Introduction
Emotional Parentification
The Path to Ruin
Don’t Call Me Unless…
Ride or Flight?
Generosity & Ruin
The Slippery Slope Realized
The Discipline to Climb
Conclusion & Lessons Learned
Additional Reading

Introduction

Is my life a cliff or a plain? Currently, I am not sure. I am certain it was once a cliff. I climbed intrepidly, relentlessly, until I finally reached the top—my destination. Then the cliff crumbled, became dust, and I was left standing alone in the rubble and ruin. Now, my life is a plain—flat and unforgiving. And with each step forward, I regress. This is the current pattern—I move forward, only to move backward even further, clawing my way amid the ruins.

I wrote that years ago; I’m not sure when. I am sure, however, that it was after I lost my footing on the deceptively slippery slope of generosity.

I was on top of the world: I was a world-class athlete, running my own tech company, married, and living in a fantastic lakefront house in a quiet community of busy young professionals. I was accomplished. I survived a hardscrabble childhood plagued by alcoholism, problematic adult bullshit, and trauma. By all metrics, I was a success. Alas, my two closest relatives lived two hours away. My ruin lurked in the shadows. Unbeknownst to me, my generosity would be my downfall.

“Never cut anyone out of your life, unless they hand you the scissors.”

Emotional Parentification

In the previous installment of “The Cruel Diary of Truth,”^[1] I mentioned, briefly, the emotional parentification^[2] I was subjected to as a child. To recap, emotional parentification occurs when a child is conscripted into an adult role and has to manage a parent’s emotional needs, guard family secrets, or serve as the household’s emotional regulator. This exploitation robs a child of their right to be dependent, messy, and cared for. In essence, it robs a child of the right to be a child. That was me as a child. That’s only one half of the parentification equation. As adults, emotionally parentified children often become the helper in every relationship. In a manner of speaking, they are like a scale’s pointer, swinging back and forth, desperate to find the sweet spot of equilibrium. They struggle to accept care, feel responsible for everyone else’s emotional state, and are exhausted because they have been working a job they were never supposed to have. That was me as an adult.

The Path to Ruin

I was always the fulcrum of everyone’s… Forget that. It all started when my brother, his wife, and daughter moved in with my mother. At first, the arrangement seemed to work fine: His wife took a job at the mall. He was unemployed and spent most of his time at the house “launching a business.” They were living off a paltry settlement he’d received from a previous employer. At the time, at least half the settlement was already gone; he’d always exemplified the proverbial “champagne lifestyle on a beer budget” adage. This time was no different: they took trips, paid for helicopter rides, and shopped like new lottery winners. Eventually, that lifestyle caught up, and problems emerged.

The problems began with his refusal to work. Instead of a job in sales, his wheelhouse, what was his idea? He was going to start a business. Alright. This didn’t come out of nowhere: before moving in with my mother, he would sometimes visit from New York. He saw my lifestyle—running a successful tech firm, competing as an elite-level athlete, and having the freedom and financial wherewithal to live life on my terms. I was his inspiration. I suppose. Unfortunately for him, he lived with his mother, under “her” roof, but contributed nothing. The frustrations mounted.

My mother, being, among other things, highly neurotic,^[3] tended to respond to everything in extremely irrational ways, ways that did not match the situation. Naturally, they started “bumping” into each other. Each day, the situation grew increasingly contentious. My mother’s position was clear: Find a job, help out around the house, and stop running up the bills. Stop running the television and playing loud music while sitting at the computer all day. His position was also clear: He’s not interested in working because, as he said, “It’s not a ‘vision,’ it’s my business”; he’s running a business. His wife’s position aligned more with his mother’s: She wanted him to work and become fiscally responsible. The chasm between the three only widened.

He told his wife, now frustrated and desperate, to search for jobs because, of course, he wasn’t searching. She did. She searched and printed job listings, all of which he repeatedly discarded. His mother told him about an acquaintance, a restaurateur, willing to offer him a job. His response was telling: “I’m not working in any restaurant unless I’m the manager!” The tension rose, like smoke from a cigarette.

Don’t Call Me Unless…

They all called me. Repeatedly, every day, I got calls from each of them telling me, of course, their version of affairs. His narrative was all complaints about his wife and mother not understanding, and how I “don’t understand how she talks to people”; she being his mother. To be fair, he was right. One of the traits of high neuroticism is an irrational response to situations, and his mother, being high in neuroticism with adjacent psychological problems, frequently explodes over illogical trivialities. She still does. His mother would call to solicit my help. His wife’s calls were relegated to pleading and expressing understandable frustrations.

