trenton

@Schizophonia I don't intend to hide the source of any conflict. The problem is that two conflicts now overlap. First of all, I opened a conflict falsely believing that everybody wanted amends. I have come to the realization that not everybody wants amends. This is why it was a mistake to open the conflict. I was naive and I have learned a lot. My older sister thinks that I did it because I am actively trying to hurt her, therefore she is vengeful. She denies this. Secondly, my relationship with my older sister is a mess. She wants to have a relationship with me, but I isolate myself from her. I don't want to spend time with her because of her anger issues and how she lashes out at me. She admitted to this issue after lashing out at me over the laundry. She refuses to get help for this. I hold this against her every time she lashes out at me. It is hard to communicate with her because she takes everything the wrong way and does not allow for the possibility that I am acting with good intentions. I end up walking on eggshells and it is frustrating. I can't get through to her because she has a torrent of projections that she accuses me of. I feel like I no longer care what she thinks of me because she lives in a completely different reality. She is unable to understand my point of view and acts like I am the one who only cares about his own point of view. This is another projection. Part of the problem with my sister is that we lack common interests. It could be the divide created by philosophy and spirituality. It has made it impossible for her to understand my point of view so it seems malicious. It becomes frustrating to try to explain myself. She tells me I think too deeply about everything.

@TheCloud I admit that "they have no interest in peace" is taking it too far. I am still frustrated because I am dealing with bad faith and vengeful motives as they try to guilt trip me. I don't know how to approach my sisters when I go back home.

@TheCloud I did not think it would be easy to change people's minds. I know the kind of person I am dealing with when it comes to my older sister. I texted my younger sister first. I might be able to get through to her. I am not holding out hope that my older sister will want to understand me. Currently, I can think of no better message than to leave me alone or to fuck off next time she starts harassing me and verbally abusing me over this situation. She fails to win my sympathy or make me feel sorry. I guess if I want to put it nicely I will tell my older sister that I have no hope of communicating hurt and anger because that is how she wants me to feel anyway. Once again she is harassing me for amends she doesn't want. Sorry if I sound kind of mean. I know being mean won't help either. I'm just at a loss for communicating with my older sister as I typically am. She refuses to get help for her anger management issues because she thinks therapy is useless and takes it out on me. She has a victim complex and constantly frames me as the abuser. Many if the things i say will be taken in bad faith, twisted, and misinterpreted. She only wants me to bend over backwards for her while claiming to want a trusting relationship. She destroyed my trust a long time ago. My relationship with my older sister is a separate issue, but it is overlapping with this issue.

@Schizophonia I didn't actually tell my cousin that much. I said that my sisters were upset with his behavior at the festival. I included that they felt he was not doing his school work fast enough. That's all I told my cousin. That is what spawned this entire mess when my sisters found out what I said. My sisters actually said way more about my cousin. They assumed that I told my cousin everything. They assumed that I twisted their words. They are being complete bitches. They want to pin everything on me. My cousin is mad at my sisters because of how cruel they are being to me.

The lesson for me at the moment is that not everybody wants amends. This is why I am naive. I was altruistic and trying to do the right thing. It seems so natural to me that it is hard to fathom that people would act like this. My sister has no interest in improving the situation. She asks for amends she doesn't want because she wants me to feel bad. I am typing a paper to share with my mother. Wish me luck. I am dealing with people who have no interest in peace and getting along.

Good news My cousin passed his test with flying colors thanks to my help. I studied with him and gave a motivational speech. My sisters are trying to guilt trip me and make me feel like shit. It is not working. I don't feel guilty. I don't feel sorry. I am doing everything in my power to be good and they tried to sabotage me. And they fucking failed. They can fuck off if they want me to rebuild trust.

Bad news I did everything in my power to do the right thing. My sisters are actively sabotaging my efforts to make amends. Fundamentally, they do not want amends. They want to guilt trip me and me feel like shit. They don't care about making the situation better. 1. My sisters say I need to take responsibility. 2. My sisters say there is nothing I can do. 3. My sisters ask me to apologize. 4. My sisters say apologizing isn't good enough. 5. My sisters want me to rebuild trust with them even though they broke my trust a long time ago. 6. My sisters are calling me the hypocrite and assuming I am acting in bad faith or trying by to hurt them. 7. My sisters are vengeful and they are saying harmful lies to me about my father and cousin. 8. My sisters are trying to guilt trip me and blame the entire situation on me. 9. My sisters acuse me of being against women saying harmful truths while they are lying. 10. They are twisting my motives at every turn. I know my sisters want nothing more than to guilt trip me and to make me feel like shit. Unfortunately for them, it isn't working. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I did everything I could to help and they are sabotaging me. I don't feel bad. I don't feel sorry. They can fuck off. How should I deal with this sabotage?

@TheCloud I'm sorry. I tried to be the bigger person and do the right thing but it did not work.

