The Demise of the American Family 4: Distance Was Part of It

 

Many Americans have no money to travel anymore. What will this mean in a world where everyone lives far away from relatives?

People can't afford to see each other in person anymore. 

During the boomer's era when a man with a high school diploma could get a job let's say at a factory, or as a school janitor, could buy a house and raise some kids and feed them, life was different then. That family had enough expendable income to go to "Grandma's house" even if grandma lived hundreds of miles away. This is another issue not being explored by sociologists very much, how declining money and expenses for travel are breaking up family. Sure some say you can stay in touch via distance. I have friends online I never have met in person, I've talked to for 25 plus years. It often can work. With family though, if you are simply not around, and you don't have people who like writing letters or emails, the relationships will die on the vine. If you all live hundreds or even thousands of miles away long enough, time will erode any possible relationships. The poorer you are, the less contact you will have with your family. The younger generations who cannot afford rent, food, and more do not have money to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to "go home" and visit family.

We were all scattered for careers that didn't pan out. 

One thing I have noticed is social services, counselors and others assume everyone has a family. While SOME people have family networks where they live, that's far fewer. Narcissistic parents will scatter families, people move away, even the golden and lost children feel the strain around the narcissistic parent, they think "I got to get out of here!" Families broke up for careers and economics and well while it paid off for older generations that did find careers, it stripped away any notion of family for younger people.

One thing I noticed in some smaller towns I lived in, is some families were still intact, they all lived in the same town. Life for them was far different, their family and relatives were part of the warp and weave of their everyday life. I know this woman where there were 5 sisters and they all lived in town, one was deceased but they visited her all the time in the nursing home before she died.

You Separated Everyone Long Ago 

I notice the estranged parent set never deal with this issue. I have posted about their outraged anger at their estranged children but do some realize, many of us grew up without extended family simply because they were too far away? Do they realize many of us saw our families scatter to the 4 winds, hundreds and thousands of miles away? I have written about how I grew up being hundreds of miles from all relatives. Why are some of these estranged parents shocked, that families have broken up? They blame their estranged kids but don't realize the fix was put in place for families to split up years and years ago.

I saw this estranged parent on social media getting angry at estranged children claiming, "They have no loyalty, roots, or sense of history, towards their family." Well what do you expect? Those things were thrown away in the 1960s. Family were strangers they saw once or twice a year or less. They couldn't pay their rent and their jobs paid them only basic survival wages so how could they afford to run around and visit people and build relationships with them? They weren't family, they were strangers. Even on Breaking Bad, the relatives were present in each other's lives even though Walter White was betraying them. 

This estranged parent ranted about  "family being reduced to DNA". 

What do you expect? Seriously. You think there's real relationships among people who never see or talk to each other? The reality is, that for many family members all they share is DNA and no relationships. I was far closer to loving friends I met online, I shared heart to heart conversations with via email than I was many family members. I sought "family" in all the churches I joined. It worked out once but then I was forced to move away from those folks. Church could be weird watching people around their families, and most of the conservative ones became extremely family focused to the point people without families did not feel welcomed. 

When a society decided that everything was going to be monetized this means social capital as defined by the book "Bowling Alone", connection no longer mattered. Along with the third spaces, family disappeared too. All decisions were to be made based on economics and "making it". Now that the younger generations aren't making it, the system is failing, the families are gone and the economic success except for the very wealthy has dried up. The estranged parents don't even understand or realize why their adult children are so upset. 

When Grandma lives over 500 miles away for years and as an adult, you live even further away for over 30 years.

How is a kid going to see "family" as important if they lived far away from all relatives and relatives were these people they only saw once to twice a year and sometimes less? I went no contact due to abuse, but I know one reason my mother gained control of the family so easily and why so many of the "better" relationships died on the vine, was I simply lived too far away and could not afford the necessary travel to maintain relationships with family. I didn't have the hundreds of dollars to go visit one's cousin's wedding, and I also had medical problems that made long distance travel far harder. It occurred to me as I tried to rescue a few relationships with some before going no contact with the entire family, some simply had no interest in maintaining family ties. They found my desire to "get to know each other" weird. They didn't relate to it. There was this sense that everyone was supposed to have their own life, and by even displaying a desire to have them in my life, I had broken some unwritten rule. In my case I learned to no longer beg people or go to empty wells, but the default was, "We don't care, get your own life, leave us alone". 

 No one came to visit me for years except for 10 minute stop offs on the way to elsewhere and even that disappeared. No one is going to keep any relationships going with this type of distance. 

Reaching out to Strangers Got Old and They left Me Before I Left Them

What does family mean today? Before I was no contact, I used to make phone calls, I was the type to call Grandma on a regular basis and even Aunt Confused. I sent presents, cards and more. What did it all mean? I was always reaching out while no one reached out to me or did as little as possible. I've talked about how I became a stranger. As I wrote in my no contact letter to my mother "Both of us have noticed we have become more ostracized over the years,  If people slam a door in your face enough times...what happens if you have any self-respect left? You walk away." And yes the slamming doors ricocheted through my life and affected what decisions I made. You can only try and force relationships that don't really exist so much. 

Churches Aren't for People with No Families

One reason conservative circles were always hard for me, was they all talked about how important family was. My fundamentalist churches, especially the last two, pounded on it continually. Those patriarchal types with their Quiverful clans of 10-12 kids lived in the world of yesterday no longer available to most. They had money and land for all those kids and tons of relatives around them. Many seemed stuck in the lives of 50 years ago where aunt and uncle lived down the street and you could go talk to them. Church got weird sometimes, the second IFB was always preaching how important family was. What if you didn't have one? Everything was about the "family". 

Some didn't get the memo that most families were all broken up starting in the 1960s and we didn't have extended families anymore. The demise of the extended family, I believe made narcissism worse. When there was more of a community around, there was more pressure to keep the narco-paths in control, '"why are you treating your kid that way?" An abused kid could get a break at a relative's house if they were close enough. The isolation of the nuclear family allowed abuse to fester and grow within four walls. The worse could get away with more. There was no one to challenge them. There was no community to demand at least a certain modicum of behavior. 

Uncles, Aunts, Cousins etc. you don't know.

Uncle Lost Boy doesn't care that I exist. He's never sent me a card and neither has his wife. I doubt he's thought of me in 25 years. "Oh I have a niece". That's the reality today. If I was homeless could I call Uncle Lost Boy for help? Doubtful. I'm a stranger. Remember I have no beefs with him. He's too controlled and passive in the face of my mother but there's been no harsh words between us. He is far closer to his wife's more traditional working class family who all live in the same town. Who can blame him?

My father's family had nothing to do with my family. We visited them but no one visited us after 1982 when my family moved to the Midwest from the East Coast. Aunt Confused kept some contact and visited once in 1998, but otherwise went poof out of our lives especially when she disappeared in the early 1980s and didn't even say goodbye to me as a teen. That was over with. They had money for trips, but no one was interested. Oddly they kept in contact with my mother, but money and lavish presents were motivators for weddings. First cousins, simply had nothing to do with us. 

