Thanks for helping to validate my comment haha. I do appreciate it.

Is there anything specific you’ve done and would recommend to help swing in the other direction like you’ve stated?

Was curious as to what you might have found helpful. I had tried the beginnings of CBT in the past, but it just makes me feel bad and frustrated. I have always been taught that my thoughts and feelings are wrong, and that’s effectively the core of CBT. I don’t like it because it just propagates how everything I think and feel is invalid. Yet it’s the “trendy” thing to do nowadays so every therapist and their mother uses it as their modality.

Interestingly though I don’t think that this issue necessarily stems from deliberately toxic parents. My mom did the best she could and is very loving and nurturing but I was just too much for her to know how to deal with in this way.

When I was a kid, I would always get in trouble for getting upset. No one ever wanted to know why I was upset. They just wanted me to shut the fuck up and I often had a hard time doing so. I really wish things would have been handled the way you describe. My siblings didn’t have the same problems as me in this way so it has always made me feel alone in feeling what I feel. Now as an adult, I never know if what I’m feeling is real and valid… usually I think it isn’t.

Anyway sorry that was only tangentially related.

So why do you feel that it’s ok for your dad to have multiple wives, but not for his wives to have multiple husbands? Curious.

Lol! She was a real “mean girl” growing up. I’m hesitant to outright call her a bully because she wasn’t ever direct like that, but she played a part in making multiple people’s lives kind of miserable tbh.

Really not that shocking at all compared to many… occasionally finding out someone is dead and etc.

But one of the ones that got me was finding out that the girl who I grew up… initially was sort of friends with and eventually painfully shunned me and treated me like an alien eventually became a therapist lmao

I like how casual her “ow” sounded when being mauled by a cheetah

I remember one day realizing it was odd that my dad would hug my mom but my mom would never hug him back. She would just stand there and let him hug her. Yeah he was an abusive husband and I was very happy for her when she finally left him after over a decade!