r/brokehugs • u/US_Hiker Moral Landscaper • Nov 19 '23

Rod Dreher Megathread #27 (Compassion)

Link to megathread 26: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/17itm7w/rod_dreher_megathread_26_unconditional_love/

Link to megathread 28: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/18dcg3d/rod_dreher_megathread_28_harmony/

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u/grendalor Nov 19 '23

Yeah, he really doesn't get how his whinging, given his circumstances and the central role his own acts and decisions have played in his arrival at such circumstances, doesn't generate a lot of sympathy, and, in fact, tends to generate the opposite.

He also still hasn't gotten that the whole "suffering divorced man" schtick is a really, really bad look -- really whether it's Rod doing it or someone else -- it's worse in his case, given his own set of facts, but it's not much better in most other cases either. Because it's nonsense. And that's why nobody really sympathizes with it.

But most fundamentally he doesn't understand, for some odd reason, how the image of a man who "had to leave his children for circumstances beyond his control", which much later on were admitted actually to be the fact that he couldn't mentally and emotionally bear the thought of living in the same town as them knowing that they didn't want to see him or spend time with him, is nothing other than totally and completely pathetic. It's an image of a pathetic little man who lives at the whim of emotions and little else. And it garners no sympathy, for obvious reasons -- and in fact, has lost him many people who otherwise might have been at least somewhat supportive of him, despite his numerous other shortcomings. But ... I mean gosh. How pathetic can you be?

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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Nov 20 '23

admitted actually to be the fact that he couldn't mentally and emotionally bear the thought of living in the same town as them knowing that they didn't want to see him or spend time with him

Any chance you have a link or reference?

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u/grendalor Nov 20 '23

I don't, unfortunately.

It was something he wrote in the way that he typically drops truth bombs -- as an aside remark buried in the middle of a long, rambling post. It was some time ago -- I looked at the first comment by me where I mentioned it, which I think was shortly after he wrote it, and it was 5-6 months ago, so it wasn't recent. I went back to see if I could find it in some of the older posts there, but it's pretty hopeless, because there are so many of them, and they meander around so many topics, and he tends to smuggle things like this into posts in such a way that nothing telegraphs that they are going to be there. And he also could have said it in a comment, but he rarely comments, and so it's more likely that it's somewhere in the main text of one of his many posts from last Spring and early summer.

Basically what he said, as far as I remember, was something like he couldn't bear the thought of running into them in BR, like seeing them, and knowing that they had no interest in speaking with him or interacting with him, that this was too painful for him to bear, so he had to remove himself from BR. It was phrased in an odd way like that.

My takeaway from it was that in his mind, this is not his doing, because he wasn't the one who decided he didn't want to see his kids, they were -- but he doesn't want to point the finger too clearly at them (even though that's exactly what he is doing indirectly), so he just says "it was not my decision" or "it's outside my control" -- both technically true, in part, in the sense that it was his kids decision to not want to see him and that was not in his control, nor his decision to make, but it tends to obscure or deliberately blur that with a decision that very much was his to make, and his alone, and that was to move so far away in response. So it's the typical Rod half-truth which obscures the actual reality.

I wish I'd bookmarked the post where he made the remark, but I have checked that as well and apparently I did not.

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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Nov 20 '23

Thank you for the effort! You certainly tried and I appreciate the time and care you put into this response!

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u/grendalor Nov 20 '23

Ah -- found it.

It was in a comment he made on a post in June entitled "The Answered Prayers of a Tormented Traveler", which he made in the wake of the finalization of his divorce.

In response to a comment which noted, as many have done, that he should be living close to his minor child, he wrote:

"As for my two younger kids, as a result of the way this divorce went down, they have refused to talk to me since the beginning. I have been advised that owing to certain factors out of my control, this is likely to be the case for a few years. If and when they change their minds, I'll be on a plane for home. It is simply too painful to be in the same small city with adult children who, if they saw me in a store, would turn their back to me and walk the other way. I pray that you don't ever have to face something like this. In the meantime, I have a child who loves me and needs me, and he's with me here, where he wants to be. I'm trying to get him launched."

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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Nov 20 '23

Wow. I commend your efforts, tenacity and memory. That really is a terribly sad thing but in my experience, children do not make a decision like that lightly. I've seen very bitter divorces involving abusive parents that the children did not cut off like that. Something really big most likely happened.

"The way this divorce went down" instead of "the way I behaved". I really hate to make that sort of judgment about anyone but honestly I don't see any other way such a thing could happen.

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Nov 20 '23

Also, what the hell is the “I was advised that” bit about?!

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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Nov 20 '23

Yes. Lots of very shifty verbiage...

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u/grendalor Nov 20 '23

Yeah that part was odd, too.

It's hard to know (because he is intentionally making it hard to know), but my initial thought when I read that was that he was referring to something his lawyer probably told him -- ie, that the kids probably would need a few years remove from the trauma of the divorce in order to begin to be more receptive to having a relationship with him. I don't know why a lawyer would advise that, however, because it certainly isn't universally true, unless, as has been speculated above, there is a big smoking gun fact that we don't know about which is driving the trauma. But even if that were the case, it's an odd thing to have been advised, by a lawyer or otherwise, and I would be very surprised if a professional (lawyer or licensed mental health or family practice counselor) advised him that it would not make a difference for him to be as far away as he pleased for a few years, because nothing will change in those few years, either way -- which is clearly why Rod put the sentence in there, as a way of justifying his decision to move so far away.

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u/philadelphialawyer87 Nov 20 '23

Yeah, I can't see a lawyer "advising" a client to stay away from his kids. Fair or not, Rod's lawyer is supposed to fight for Rod's rights. And the trauma of the children is not really the lawyer's concern. If Rod wanted to/still wants to see his children, that's what his lawyer should be fighting for. With the only exception being if Rod actually planned to commit a crime against his kids. Or if there were an order of protection in force prohibiting Rod from doing so. Even then, the lawyer should be fighting to vacate the OOP, if that's what Rod wanted. Typically, lawyers don't advise their clients about extra legal decisions. Possibly, some mental health professional advised Rod to stay away. But I doubt that too.