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a77ab7e
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...my father, [was] a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room ... I'm sure he told himself: 'I never hit her'. I'm sure because of this technicality he never saw himself as an abuser. But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bad directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun.
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rage
silence
family
heartbreak
love
abusive-parents
mental-abuse
abusive
broken-home
heartbroken
love-lost
fights
divorce
childhood-memories
malice
emotional-abuse
anger
communication
fighting
parents
parents-and-children
mother
fury
fight
father
childhood
terror
parenthood
scared
sexism
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Gillian Flynn |
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97f44f6
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I think maybe, when I was very young, I witnessed a chaste cheek kiss between the two when it was impossible to avoid. Christmas, birthdays. Dry lips. On their best married days, their communications were entirely transactional: 'We're out of milk again.' (I'll get some today.) 'I need this ironed properly.' (I'll do that today.) 'How hard is it to buy milk?' (Silence.) 'You forgot to call the plumber.' (Sigh.) 'Goddammit, put on your coat, right now, and go out and get some goddamn milk. Now.' These messages and orders brought to you by my father, a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee.
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silence
depression
relationship
family
heartbreak
love
abusive-relationship
bad-parenting
abusive
broken-home
love-lost
fights
divorce
childhood-memories
abusive-relationships
communication
fighting
parents
parents-and-children
mother
fight
father
childhood
parenthood
sexism
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Gillian Flynn |
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a18474b
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Often, our misunderstandings about love are born in disruptive family relationships, where someone was either one-up or one-down to an extreme. There is an appropriate and necessary difference in the balance of power between parents and young children, but in the best situations, there should be no power struggles by the time those children have become adults - just deep connection, trust, and respect between people who sincerely care about each other. In disruptive families, children are taught to remain one-up or one-down into adulthood. And this produces immature adults who either seek to dominate others (one-up) or who allow themselves to be dominated (one-down) in their relationships - one powerful and one needy, one enabling and one addicted, one decisive and one confused. In relationships with these people, manipulation abounds. Especially when they start to feel out of control.
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family-relationships
abusive
counseling
disfunction
enable
enabling
codependency
manipulation
control
power
psychology
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Tim Clinton |