When I wrote the post that became Down the Rabbit Hole, I speculated that normal parents whose children were estranged filtered away to groups that addressed the reason their children were estranged--parents of alcoholics went to groups about alcoholism, etc. But I never followed up on it.

Recently I started reading the forums at Out of the Fog, a ( Read more... )

The estranged parents' forums finally found my site on estranged parents' forums, and the response has been... predictable? Depressing. Let's go with "depressing." I'll skip over the black-and-white thinking, the failure of reading comprehension,* and the weird entitlement to write their opinions directly on my site, and go straight to an incident ( Read more... )

Last night, Ella was hit by a car and killed.

Rest in peace, Miss Ella. You were the finest of small, squirrelly cats.

ETA: Ella's owner says:

Ella 2009-2014 ( Read more... )

In this long series of posts, Ginnie talks with another forum member about the likelihood of her personality-disordered mother-in-law getting therapy and improving.

The thread starts here...

In the middle, Ginnie discusses how family members who wake up to the family dysfunction usually try to handle it. If you're the family truthteller or ( Read more... )

Thor fanfiction has been tough for me to get into, not least because the fandom's favorite pairing is Thor/Loki. Guh, squick. It's not the brothercest that gets me, it's Thor. I don't even like thinking about Thor/Jane, and that pairing's canon.

So which pairing grabs me?

Loki/Darcy.

Sigyn (binding is not punishment)by Aria ( Read more... )

Superhero movies aren't known for their tight, cohesive plots, but there's a fracture in the plot of Thor that's driving me nuts.

The story as it's told is:
( one big spoiler from beginning to end. )

...to have a thankless child.

Estranged parents like this quote. I like it, too. Once upon a time it pissed me off, but then I looked it up to find out which thankless child King Lear was cursing.

It was Cordelia.

The Mothers-in-Law Anonymous forum used to have a poster named Ginnie who was a hidden gem. She was a practicing psychologist in her 60's, and she had a talent for digging down to the bedrock of complicated psychological concepts and laying relationship problems bare with scalpel-like precision. She stopped posting a year or so ago, and a site ( Read more... )

Some interesting notes on the stages of denial from here:

Barrett and Trepper, in an article in the Family Therapy Networker (now the Psychotherapy Networker) in 1992, pointed out that families have multiple layers of denial, which often come out in the same order. As one breaks through each of these resistances, the next one pops up in its place ( Read more... )

After several frustrating days of not being able to play my tin whistle because the lower notes needed radically different breath pressure than the high notes, I asked Google what was wrong. Google said: Your whistle is a Generation brand in the key of D, which is one of the best whistles out there. Tons of professionals swear by their Generation ( Read more... )