@TheCloud thank you very much for this input. I will test what you told me and inform you of the results. I didn't consider talking to my sisters first. My instincts do mess with my evaluation for the worse. A similar thing happened when I didn't tell my mother about my father's crimes. I have been struggling against my instincts my entire life. This is partially due to autism. People think I'm acting with ill intent, but really I lack social experience. I am learning a lot from this situation.

@TheCloud This is the answer I was looking for. Do you have any tips for where I should go from here? I had a plan, but you are giving me ideas for a better plan. Thank you. I have a history of being naive about things like this. I once believed that somehow mom and dad would get back together.

How am I supposed to rely on family for emotional support? I want someone who understands, but I feel disconnected. Do I have to somehow undo what I learned from actualized.org? Is that the problem? Or is the problem autism and the struggle to understand how neurotypicals think?

@Schizophonia I have been making progress. I was considering making a thread about all the progress I made and some questions.

@Shakazulu I know this isn't much, but I'm sending you this message to wish you luck on recovery. With all the work you did in pickup it seems you have on some level overcome this issue. If you keep working, I hope you can learn that you deserve to be loved.

I have recently opened my mind to this issue. My understanding of relationships is still developing. They seem to be full of shit, and I don't get know how to navigate it. It seems that I need to be a light walker and question the other perspective as little as possible while accepting as much as possible. I am being criticized for being too honest and I think it tears relationships apart. He mentioned this issue in the how to get laid series. I'd like to see a continuation.

I don't belong in my family. Their emotional support is empty to me. These are just the people I happened to be born to and now their supposed to be fucking special. I'm sorry, I don't buy this. Part of my emotional numbness is caused by ptsd. To be honest, I feel like I belong back in the psychiatric ward or some kind of group therapy. Those people are accepting of me. I was able to use everything I learned from everything I studied to improve the lives of others. It would be nice if I could do that more. I love those people more than my family. Now how am I supposed to square my life with something like this?

I want to know how to improve this failing system. currently, about 60% of owed child support is paid. I want to know how to prevent children from going through hell over bad parents, but this is hard to do. I will start with my personal experience. My father fled the state to avoid paying child support. This is a problem because child support enforcement is mostly done at the state and local level. There are a list of things that are done to try to compel a parent to pay, but they all failed in my case. You can suspend his license, but he drives without a license anyway. You can tax his pay check, but he jumps from job to job to avoid being taxed. You can try to use his property or bank account, but he just uses his moms property and bank account. He also gets money from under the table through drug deals. He then makes payment in cash to get around all of the safety nets put in place. He owed about 200,000 dollars when he finally died. I tried calling my representative to ask for change. They told me that this was a rare case, and it sounded like there was nothing they could do. I am trying to find what it would take to get federal enforcement of child support.

@Roy my interest in chess is falling again. I'm still adjusting to the new pills. I'm otherwise not apart of any communities but this actualized forum. I mostly just dream about self actualization without doing anything. The closest thing I felt to belonging was in group therapy.

@PlayOnWords I grew up with a dysfunctional family. They tell me to just let it go and move on. What the hell do I have to look forward to in this life other than recovering from a horrible childhood? I've repeated the story several times on this forum. My family is the reason I have been isolating myself and refusing to socialize. I'm sorry your childhood was hell.

I have become aware of another one of my desires. It is the desire to be a woman instead of a man. If gender is a spectrum, then does that mean I may not be purely a man or a woman? I was never fully comfortable being labeled he/him. I somehow find it depressing. Part of this may be due to intense shame associated with male sexuality for a number of reasons. It makes me not want to be a man because of how much I hate myself. I have been trying to love myself all my life. The shame is too strong. Therapy is recommended in these cases and I plan on bringing this up to the psychiatrist in three days. Part of this may be due to me imagining what it feels like to be a woman having sex. I find it very sexy and it may be due to my straightness, rather than me becoming a woman. Have any of you questioned your gender or sexual identity? What did you discover in your journey?

Update: I wrote out a list of things that make me depressed. The loss of my sexual innocence is at the top of the list. I have been clinging to This identity since the incident from when I was six. It was undermined with masturbation and pornography later on. The loss of sexual innocence has more to do with the issue than the shame of being a man. My desire to become a woman was addressed and is now fading. I have been watching parts of how to get laid. I was open minded for a bit, but then experienced ego backlash. That is when this desire to become a woman came up. Sorry if I seem kind of jumpy. Everything I put on this forum is a discussion of things that have bothered me for a while. It is all coming up at once and I am changing fast. My mind is becoming more peaceful, so this is working. Suicide is starting to seem preposterous. The most important insight is that me trying to love myself stands in the way of me loving myself. I believed that I needed truth to love myself because I otherwise love illusions. I was trying not to be self deceived, but I am now trying to flip what I have been doing. I'm trying to let go of this belief that I am morally obligated to love myself based on who I truly am. I don't have to love myself. Believing I have to love myself makes me hate myself. It is paradoxical, and it goes against what this site holds. That is love and truth are one. Maybe the fundamental problem is that I confused relative love and truth for absolute love and truth. I also meant who I truly am as an ego, not God. Struggling to love myself therefore made it impossible to love myself because I stood in the way by trying to love myself through forcing truth on myself out of a sense of moral obligation to love myself. I ended up dropping the hammer on myself constantly and brutally. It is finally stopped. I feel present. Of course I still have the list ready for the psychiatrist. There seems to be a happy ending to all of this.