I am not the only one no one talks to because I went no contact. My brother told me he hadn't talked to my sister in 2 and half years right before I went no contact with him. My other two siblings are at least at the very low contact level and could be no contact now. I found out from Aunt Confused, that two granddaughters wouldn't even share their addresses with her. She was invited to weddings, but not allowed to be part of their day to day lives. The cousin who called me to tell me he had gotten divorced, a few years ago, told me he hadn't seen any family members in years. Some ACONS warn when the scapegoat leaves, the families break apart. Mine had broken apart before I left the fractures definitely grew. Younger people don't have the same money, time, resources, energy or space to maintain family relationships like older generations. That impact is already happening. 

This issue has been covered on this blog by me multiple times where I talked about my life as an "economic nomad" and there was never any real home. Someone may ask "What's your home town?" What town do I name? They say "move home to family for support"  to young people. Some have divorced parents so things are even more broken up. What does that mean when the family is spread about 5 different states? 

One thing I constantly noticed in the fundamentalist and conservative churches I was in, was many were in the more traditional mode, they lived among family members mostly in small towns. Now these churches were mostly the Baby Boomer generation and older. They had jobs and established lives in small towns, and extensive networks. This will not be true of the younger generations. I predicted there's going to be a lot of churches closing when the boomer generation dies off. This one thing I chafed against in all my conservative and evangelical churches. Many evangelical churches claim they grow by going out to the highways and byways and street preaching for new "converts" but I'll be frank, that's rare. Most people in the churches are family members. I've noticed with some of the estranged parents, they all are of that background, some are evangelicals using religion to shame their "wayward" youth. 

Conservative politicians were always hypocrites about "family values", they pushed those in our faces for years, while pushing idyllic 1950 visions of home and hearth, they built financial systems and took away all social safety nets that would have allowed more families and communities to remain intact. I didn't want to hear about how all the people without families were wicked. I've noticed the estranged parent movement has a huge evangelical flavor to it, where they push the same stuff ignoring the economic realities their adult children face and say their children are all "wicked". 

Physical Presence Matters

Family will break down from distance alone, physical presence matters. In history, cultures had rituals and shared events. These events built up solidarity and positive memories. That won't happen in a family that can no longer afford travel or participate in any traditions or meet-ups.  The family dinners, and family reunions of yesterday also have disappeared. I am old enough to have seen some of those things in the 1970s. Things were different then. When I was sent to my aunt's house to stay, that wouldn't happen for many children today.  Due to distance, people will be facing extreme illness, poverty and other life troubles on their own. Those with young children will be on their own or fully dependent on expensive daycare. The family is simply not there to help. As the economy gets more oppressive this means the young will have less to do with their families, even in non-toxic ones they would otherwise desire contact with. The money will simply not be there. 

Connection between family members has broken down. Now there's those of us who had to break connections that brought pain, abuse and sabotage to our lives, but there's many connections being broken now for other reasons. Family are strangers that don't even know what your day to day life is like. I see the theme with young people trying to describe their reality to their parents, where the parents take little interest, or do not relate whatsoever to what they are facing. The old days weren't perfect, some were stifled and controlled too much by their family systems. Some families were abusive or demanded too much. Small town life with a permanent reputation at the hands of your family could be oppressive. People were told to obey parents to the extreme. However, this isn't good either.

Family as Competition Clubs, with No Love or Loyalty

However there were some family values, that were different. There were notions of loyalty, duty and more. While some of these things could be used as a trap, in the "old days" one could depend on one's family a bit more. A daughter would not be left to die in an inner city with no one to help or even pushed to get a job like that in the first place to avoid "homelessness". Family used to take each other in if they faced hard times. There was unity in some families. There was some cooperation and an idea of "us against the world". Older generations did have the outlook of "keeping the family together". I've seen this meme around and there's truth in it. Many have noticed when their Silent Generation grandparent died or even a more traditional older boomer did, the family folded, no one was having family meet-ups any longer even beyond the affordability issues.

My family was a competition club. I'm not the only poor person who got mocked. I grew up listening to this nonsense. Nepotism became for the favorites instead of trying to help the family as whole. I noticed among older generations there wasn't such a severe divide economically between family members. This is definitely one thing that has happened to the American family. There was no more togetherness, there was economic competition. There's a reason estranged and toxic parents put their kids down as "losers", and then they are shocked when said adult children, walk away. They have no sense. Of course they would. Their family is not a bastion against a cold hard world but people who made everything far more difficult. 

While there were disabled people who were abused or rejected, [locked away in the attic] I know if several great-uncles and aunts got Huntington's today, instead of 50 years ago, their fate would have been far worse. I don't have contact with those family lines anymore to know how their children have fared. Family shared business and opportunities where now that seems to be only competition. Some wealthier families do use nepotism still, but many are left out of that. There was some social contract and more trust within families. Family was supposed to protect and look out for each other. That definitely has been lost in many places. Leaving a relative to the homeless shelter instead of helping them, would have brought shame in the old days. 

There were negatives, abuse could be hidden, via the unspoken message "We don't air our dirty laundry in public", you didn't go to therapists back then. There could be more secrets but family in more cases was something you could depend on more. The second Great Depression will be far harder on people because during the first Great Depression there was far more family cohesiveness and connection. 

There's some panicking because Gen Z and younger generations don't want children, "We've gone below replacement levels!" If you think about it why would they?  People aren't receiving fond memories of family but dealing with families that harmed and abused them. Even if more neutral, family connection is something for yesterday. DNA today means strangers who live far away, it doesn't mean people you can turn to or count on. I know some fortunate souls have a far different experience of family but for many people it's been a wholly negative experience. This is one reason young people don't want children, if family is a negative word to you, why would you want to add members to a family that never had your back and always left you behind?

The Demise of the American Family: The World of Regretful Parents

 

 I never had kids. There is a price that comes with that, since I left my family of origin, there is no family of creation. There will be no grandchildren or son or daughter. There is a 1994 Star Trek movie, "Generations", the one where Picard and an aged Captain Kirk help each other and there's a moment that Picard is put into this "nexus world". In this world he has a family, a wife, children and his dead nephew comes back to life.  The character doesn't really have children but you could see he longed for that kind of life. He breaks away to return to his real life and "save his crew" but you can see him being pulled to the world of family. 

 I don't think having kids would have worked for us, even if I could have pulled it off. We didn't have enough financial resources. There wasn't enough physical and emotional stamina! All the doctors told me I would die if I got pregnant. One told me I couldn't get pregnant at all. I never have been pregnant. It just never happened. Who wants to have a kid with their life destroyed by super-obesity, autism and extreme autoimmune disorders? My father didn't think of me passing on his monster genetics.

