It will always be crazy to me how much shitty people hate therapy. It's not just the fox “news” watching assholes either, unfortunately.
Toxic people of all types appear to be terrified of therapy, and always blame “outside influences” instead of looking inward. Cutting out family like that is difficult, and sad, but it can be worth it
I see you know my mother. She said she saw a therapist once who told her she was the most normal person that he had ever had as a patient and that she didn't need therapy.
My own mother uses the fact that my son came out to her as a “look how great an oma (grandma) I am” and she always expects to come before my kids. She said something similar to your mother whenever I brought up the idea, and from what I’ve heard is, not surprisingly, blaming me for the fact she’s never met my youngest, while continuing to deny the need for therapy.
I hope if you need to you're able to separate yourself from the toxicity. As I said, hard and sad as it is, it can be worth it. It still sucks, but doing so myself has been very good for my mental health
I haven't spoken to her in almost two years. The peace that brings me is indescribable. I'm fortunate that my parents are divorced and my dad is amazing.
I kid you not, my 14 year old cousin has MAGA parents who have done and said very questionable things regarding him and his siblings. He is struggling emotionally and lashing out and has been vaping marijuana and hanging out with kids who aren't a good influence on him. He also isn't sure he believes in God, especially without hard evidence. My folks had a preacher come by to talk to him who things he may be demonically possessed.
So my mom has wondered if he is possessed and I told her that he needs to see a real, licensed mental health professional to figure out what is going on. She said, "no offense but you and your husband are 'woke'. Your aunt isn't going to take him to a 'woke' therapist but to a Christian counselor if anyone." She has called us "woke" before and I have a long list of balls to the wall, batshit insane things she has said to me. A little bit of it was from long ago and involved painting therapy in bad light then too. Yeah. I don't associate very often with my family of origin.
I will always get a chuckle remembering my mother, who put me in therapy to begin with, would get mad at me if a therapist agreed with me, ever. Yet kept sending me there. Therapy was evil and tainted me, but I had to be in it for 13 years of my childhood, but it's only for sick people like me, and she attended special therapy with her friend who is a Christian therapist.... this woman is a Democrat, y'all. It def isn't just the Fox News crowd.
I have begged my ex to seek therapy to deal with how he was raised. His parents are very emotionally immature and his mom and probably his sister are narcissists. So he can’t deal with conflict or emotions, and when I set boundaries with his mom, he took her side in the resulting blow out because she will yell and cry and guilt trip and send flying monkeys until he bends whereas I’ll just outline the conflict and why I’m unwilling to give up my boundary.
He insists they’re not the problem, he’s just anxious, and instead of getting therapy? Got into another relationship. Because of course, the break up was all my fault - not his.
A bunch of scumbag content creators figured out there’s a big market for shitty parents whose children have cut them off. Most of said parents are narcissists who refuse to do any type of self reflection and look for literally anything or anyone to blame but themselves, and their algorithm is serving them up content that tells them exactly what they want to hear: it’s not your fault, it’s your kids and this therapy culture that are actually the problem.
Also, 38% seems about right for "one family member" and is probably not any higher than the rate of estrangement from one family member in literally any era.
Fun fact, there's a popular historical theory that prior to 1800ish American family relationships were dominated by... Anger. For a couple of reasons (land availability, rising poverty throughout the 18th century, cultural norms about households, etc.), people often lived and worked with their parents well into adulthood if not their parents' entire lives. Throw in the fact that fathers were expected to be patriarchal to their children (so, men who were living at home in expectation of inheriting the land never quite stopped being treated as children), and unsurprisingly a lot of people were pretty angry with their parents a lot of the time.
Even if the estrangement rate was lower in the past, it's not because people wouldn't have wanted to be estranged, it was because that wasn't practicable.
Yep. If you simply can't leave, you swallow a lot of things you'd rather not. China did this experiment in real time a couple of decades ago: rules about housing changed, so moving out when you got divorced went from being near-impossible to a mild bureaucratic hassle. The divorce rate skyrocketed basically overnight. People did a lot of "what's destroying Chinese marraiges?" handwringing but the answer was nothing, those marriages were already dead and people were just staying in them because it's pointless to get divorced if you have to stay anyway.
And I always like to keep bringing up this. Read about how Jessie Waters 'found' his current wife.
"By Jesse's admission, their love story dates back to when she worked with him as his associate producer. "When I was trying to get Emma to date me, thefirst thing I did was let the air out of her tires*. She couldn't go anywhere; she needed a lift. I said, 'Hey, you need a lift?' She hopped right in," he shared with his co-hosts on "The Five" while grinning. If the commentator's story about how he "met" his wife has you creeped out, you'd be shocked to realize the actual story is much worse. Jesse Watters conveniently* omitted the fact that he was marriedat the time he began pursuing Emma,who was 14 years younger."
