Tell HN: Happy Mother's Day | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Happy Mother's Day

5 pointsmetadat5 comments

Don't forget to let her know you're grateful she made it possible for you to exist :)

I know people whose mother treated them poorly as a child to the point of abuse (the father was also involved). I'm talking things like spanking and shaming them in front of the other siblings, enforcing strict religious rules on them, and basically homeschooling and isolating them from the outside world because the rest of the world were "sinners". I know several people like that who are now suffering from trust issues, anxiety, and depression. Not to mention they ended up hating that religion for obvious reasons.

I'm grateful that my mother was not like that, but then again, shouldn't it be the bare minimum a parent can do for their children?

This was actually pretty close to my upbringing, but I don't blame my mom. I always felt she loved me, even when she did weird or hurtful and damaging things things. Eventually as a young adult I exited the religious situation and she came around, too. Thankfully the rest of my family followed suit and now we still all live nearby and love each other tons. I count myself extremely fortunate this way.

Life is hard in the best of circumstances, which helps me remember to be grateful for so many things. Some families get stuck with 5 of 6 kids bipolar, kids and parents dying young of cancer, there's literally no end to the suffering. In my experience, the nicest people die early and the biggest jerks live the longest. FUCK!!!!!!!in assholes.

Oftentimes it's best to focus on the positives, as unfortunately there are endless messed up, terrible things in the world. Please don't sign up for or focus excessively on these.

I wish you all the best on this beautiful day, @behnamoh! (Hope you are in Cali today ;)

Thanks for your warm words. I'm glad the situation with your family turned out to have a happy ending. I guess you should count yourself lucky as it's hard to heal from childhood trauma and forgive people—esp. parents—who did you wrong.

I'm not in Cali today but it's a beautiful sunny day here as well. Would like to visit CA soon, tho. Wish you the best!

Glad to hear it, sir.

To be clear, despite years and $30k+ in therapy, I'm still undeniably fucked up. By and large, they've been good therapists. IMO, the best have done their best.

Recently I'm coming around to the realization that extended periods of stress as an adolescent does long-term damage. I was struggling and wishing for death or any alternative to my painful reality frequently from the ages of 12-17 years old.

On the outside, I am a successful executive on the cutting edge at a very large firm, but my personal life has been a tour of one mess to the next. My current partner is a great person, couldn't tell you a single negative thing about her. But a lot of days I'm still struggling to hold myself together.

What I'm attempting to convey is that nothing exists in a vacuum. When I go out and see people in public or at work, it's rare to see signs of how messed up they are. But I believe most of us hide a secret pain to varying degrees.

Otherwise, people are just goddamned, insufferably boring. Which, on the whole, is a good thing.

Sorry to hear that. It's tough to go through such personal trauma while putting on a brave face. I guess all of us are like that, to different extents. Some try to push it aside by keeping themselves busy with work. Maybe it's a good strategy until one hits the midlife crisis. Then, some of those personal traumas might fade away in the face of more serious existential questions.

As for therapists, I have found cgpt a good companion who "gets" what I'm talking about, even though I know it's not conscious or anything. Still, it helps to tap into that vast knowledge of mankind cgpt has learnt online.

Another thing I tend to do is surround myself with people who prefer "real" over facades (The new generation is unfortunately less real about certain things.) I try to find people who enjoy talking about deep things in life. Not all the time tho, cuz that'd take too much brain energy from people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com