What does family mean anymore? Many of us, especially white people in America really don't have one, we came out of competition clubs. No one admits that the reason immigrant families do better here is because they pool resources. Other cultures have more of a cooperative stance. Americans suffer for having no heritage, Native Americans have their tribes, and other groups their clubs and traditions, but many of us ended up with a bag of empty. I see people refer to "my people" and there is no group we belong to.

Many people today seem very disappointed by having kids. I found this board called regretful parents  on reddit. It is fascinating. Some people admitted the childfree and childless frequented the board to see the horrors they escaped. The mods are very heavy handed and don't allow much interaction from outsiders but the regretful parents themselves. This board was surprising. I think there is a lot of truth on that board about how parenthood is presented in our society, we see warm fuzzy moments on family sitcoms, many of the people basically come on there and write things like: [paraphrased on purpose not to single anyone out]

• "These children are disappointments, they disobey and tear the house up"
• "My life is a misery, there's not enough money, all I do is work and come home to housework, cooking and childcare!"
• "I am imprisoned with this autistic [stage 3] child who has no future and I will be a slave forever to them, and they hit me!"
• "I wish I never had kids"
• "I hate being a parent, I wish someone had told me how terrible it was!"
• "There's not enough money to pay for anything!"
• "My daughter is 23 and still hasn't got a job, she has no motivation and expects me to pay all the bills."
• "I hate my child's personality."
• "My child is a psychopath." 
• "I want to run away!"
• "Children are noisy brats"
• "They expect me to entertain them night and day."
• "My partner never helps."
• "No one told me it would be this much work."
• "Babies are terrible, selfish and never sleep!"
• "My child hates me and always speaks to me disrespectfully and never listens!"
• "I would never become a parent if I knew what it was like."
• "I regret my choice to become a parent very much so.
• "I may divorce so I can give my mate custody and be free of child rearing.
  
• "Maybe I should run away!"

I'm noticing some themes on that board. Some of the people are very sympathetic. Some did get a child with no conscience or stage 3 non-verbal autistic children where there is never a moments rest. Some could be personality disordered, or narcissists themselves or were raised so badly or abused themselves they don't have the emotional fortitude for parenthood. Hey, I didn't have it!

Maybe the kids are different now. They are far sicker. Maybe a lot of the misbehavior is from brain injuries, whether you believe that is from vaccines or from toxins in the environment. Kids seem far less able to self-soothe. ADHD may be more a problem with physiological basis than psychological. Autism rates are off the charts and even level 1 autism can bring a lot of challenges. This is affecting the children's abilities to be quiet, listen, function, learn, play, and behave. People are unhealthier. I have noticed young people seem to be more seriously ill with more autoimmune diseases. This is an outcome of many problems. 

Parents are older now, people have a lot more energy when they are younger. Add in all the job requirements, working women, people don't have the same energy to keep up with the kids and it shows.

The outcomes of Feminism made it far harder. The "you can have it all and make the bacon too" lie is a fiasco. Women who are mothers are exhausted. My elderly friends who had school aged children in the 50s and 60s told me directly, family life was happier, when mothers were home to take care of the children.  I saw posts about lazy partners all over the regretful parents board. Sheer fatigue seemed to produce a lot of the regret. When corporations got their two for one deal, it cut family time by 50 percent. Outraged, overworked mothers, yell at the men and partners who won't step up, because they are basically pulling double shifts. Divorce is far more common with many households dealing with custody issues, visitation and divorced parents who live far away from each other. 

This is a sick society, it is not a place for children. Most adults are so beaten down, by work and financial responsibilities, there's nothing left to give to the kids. One other theme that is repeated is how there is no one to help. Parents who wanted the status of grandchildren and push their adult child to have children, check out and aren't really there to help when the chips are down. 

There's no village and parents in America are definitely feeling it. There's no one to help babysit. All the bills are too high. Life has become nothing but work. We have very little community left in this country and third spaces, and in the old days there would have been aunts and uncles and extended family to help out. Now there isn't, the nuclear family is alone in the house. Many can't afford the money to have a church group or coach to pick up the slack either. I wrote about in this article years ago, Economic Nomads in the Geography of Nowhere how the social ties of society have been destroyed, this definitely has affected raising children. 

I spent my 20s with children, raising other people's kids for jobs, at the juvenile home, day cares, babysitting, school programs, camp, substitute teaching and the residential counselor job. At the group home, they told us, we served a parental role with the title "family teacher". I had many special positive moments while teaching, a few young adults came up to me 7 years after I was their art teacher and told me how they had positive memories of me. There were kids who did blossom in my classes and who were reachable. True connection happened at the group home. I would focus on helping them get out of there! There were other young people, I stuck up for too.

 However, my ovaries dried up and blew away in a PCOS frenzy because while I liked young people in small doses in the art room and other places, the residential counselor job took a toll on me. I hated the constant confrontations, I thought, if I had to deal with this 24/7 I would go nuts. 

There were a lot of times in my child-focused career, that children did disrespect me, and I found that part tiring. Remember how fat I was. I walked into a substitute teaching situation, and I would hear "You're fat"! It kind of wove in with my past abuse in an noxious way. One boss told me I lacked presence at the residential home, but I did realize with time, I was the only worker there who never got jumped. They feared me enough not to beat on me or touch me. Maybe it was my size or something. I didn't touch them either unless it was necessary. So maybe that cut me a break.  I got told by more than one boss, "You don't do enough restraints".  I did a few to keep a kid from jumping out a second story window, and to break up fights, but some of the workers there abused that stuff, always using it a control mechanism and that disgusted me because of my history of abuse.   

Yes I had a few co-workers get jumped and one got thrown down a flight of stairs. The kids there were "troubled youth" removed from their homes or dangerous neighborhoods. This job is of the job made me ill, the violence I witnessed would take a toll for years. It was part of my PTSD diagnoses and needs for counseling. Did my abusive childhood lead me to accept a job like that?  There were the realities of how my family left me so desperate, alone and abandoned, I did work basically no one else wanted to do, just not to be homeless. Homelessness may have done me less damage. 

One thing I did notice at this job, is CONTROL and DOMINATION was the biggest motivator for some of my coworkers. They wanted to keep the kids in "check" not connect with them. They handed us a behavior system that was based on compliance and manipulation. I wanted to have real connections with the kids but was told to give them points on how many chores they did instead. The behavior program trained us to be distant removed observers and judgers of their behavior instead of fellow interacting human beings. It was based on some psychological system. It was not as bad as programs like at those infamous schools you hear about that kids get sent to, like Elan school, but it had the same flavor.  The chores were obnoxious, and never ending but no kid was worked into ill health. There was no physical punishments beyond the over-used restraints. 

A lot of things bugged me there, I got in trouble all the time, making my viewpoints known. Sadly, I got sicker and sicker, I could barely take care of myself. I shouldn't have been there. I was a warm body in the room making sure to report if someone ran away or following the protocols for a psychological hospitalization. I myself needed to be in a group home probably for autistic adults or another supportive housing place. The social workers had turned me down for help for years. 