That’s when I started making the two-hour drive, once or twice a week, to visit. In part, it was to get him out of the house and away from the tumult—advice he never bothered to take—and also to drive him to places he needed to visit. I would take him to doctor and optometrist appointments. I would also take him to the hock shops: When desperation peaked, he began hocking his jewelry, watches, television, and so on. He still refused to modify his behavior. His wife drove their car to work and, of course, his mother wasn’t about to let him use hers.

“Just take a part-time job. That way, you’ll be working, be able to chip in, they’ll get off your back, and you’ll still have time to work on developing your business.” All advice fell on deaf ears. The only response, ironically from all three, was justifications for their inflexibility:

• His mother’s inflexibility came from her personality traits and psychological morphology: The house was a family house, fully paid off, and she lived there free of any cost except the electric bill. She didn’t need the money; she wanted control.
• His wife wanted an emotionally attuned partner who would participate in decision-making, financial contribution, and child-rearing (she paid for day care, six days a week).
• He wanted them to leave him alone to accomplish whatever he thought he was trying to accomplish.

In hindsight, it had a nasty solipsistic tinge. I believe they only wanted me to “talk to them about them” and take sides; there was no interest in solving the problems.

Then one night, the call came: His mother called the police because he’d allegedly struck or pushed his wife. His wife ran out into the street around midnight, screaming, wearing nothing but her nightgown. WTF? At the time, I was already beginning to crack internally; I just hadn’t realized: No one did. Police swarmed onto the block like locusts in a grass field. Despite his protestations, he went to jail. And according to his mother, he kept calling her, crying, pleading with her to bail him out. Two weeks later, she used her car as collateral and got him out. Nothing improved. There may have been a soupçon of contrition, but nothing changed.

While he remained jailed, his wife took their child and left. She went back to New York to live with her parents until… whatever. He remained with his mother, continued being a nuisance, wallowing in a stew of man-made depression and sacralized selfishness. (He literally began seeing a psychologist, desperate to find an accomplice who would justify his behaviors. He even started claiming to suffer from “adult ADHD,” along with depression, anxiety, and a slew of other maladies.)

Ride or Flight?

He never looked for a job, but he did land on a brilliant idea: He was going to ride his bicycle across the country. (All these years later and it still sounds stupid.) He was serious. As he put it, he was going to be the first Black man to accomplish this feat; he was making history. The daily communications continued; he called, his mother called, and his wife emailed. She had stopped talking to him completely and kept their daughter away from him. She claimed to be terrified, but I had other suspicions, later confirmed. I tried every avenue to reach them, but they never listened, never took any advice, never brokered peace on their own behalf. At my behest, he moved out of his mother’s place and stayed with me temporarily. That arrangement came with its own set of challenges; after all, I was married, running a business, and living—up until that period—a relatively drama-free life. Two weeks later, he left for New York, maybe.

One day, about a month later, he called: He was on the road, on the bicycle, “making history.” WTF? His ass was catching hell. It was a struggle road trip; a mission doomed to failure. He regaled me with stories of being “homeless,” having to dumpster dive for rations, the frigid temperatures that gnawed at his bones, and even being shot at by what he described as “Klansmen,” on some night in the rural South. Not a single lesson was learned from the experience of living with his mother, from the things I implored, the separation, the involuntary estrangement from his child, and the eventual dissolution of his marriage. Unfortunately, that damned emotional parentification continued like a parasite with a willing host; I still advised him, much to my chagrin.

Generosity & Ruin

By this time, the crack had become a canyon. I was completely drained, emotionally depleted, and going through a breakdown. I now had my own problems in my home. The ordeal proved too stressful for me and my then-wife, with the money spent (yes, I gave him “float money,” or as he put it, “a bailout”), the time, energy, and resources lost. The stress mounted. It began as snide, petty remarks and sneers that became bickering; bickering that transformed into argy-bargy; argy-bargy that eventually became more or less constant. I eventually had to see a psychiatrist, get medicated, and endure a short sojourn in a psychiatric treatment facility.

Even after being stabilized and released, there remained a certain delitescent, a lingering spectre of the ordeal. I continued taking medication and continued to unravel. Thinking of it now, I believe my experience was similar to cataplexy: I went into a kind of emotional shock that was difficult to recover from. I stopped training, stopped competing, neglected the business I built, and withdrew into myself. Clients left one by one, understandably. My wife did the same. She returned to London, England. I went to court with her in absentia to bury the ashes that remained of the life we built: Irreconcilable differences; no chance of resolution.

I lost everything that I worked so hard to accomplish, build, and care for. Marriage? Gone. House? Gone. Cars? Gone. Money? Gone. Life and style? Gone. I sat alone in the empty house—before giving up on clinging to it—and drank beer. (I was never a drinker. It started and ended with this crisis.) I sat, buried beneath the fertile soil of ruminative thoughts and negative emotions, and looked out at the lake. That’s the price I paid for my generosity. The cost paid by a once emotionally parentified child: Give everything trying to help; lose everything in return. In a cruel tightening of the screw, briefly, I had to “downsize” my living situation and move in with my mother. Oh, the irony. That was a whole… It was my personal Sheol. I even remarked to my mother once that they “killed me and I came to this house to be buried.”

