As requested, an open thread. I’ll try to get these up more often in the future. This one will be overseen by Morrissey with a cat on his head.
No trolls, no arguments.
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Open Thread for Personal Stuff: January 2014 Pretty Cats Make Hats Edition
Ally — when it magically appears because your friend has it, tell him they must’ve just misplaced it, happens all the time. And think, soon enough it’ll be his problem, not yours! If you’re terribly worried they’ll think you’ve been kidnapped or something, you could always leave (an intentionally vague) note about going to stay with a friend or something. But really, not your problem. Also, CONGRATS!!
And w00t for the doggie!
Now my turn to ask advice, kiwi girl posted a link to this list the other day —
Do you feel nervous around your partner?
Do you have to be careful to control your behavior to avoid your partner’s anger?
Do you feel pressured by your partner when it comes to sex?
Are you scared of disagreeing with your partner?
Does your partner criticize you, or humiliate you in front of other people?
Is your partner always checking up on you or questioning you about what you do without your partner?
Does your partner repeatedly and wrongly accuse you of seeing or flirting with other people?
Does your partner tell you that if you changed, he or she wouldn’t treat you like this?
Does your partner’s jealousy stop you from seeing friends or family?
Does your partner make you feel like you are wrong, stupid, crazy, or inadequate?
Has your partner ever scared you with violence or threatening behavior?
Does your partner say, “I will kill myself if you break up with me” or “I will hurt/kill you if you break up with me”?
Does your partner make excuses for the abusive behavior? For example: saying, “It’s because of alcohol or drugs,” or “I can’t control my temper,” or “I was just joking”?
I sent it to a friend who has a GF I was 95% sure had crossed the line from inappropriate behavior into abusive. She has, apparently nearly all those apply (and, at a guess, the only ones that don’t are physical/sexual violence), problem here is that he’s fairly sure she’d say the following ones apply to him —
Does your partner criticize you, or humiliate you in front of other people?
Does your partner make you feel like you are wrong, stupid, crazy, or inadequate?
Does your partner make excuses for the abusive behavior? For example: saying, “It’s because of alcohol or drugs,” or “I can’t control my temper,” or “I was just joking”?
I’ve only heard his side of it, but for various reasons am inclined to accept him as a reliable reporter, whether you consider him an unreliable narrator is clearly not my place to say. (Well that sentence fell apart!) To top off this shit sundae, I’m fairly sure there’s at least some gaslighting going on, though he says she doesn’t do it intentionally, she’s just being immature. And she is immature, age wise and reaction wise — telling her to stop doing things that are making it impossible for him to sleep result in her storming off in tears (she lives upstairs from him, just to make this a bigger mess).
The living situation is part of why he won’t just break up with her, another reason is that she has threatened to hurt herself so he’s worried. As for his fears that he’s being abusive too, I’m inclined to say he’s reacting reasonably to unreasonable behavior on her part, but I want y’all’s opinion, and any advice, because the only thing I’m 100% sure of is that she’s making him fucking miserable.
Oh and peculium, yes this is the situation I emailed you about, before the latest set of revelations. Please limit your replies to what I’ve said publicly, thanks!
I know you said the living situation’s why they’re still together, but is there any way for them to split up? Whether it’s all coming from her or not, that sounds like one hell of a toxic situation that’s only going to get worse.
(I am a great believer in burning bridges as you know …)
Kitteh — I should’ve mentioned that she’s probably getting deported in the spring (student visa, I think) — back to Canada, which is, IMO, an upgrade. So there’s very likely an end date on this mess. But yeah, I don’t see anyway this can get better.
It’s not an apt building though, it’s a split level house — they share a front door, if she decides to insist he see her, she can, easily and legally. I mean, that comment to Pecunium? I had him try war gaming it, more or less, and all he had was to obvious — that it’s a mess. (Thank you captain obvious >.< )
Let’s hope she does get deported, then – and not be able to do the overstaying the visa thing.
