LogFAQs > #974956358

Jen0125 posted...

Can you tell me what I should be regretting? I ask this of everyone who says this to me and they never respond.

That's because most of those people aren't thinking for themselves and are just rote repeating things they've been told all their life by older people with a vested interest in inculcating the idea of mindless loyalty to elderly family members, or who have themselves been brainwashed into thinking that way.



doshindude posted...

Perspective changes when family members die.

Think long and hard about that. Maybe you're too young to know.

To be fair I can almost guarantee I'm older than you, and I'd say you're coming across like one of the most immature people posting in this topic. Soooo...

I can also say from experience that perspective doesn't always change when family members die. I have dead aunts and uncles who I absolutely loathed for most of my childhood, and now that they're dead I still feel absolutely nothing positive about them. They were shitty people who did shitty things, and cutting them out of my life was one of the best things I ever did. And now that they're dead and gone the only thing that's really changed is that I don't have to think about them except during discussions like this where the topic comes up.

I also know other people who have literally said their parents dying are one of the best things that ever happened to them, and they haven't shown one iota of regret (other than possibly regretting never pissing on their graves afterward).

People tend to regret when good family members die, if those relationships have decayed to the point where it feels like opportunities were lost or things could have ended on a better note. But if the family member in question is a terrible person and it feels like there is literally no interest in redemption or compromise on their part, then regret really doesn't come into it. If anything, the survivor is more likely to feel apathy or even relief more than regret. The family member isn't someone worth missing or remembering, they're a burden and an ordeal which has suddenly been removed and which is best left behind.

Constantly telling people they should be obligated to abusive or neglectful parents forever is actually a far more psychologically damaging phenomenon than any possible regret those people might feel later.



potdnewb posted...

its probably for the best for someone who cant forgive their parents to not be a parent themselves

On the other hand, those sorts of people are often better parents, because they remember very clearly all the terrible and abusive things their parents did that made them hate them in the first place, and then go out of their way to avoid doing those same things to their own children. It's a level of self-awareness that tends to break the cycle of abuse wherein kids who are abused grow up to be parent who abuse, because they've internalized and accepted the abuse as "just the way things are".

And honestly, if nothing else I'd say people who haven't forgiven their parents would be far better at raising kids than people who have nothing better to do than troll on PotD. That seems like the utterly pathetic sort of person who would raise truly shitty kids. Ironically, my parents would probably agree. They'd hate people like that.