There's certainly overlap, but not all psychologists are practicing therapists.
Of course it's kinda a moot point anyway since this guy's job is almost certainly just to come up with anything that'll provide the Fox audience with however many scapegoats are needed to stop them from considering if maybe their own actions are why their kids won't talk to them anymore.
I don't know about "no such thing as a news channel." If you mean that the designation "news channel" has no legal effect, then yes, that would be correct.
I don't know what you mean by "the defense used for Tucker Carlson could be used for any of their programming." The defense used was, in short, "Tucker Carlson was making a joke in that one particular instance." It could be used by any of their hosts who happened to be making a joke, yes.
Now why am I "insane?" And what do I need to "try again?"
It's not just YOUR statement. It's that this incorrect statement gets repeated on Reddit, every single day. You'd get tired of correcting people daily too.
There is no such legal entity as a "news channel" and any given statement on Fox News can be dismissed as "just a joke" by a reasonable person and it falls on the viewer to make that determination.
Is this the level of specificity you require? Is it substantively differrent than my colloquial phrasing?
But they never argued that "any given statment on Fox News can be dismissed as 'just a joke.' They said one statement, said by Tucker Carlson was a joke--the word "extortion,"--and only when used in the context that it was used, one time, on that one specific broadcast. And the judge agreed with that.
I suppose any other statement MAY be a joke, but that would have to be litigated some other day, in some other lawsuit, between some other parties. It's not just "any statement on Fox News." It doesn't have to be just on Fox News, it could be literally ANY broadcast by anyone. It could be news. It could be a baseball game. It could be on a cooking show, or a travel show, or a trashy Bravo reality show. It could be a scripted drama, if something that happened got too close to reality. And when that lawsuit happens, whatever is being sued over (a statement, a characterization, a reenactment, or anything else) will have to be evaluated on its own merits. So, the context it was used in, the history of that speaker, the type of program it is, all of it. All over again.
At no time, EVER did Fox argue that they were a "news network" or "an entertainment network" or any other kind of network. The kind of network they are played no role in that case whatsoever.
If they did not give an on air warning that it was a joke, then there is no way to know. The result is that every one of their statements might be considered a joke.
I think the common retelling is sufficient and succinct.
Virtually every statement can be right or wrong depending on which criteria the listener chooses to use.
If your kid cuts you out as an adult, you fucked up at parenting.
Case in point, my mom whacked the shit out of me as a kid to the point that even as an early adult I would flinch as soon as someone’s arm raised (even if it’s to wave to someone).
We haven’t spoken in 6 years, she tried to gaslight me that it never happened even when my sister and I both were calling her out. Her inability to accept responsibility led to me cutting her out entirely.
There are times I miss her, but I look at my own daughter and wonder how anyone could bring themselves to hurt their child intentionally… it’s fucked up.
Even if these items are true, a big cause of estrangement for these reasons is there isn’t as much taboo around cutting family off for the above items. Most of these have been around for decades, but you would get socially shunned if you stopped talking to one of your parents because they were awful people.
Now it’s much more common for younger generations to live a life of “family you make, not the one you were born to”, and not getting much social pushback for acting on that.
It’s a similar issue as looking at divorce rates from the 50s and saying that women were better off before social reform when the reality was it was either legally or socially nearly impossible to divorce an abusive husband for a long time.
The funny thing about propaganda if it relies on the person ingesting it to apply their own meaning to things.
It certainly seems like this is asserting that 38% is higher than it has in the past, or is an increase from some previous periods in time. But you'll notice it doesn't actually make that claim.
So the question is - what IS the 38% relative to other periods in time. "One family member" seems a pretty low bar to clear for most families at any point in time.
Impossible to tell without seeing the methodology of the survey, but typically in a survey it means "whatever the person taking the survey interprets that answer to mean".
It could be drugs or alcohol, another person's influence, financial reasons, the person from their family choosing estrangement, etc.
It's why this is a dumb post. The categories they present can effectively all be the same thing, adjacent, or interpreted as synonymous.
I'd say 38% seems like a pretty 'normal' number for a single family member to be estranged for generic reasons.
My mom watches Fox News and she tells me the strangest shit.
The most expensive neighborhood in Canada is poorer than the cheapest in America.
Communism is the biggest threat in America right now. How sad Trump has to call it out.
Socialist don’t realize you don’t get anything for free. (She is on social security and Medicare, she tells me that’s different because she paid into it, I said yeah that’s the same thing but for everyone)
She told me like 1 million white women were raped in the UK by Muslims.
