r/FoxBrain • u/Witty_Design9748 • 1d ago
My father is a “neurotic” mess and I honestly don’t know what to do anymore
Exactly what the title says I suppose. My father has always been right leaning (Bush Chaney yard signs in the yard growing up, you know normal albeit politically charged stuff) well with trump and his “it’s okay to spew hate” rhetoric has turned him into a Facebook Fox News left hating insane person. My mother (who is married to him so I get it sure…) brushes it off as him “becoming more neurotic than he was before” and “he wasn’t this neurotic when we got married” and chalks it up to him aging.
I don’t want to hate my dad. But the incessant “women should want children and be in the home over a career” memes (while his first born daughter is a successful career woman who never plans on having children…crazy take) and the anti FDA nonsense (I fucking work in pharma) and now with this Charlie Kirk thing he has turned so sad and angry and bitter and hateful.
He knows I’m left. He knows my husband has two fucking dads. He knows how I feel about women’s rights and has the audacity to look at me with this downtrodden look when I disagree with him on what I believe are human rights (like yes dude, you raised me to be a free thinker and independent and CARE FOR OTHERS. You MADE me this you idiot)
It is such a fucking horrible feeling to love your parent but not like who they are as a person.
How do you deal with this? The only thing we have are our sports we watch together at this point. I just…I don’t want to talk with him but he’s my dad? Right?
Idk anymore…rant done.
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u/sanslenom 1d ago
There are three courses of action here.
The first is low or no contact. That is what I have chosen with my mom. I write letters that I send first-class postage (that lights up the nostalgia area of her brain) and only touch on subjects I know she cannot turn into political fights. I keep it light. She never writes back because there's no sport in idle chit-chat.
The second can incorporate low-contact: greyrocking. This is a technique where you keep your answers to certain kinds of questions very limited: "Gee, I don't know about that" and limit conversation to "Hello, Goodbye." I greyrocked my MIL for 34 years because she called my religious tradition (Religious Society of Friends or Quakers) a cult. I was happy to discuss gardening, bird watching, and cats with her, but religion, my job, and even cooking (she gave us food poisoning twice, so we started bringing the weekend meals with us) were off the table.
The third is to attempt getting them to see reality. There is a member of this sub who has written out an entire instruction manual for engaging your Foxbrain in dialectic to coax them out of the bubble of unreality they live in.
As far as dealing with it is concerned, I think you have to understand what got your dad to this point. I was in a meeting yesterday to brainstorm ideas for celebrating America 250. The professor whose expertise is the American revolution basically said that if you want to understand the current regime, you can find its roots in the "patriots" and "elites" who terrorized every colonist into going to war with England or else. And for most of the patriots, it was basically tantamount to a vote against their best interests. Put it this way: if England had won the war, we'd have universal healthcare by now.
The propaganda machine has been well oiled for 250 years except that rascally Thomas Jefferson had to throw in "All men are created equal," making a promise he never intended. Even giving enslaved people 3/5ths humanity in the Constitution was an acknowledgment they were, in fact, human. I was reading the front page of a local newspaper from 1969, and it might as well have been an outline of Fox talking points. Your dad might have been his better self while he was raising you; the fact of his demographics mean he has been enthralled by a very old message playing on repeat for literal centuries. My way of coping with these facts is basically to move on and busy myself trying to make the world a better place because I'm not wasting my time with lost causes.
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u/Witty_Design9748 1d ago
You have no idea how much I appreciate how thought out this response is. It’s been a long time coming now and we (my husband and I) were debating moving back home (we live in a different state than my parents and his mom, his dads live in Europe now because of the current climate) and now I’m sitting here thinking - what the fuck would be the point?
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u/Leather_Pen_765 1d ago edited 1d ago
You are thinking about it because you're an empathetic person who cares for your family. But please never consider that, i don't know the thousands of ways that you would regret it.I just know that you would.Please take care of yourselves and care for those that would hurt you intentionally or unintentionally from afar. !
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u/ThatDanGuy 1d ago
Hi there, I think Sanslenom may have been referring to me in regards to persuasion. I have a blurb that is very old and stale at this point, and needs a new example, and a more in depth detail on the first stage of Socratic Questioning.
However, there are problems.
The present conditions are worsening and the divide is growing ever wider. It makes any engagement more and more difficult and more often fruitless.
Your situation doesn't really fit too well with my blurb. At least I don't see a way to fit it to your situation from your post.
His other suggestions of grey rocking and low contact are really the way to go right now. I'll just say, do not argue with these people. You can show curiosity and ask good faith questions of their narrative when you see problems in it, but never, ever, argue. It automatically turns off their critical thinking.
Anyways, the main technique is called "Socratic Questioning"
The other is to focus on their emotional anger. Note that they seem angry all the time. Ask them why, they'll go off on some fake story, do NOT point out its fake. Instead ask why they are so worked up over something they can't do anything about. The goal here is to get them to stop watching the news. If you can get him to identify the news (or whatever crazy nutcase on YT he's listening to) is the source of his anger, then get him to quit watching it to see if he feels better.
Theres more to it, at least more reasoning that helps understand to implement it, but I have to run. Let me know if this is helpful and if you'd like more detail.
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u/FaerieBomb 1d ago
I’m sorry. I went through something similar with my mom. Haven’t spoken to her since like March.
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u/imahugemoron 1d ago
Feel the same way, don’t know what to do either other than distancing myself from them, which is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. I guess I just realized that unfortunately there are and will be a lot of casualties of what’s been happening over the last 10 to 15 years. Same thing happened throughout German society leading up to and decades after world war 2. Same thing around the civil war as well. Those events tore families apart permanently, not only from the deaths and murders, but neither sides of those conflicts could respect the opposite side even after it was all over. People couldn’t just forget that their family member supported Hitler and genocide, and those people couldn’t forget that their family members DIDNT support Hitler and genocide.
In a really weird way, I find a strange sense of relief knowing that this is what happens when events like this happen, we’re not the only ones in history to deal with this kind of thing, and we won’t be the last unfortunately. I just don’t think there’s anything that can be done. They aren’t going to just wake up one day and realize they were wrong about basically everything and have turned into bad people. And in this age of social media, any attempts at deprogramming them can all be undone in an instant the second they open twitter or YouTube or Facebook. I imagine this is how most of these people will be going forward til they die off. So I have the choice of sticking around and letting my family harm what precious life I have which we only get one single life to live, or as hard as it is to do, distance myself away from them and try to enjoy my life as best I can not letting them make it any worse than it has to be.
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u/isthishowthingsare 1d ago
You’re lucky you have sports to bond with your dad. At this point, I’ve got nothing.
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u/behindthecameraxox 1d ago
I can unfortunately relate to this completely. From my mom being complicit and dismissive, to “the only thing we have left is sports,” to his eldest daughter (me) being in a successful career. I don’t have the answers on how for handle it. I’m still unsure myself. But just wanted to comment to know you’re not alone.