I think i had some good thoughts regarding this in my big-ass reply to you, so if you don’t read all of it, here’s the relevant bits:
- bring up instances of when he hurt you, but as 3rd person stories; “my friend took 2 cookies from the jar when he was 11 years old and his dad shouted at him and called him a fatass” Your Dad:“what a jerk” Yiu: "Yeah. Well, that was you and me when i was 11 Y.O"
- If that for instance doesn’t work, because maybe he approves of that behaviour, then gloss it up a bit: "… Now this friend had trouble feeding himself because he associated the executive decision to get food with his father’s ire. He also started to see abusive name calling as something fatherly and it lead to him putting up with some pretty shitty friends, bosses, romantic partners. We are left with a man with an E.D surrounded by awful people in their life, because he was too young to put his foot down and defend himself and, in those small ways, he has been stuck at that traumatised age ever since.
- send letters about what he did that hurt you. He will read it more than once - how many letters do you send him regularly? Probably not a lot.
NannerBanner@literature.cafe 1 hour ago
Half the problem with those is that it is SO easy to justify doing things. Oh, your kid turned out well with a decent job/family/friend group? Well, everything you did must have been worth it then!
I ran into that thinking with my grandmother, when we were just casually discussing pre-k in the context of its effects on people’s chances in life. She immediately threw out the classic, “well, all of [your parent’s siblings and your parent] came out just fine, and we didn’t let them start until first grade! Earlier schooling would have doomed them!”
For them, everything was with “a reason,” even if that reason is completely post-hoc. They don’t do ‘X thing’ that is socially inappropriate? It’s because they were spanked for doing it! Spanking is good! They have a good job now? It’s because they were yelled at if they weren’t studying for hours after school! Yelling is good!
And conversely, they don’t care if the person was hurt. In your example of the traumatized man with an eating disorder? It’s his own damn fault. He was always going to turn out that way. He might have even been fat if he wasn’t yelled at!
It’s just sickening. There’s a reason to cut off parents who don’t acknowledge their actions.