When I wrote the post that became Down the Rabbit Hole, I speculated that normal parents whose children were estranged filtered away to groups that addressed the reason their children were estranged--parents of alcoholics went to groups about alcoholism, etc. But I never followed up on it.

Recently I started reading the forums at Out of the Fog, a ( Read more... )

The estranged parents' forums finally found my site on estranged parents' forums, and the response has been... predictable? Depressing. Let's go with "depressing." I'll skip over the black-and-white thinking, the failure of reading comprehension,* and the weird entitlement to write their opinions directly on my site, and go straight to an incident ( Read more... )

...to have a thankless child.

Estranged parents like this quote. I like it, too. Once upon a time it pissed me off, but then I looked it up to find out which thankless child King Lear was cursing.

It was Cordelia.

The Mothers-in-Law Anonymous forum used to have a poster named Ginnie who was a hidden gem. She was a practicing psychologist in her 60's, and she had a talent for digging down to the bedrock of complicated psychological concepts and laying relationship problems bare with scalpel-like precision. She stopped posting a year or so ago, and a site ( Read more... )

This is a guest post by a reader who wishes to remain anonymous. She writes, "I need more feedback than the stuff I'm getting from the people around me, which is mostly uncomprehending. [....] I've read the responses of the people who follow you and I was thinking they would understand and might have some reasonable and compassionate feedback."

I'm ( Read more... )

For several years now, I've followed blogs about narcissists and other abusers, written by victims of abuse. They're powerful tools for recovery, and powerful testimonials to the impact of emotional abusers on other people's lives. What's been missing is the abusers' perspective on the abuse. The narcissists I follow online don't write about their ( Read more... )