Mind the shavings

  • 2 Posts
  • 638 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 16th, 2024

help-circle












  • Family is usually everywhere in your life. Not everywhere-everywhere, but everywhere for you. The ways it’s fucked up aren’t obvious from that perspective because there’s no contrast from inside the system.

    Your aunt is displaying a pretty gross and spineless “genes over well-being” attitude present in a lot of families. It can be very useful for getting through lesser hard times together, but it’s poison when used to excuse treachery.

    It gets used to excuse treachery like your aunt did because not excusing it implies seeing how awful it is, and the realization could break her conception of the family, which could break her. While your aunt’s words are dumb as fucking bricks, the thing to picture here is her nervously texting you, trying to cobble together some victim blaming horseshit as a way of not having to make eye contact with the Madness Demon staring at her from across the room.

    A lot of what gets labeled as (and is) “complicity with evil” is fueled by this. People blame victims because they don’t have the strength to see that the victim is actually just in that bad of a situation. They can’t handle the heartbreak of seeing it, or the fear that it could happen to them. So they blame you because that means (it doesn’t but they tell themselves) you could have done something to prevent your own awful situation, and by extension, so can they. Your crappy situation dispels their illusion of control; victim blaming scotch-tapes it back together. They don’t see that they’d be safe without it; they think if that illusion of control goes, the universe ends. They’re scared. Very tense, no way to live.

    I don’t have advice, I can just tell you for sure that you’ll see this much more clearly, if not more simply, with distance, by seeing the family system from the outside. But that does mean leaving the family in some sense, which isn’t for everybody. So maybe reading this can give you some sense of what your own eyes would probably tell you if you could get the angle on it you needed to verify it yourself.