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there's a scene at the beginning of the suicide squad where bloodsport's daughter is visiting him in jail and she *wants him to get mad at her for stealing* and gets mad at him for not doing that, which reminded me of this https://t.co/ZfE43CF053
also reminded of the chapter in running on empty about permissive parents - they explicitly call out being too permissive and never saying no to a kid as a kind of neglect and this was probably the most surprising and unintuitive chapter to me in the entire book https://t.co/8tGYU5hNtB
i'm not really sure how to talk about this bit but like - okay, so i periodically socially withdraw from everyone for weeks or sometimes months at a time and one of the worst things about that experience is learning that nobody really needs me for anything
and tbf i've carefully set up my life so that nobody needs to depend on me for anything specifically so that i can do that withdrawing, it just turns out that it sucks a lot more than i thought. it makes me feel... expendable? replaceable? useless? i don't quite have words
like i lowkey feel like i've been wasting my life for years and in some sense i needed to do that but also i've been waiting for someone to get mad enough at me that i can tell it matters to them that i am doing this and they want me to stop
there are at least two components here and i don't have great words for either of them, one is like "i want what i do to matter to other people" and the other is like "i want someone to believe that i can do much more than i'm doing"
the funny thing is that as i was going through all of this privately the other day i remembered that @uncatherio actually did get mad at me about approximately this, twice, the first time long before i could really metabolize it and the second time right when i was on the edge
i mentioned awhile ago that i was trying out the ideal parent figure protocol - it's significant that when i was doing it i was exclusively working with an ideal mother, infinitely loving and accepting, all that jazz. even that was hard. i didn't feel ready for ideal father
that's changing though. the ideal father... again i don't have great words for this. the ideal father has standards. there are values he wants to pass on, skills he wants to teach, dangers he wants to guard against https://t.co/Y6mJoZa20A
"standards" doesn't mean that his love is conditional - that's one way father energy gets twisted and distorted and then people rebel against it - but that there's a difference between being strong enough to defend the village vs. not and his job is caring about that difference
but it's so complicated. masculinity gets harder to do and transmit the more complicated the world becomes. what are the values worth having? what are the dangers we really need to defend against? these are increasingly hard questions to answer in the 21st century
i don't really have a conclusion for you here but this is some background on why i've been pondering over decisiveness and will https://t.co/OoCgyqXko5
@QiaochuYuan I was doing some self-IFS and realized a had a protector part that was very much this. It was weird because I had another part that wanted to relax, take it easy, prioritize comfort > pain. Emotional complexity -> not very non-coercive!