The Slippery Slope Realized

Where were they? After all this, the collapse of a symbolic empire, what happened to each of them? Finally heeding my admonition, he gave up on his cross-country trek. I’m sure much of his decision was due to the constant hardships he faced: a broke, frail, hungry, sickly, asthmatic malcontent taking on such a Herculean task in the dead of a blistering winter. He returned to New York, really New Jersey, and got settled. His wife? I finally convinced her to speak to him; to let his daughter see and talk to him. She did. Their relationship remained pugnacious, becoming unflinchingly acerbic, caustic, and bitter. He remained a jackass; she revealed herself to be a churlish termagant. (Another mess, for another day.) His mother continued on her chosen path of self-defeating behaviors and the wanton destruction of relationships. The bottom line is that they all went back to living their lives, while my life remained in shambles—for a while. I stopped talking to each one. Years later, I started talking to my mother again. She never changed and is still as obstinate as a donkey.

The Discipline to Climb

I was, eventually, able to climb back up. I’d moved out of the house. Honestly, my mother is an intolerable control freak whose identity is wrapped up in dominating others. This isn’t entirely her fault—it’s a behavioral problem—bad habits, basically. But habits are learnable and can be changed, and she chose otherwise. Alas, she will never change; that cow left the barn a long time ago. After moving more than 1,000 miles away, I started training again; not to compete, but to heal physically, psychologically, and emotionally. I also started writing again, professionally and on my own projects. I also remained tech-adjacent, working on disparate projects and learning new technologies that interest me.

The combination of distance, physical activity, and cognitive exercise is what led to my eventual healing. At the very least, it was the beginning of the journey. I had already stopped taking the medication and wasting time and money on a therapist who, incidentally, never listened to me. He was basically a glorified and credentialed drug dealer. I solved my own problem by looking within, then tapping into the knowledge I’d acquired over the years. That knowledge includes harnessing the powers of discipline, personal responsibility, focus, and a bias for action—all things that I preach and teach to this day. I don’t talk to my brother or his ex-wife; that’s a poisoned pool, not worth the risk of stepping into. It took six years, but I started talking to my mother again.

Sometimes ‘family’ is the worst thing that could ever happen to a person.

Conclusions & Lessons Learned

“Never cut anyone out of your life unless they hand you the scissors.” Years ago, I heard a man say this, and it has stuck with me ever since. My generosity was never the problem; the recipients of my munificence were problematic all along. My generosity was abused, due in part to my negligence, and I hold myself accountable; I always do. Hell, I practice personal accountability rituals that eliminate reliance on external accountability by starting each day with asking: “What do you want your behavior to look like?” The practice helps keep me grounded and focused on what’s important: My emotional, psychological, and physical well-being. Besides, when you hold yourself accountable, you replace the need for external judges. And while they contributed to my demise and slide toward certain doom, I indulged them by trying to help. That’s emotional parentification, made manifest in adulthood—always in the role of “savior,” problem-solver, or helper.

Limits and boundaries, held fast, are an important lesson and a buttress against the abuse of kindness. This is especially true when dealing with family. Why? Because of societal and cultural norms (read: pressure), “family” tends to have certain expectations: You must always be there, no matter what. I’ve never subscribed to that line of thinking, and maybe I should have held my position more firmly. The unfortunate reality is this: Ideologies like “That’s your mother. You have to love her,” or “That’s family so you gotta help,” become cudgels against better judgment, in provinces without clearly defined boundaries. It’s unfortunate but true. It’s also another manifestation of disguised coercion.

They’ve never apologized, showed any remorse, or expressed any sorrow. They merely walked away, moved on with their lives, as pleased as punch to get what they wanted. My mother got control of the space and was free of a nuisance and his family. He was free to do whatever he wanted without beleaguerment. His ex-wife rid herself of him, moved back with her parents, and assumed the role of a thorn in his side. I was left with nothing but ash and ruin.

I used to say, “Sometimes family is the worst thing that could ever happen to a person.” It’s a thought I had, perhaps arising from this months-long gauntlet. Years later, I heard: “Never cut anyone out of your life unless they hand you the scissors.” I think that’s the biggest lesson to take from this experience (much of which I left out for brevity). I have only spoken about this once before; it was emotional; the wounds were still wet. There was no emotional upswell while writing this essay. I guess you could say, lesson learned and applied.

Additional Reading

[1] The Cruel Diary of Truth: What Have I Learned?

[2] The Long-Term Harm of Emotional Parentification

[3] Neuroticism