I had been a juvenile home art teacher before this job, I was still idealistic, and wanted to reach them. Maybe it was too many "Welcome Back Kotter" TV shows, but the job totally stressed me out.  Things got really bad near the end, as I got sicker, and I was being mocked for my weight and my hair falling out. "Baldy-head" is there engraved in my memories. The kids started saying "I stunk" all the time as I was in the middle of my huge and fast 400lb plus weight gain. I'm surprised they didn't fire me, unemployment would have been a relief.

 With the last group of kids, I refused to say goodbye, they were so abusive, and violent. One co-worker only a couple months after I left would get jumped and beaten up by one girl, and end up with serious brain injuries.  I don't know what became of her. I warned this co-worker who was very abusive,"One day you will meet a kid who is bigger and meaner than you, if you keep restraining and grounding these kids, over stupid stuff like forgetting to wash a pan in the sink"

Now this is extreme stuff, the teenswere the most extreme, they were from the inner city and some were diagnosed with psychopathy [oppositional defiant disorder] and other Cluster B issues. This was back in the 1990s, so things are worse today. My old work place got closed around 2012.  The more well off suburban neighborhood that the group homes were in, were fed up with runaways and other problems in the neighborhood from the now more uncontrollable clients. This was detailed in local newspapers. So it got shut down and they bulldozed the buildings. 

Many of these kids were not only messed up from racism and other issues but society in general. Americans no longer dealt with children in a hopeful way, desiring relationships with them and teaching and guiding them but started to deal with children in a way that was all about control and domination. Some say this has always been true in a capitalist society and it has been, but it's worsened. Look at adulthood for most of us who are poor, life is a constant series of threatened punishments usually over lack of money. Endless punishments for children translate into endless punishments for adults. This is a top down control society with little mercy.

Now harsh parenting has always existed with corporal punishment and "children should be seen and not heard" attitudes but there's a new twist to the mix when children are objects to be displayed on social media, and some parents seem to have children wanting them to be their little Mini-Mes. 

Helicopter parenting was the norm on the Regretful Parents board. I understand constant supervision of toddlers and babies for their safety, but now the older kids are supervised to the extreme and far more when I was a child. No child is allowed to ever go to the park and play. Maybe the parents saw too many news reports like the woman being arrested who let her school aged child walk to the park, something I did as a kid constantly. They locked down their homes. 

Many of the children seemed bored in their posts and unable at all to entertain themselves, read a book or settle down, they were dependent on their parents for everything. They didn't have other kids to play with and couldn't run and play or ride their bicycles all over. The youngsters seem very dependent and unlike they were able to achieve any independence This has made parenting far harder.

In an authoritarian society where they are replacing real lives and real living with digital pseudo-lives, it makes for less learning, less initiative. I plead guilty on this too as the internet took too much control over my life, and it seems like the only voice I have in this world besides my marriage and a few friends is online. If you are broke or in the suburbs, there's far less to do. 

The kids seem helpless and far too programmed and controlled. There was no exploration, no relationships in an outside community, and it has made everyone miserable as hell. Some parents got fed up being "forced to play" with their kids and they hated it. We never played but a rare board game or cards with our parents growing up, it simply wasn't done. The adults had their world and us kids had our own. Adults still could have lives back then and have children.  It is kind of scary thinking about how this is going to arrest the development of children. It definitely has led to more regretful parents. Very few even say "Let's change this!", they take all the control for granted!

 Maybe was the control stuff run amuck, the kids weren't even allowed to play by themselves, play dates had to be all arranged, they couldn't cross the street to visit a neighbor kid even at age 10. The jailers, aka parents, lose time and space for themselves keeping life so locked down. It does seem odd to me that the parents don't loosen things up and don't raise kids the way they were, with freedom to ride their bikes or go to the park, but maybe there's too much condemnation and too many dangerous neighborhoods. Crime is supposed to be less than the 70s and 80s but maybe all the "in your face" news reports took a toll here too. 

Control definitely was the theme of the group home. I noticed no one addressed morality, or life skills except cooking some cheap meal. Family cooperation, hopefulness in youth, and just teaching and guidance just seemed set aside for something else. Sometimes I used to think these kids are 17 and 16, and are supposed to have jobs and adult responsibilities within 2 years, and they want us directing their every move like they are toddlers? Very little was taught. 

 I am old enough to have enjoyed some of the independence of the old school childhood. There was more freedom for me with my time at my Catholic school, riding my bike to the park, playing with my neighborhood friends including my friends from Vietnam with no parental supervision. In my case, it was odd that when I became a teen, things became far more locked down. It's strange because teens usually get more freedom as they get older, but it seemed to work in the inverse for me growing up. My abuse grew worse in my teens as my parents moved us to a more isolated suburban neighborhood, the library was 10 miles away, and no longer a bike ride away. Before I had a community and school right across the street to escape to. There were people all around me, from the nuns to my 4-H leader across the street. This probably curbed some of the worse from my parents. Today's kids, with their locked down lives, the kids with abusive parents, won't have outlets children once had. 

If a country switches from an open democracy with self-guided citizens to a police state like this one, do some of these changes filter down in society? I think so. I discussed some of the changes for millennials, how they were so much more locked down and controlled than Gen X. One mistake and your life was ruined. Their junior high schools were full of police ready to drag them away for one fight at recess. The children pick up on the fact, that they are seen as "outside" society and a burden. 

One thing I noticed reading the Regretful parents board is many were in bad situations with checked out spouses, lack of money, disability, severely ill kids with mental disorders and high stage autism.  Americans grow more and more and more unhealthy with bad food, toxins, stress, and it's showing in the kids. Remember mental health and the brain are affected by physical health. Why do so many kids have ADHD? Why are they so spazzed out, anxious, nervous, unable to self-soothe? That could be influenced by physical manifestations and problems too. Obesity as detailed on this blog multiple times is also a sign and symptom of failing health. Many regretful parents were disappointed by who they got for children. That's something that has changed, in a consumerist society, as everything came to order, there was cultural developments that were not positive. 

My own parents I think were regretful parents. They spoke of having a large family but stopped at 3 due to my mother's endometriosis. My brother told me, my mother had been told no more babies after my sister. My parents were narcissists and had children because they were "supposed to", this was common back then but they didn't enjoy it very much.

I was quiet, and while I was abused in the background, there was a lot of fights and angst with my brother, who was too noisy and always demanding attention. There was this air of "we must look good, and have this happy looking family, especially when Christmas rolled around, but overall I think parenthood made them miserable. They were neat-freak people without many emotions, my father was computer/STEM oriented and both saw kids as an intrusion, that ruined their neat polished living rooms and put water spots on the floor in the bathroom and dirtied too many towels. My personality did not mesh with my parents. There were angry words about me being weird [from my autism] very early on. The talk of kicking all the kids out at 18 started by the time we were 5, and the complaints about financial burdens and what kids cost were numerous. My parents would have been far happier and maybe better people without children. 

