Family holiday venting thread

[mickeal]

Please feel free to vent your holiday family frustrations here. No judgment, no advice...just vent

[mickeal]

I cant stand getting together with my family, especially over the holidays. Most of us cant stand being around eachother. People shame and step on others. My mother says said to one of my sisters that "at least I have at least one good daughter" in front of both of her daughters. WTF is wrong with my parents. She was going to tell off the daughter she doesnt like. She tried to rope me into it too. It reminds me of one of the guests Paul had on where the guests mother told the courts that she only wanted two of her three children. The judge awarded all of the kids to the Father because in all the years of being a judge, he had never heard of a mother not wanting all of her kids.

My sister is a narcissistic. She and my oldest siblings like to step on the rest of us, feel good because they have better jobs or higher degrees. They say shaming comments all the time. I don't know why I go. They are all so damn 1 sided. Thay have 0 clue that they are most of the problem. How can they be so fucking blind.

My mother constantly tried to get under my skin. She asks me the same question over and over until she knows shes bugging me. She then acts like im being immature for getting bothered by it. I think I've heard it called gas-lighting.

She wanted me to agree with her and say bad stuff about my sister. I said "Im not going to get into it". So now she will double her efforts and try to get under my skin.

Thats only half the fucking family.

Then most of us go over to my fathers house. FML. Hes a complete narcissist. He goes on with storied about his past and about his life. I used to act interested. I usually politely move to another room. Then there is my step-mother. She is twisted. She shamed me throughout the night on how I eat anything and everything. Shes really good at being a an asshole. Its really hard for me to not sit and take her comments. Sometimes I say something back but the comments just keep coming.

Fuck

I think if I was single I would cut them out of my life entirely. I would talk to a few siblings but that is it.

I wish there would be someone to parent my parents. Someone to say "thats not okay" "You never do that to your childeren"

I fucking drew a shit hand as far as family goes. I hear people on the podcast say "at least I had one good parent" or role-model. I had no one. 2 shit parents. No other good family.

Luckily now, I have a great wife, and a good therapist. I have a good AA group. Some good friends. I fucking wish I could have a get-together with these people only. People I actually wanted to be around. I don't think these people will ever fully fill the grief of the family I never had but Im doing pretty damn good, considering where I came from.

[rxtravaganza]

Okay so I am born on December 24 and for my entire life, whenever I have told this to people, they immediately tell me that my birthday must suck because I only get one birthday-Christmas present. First of all, I am bored to death of this old trope and misconception about people born on or around the holidays. Second of all, my family did a lot of fucked up shit but individual presents for my birthday and Christmas had very little to do with it. Third, I do hate my birthday and Christmas, but for the fact that they have always been the days where I am the most lonely and desperate for connection ever.

Obviously I could never have birthday parties on my actual birthday when I was young, but I was usually just left to my own devices all day while my family did all their Christmas shopping at the last minute. Once I got into the job market I always opted to work on my birthday because it beat being alone.

Christmas in my family was always a ritual of fake smiles and stiffly regulated displays of joy or gratitude but any genuine expression of feeling, positive or negative, was severely punished. The year I turned 9 I was feeling especially goofy and gleeful and was really into Homer Simpson saying "woohoo!", and I was eventually reprimanded for being too enthusiastic. A few years earlier, when my sister and I were unhappy with the presents we'd gotten each other, we both got a beating. Most of this rigidity and strict behaviour was rationalized to us children for the fact that Christmas was a "hard time of the year" for my father so we had to respect his needs. No matter what we did every year it never seemed like we could do this right, of course.

I now live in a city far away from this family I come from. I went back for the holidays once in 2012 and that is when all the repressed memories of physical and emotional abuse came roaring to the surface. I have very little contact with my family now. I have a partner whose family has similarly rigid and uncomfortable Christmas traditions and avoids holiday events at all costs. The thought of them gives us both anxiety attacks.

The holidays give me a deep melancholy because they represent such intensified moments of my family's collected disorders - my father's narcissism, alcoholism and abuse; my mother's helpless co-dependent victim complex, siding with the abuser and unable to protect her children; my sister's bullying and delusions of grandeur; my own unpredictable moodiness, distance and anger.

But I have found ways to enjoy the days for myself. My birthday and Christmas are now two days devoted to watching my favourite low-brow holiday comedies (things that were always looked down on by my pseudo-intellectual, narcissistic father) and eating terrible junk food (which my neurotic, co-dependent mother wouldn't allow). I don't get a tree or really decorate, except for some lights. I don't take or make greeting calls and I just enjoy the solitude that I used to hate so much.

[mickeal]

Thanks for sharing rxtravaganza.

Sounds great to avoid the family. My spouse drags me in the fire every year. Good idea to move