Ally: good luck on your journey, I’m sure you’ll do well and will continue to keep us updated. So exciting! Re splitting from family, I have a long-standing view (from hard experience) that we tend to give close family members “passes” on behaviour that we would not tolerate from friends or acquaintances. There is that phrase “blood is thicker than water” but it shouldn’t be used as an excuse to try to make a person stay in an abusive situation. If blood was thicker than water, then abusive family members wouldn’t – you know – be abusive. Any fertile idiot can contribute to a child coming into being, so fertility is not a mark of whether a person is going to be a good parent or not. tl;dr: there’s no ethical reason to let family members get away with behaviour that is unethical.
Argenti: wow, crap.I have no idea of the age of these people (it has some relevance, recent research suggests that brain development, including some executive functions, doesn’t finish until around age 22-25 years). Being devil’s advocate here, the behaviour that you gave as an example of immaturity (storming off in tears) may not be a sign of immaturity, but could also be a marker of having suffered ongoing harsh criticism in the past – which would mean she’s attuned to it and it hurts more. Not saying that your reading is wrong, just that it is possible that there is another interpretation.
I’m not sure if your friend has tried it, but there is a behavioural technique that can be used to try to make a point that limits the escalation behaviour from the other person. It’s using the “I” ownership words, and it’s being clear about what the undesirable behaviour is, and how it makes the other person feel. It also needs to be delivered at at the time the negative behaviour occurs, for example:
[said at the time it is happening] Alice, could you please stop cutting your toenails in the living room so that they fall onto the carpet, and use the bathroom instead? I feel queasy about the toenails flying around the room, particularly when I am eating. Is that okay with you?
The hardest thing I find with this method is limiting the request to behaviour that is occurring at the time. And sometimes there is a “retaliation request” from the other person, which I think is a defensive mechanism (oh but you do something that really annoys me too…)
She may still over-react with this approach (assuming your friend is not currently using it), but hopefully it will reduce the magnitude.
With respect to advice for your friend, it really depends on what your friend wants to happen. If they’re not sure, there is always the coin test (only works for binary decisions):
Take a coin and label heads as one decision, and tails the other. Toss the coin. Look at which side lands face up. What is your immediate emotional reaction to that result? If the emotional reaction is either “oh wow, I’m so pleased it landed that way” or “oh FFS, no”, then you know which decision you really want. If it’s “meh”, then you probably don’t have a firm preference either way.
HTH.
Kiwi girl — the coin test is my method of making most decisions, but I’ll mention it and the “I” word thing in case he isn’t doing it yet. As for ages, he’ll be 30 this year, she’s 24 or 25, I forget.
Thanks 🙂
@Ally
Best of luck to you.
This sounds like a no-win situation. And he’s just staying with her because of the living situation and because he’s afraid she’ll hurt herself?
It sounds like she’s hurting him a lot. But I have no real advice to offer on this one.
Auggz — depending your living situation you could pull a fake emergency and yell, near enough to that phone that he’ll hear, about how you need her help NOW! It’s the perfect nobody’s at fault way to end a phone call.
Eli — pretty much, yeah. And yeah, she’s hurting him, emotionally anyways, which I guess ranks less seriously than threatening to physically harm herself. Part of why I can’t see him being abusive is that he’s caring to a fault. I can see him yelling if provoked enough, and I can CERTAINLY see him getting into a heated debate in public, of the sort most of us here would enjoy — though she may not of course. But manipulative? No. This is someone who flat out asked me “are you trying to blackmail me into breakfast?” (I said I supposed I was, and never mind then [I pulled an “I’ll go if you go”])
Good luck to you, Ally S! I’ve got my fingers crossed. But never doubt: You’re doing the right thing.
And hugs and tickled penguins for Argenti and auggz and LBT and everybody else.
Can I vent a bit?
I’ve got these friends from college. They weren’t particularly religious in college, but they married shortly after they graduated and then a couple years later they got bit by the evangelical, young-earth-creationist Christian bug in a bad way.
Then they decided they wanted to go be missionaries to the Chinese because Communist persecution, don’t you know. So they went off to a seminary in Missouri for several years and when they came back they had a little girl.
