will always be there for you through thick and thin, and in an ideal world, that is how it should be. We are tribal creatures, wired for attachment, even as adults.

So when things go wrong and your family has cast you out of their midst, either because you became the scapegoat, or your values or lifestyle are disapproved of by the rest of the family, people from normal, loving families think the problem must be with YOU. They can’t imagine that any family would cast out or reject one of their own, so you must be the one at fault. If you have gone No Contact, they think that is a cruel and unusual thing for any adult child to do to the people who gave them life. But because they weren’t the children of narcissistic parents, and have no clue what being the family scapegoat is like, they cannot understand the pain of staying involved with people who cannot love you unconditionally and are rejecting and abusive toward you even if they haven’t outright cast you out.

Many estranged ACONs are financially vulnerable due to having dismally low self esteem that kept them from acquiring the confidence and drive to be successful in a career or the self esteem to build satisfying, healthy relationships. Many ACONs are divorced (often from other cold and rejecting abusive or narcissistic types much like their parents), unmarried, impoverished, and lonely. Many also find it difficult if not impossible to build a surrogate family of close friends, because of their difficulties making friends for the same reasons their other close relationships don’t last. They simply don’t have the self esteem or social skills needed for that. A rejecting family who then turns around and blames you for your “failures” (due to not having given you the tools that most children got from their families to do well in life) is like salt rubbed in an already gaping and infected wound. It’s beyond unfair. Add to that the sad fact that scapegoated adult children are usually left out of any will, if there is one.

Social service agencies and charities don’t help much. They are temporary measures at best, and have limited resources. They don’t love you unconditionally like a family would; in fact, they don’t really care. So scapegoated and marginalized adult children often have no resources to which they can turn when things are rough (and they usually are). They are vulnerable in every way it is possible to be vulnerable, due to poor mental and often physical health and without the means or the tools or the friends and family to give them support when they most need it. Then, much like their own families did, society blames them for their failures and poverty, telling them it’s their own fault they have so few resources and insults them by calling them worthless drains on society. It wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out that most homeless people were the scapegoated children of narcissistic families. Having been dealt such a lousy hand in life’s lottery, you’d think there’d be more suicides among estranged adult children. But the survival instinct is strong with us. It had to be, or we wouldn’t still be here.

The price of being the most emotionally honest member in a narcissistic family is a high one.

Don’t judge.

Image

judgement-meme

Unnecessariat

Posted on October 27, 2016 by luckyotter

This is an incredibly well written and deeply disturbing post that went viral when it was posted and I completely missed until today. The early die-off of poor and formerly middle class whites may be an intentional progression of the social Darwinism that is hobbling this once-great nation. If it works, you know what will happen next. The “fittest”–the wealthy survivors who thrive under the new and “improved” global economy–will also be the most sociopathic and narcissistic. With the great die-off, will empathy become as extinct as the dodo bird? I wonder.

More Crows than Eagles

I remember AIDS. I’m older than you probably think I am, and I remember what AIDS in America meant in the eighties, when William F. Buckley suggested all “carriers” be tattooed, and the Wizard of Id got in trouble in Canada (fr) for a joke in which Robbing Hood’s “Merry Men” were rounded up into quarantine camps. Mostly what I remember is the darkness- the world seemed apocalyptic. Everyone, at least in the gay men’s community, seemed to be sick, or dying, or taking care of someone else who was sick or dying, or else hurling themselves headlong into increasingly desperate and dramatic activism the like of which has hardly been seen since. I was actually watching the MacNeil/Lehrer news hour when ACT-UP broke in and nearly handcuffed Robert MacNeil to his desk. The tenor is just unreproducible; you get a taste of it in some of Sarah Schulman’s…

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Protected: Sick of being treated like I’m retarded.

Posted on October 26, 2016 by luckyotter

Finding meaning in life after narc abuse and in poverty

Posted on April 22, 2016 by luckyotter

Katie’s life trajectory has been so much like my own it’s downright spooky, but I think God brought this woman’s spiritual wisdom into my life as part of my journey in recovery. Her blog has become one of my favorites.

This article was so triggering and upsetting to me I almost stopped reading it (because it was like reading about myself) but something (God, maybe?) told me to keep reading anyway, and I’m glad I did because by the end (as with all Katie’s articles), my soul was lifted up.

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Adult poverty and scapegoat-hood: a connection?

Posted on February 14, 2016 by luckyotter

I’m copying and pasting this from the comment section under another post, because I think it’s an important issue that needs a lot more awareness and research than it currently has.

I always felt like an outsider in the world because I’m one of those rare people who came from an upper middle class family but fell into a lower class financial lifestyle. I thought I must be horribly defective for that to have happened. From everything I’d ever read until recently, it was believed the only people who would fall so far down the social ladder into poverty (who weren’t born into it) were those who were mentally challenged, drug-addicted, or insane (and even then, their wealthy families would continue to help them financially, if not support them). As a person with a high IQ, I found the theory that “people who become poor are dumb and lazy” incredibly insulting. I’ve worked hard my entire adult life and I’m far from stupid. I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink, and I don’t have the type of mental illness that keeps a person from being able to take care of themselves. I knew my poverty had everything to do with my dismally low self esteem and wondered why this wasn’t ever considered a cause of poverty in adulthood.

It wasn’t until I found the ACON community that I realized I wasn’t alone: this seems to be a phenomenon almost exclusively limited to adults who became the designated scapegoats of narcissistic families. It’s as if we were not only isolated from the rest of the family by our narcissists; we were also kept from being able to take our rightful places in the functioning world. Whether we’re male or female, we were castrated and crippled, then we were blamed for it. We were told we were “losers” or “stupid” or “lazy.” But we never had a chance. To make matters even worse, once poverty befalls us, we are further isolated and rejected because we “embarrass” the family.