As a chess player, I used to see life as a game of chess. The problem is that I find this worldview very limiting. Life is way more complicated than chess. For example, there is the meta game of being careful not to win too much or people don't play with you anymore. There are world champions who take chess and make life lessons out of it. It is possible to see life that way, but again it is very limiting. I do the opposite. I find life lessons and other areas of development and look for ways to apply them to chess. For example, mental resistance in personal development and why chess players stagnate. We get stuck in habitual thinking patterns. The list goes on and on. By the way feelings matter a lot. Skilled chess players read your emotions during the game to find signs that you may make a mistake soon.

I read the book. Others on the forum recommend that I apply what I've learned. I have been opening up to my family on a lot of serious issues. so far I have made great progress. There is one last thing I have not told them about. It is about my father. Is it okay to tell my grandma that I'm happy my piece of shit father is dead? She is very sensitive about her son. She takes it as a personal attack when talking about all the horrible things my father did. She needs to understand that she did everything in her power to be a good mother, but her son was beyond her control. Her grand children were hurt deeply because of it. I don't blame her for being a bad person or anything. It is just painful for her to love her son as it is painful for me to love my father. A few things about my father. He was involved in gang violence. He was a drug dealer. He fled the state to avoid paying child support. He committed statutory rape when he impregnated my mother. I am trying the forgiveness exercise on him but am experiencing a lot of intense anger toward myself for being blinded by my unconditional love for my father. My father manipulated me. He preached the bible as if the father son bond was sacred. He wanted me to carry on some grand legacy with the Hamann name rather than holding my mother's last name. It was all fake. He wanted to use me as a pawn against my mother to get out of paying child support. He threatened to disown me if I told mom how he was evading child support. He therefore coerced me into committing a felony because of how he made me swear to secrecy. My feelings toward my father are that I love him even though exploited my love for him to use me as a pawn. It feels easy to love dad but very hard to love myself. I hate myself for loving my father. I judged mom for refusing to evict my step father because of her emotional weakness. I'm angry at myself for having the same emotional weakness that prevented me from sending my father to prison for the rest of his life. I deceived myself easily as I lied for my father. I drew a false equivalence between my father and abusive step father who destroyed the house and beat my mom. My father's side of the family told me that mom's side was the untrustworthy ones and I felt that nobody could be trusted. This played into my father's hands. Furthermore, I felt that family values were meaningless. I applied it to my whole family, causing me to feel depressed. I hate myself for defending my father in a way that hurt the rest of my family. I can forgive myself for doing everything in my power to be good. I still need time. Is it okay to be this honest with my grandma? My sisters were against it. They told me that I am too honest and I need to hold the truth back. They told me that I may have caused a man to commit suicide when I told him "I am not optimistic about your future, but you don't deserve to suffer."

I want to tell my family about the porn I've been looking at. I have been holding up the image of being innocent long enough. Deep down I am uncomfortable with my sexual attraction toward women because it reveals that my innocence is bullshit. I want to have an authentic relationship and I don't want to be fake at all.

Update I managed to open up a little more with my cousin. I told him that my sisters are talking about him behind his back. They act friendly when we visit, but it is a thin veneer. It is incongruous with how they talk about my cousin in the car. I told them about a sexual incident from when I was six, my depression from my grandpa's funeral, my suicidal thoughts, my intrusive rape fantasies, my slight sexual desire toward men, and a couple of other things. They are already complaining. They are telling me to hold back the truth from my family while claiming to be emotionally supportive as if they really care about my point of view. They cannot handle my point of view. I didn't tell them I don't believe in family values yet. I just need to be patient and methodical about which truths I let out when and to whom. Sooner or later I will tell them. I don't know how my grandma will feel if I tell her the twisted view that I am happy for her sake that her son is dead because of how he exploited her for money. This one I might actually hold back.

@UnbornTao my entire attachment to truth is fundamentally dishonest. I know that my attachment to truth hurts me, but I do it anyway. It is self serving because I think truth is what allows me to love and to be good through unconditional acceptance. Honestly I suck at unconditional acceptance because I'm filled with hate and depression. If you value truth, then even that comes from a selfish desire for truth. It's not like truth is actually valuable, but I act like it is and it matters anyway. I could rewire my entire brain to fine with self deception and bullshit myself into thinking everything is fine, but I don't want to do that. I have been against that my whole life because I want to love. The problem is that it is hard to love.