One thing I noticed on the Regretful parents board was many said, "Why didn't anyone tell us how hard this was?" Some even cited the damages, some permanent, that pregnancy did to their bodies and the destruction of good looks, and thinness. Overall, some came to the conclusion, people lie about how bad it is to have kids out of guilt or wanting to have more numbers join their ranks. I had no illusions, I had to feed the babies and toddlers and take care of them, I knew what diaper pails smelled like at the day care centers and saw the extremes of teenagers, but most people outside of some babysitting weren't having those experiences.  Some would write things that parenting is mostly misery and while there was a few happy moments like seeing a baby laugh or having a moment of connection with their child, those were occasional while the daily slog ruined their lives. 

Too many people see children as commodities and status symbols.  Social media has made this worse with family used as something to brag about. If your child doesn't "come out right" or is "poorly behaved" or isn't pretty, many are disappointed, like they opened a present and got a lump of coal instead. People always wanted children that reflected well on them, but in a society where the youth are being crushed, and sociologists have ignored the fact that all generations younger that the boomers have done vastly worse economically, how many have "successful kids" now? Some say kids at least gave a little work and effort to the family farm but in the suburban house, they sadly are seen as liabilities. Some lamented on the regretful parenting board that now many have live with you past the age of 18.

The trophy kid thing is a real phenomenon. Good trophies are the favorites. With some of these parents, average isn't good enough, you have to be a star that reflects light on to them. Everyone is divided into winners and losers.  We had stage mothers in the 1980s but this seems to be the majority now. Here's one weird thing my narcissistic sister said to me, I was breaking away starting my no contact and in one of the last emails she said, "I don't know why you don't want to see your nieces and nephews in their celebration of life". I found it weird, I wasn't expected to be a participant in their lives, that never happened. They truly are strangers but an OBSERVER of it. I was to observe "shining trophies" not interact in a relationship with human beings. This developed in a materialistic country obsessed with "success". Ironically though as financial pressures increase, the cracks are starting to form. 

Financial problems hover in the air. America the corporation is a society where money comes first and it's affecting family.  What does family mean when everything is about rising to the top and getting the most money? Some point to individualism as the reason for rot in America. Families have become competition not cooperation clubs. I saw this in my own family. Why was one sister so poor she didn't have running water in a broken down trailer, while another shopped until she dropped?  Why was one sister given everything, while the other almost left to die in severe poverty? Why did one uncle who got into a company via his best friend's father sneer at the poorer members of the family? My sister has gone to Europe, has all the clothes and food she wants, and is rail-thin. Thinness is easier to achieve with wealth but in her case, some possible eating disorder and hyperthyroidism kept it going. Would my sister if she went deaf have to go without hearing aids for years because she could not afford them? Economic ranking mattered the most. The "failures" all knew who they were.

What is sad, without a supportive family where there is love, cooperation, guidance and teaching, future economic failure as an adult is far more possible. This economic chasm and pressures had destroyed family loyalty, cohesion, and any connection. Materialism in America destroyed family loyalty, kindness and teamwork far too often. My mother made it clear to the rest of the family I was the "loser" who did not deserve anything. It was only years into my no contact that I realized the extent of how things really worked and how certain members were given the use of connections and opportunities which I wrote about recently.

The financial edge was there even for the parents of young children, they see their kid already as a failure, in not developing enough talent, or doing well in school. There definitely is rage at the older ones who fail to launch, and greater economic forces are ignored. We all know the trope of the adult child in the basement with no job, gaming, smoking pot and wasting days away as a stereotype of someone as a "failure to launch". We see in our society now, blame for the homeless, and poor of all colors: we are told, they did drugs, they didn't make responsible decisions. While some poor decisions are made by some people, no one pays attention to the social forces that are impoverishing millions of people or making it impossible for young people to get an economic foothold. The dog eat dog culture we have trickles down to the kids. If little Johnny can't read at the "right age" he's seen as a failure. Some of the parents seem to give up on their child early on. 

I felt annoyance at some of the parents on the board who seemed to have completely helpless young people with no career or other skills in adult survival, who were angry at them. What did you expect and why didn't you prepare your kid to make a living? They toss their kid out into a job world that denies 50 year old men work, and say, "Get a job today!" Some of these middle class and above parents were more busy taking their kids to Disney world then teaching them how hard it is to survive in the real world.  Parents fail to tell children about economic survival or teach any money skills.

There's definitely some narcissistic parents posting there too among the ones with real serious problems. I notice a "coldness", with some, and we see that in society. Some say they are unable to bond with their babies, and well, that too goes with a society that has lost the plot. Broken social connections have impacted this entire culture. Am I a "throw back" for having feelings? People don't seem to connect like they used to.

 The "think positive" movement made talking about any serious matter a social crime and taught people to paper-over everything with platitudes. This cut people off from each other. I am struggling now, because I feel under pressure to hide every problem and appear like I have it together. Maybe it's me, and my problems reflected on the world but it just seems like people don't feel anymore. One thing I have been coping with is thinking, "I better harden up to survive with all the poverty, betrayal, and health problems"  Why did life come to that? You see a emotional flattening across the land, as everything is focused on survival and money and there's little time for "fun" or emotional connection. The children are being shoved aside. No one has time. Softer feelings are for "yesterday". "How dare you cry or say you miss people!" We are all supposed to be stone-faced stoics. Years ago, one could let loose and laugh a bit more. There's rare moments that happens with friends but in dystopia, feelings are not allowed. 

Personality disorders are exploding like wildfire, in a society that denies emotions, social connections, pleasure, economic stability, happiness and where you are to be the most emotion-less drone to succeed. Only STEM people seem to make any money now, and the arts have basically been smashed to bits and the "helping professions". Yesterday, I read how Indiana University and another university were doing away with multiple degree programs, that included art education and journalism. I could understand why, in that people get those degrees and there's no more jobs in the field. I know from my husband, journalism is absolute toast. Look at how poor we are, and he still writes newspaper articles. Newspapers stopped hiring reporters and now use stringers. If liberal arts no matter means anything and only cold hard STEM sells, what is that doing to society? It's a sign of a society in massive cultural and economic decline. 

How's family doing when there's little "soft" feelings allowed?  I used to tell some of the relatives I went no contact with, that I "missed them", this was a few of the ones who were more likeable like the cousins. No one cared about how I felt. They seemed nauseated by any expression of feeling. I learned to keep that stuff to myself. I'm 12 years into no contact now, and no one missed me or tried to "get me back". None of them cared about me, their entire emotional life ruled by a would-be psychopath who promoted lack of feeling and coldness. Maybe my early connection to my decent aunt tortured me, as I got a taste of "how things should be".

Even my mother's "hooverings" were mostly to see if I was alive, with those dead cards, she probably has life insurance on me, she's getting impatient to cash in. Nothing personal was ever written in any of them. Holiday cards from the dry cleaner were more personable. The rest of the relatives knowing I cut off Queen Spider except for the cousin who called to tell me about his divorce, know they could bring forth her wrath or even trying to talk to me. The ones with the least feelings or soft emotions were the most lauded. 