So many of us became poor but didn’t grow up that way. Obviously something’s significant is going on here. I think studies need to be done on family scapegoats/black sheep and poverty and find what the correlations and causes are. I would suspect the lack of normal familial support systems, isolation from others, and emotional coping tools due to horrible self esteem are the culprits. Awareness needs to be increased.

Right now, a number of ACON bloggers are writing about their own experiences with it, so it’s starting there, at the grass roots level. Hopefully, in time this very real social issue becomes more noticed and addressed in the general realm. I hope in the future there’s more empathy and tolerance toward the poor in general, who don’t all fit in the same box. We aren’t all lazy slackers and we weren’t all born poor. In fact, many of us are intelligent and college educated. We just don’t know how to navigate the practical side of life as well as others, and we lack the social support networks others have, because of what was done to our self esteem by our narcissistic families.

Truth teller.

Posted on February 13, 2016 by luckyotter

I am the truth teller in my family. Because of that I have been scapegoated and disowned. I’m well aware of the possibility of my family seeing this, but due to the indifference I’ve been able to develop toward them (which I think is healthier than the hatred and rage I used to feel), I can now say this without guilt. It’s also the only way I can ever “communicate” with them about how I really feel, as if that would make any difference. It won’t, but at least they will know, and they should know. I’ve hesitated about ever writing a post like this, but I’ve kept this inside too long, and need to get it out there for all to see. That’s what this blog is for, after all. It’s about MY life, not theirs.

1. I was trained by my family to be a victim (scapegoated child). I was never given the emotional tools to do well in life, or much financial help either after I turned 18. My family had money, but would not pay for my college education. I had to pay for it myself and take out loans. (My father did pay for my son’s college education. I’m not bitter about this but grateful at least he got help).

2. I live in poverty because I lacked those emotional and survival tools to do well on my own. I have had extremely low self esteem my entire life and felt incompetent in most things because of the way I was treated. In addition to having no confidence and being painfully shy (which is a handicap out in the world today), I also can’t connect in any meaningful way with people, so I am all alone in my 50s as well as poor.

3. My family, who still has money, refuses to help me. Not that they should have to at my age, and not that I would ask, but they never have (except during the few times they were shamed into it by people in authority, but I won’t get into that here because it’s irrelevant). In loving families, when a child, no matter how old, is struggling, everyone pitches in to help. That doesn’t mean support them forever, just help them get back on their feet so they can make a fresh start. But my family isn’t normal. My mistakes are not tolerated. I failed to meet their unrealistic standards of perfection, so I don’t deserve a second chance. But this shouldn’t surprise me. They are a family of narcissists, both covert and overt, with my mother at the helm. Others in the family live well and get help when they need it. But not me.

4. I have been disowned, even though I was a “good kid” who never got in serious trouble, didn’t do drugs, get in trouble with the law, etc. No, I wasn’t “easy” (I had lots of BPD and complex PTSD episodes and severe mood swings), but overall, I wasn’t a bad kid, just really fucked up in the head. They hold it against me that I “went back” to my sociopathic malignant NPD ex, even though I was so victimized at the time I felt like I had no other choice. I felt like I had nowhere else to go. But I think I would have been disowned anyway, because I was the scapegoat of the family and singled out for this treatment when it became clear I was the one who saw through all the lies and bullshit. Even though I’m no longer with my sociopathic ex, as far as I know, I’m still written out of the will. No one ever tells me anything.

4. My mother has triangulated against me and turned the entire family against me so everyone thinks I’m crazy and evil and wants nothing to do with me. She has actually told her relatives I deserve nothing and “brought this on myself.” No one in the family (except my children and my father) talks to me. (My mother and I do exchange cards, but they are very generic and impersonal). I’m never invited to any family functions. I’m grateful at least my kids know I’m not this horrible person the rest of the family thinks I am. Actually, they told me they think I was a good mother who did the best I could with what I had to work with. That means a lot.

4. They throw their disdain and contempt toward “the poor” in my face all the time, quoting Tea Party screeds about how all poor people are lazy and leeches on society and deserve to be poor. This is done to shame me and make me feel like an outsider, which of course I am.

scapegoat_child

I try not to be bitter about all this, but it’s so hard sometimes. To survive, I had to become indifferent toward them and think of them as pathetic little victims themselves, otherwise the rage would have destroyed me. Actually, I do have love for my father, who I do believe loves me. But he’s under the thrall of the rest of the narcs, who keep telling him how useless, crazy, and undeserving I am.

That’s what I get for being the truth teller in my family. The one who can see through all the bullshit.

Until I found the narcissistic abuse community, I felt all alone. I’d never known anyone who was treated this way by their family of origin. But my experience seems to be a common one among so many victims of narcissistic parents. So many of us have “failed at life” because we were never given the tools to do well, or allowed to develop any self confidence. We were always told we’d fail at anything we ever did and not allowed to try things when we were young. But then later we were blamed for not achieving great things in life. I’ve never seen so many people living in poverty in their 40s and 50s except among other children of narcissistic parents. Why is it that so many of us don’t discover what we’ve been up against until so late in life?

It’s incredibly painful to realize our own family doesn’t love you and probably never really did. I used to envy others for their loving families and still do, but it’s time to move on. Indifference is the only way I can cope with having been rejected by the people who were supposed to love me unconditionally.

I’m getting enraged now so I need to stop writing this and go back to being indifferent.

Further reading:

Why Family Scapegoats Become Lifelong Victims

It’s All About Image: The Skewed Values of Narcissistic Families