That didn’t seem to faze them at all. Nope, full steam ahead. From what they’ve shared about their schedule, I have deduced that they’d reached some kind of agreement with their local church for tuition in exchange for service. It’s still going to be several years before they actually go to China full-time, because they’ll have to tour the States and raise money.
But now they have a second little girl. My Beloved is confident that eventually the logistics of raising these two darling children are going to derail the missionary plan, but I’m not so copacetic.
I can bite my tongue when they start having a laugh at how evolution is just like Pokemon, and I’ve had years of practice of not talking religion or politics in order to keep the peace, but I am upset that they’re going to be little imperialist mongers and that they seem to be willing to fracture their children’s childhoods like that.
On top of that, I dread the day that their kids start deconverting … that’s going to be painful for all of them. And I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen eventually because I’m pretty sure they’re aiming for creationist homeschooling, and that hardly ever ends well.
Should I talk to them about it at all? I worry that not saying anything is tantamount to approving.
@auggziliary
I know people have mixed reactions to it (and many advise skipping the domestic violence chapter), but Gavin de Becker has a lot of good advice in The Gift of Fear about multiple phone calls from someone who has been rejected in some way.
It goes something like this: If you answer on the 200th call, you teach the person that the way to reach you is to call 200 hundred times. When she answers the phone, she is just starting the cycle again.
@auggz: he’s abusing her over the phone. This is harassment, and it could be against the law depending on where you live (e.g. there is a possibly of a non-contact order, but not sure how the legal situation is where you live). She could investigate options with a local women’s group, assuming there is one. Another option is that if the guy has a family member that your roommate trusts, she could let them know what is going on. That’s most effective if the guy has regular contact with that family member and respects them. I’m not sure if your roommate has tried either of these options.
As he lives a distance away, and so long as you can reasonably assume this will not escalate him to violence, there is *no reason* why your roommate has to have contact with him (read emails, listen to him on the phone). She can delete emails unread (or may like to save them to a folder as proof of what this guy is up to, if she wants legal support – the emails will form some proof of what he’s doing). When he phones, she can tell him that she doesn’t want to talk to him and *hang up* (but that could escalate him, and it doesn’t stop him ringing back repeatedly and a ringing phone is still annoying). If she wants to go down the legal route, then a record of the times and durations of the phone calls, and the general content of them (quotes are good if she can remember them) are also proof.
What the ex is doing is *not okay*. He is being rewarded for his persistence by having continued contact with your roommate, and (bonus!) he even gets to keep venting at her – so he continues to have all the power (abusers like power). It’s not good for either you or your roommate. At the moment, it sounds like she’s hoping that he will just quit the behaviour – which is only likely once he fixates on someone else.
ooh, I kind of left that one last one just hanging there. Is there any way to send calls from his number straight to voice mail?
@Falconer
That’s so hard. A lot of your scenarios are possibilities (the kids could grow up attached to faith, for example), not certainties. Surely if they’ve had training, they know about the missionary experience. The only thing I’ve read is The Poisonwood Bible and that would never make me want to subject my family to such conditions. I don’t know what part of China they are thinking of, but it could be just as remote with dangers they can’t even begin to imagine. You could just drop a title of a non-heartlifting missionary book and see what their reaction is.
@Argenti
Am I missing some context here? was this a reaction to an invitation to dine?
“200 hundred”
oops!
& what Kiwi girl said!
Soooooo now my dad has decided to go to the library himself and look for books he might be interested in. He will then call me (if he finds any books he wants to check out) and ask me to come to the library so we can check them out together.
Unless he miraculously doesn’t call me, I’m doomed.
@Falconer, I had a brother and sister-in-law who did the whole home-schooling thing, where neither were particularly good at English and I worried in particular about the quality of the science and maths education my nieces and nephew would get. I don’t think there is any way to have a discussion on this type of thing without those sorts of parents (fundamentalists – who tend to be the evangelicals) getting extremely annoyed. They are basically taught that faith is holding onto beliefs in the absence of evidence, and that evidence is basically the antithesis of faith – so they’re not exactly open to debate, evidence, and logic.