"Feelings" no longer mattered and neither did connection. In the Brave New World no one cares about anyone! Can the concept of family even survive that change?  What is family needed for outside of biological requirements if there is no emotional connection? The children are good for their ability to reflect on your success and not much else. The children have become a burden if they don't reflect well on one's social status. Many an ACON can attest that a lot of our abuse was centered on "how sensitive" we were and we would get smacked alone for having feelings, even positive ones! "Stop that giggling!"

Remember the "Ok Boomer" stuff from a few years ago? The younger generations are angry. Some may say envy is a sin, but when people like Ollie Matthews complained about boomers [not all boomers--he says 21 percent are good--not sure where that ratio is from ], a lifetime of seeing people have everything while your options and opportunities shrink to nothing, gets harder and harder. There is building rage out there. One thing to remember though is, the parasites, aka the1 percent elite, do the divide and conquer thing masterfully, maybe they are doing this with generations? If boomer and millennial and Gen X all go head to head, no one will notice the jerks in the shadows pulling the strings and stealing all the money. Boomer mom could buy a house and pay her bills, but then they passed laws and increased costs, so Gen X got stuck in an apartment for life. Gen Z probably will be living in cardboard boxes on the sidewalk or in pods and each succeeding generation will grow in anger at the former.

I have had many good boomer friends but many older people in my life lacked any empathy for young people who failed to reach the same level of economic stability. This blog is full of my stories of how I was blamed. There is a class structure in the USA now, where some of the ones who do better, look at poor people with utter disgust and now this includes people's view of their own children and family members. Some right wing people go on about all the "welfare" cheats and post rage bait about anyone on EBT with extreme videos with people getting thousands of dollars on their EBT card. No one gets that much money. We got 16 dollars a month the last time I was on EBT.

Too many parents were angry, disgusted, disappointed and treated failing adult children with put downs. I do think there's been a lot of generational trauma from this alone, and it's been another knife to family cohesiveness. My class status alone in my family made me a non-person in their circles. It's a voiceless matter here, the poor adult children are rendered voiceless via embarrassment and told it's their fault because of their failure. What is this going to do with relationships in families, nothing good!

The sad thing for me wasn't the going without, but the fact so many "put" the poorer people down. I'd hear wealthier boomers brag about overseas trips and I couldn't even pay my electric bill.  I am so tired of showing off rich people. Some may not have ill-intent, but I find it kind of thoughtless, such as the time my mother flashed her new sapphire ring in front of my face. 

Today I committed a faux paus as another older person bragged about an overseas trip. Around here, these people go on overseas jaunts every 6 weeks. I got angry and muttered, "I can't even afford to cross the street!"  while on Zoom with them. They are so out of touch. I don't expect people to pay my bills, but I'm tired.  When my needs are met, I don't care, let them do their thing, but I struggle with anger and resentment when my needs are not met. This weekend, we had to make sure there was enough money for a car repair. This group knows I am poor, sheesh, I wrote a poem about it. These people would never understand the fear that some of us have to live in. Again, I do not recommend that poor people live around the rich, it doesn't do good things to your psyche.

How do these people have so much money as the rest of us are crushed? I understand Ollie's emotions. I don't want to lump in all boomers though I have complained about boomers myself. Now I am seeing Gen X lauded as 'rich jerks' who are selfish by younger people. Some Gen X people did do okay especially if they got into STEM fields, but overall Gen X did worse than boomers by the statistics. So this can keep going down the line, right now they got races, religions, politics fighting why not add age to it? It's something I have thought about. There are poor boomers and nice boomers and ones who question their own generation. Gen X was too passive, and took that "slacker" crap too seriously, I also think my generation is way too checked out and never saw any at any community events. Maybe they were all overworked, but it was always something odd to me

There are poor boomers and those who don't fit the entitled narcissistic personalities of some. These generational tags don't describe people fully but something went awry between the generations. One thing I notice is wealthy boomers are always focused on success. It gets wearing. It doesn't do good things to people to have economic failure rubbed in their faces for decades. Some may say that's why they got successful, maybe so, they worked all the time or focused on those things in life, but I wish some would understand motivation gets knocked aside when the pay-offs are rare or not there. They rant about "lazy" young people.

 I had a final fight with my mother years ago where she told me, "Yes I am well-off and it is because I worked hard!" I fired back, "You were given a place to work hard which I was not, that's the part you do not get!"  So many people especially younger got into this desperate place of trying and still saw everything come apart. This is where the economic chasms, open wide. Empathy is not there, between some within the generations. 

 I was abused by my family still when I seem to have a viable economic future, such as the time when I had my first art teaching job, and later when my husband had his assistant editor newspaper job and we expected things to build up. He also got a book nationally published that year, a second would come some years later. They treated us worse however during the poverty times. We were disrespected and maligned at a stronger level. I had attempted to finish my paralegal degree in the early 2000s, but was audited by the school and turned down due to time that had elapsed. I had hope of getting better, my body did not cooperate.

Abuse and disdain reached great heights. I am glad I am no contact now, because the level of poverty we are at now, where I could not afford gas to visit them or even clothing, SHOWS, and the abuse would be off the charts.  The powers that be crush us now, and have separated people even from their own families, this is where narcissism and abandonment of spiritual principles, have wrecked the family structure. If there's no more love or connection, what is the purpose of it all?

It wasn't just me who got separated from poverty, I could see class divisions in other branches in the family, the multimillionaire cousins wouldn't let Aunt Confused [their grandmother] visit them, or even know where they lived. Uncle Lost Boy while not abused, was seen as a "failure" by the rest, and he spent more time with his wife's family that was a close knit, very rural, working class family. When I saw pictures of my nephews wedding on Facebook, I noticed none of the poorer relatives were there, including my brother, they probably weren't invited.

My brother had less to do with the wealthy ones and was seen as a secondary "failure" next to me, he got a whole new family with his long-term girlfriend's family that was working class and treated him well. I think he didn't miss his former family, he still kissed my mother's butt and got money from her, but living far away that was his "replacement family". I would have done the same, except my husband is a birthright baby, his parents emigrated here, and there's only one living relative in America, his sister who lives many states away. Economic chasms are opening up in families and changing the lay of the land. If you don't match the lifestyle of your family are you even a member anymore? 

Maybe this has always happened, poorer family members cast away, but sociologists are neglecting to study the family chasms that are opening up between generations based on economics and more. When I did genealogy, I studied one side of the family back to the 1400s, and another side of the family back to around 1880. I needed an international membership to take things back further.  As I wrote on the "Economic Nomads" article, all the relatives grew up in the same towns, I could do all research in one small town in America for both sides. While there were some who succeeded more than others, I didn't see evidence of people cast off for economic failure. I noticed many relatives living with others, such as aunts and uncles living with siblings, there were shared businesses where brothers worked with one another and far more cooperation between relatives. They all attended the same church and participated in community events. There were notions of having kinfolk, a heritage, and a legacy.  America is a dying empire and the families are breaking apart too. 

