Topics of generational abuse, or intergenerational abuse, have suddenly become relevant in my life. I have a parent I barely know and was criticizing one day, and I was getting all kinds of excuses which mainly boiled down to either “appeal to authority”, “appeal to psychology”, or “not my problem”. At one point, I ragequit the conversation after making sure I had made a statement. I contacted my sister who knew all my relatives better than I had and dropped a brief comment along the lines of “I wonder why they are like this” and she responded with a “you’re not being tolerant enough, they have generational abuse, cut everyone some slack”. So maybe I’ve been influenced the wrong way when I say intergenerational abuse as a phenomenon or a concept sounds like the biggest load of BS I’ve ever heard.

I’m also into learning about a lot of culty topics, and recently I watched a video about one of those televangelists you see on TV that claim you can pray your stigmatized relationship orientations away, and the video was chronicling his life and how he grew up in an environment that would always put him down for his lamentations towards many of those practices, and it mentioned he became the monster he feared growing up. Genuine question here, how DOES someone become the monster they fear? What kind of free will does someone have to lack to inherit someone’s monstrosity? Even when someone says it simply, such as when they say “that’s just how I was raised”, that raises a huge red flag, because if you don’t like how you were treated/raised, why the heck are you (even consciously) imitating it?

In general, in a world where we expect free will to be valued and where that “bad times make good people” meme still floats around, how are people so unquestioning enough of their bad experiences that they consciously use the lack of their questioning of something they never liked as an excuse to do that very thing onto others?