lengthy response to cJessicaPyne
i like what everyone has shared so far. and i agree with two specific points in particular:

1. that they (parents) serve as examples, both good and bad, which SHOULD be used by their offspring, to improve upon the foundation they laid by making appropriate adjustments.

2. that if they hadn't been for me whatever the hell it was that they were, i wouldn't be who i am today. and in order to be content with my current self, i HAVE to accept whatever predecessors brought that current self into being.

A. a running trend, in my life, and apparently in many others' as well, is that most trauma/conflict comes from emotional turbulence within the family (in the sense of a social microcosm).

B. there has also been a trend of physical violence, stemming from this emotional upset, and consequently creating a great deal more emotional turmoil in the recipient of the abuse, than was already present. as for me, i was never really physically abused. for a time, i dished out my fair share of physical abuse, though, so my experience differs from some of yours, to an extent. but it is exceedingly important to address this concern, as it does so much to exacerbate the problem, and can really get in the way of progressive improvement in the individual.

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my folks are pretty average. mom grew up in the country (blue water highway, between saranac and ionia), and is fucked up because her dad was abusive (not to the kids, but to their mother), and addictive (booze and cigarettes... also a theme which i'll get to in a minute), and so she assumes that everyone else will be too, and is hyper-sensitive to these issues, as she was the baby in her family (youngest of 4). she projects her problems and issues on to other people, accusing them of having all these things, all the while trying vehemently to "make them better," and at the same time ignoring the fact that she would be more help to them by fixing herself. she is the epitome of the person who feeds their kid tic tacs, because their parents never did. and she will never fully recognize how like my grandmother she really is. and she didn't fully succeed in removing her father's influence either, as she still has spurts of his bad temper (although much rarer and more subdued), as well as his "pack-rat-itis". She seriously can't throw ANYTHING away.

my dad was the 2nd of 4 kids, with one older brother, and 2 younger sisters. his family was much more suburban, and what you might call "traditional" (roman catholic, as a matter of fact). mom always refers to his parents as ward and june cleaver - which isn't entirely inaccurate, although perhaps unfair. all 4 of the siblings in the family were put under immense pressure by their parents (through subtle application of guilt - catholic, remember?) to excel in sports, academia, and pretty much everything else. all of them have spent much of their adult lives learning to deal with that inadequacy complex. grandpa and my dad's older brother both really liked their drink too, and dad was no different. he partied. a lot. all through high school (west catholic, if you're familiar), and beyond. got a job at steelcase, dropped out of junior college, bought a house, got married, had me, continued drinking, moved to a bigger house elsewhere, had my sister, drank a LOT, fought with mom a lot, made some moves on a couple of mom's friends, got arrested for DUII, and then mom kicked his ass out of the house. he moved back in with his parents, did his community service, joined AA, drove to work on a bicycle for several months until he got his license back, lived in a trailer for quite a few years, and finally a couple of years ago got remarried and bought a house, where he now lives with my stepmom. finished his bachelor's at cornerstone, and is still working at steelcase. Sorry for the lengthy life story, but i think it helps you get a picture of who he is. he's been sober for over a decade now - ever since the divorce. he also reestablished his faith, and is more churchy than ever. partially because his new wife is more devout than my mother ever was. which is obnoxious for me, being heathen by comparison (not really, but i'm less down with the program than he is).

my stepdad, who has been married to my mom for 10 years now, is probably one of the best things that ever happened to me, developmentally. i think i'm finally beginning to reach the point where i've outgrown him, but during my formative adolescent years, his influence was exactly what the doctor ordered. he's quite uncouth and outspoken about pretty much everything. he has an intriguing worldview - childlike, in many ways - but is surprisingly intelligent. formerly a self-employed builder, his true love is carpentry. unfortunately, he had to cave to "the man" and get a haircut and a "real job" for a remodeling company. but he did spend some time after he divorced his first wife, before he met my mom, living down in key west florida, in a conversion van, playing guitar on the street for money. a dog and a scavenger in the truest and fullest sense of the word.

my stepmom is the most recent addition, and is therefore the least interesting. mostly because i had pretty much developed fully at that point, and she's kind of boring. not boring to be around, just boring to talk about. she likes god, and reading, and being quiet. she works for a publishing house in GR. she has three cats, all of which moved into the house with them when they got married. she is quite catlike, actually. very sensitive. the slightest thing can get a great reaction. and, at other times, apparently stoic and completely in control. she is substantially more loyal than most cats i've met, though. which makes the feline tendencies more tolerable.

those are my folks.

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it's important to realize that they are not the only ones i (or anyone else) learn from. we all learn from everyone we encounter. friends, family, teachers, coworkers, superiors, subordinates, young, and old. we take it all in and make a collective. parents and siblings tend to be more recognized for their influence, because they are the ones who we see the most of, time-wise, especially during our developmental stages of growth.

it's interesting, then, to see the way in which my father and mother were normal in the amount of time they spent with me, up until the divorce. after the divorce i saw my dad much less, and his influence decreased along with it. people who see me alongside my stepdad swear that we're blood relatives, despite differing hair color. his influence on me has been so great, not only because of my receptiveness to it (which it took a while for him to earn – believe me), but because of the sheer amount of time he has spent with me. there is really no substitute for that. which is why i consider my stepmom's influence nominal, at best. not because she's a terrible lady and i hate her guts and think she has nothing to teach me. none of those things are true. it's just because she hasn't had the opportunity to spend that much time with me, so her influence on my development has been negligible. i'm curious to see what she does with my sister, though. because libby's a freshman in high school, and is now getting to the point where she and mom are always going at it verbally (which i think is pretty normal), and it will be interesting to see how much of an understanding, feminine shelter our stepmom will turn out to be for her.