Now some of us are getting older and realizing it's not going to change. As America goes into the Great Depression 2.0, while we are gaslighted, those who feel its effects in the early stages have no family to turn to. Things are going to be worse this time, as people in the 1930s still had stronger family and community networks. 

Did people of early generations realize that kids would be their own people? I'm not sure, but there seemed to be some ideas of family togetherness, love, care and concern, that have dissipated.  I noticed in the years before Ollie Matthews talks about the "degeneracy" of the 1960s-70s destroying many foundation of our society and pumping out higher numbers of narcissists. I've done enough conspiracy studies, reading about Tavistock, and books like Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart Of The Hippie Dream. 

Something did go awry in the 1960s. Many conspiracy theorists do rightly point to the planned destruction of the American family, changing the emotional life of Americans and attitudes towards children definitely was part of this. I know some of the religious right abuses this stuff, with idyllic visions of families from the past ignoring poverty like every family could afford to have a "trad wife" but something went wrong. The 1960s is when the economic breakdowns really got rolling and when people started moving for jobs separating families. 

Since leaving the UU, I realize I am more of a traditionalist on many matters, this includes religion which I'll write about as a separate topic. I'm kind of in this strange middle, disgusted by the abuses of the religious right, and worn out from the "woke" who surely don't care about the broke.

 Allison Bechdel is a graphic novelist, I like to read, one of my favorite books was her graphic novel Fun Home.  Her new book is called "Spent" and deals with money, privilege and aging issues. Some old characters from her first comic are in this book. I found myself reacting with horror as these "boomer characters" who were doing a threesome and calling it a "throuple". Their kids were in polycubes, and I kind of laughed at one daughter who formed an asexual polycube. Maybe they got burned out on the free love thing of their parents.

The boomers in this graphic novel who did the "throuple" seemed very spoiled, they were affluent. Bechdel definitely did have a sense of ironic humor about her world in this book, but I found myself thinking, "How different were their lives!", maybe different characters were formed struggling for survival, and those who had it so good. Remember when I wrote this article about Generation X, 10 years ago? Some of my predictions in that article came true. I guessed right about some aging boomers not letting go, it's why we have politicians in their early 80s now who refuse to retire.

Something changed within families though, with the counterculture. Some things from before were worse, all the stiff upper lip stuff, family secrets, women lacking their own credit, and endless hidden tragedies. A lot of counter-culture writing talks about how the parents were very closed mouth and the children at that time are always left in the dark, even as they grow old about what is really going on. There was no open sharing. The comic artists became far more self-revelatory in autobiographical comics. So communication wasn't perfect. What happened to the family otherwise? Were loving families more plentiful in the past or were things just as bad? In the 1800s one could read about those kids especially males who grow up to hit the road, go pan for gold and go on other adventures, and of course war always created losses within families. That past wasn't perfect by any means, but family seems to be falling apart. All those right wingers warning about the demise of the family aren't wrong.

I wrote some outraged posts here that supported abolition of the family but then realized that's more Maoist stuff, that experiments already been done where they broke everyone up and sent them away to camps and communes and tried to slice family ties, and it failed miserably.  I read "Wild Swans" last week which is a biography of a family living under Mao's rule. Even if one sees families as a biological prison and parenthood nothing but a work farm that was foisted on everyone with less choice before birth control came around, it seems life without family hasn't worked out that well either. 

Why did some of these regretful parents have kids to begin with? There is birth control now. People in the past didn't have as much of a choice obviously. Why didn't they give them up to the state once they realized their utter misery? Maybe they should make it easier to give up custody instead of considering it abandonment. A child may be at less risk of abuse then. Do orphanages even exist anymore? I know there's group homes, but in the old days people would send children to orphanages especially when they hit severe financial troubles. I'm not saying that's great for the child but we are living in a system with no safety nets.

One odd thing is I have been reading this "regretful parents" board on reddit, they are not all abusers but I found myself thinking why do people hate being parents so much? They can't stand their kids. It's kind of a dark place to read. Most regret toddlers and babies the most but some say their adult children gave them nothing but misery. Did something happen where parents stopped being able to discipline the children beyond physiological effects? Oh, gentle parenting does seems to be nonsense, it does seem to work with some personalities, reasoning and rationality would have worked on me, but the aggressive children seem to brush it off. It seems to be more "permissive" or lazy parenting than anything else.

If I had a child, I would teach it to read as early as possible, and teach it to adopt quiet time, and to play quietly in their room. Is this impossible now? Do time-outs fail? Are the kids laughing at having privileges taken away? I know if I had children there are certain personalities that would have disappointed me. It would be better to hide this, but I had the fear of having my mother in mini-me form living with me. That would be a nightmare. Why is discipline failing across the board? Because there's too little positive interactions? Not enough time? No respect or love? Crushed overworked parents?

The lack of sleep, no money, lack of support, noise, toilet training seems be some of the biggest issues. Some say, "We didn't know what we were getting into". Some write over on there they don't love their kids. That's sad. I wish those kids could get out of there. 

It was weird at the group home, I would have the kids do art and creative projects, to past time. It wasn't all violent outbursts. They only allowed them one hour of TV a day so I had to think of something. Maybe a decline in culture is losing the things humans spent time on like gardening, care for animals, building things, making art work, cooking and it's showing up in the children. The parents are overworked, there's no fun, no festivals, no holidays. Everything costs too much. The poorer people, this is even worse with the family stuck in a little often white box, with the bare minimum, there's nothing to do, some will watch TV or the ones who can afford it will stare into phones. Everyone's too restless and feeling the lack of community.

They ban non parents from posting over there, sometimes I just want to write, "Give your kid up to someone who will love them.".  I also want to write, "Stop controlling your kids, teach them to ride a bike and let them see a park once in a while!" I fear more abused kids. Some do "right" by the kids, and say we provide care and hide our real feelings but that's sad too. Do people hate being parents now but then thought I've never had a kid so how would I even get into this topic? I have to balance some things here, I do see positive posts on occasion regarding parenthood where some people have written it's given great meaning to their lives and they enjoy their children as people. Those people do exist. It did have me get some thoughts about my own parents. Would they have been happier people without children, I think so. They still were bad people but it's like the situation of having children, made them WORSE people. The pressures of this society do not go with having children, that's getting worse.  There's something that has gone really wrong in this society, you can see old fashioned family connections and can I use a word like "duty" or even "connection" within a family just dying out.

We live in a society now where all personal connections are under assault by parasitical elites, who don't want us to have happiness, connections, and people to turn to, because our vulnerability is what gives them power and prestige. Very few question this system. The elite and their bougiecrat vassals don't care that the lives of children are being ruined. Given what has been done via public health since 2020, it's obvious their very lives are not valued. They don't want us to have families or people who care about us. They want every individual drone worker going home to his little pod with piped in shows and messages from corporate-owned media. Divorce became far more widespread, more people were unable to have children, people were forced to move away from their families for jobs that paid too little. They put down those who lived in multi-generational housing and broke all the networks. They worked all adults besides the disabled endless hours.

