Thank you. That’s so nice.

Nailed it! I learned a little trick years ago: Post struggle life on social media. Complain about your kids. Your bills. Act downtrodden. Works like a charm.

I totally get that, and if they are in a position to physically harm you, that’s a little different, although it is still important to understand that complying with them will not keep you safe. If they are not a physical threat, however, you can remind yourself that they will scream in your face no matter what you do or say. As scary as it is, you still cannot control their behavior by doing what they want.

This is what no one likes to address. How violent they can become. It’s not so much what they do, it’s that there is always this unspoken if you don’t comply unaliving is always an option. Enable my arse. I’m not willing to risk being unalived because the chicken was baked not fried and I didn’t mind read well enough to know it.

I still believe there is hope if you are willing to put in the work. And I know it’s a lot of work.

The problem is that there is no way to manage them. Everything is a catch 22. The best you can do is to keep as low of a profile as possible. Saying as little as possible, making no waves. But even that will have moments of failure, not to mention it’s no way to live. You can’t live with them without paying a heavy price that you shouldn’t have to pay. There’s no way around it.

Oh I’m sorry to hear that.

I totally understand that, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that they are nothing but human. Nothing supernatural is necessary for human beings to become monsters. We are perfectly capable of it on our own.

Imagine playing a video game. The world and all of the characters/bad guys only exist in relation to you as the player, they have no function outside of you. When you're playing level 1, level 2 literally doesn't exist, and so on and so on. The second you pass that goomba, he doesn't keep walking until he makes it home to his goomba wife and goomba babies, he isn't thinking about financial stress or thinking about what he's going to have for dinner later, and he doesn't have emotional reactions to things, he literally ceases to exist the second you don't need him to. Because he's only there FOR you, there is no use for him outside of his use to you. He literally only exists for the purpose of engaging with you. Everything he does is about you and for you. He's not just aimlessly guarding that tunnel, he's doing it just for the impact it has on you. Even the other main characters, they still only exist for you. No one is there for anything other than serving your gaming experience, they're all there to serve you. When you go and talk to the princess, she isn't reacting to you as an autonomous being with purpose and passion and history and personal values and her own beliefs, she only says the preprogrammed things she supposed to say to you. There is no thought or emotion driving her, there's no depth or nuance, you don't consider what she's feeling or experiencing, she's just dutifully following the script. That's her only purpose in existing, to follow the script that serves your experience as the player. Imagine if all of a sudden she started telling you that you'd invalidated her or she was having a hard time dealing with a coworker or her student loans were stressing her out or any other personal sentiment that has nothing to do with the game you were playing. That's the best way I've been able to conceive of it 🤷🏼‍♀️