Thus, I don’t consider that this situation “is tantamount to approving”. I consider that this type of situation is state-sanctioned child abuse, and until the state outlaws this type of home-schooling (I know of others where the parents were teachers and felt they could do a better job than local state schools, I have no worries in that situation apart from socialisation of the children) then there isn’t really a neutral “opening” that can be used. In my situation, I rang the education department and talked to one of their field workers about it, who keeps an eye on the home schoolers. She told me that most people who home schooled their children did so for religious reasons, and there is basically nothing they can do because it’s legal. I know you’re in a different country to me, and I assume you’d get the same message.
There is a cool blog here: http://leavingfundamentalism.wordpress.com/ where he talks about the “education” materials they use in the UK and USA. If your friends are open to this (and they may not be), one option is to talk about what they will be using as educational assistance and what advice they are getting about how the material is comparable to the state school system. That blog has some examples of what seems to be pretty bloody stupid test questions. *If they are using that system*, your friends could be open to a discussion about the quality of it. However, they could be using material they got from the state education system, or other quality provider, which means the conversation could be much more positive than I’ve assumed earlier in this paragraph.
This is an incredibly touchy area of discussion for people. Especially because a bunch of them seem to assume they’ll be the best teachers for their children, even though they have no teacher training, and even when they didn’t do particularly well at the subjects they will need to teach.
Yeah, I presume they know how hard it can be, I can’t really stop them.
I just wish they weren’t perpetuating imperialism, is all. I recently heard the husband/father refer to the non-Christians in China as “the lost” and it got me all riled.
To clarify, I don’t think my dad will actually hurt me if he finds out I’m not going to school – I just have fears based on past experiences – but if he does find out, leaving the house will be far more difficult because his suspicion will be higher than ever and he may try to prevent me from leaving the house if he sees me with my backpack somehow.
@Kiwi girl: Well, they haven’t explicitly said, we’re going to be homeschooling, it’s just … they’re going to be on the road it sounds like for years, trying to get funding, and then they’re going to be in China for years, and then back to the States for more fundraising. It seems like homeschooling is the logical conclusion.
Yeah, I’ve been gently browsing Leaving Fundamentalism over the last couple of days. I don’t think they’ll be using ACE and the PACE books, it seems far more likely that they’ll be using A Beka or something from Bob Jones.
Interestingly enough, over at Freethought Blogs, En Tequila Es Veridad has been looking at some homeschooling texts, and I noticed something funny about an illustration of the Vapor Canopy that they excerpted. The text seems to have embraced plate tectonics, because the illo of the Earth that it uses has all the continents (largely in their present forms) all joined up like a jigsaw. My thought is, the text did that so they wouldn’t have to address the Long March of the Koalas when they get to Noah’s Flood.
Ally,
Isn’t that totally out of bounds and a violation of library rules? I’m pretty sure if there are so many books that he needs, it would be more appropriate for him to pay the fee that some university libraries will accept for a private citizen to get an account.
Do you think he’s figured out what you’re planning? Can you hide your backpack somewhere? Can you leave while he’s out of the house? Are you leaving soon?
@Ally S, that’s scary. I wish I knew what to tell you, but I’m less useful than a paper hammer when it comes down to it.
Things I learned recently from a sermon while I was doing work in a church setting:
1) Jesus Christ is the only deity that people ever invoke when they curse.
2) No humanist has ever sacrificed anything to help others.
3) Before Jesus, women were second-class citizens. Under the Romans, they were no better than slaves and were lucky if they got food and weren’t left outside in the cold to die.
(3 is an almost quote. He realized what he said made no sense (I had to bite my lip to stop from giggling) and threw something in about ‘since they weren’t male infants’ wtf?)
The imperialism is troubling, but I hope most of the Chinese will see through their bullshit.
I don’t think he’s figured out that I’m leaving, so the backpack isn’t an issue. In fact, my backpack isn’t even fully packed – it’s missing a few documents. I’ll try to leave when he’s out of the house but if we don’t get the book today there is a chance he’ll want to take me to the library with him tomorrow morning, which is when I plan to leave.