anyway, things were pretty boring up until i was about 7. sure mom and dad fought a lot, but i was a little kid. i didn't know better. i thought that was just the way things were everywhere. i watched a lot of tv, which probably contributed substantially to my distorted sense of reality. when i was 7, my sister was born. that made things kind of topsy turvy for me. the entire existence i had grown accustomed to and established for myself was shattered. less than a year later, mom had kicked dad out and filed for divorce. what had been topsy turvy was now an absolute clusterfuck. and i was pissed. i had this whole order and balance established, which might not have been normal, but was at least agreeable to me, and then it got all shot to hell and went into a tailspin. you'd probably be pissed too. and mom was pissed at dad for all the things he'd done, large or small, and i now know that most women that happens to will never truly let go. they will always hang on to at least a little shard of it, to keep safe in the tiniest, deepest, darkest, most evil place in their soul, to be used only when they really want to confuse the fuck out of some idiot who just wanted to get laid. poor, poor, idiot. additionally, mom no longer had dad to argue with, so all of the pent up aggression she was accustomed to letting out on him, and all of my newfound anger at the whole messed up situation, which – as far as i could tell – was entirely her doing, collided with cataclysmic force. it's a good thing this happened when i was seven to maybe... ten years old or so. because if i had been any bigger, she would have gotten hurt. and i was scrawny then. i got into middle school and gained a bunch of weight (a decent amount of it bone and muscle, with enough fat marbled in to make me self-conscious) which would have done a lot more damage than the former wiry punk could. i had also started taking it out on kids at school. mostly just one or two. the really BIG weenies, you know? so they sent me to a psychologist, had me do all these tests. in then end they said i was too smart for my own good, and just had to learn to curb my anger. which basically meant internalizing it. or at least, that's what mom said to do. that didn't work, because i couldn't hold it forever. but she paid more than her fair share for teaching me that. so, dad's way was to give it to god. this posed a problem later, when i started wondering if god really existed or not. and honestly, it was kind of a difficult concept for a kid, even a fairly smart one, to grasp and execute fully. so that didn't really work.

what i wound up doing was breaking it down to the two most fundamental parts i could, the A and B listed above. and i realized that when i would get angry and hurt people, i couldn't control it. or more accurately, i realized i couldn't control the fact i would get angry. if somebody tells you something really mean (which kids are extraordinarily good at, for some reason) you can't help but get angry at it. so, you have to accept the emotions (not just anger) and acknowledge what they are and why. the next step is the part you do have control over – the action/behavior/whatever. i decided that i didn't want my emotions telling me what to do all the time. i'm a human being. i have the right to choose what i do, and that action then determines the consequences (good or bad) that i will have to contend with. i can experience the emotion, recognize the emotion, and then disconnect what i'm feeling with what i'm doing. it's a weird way to function, and is in no way an easy thing to do, but it was the best solution to the problem i could find. it's basically like using a really big shock absorber on all that emotional volatility i mentioned in part A. and it helps to calm the whole house down as well, because the behavior is altered, so rather than contributing to the chaos, it's just staying the course. i mean, don't get me wrong, life is boring without a little pizzazz. you need fluctuation every now and again, just to stay sane. but it's a nice tool to be able to use when the really big stuff rolls around and you just want to stop the merry-go-round and get off for a second. remember, all this stuff is what goes on inside my head, unaltered. i'm not getting help from somebody/something else to make me FEEL better. and honestly, i don't FEEL better. i'm just kind of detaching during a big swell until the wave dies down and i can come back again. i'm not ignoring it. i'm not burying it. i'm just choosing that i control my behaviors. i don't always do what i FEEL like doing, just because i feel like doing it. i'm just smoothing it out. i hope that makes sense, because it's key. and it took me a long time to learn. so i'd like for other people to benefit from it too. feelings and actions are two different things. when the line gets blurry, bad things happen. that's the lesson here.

i will admit, however, that i no longer use my mind exclusively to alter this thought-feeling-action sequence. not that i'm using alcohol or tobacco or anything else to escape my problems, or to make me not feel so bad, or anything like that. my motivations for their use (read: my behavior, which is the use of them) are not emotionally based. if they are, once again, bad things happen. i enjoy using recreational substances on occasion. i find their effects pleasant. obviously, i can't do so all the time, because i still need to function. and other times, i NEED to feel bad, so i shouldn't use them. it's not normal to feel good all the time. and honestly, if you do feel "good" all the time, then eventually you forget what "good" is. everything just flatlines. your emotion-scape becomes fucking iowa. at which point, "good" is no longer good. like i said before, humans need a bit of fluctuation here and there. without it, we go stir-crazy. it's bad. we need drama. just not too much drama.

i thank all four of my parents, as well as all the rest of those who helped make me who i am, for showing me what it means to be human, and for teaching me how to deal with struggle. if there is one life lesson that i take with me from my childhood, this lesson that enables me to deal well in high-stress situations, and still function logically and soundly, will likely prove to be the most useful. and i intend to use it. in fact, i already have.

Spare Some Change?