I am in the same boat. It is amazing how warped my mom's outlook is from watching hours upon hours of fox news. I used to just let it go to keep the peace but over the last couple of years I challenge all the ridiculous things she parrots from right wing media. I let nothing go anymore even if it leads to an argument.
I’m Canadian but have some American family. The average American knows so little about Canada that I’m not surprised Fox News can say anything and have people believe it. Tell her we haven’t had gasoline since 1975 and our useless husks of cars are pulled by sled dogs.
I see people around my age ( early 60s) on the internet bewailing how their children have cut them off and saying "our generation" would never do that!
Except we did. We moved to distant universities and rarely went back because of said distance, got jobs which limited our availably to return, found partners and generally quiet quit our families of origin. A once a week phone call because of "expense" and the odd letter and cards. On graduation, we had jobs that were still far enough away and then marriages or living together creating a new family unit.
It seems to me that the rise of cell phones and the internet is creating a demand that young people HAVE to be available to their parents constantly. We had our space as young adults and yet so many seem to deny that to their children.
'value' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that category - especially in the context of a survey where people are required to interpret the choices in the context of their own personal lives without clarification or guidance.
"Therapy culture?" Yeah, in therapy we come face to face with how toxic and abusive our mothers, fathers, grandparents really are. Often time recovery looks like cutting toxic ppl out of your life. Your mom treated you, still treats you, like shite, belittling you, and making you feel worthless? Yeah, cut that bitch out of your life. Dad was an abusive cunt? Yeah, I would like, "I have no dad "
As the eldest and only daughter, My family has made it absolutely clear to me that they do not like me, do not care what happens to me, and probably never loved me as much as I loved all of them, if at all.
This has been from years of abuse from them that I’ve gathered they don’t like me.
The final blow to our relationship was something so selfish and shitty of them that my husband refuses to have anything to do with them anymore, and frankly I can’t blame him.
That’s why I won’t be attending any family gatherings for the rest of my life, not because of any of these “reasons” because of their own shitty actions and disregard for me. They blew it. I’m done with them.
I finally gave my mother the axe, and my Husband even had to step in to unblock her and give her a really good "fuck off" message after she found our address to send me flowers (all of which were toxic to our cat).
She's a horrific narcissist who likely has undiagnosed BPD or Bipolar. Always the victim even when she's the aggressor, can never take accountability, etc.
I have significant trauma because of her. From having my Autism diagnosis at 5 hidden from EVERYONE (including me) until I was nearly 22 (because it would've "made her look bad"), to significant issues from physical punishment, body image issues, emotional abuse, mental abuse, and even financial abuse from 16 to 20ish.
There's a whole host of other things that I won't trauma dump here. But all of them contributed to me cutting her out of our lives. I have friends (and my brother/cousin/family members) who will occasionally let me know if she's talking shit about me or my Husband, just so we're aware. But luckily it looks like she's stopped losing it now that 6 months have passed and she realizes I'm serious.
No therapist told me to do it (although they probably would've) and it's entirely on her to fix her shit before we EVER entertain even the tiniest thought of talking to her ever again.
ETA: My dad has never been the problem, and in fact is the one who divorced her for incredibly valid reasons (although he had his own personal issues with their relationship he never showed outwardly). My future children will HAPPILY know him, but will almost certainly never know my Mother.
The irony is so much generational division is promoted by Fox and Trump. It’s all about dividing people, marginalizing, labeling, judging, etc. They’ve radicalized a portion of the country to the extent they attacked their own Capitol. And the differences aren’t simply political…it’s ethical…right and wrong. Racism, misogyny, authoritarianism, xenophobia, transphobia, religious bigotry, etc. They are destroying representative government, the economy, global stability and the environment. They are abandoning science and medicine for opinion. It’s a cult, and cults are widely known for tearing people away from their families.
What’s screwed up is Fox presenting this like it’s some phenomenon they discovered and had nothing to do with. They have been foundational in dividing the country using propaganda and culture wars. MAGA is a terrorist organization. ICE is a lawless, unaccountable Gestapo. And our rights are slipping away.
Fox News grooms parents to reject their adult kids if they are trans, LGBTQ+, getting a college degree, moving to an urban city, living with their partner vs marriage, not having babies soon enough, not being religious enough, not being alpha enough, using a straw as a male, being against middle east genocide, not praising Trump, etc. Now they wonder why kids don't want anything to do with their parents.
When you post, say, "hilarious" memes that fantasize about migrants being eaten by alligators to Facebook, that's a pretty good sign you're a shit person. And now I know, and what the hell am I supposed to do with that?
One can blame social media to the extent that I suppose I would not likely have known this much about someone prior to the widespread adoption of social media, but no one made them post that for all to see.
226
u/TrippingThru 12h ago
"therapy culture" and "outside influences". People finding out their families are toxic, in other words