Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Family Dynamics

  • Corrosive, Obsessive Hatred

    Corrosive, Obsessive Hatred

    How can people not see what their untrammelled hatred does to themselves and those around them? How can they give into it day after day so that it obscures both their very reason and destroys their lives?

    I must forget my obsession with the science and philosophy of determinism and free will, and assume for the moment that we are indeed able to choose our behaviour if we wish and if we can see any necessity for so doing.

    I must also admit I may not be in the ideal position to talk about such matters, since I have no reason to feel hatred and I don’t think I ever have.  At least for more than a few fleeting moments.

    I am what the Americans would call a “WASP” – a white anglo saxon protestant. The Brits would classify me as a typical upper middle class Londoner, well enough off and lucky enough in the genetic lottery of birth.

    So I may not be ideally qualified to understand corrosive, obsessive hatred.  I have never suffered torture or political oppression, never had my extremities removed by the steel arms of a vicious and backward desert theocracy.  Isis has never reached my pleasant ivory tower and Idi Amin has never eaten my relatives.

    But in my own, generally calm and privileged environment, I have nonetheless seen what damage hatred can cause. And indeed money is no cure for despair or misery – as we have seen in the unhappy recent history of our Royal Family.

    There is a particular woman I know who has gone overboard in recent years; she has destroyed her life and her family by hatred and yet as is so often the way, she insists it is others who have wronged her and will accept none of the blame. Nor will she change or even see the need to change.

    For her own sake if only she would heed the words so often spoken to her in kindness by all and sundry including counsellors, family and paid advisors she could transform a very hell into a veritable heaven.

    She is the maker of her own prison, she has built the very walls which have trapped and enslaved her.  She is the wife of an exceptionally wealthy banker; they live in luxury in London and in thousands of rolling acres in the countryside.  Their children have been well educated at the finest public schools and the family is surrounded by staff and lackeys to cater to their every whim.  No doubt like prince Charles, they could, if they so chose, have a maid put toothpaste on their toothbrushes and another maid run their bath.

    The husband has unfortunately never been faithful and many are his “conquests”. Filipino maids, girlfriends in every port, county wives of the great and the good in their beautiful English shire.  It’s all rather Edwardian really. Or I think the french still live like that, don’t they? A pampered wife wanting for no material comfort and a philandering husband who plunders and swashbuckles as he chooses.

    Well women have a choice. Many choose to let their husband out on a long rein.  It appears that marriages can work in that way.  Edward VII’s Mrs Keppel and a stream of others were tolerated by a long suffering Princess Alexandra of Denmark.

    If you refuse to tolerate such misbehaviour or you can not, then separate.  Live your own life, start again, take up a career or a new one, re-marry, have some fun, travel.

    Few are lucky enough to have your resources!

    But please, do not chose the route of hatred and bitterness. Do not drive your own children away from you by your temper and your anger. Do not split your family and blame your siblings. Accept help, go to counseling but listen to what your counselors tell you. Do not throw their well meant help back at them. Do not assume everyone around you means you harm and ill. That everyone is threatening you and trying to swindle you.

    There comes a time when however close you once were, your friends and family have to back away for their own health, happiness and sanity.  They can not enter a reality they know is yours and of your making. A solipsistic nightmare.

  • Sibling Bitterness

    Sibling Bitterness

    Why is it that siblings often fall out in such a bitter fashion on the death of parents? Is it a petty dispute over the will? Or is it something deeper?

    For many years a given family of siblings may rally round their parents. As children and adolescents this is usually a matter of physical or economic necessity – unlike most of the animal kingdom human children take many years to fledge.

    As young and middle aged adults the sibling relationship may trog along quite reasonably although at this stage tensions may start to appear as the siblings develop their own relationships and bear their own children.

    The novelty of the newborn and the pleasure they give to the grandparents may heal and unify any rifts which appear in the family unity at this stage. Novelty and young children are a fine glue and many species have evolved to find attraction in the faces and gamboling antics of the young.

    But as life wears on cracks appear in the sibling relationships. Cracks may also appear in the individual lives of the siblings. Their own marital relationships may be problematic. Their children will give them the normal worries of any parent. They will face career difficulties, financial problems, health scares. None of these need necessarily destroy the original family bonding.

    But then the siblings’ parents age to the extent that they, the parents, reach a second childhood and become a burden rather than a support.  Siblings worry and squabble over what to do about the aged and now infirm parents: will their money see them through, who will look after them, will the family home have to be sold?

    By now petty jealousies and rivalries may well have developed between the siblings.  One sibling may envy the life of another, the possessions, the health, the happiness or whatever.  The storm clouds form.

    Inevitably one sibling will play a bigger role in the care of the aged parents than the others. In a well balanced and loving family this may end well – that sibling might be praised and offered just reward for some years of sacrifice and difficulty.

    In other families the eventual death  of the parents leads not to a celebration of lives well lived but to a bitter and vicious squabble over the will.

    A sister (one of five siblings) and her husband and children spend seven long years catering to the every need of a mother with increasingly severe dementia and an increasingly crippled and mentally frail father.  There was no cash to pay them for the full time job, so they were promised reward on death.

    And on the death of the last parent all hell breaks loose.  Two of the siblings accuse the carer of theft – undocumented and totally spurious. The motive for the accusations remains unclear but some long seated jealousy or sibling rivalry seems certain. A third sibling gets involved in purchasing a part of the parental home while the caring family retain the other part in recompense for their effort.

    And boom! Suddenly even that sibling turns on the carer when it comes to “negotiating” financial and physical details of the property division.

    The original parents were not easy people. A father with lifelong depression or bi-polar disorder, a mother who struggled with insecurity, a waspish tongue and, perhaps, fear.  Certainly it was not an easy life for them with five children to raise.

    A life of dispute, back biting, jealousy and unpleasantness trickles down through the generations. Is it genetics or life’s circumstances? Nature or nurture? Who knows.

    How glorious to be a human.