The way the economy and job world operate is one principal driver of the destruction of family and putting children last. It's destroyed immediate nuclear family and extended family as well turning Americans basically into nomadic slaves to the corporations.  Nomadic slaves don't build communities. Now they won't even guarantee food and a home, with so many now living in their cars or in the streets. Young people are already not having kids due to these pressures.

 I'm noticing the conservative Republicans some of whom are right about the two for one deal the corporations got when they sent women into the work force, seem to have no interest in addressing these problems either. They just want to make things worse. The people who can afford the nice small town life with close knit families where they can take care of kids are already very small in number. The small towns are going the way of the inner cities into economic devastation.  Dads away at two jobs and Mom's working 12 hours a day. No one's making pot roast and no one can make it over to Wednesday night church service or can take a whole day to visit Grandma.

They've destroyed social ties. Robert Putnam who wrote Bowling Alone wrote on dropping social engagement.  Social disengagement has only worsened in the last 20 years. The whole society has become nothing but a Hunger Games competition fest. Children aren't going to thrive in this. Parents will turn the kids into objects and often now the kids are just another status tool for competition. If a kid fails nowadays, woe to them.  Families often are not bastions of comfort and care anymore but a competition club. You need to have a time for a private life, to raise children properly. People with 2-3 jobs don't have the time. They drive us crazy with paperwork and useless tasks especially related to technology, and it seems they want us too busy to think.

The pressures have created overworked adults who see children mostly as a burden. I will do another post on the Abusive and criminal parents related to the demise of the family soon, but this coincides with the rise of personality disorders and narcissism. Weak social connections don't build thriving healthy people who can engage and connect with their fellow man [and children]. Children are resented nowadays. Some economics added to this, children could help on the farm and often were seen as assets instead of liabilities. Maybe people of the past were more forward looking, they thought of the future and their grandchildren instead of gratification in the present. They wanted to build and progress. Maybe the planets gotten too small, and this is related to overpopulation, and it's affected humanity as a whole.

 Many of the regretful parents seem angry, this tone of "you little parasite" is beyond some of the words. You can see the anger at the helplessness of babies in some extreme cases. There is the unending anger at the ones who fail to launch. I get flashbacks to my own 20s and how doors were slammed in my own face over and over, and wonder why parental mercy for the economy today is so low! Sure some kids can be drinking and partying their lives away but I saw many responsible kids who seemed hated by their parents simply because they failed. Some of these parents were absolutely useless in talking to young people about making a living or at least going to Vo-Ed.

How many people are there like me who worked hard and got sick or had other misfortunates, and then had it all fall apart? While some people have supportive parents many do not. That's why economic things are so hard now, because many know there is no safe place to fall. I wrote about this before, but my mother told me if I became homeless, "Don't you dare show your face here!" I have noticed these attitudes growing across the board. The whole message is "You are on your own kid!"  This goes both ways, are young people going to help parents who treated them that way when they get very old? The very old are often abandoned or put away into homes now, there's no family to help them either. Some are toxic where the adult kids went no contact but still others had the attitude of "sink or swim" regarding their adult children and there were no favors to be returned later. 

Poorer people may be better off here from working class/poor/inner city families, they would be less likely to let a child or even extended family member rot in the streets. My husband watched me always marvel at African American and Hispanic people who were incarcerated in prison visited by relatives on prison shows. "Look, their families still love them!". I also noticed while living in the ghetto and inner-city areas, that many homes were full of extended family members.  There is so much coldness in modern American families in some circles. Maybe lack of love, care and human connection, has people see their children and adult children as burdens. Now my mother is extreme, but I saw the trend of children being seen as burdens. "I can't wait until these kids are out of here!" and "They better never come back!" Children seem to be seen as millstones around their parent's necks in America.  People from other countries do remark on how Americans didn't want to team together with their family or help or how multiple generations had resentment while living together.

A lot of retired people are taking care of all the young who are far poorer and whose economic realities do not match the expectations. Gen X is pretty poor, but even probably are having to take care of poorer millennials and Gen Z who can't even afford the crummy apartments and life with the milk crates. This is one way the economic destruction has destroyed family life. The sociologists have ignored the falling down the ladder and what it has done to life, and family relationships. There is so much anger and resentment towards the kids that have failed by the way, even the older adult children. There are far more people not wanting kids, Gen Z and millennials definitely don't want children. Did they see all the regret in their own parents and think "I don't want to do this?"

All this regret is definitely a sign of a society with serious problems and decline. Children are the future and what kind of a future will there be when they are so regretted?

 

They Burn Down Your Life: The Financial Destruction of Scapegoats

 Ah, money, the bane of many people's existence, there is always a lack of the green stuff. It's not easy.  I've written about being poor here for years.  Dealing with personal poverty is one of the least talked about topics on earth. No one wants to admit it. You are supposed to hide it and go away in shame. I don't think I even have ever seen a website or blog where someone has talked about it, though you can find reddit posts on it. It is taboo. No one writes about being poor. No one talks about it. Probably most sink under the waves into substance abuse, depressive silence and many do not have access to the internet. Often there is the feeling of speaking to an empty room. No one wants to know. Many hide poverty out in the world. It ruined my life. I was unable to solve it. Some may say well you managed some art shows and you aren't in the streets, maybe that's some success but I don't think normal people wake up everyday, always having a feeling of fear. That never seems to go away. My relatives were never afraid. Their lives were an easy street. 

Book learning came easy but the "doing of things" always wiped me out with the endless details, with the body that can barely move. How much of my poverty came from the environment I was born in? How much did the abuse cause? Some of us ACONs know we have been set up. Whether this is a prison planet or not, it's like someone took a giant rubber stamp and stamped POOR on our foreheads. "No Soup for you! No money for you! Get in the back of the line!" The worse part of scapegoating can be how your abusers burn down your life. Some of us can struggle with poverty our entire lives. If you are a scapegoat, you are more likely to be poor. 

One weird memory came floating back to me, my parents are driving through this wealthy university town in my state. I'm in the 9th grade, and they start saying as we drive by these luxurious ivy-covered mansions to me, "You'll never have that!". It was so strange, like what kind of people say that to a teen? I remember crying a few times that day, and they yelled at me once telling me my grades [my GPA was about a 3.4/3.5] weren't good enough to get into that university. I often got yelled at for failure that hadn't even happened yet. I liked to read already.  Indoctrinating your kid into being a post capitalism slave with no free thought about the system sucks! There was never any encouragement only discouragement. Wouldn't it be better to tell your bookworm kid, study hard and maybe one day you can be in these hallowed halls? 

Today, I got a box of things for us to sell on ebay from a friend, I'm reheating leftovers for dinner, and three new medical bills came in the mail. The hospital wants 70 more dollars. Fortunately they incorporated that amount into my 25.00 a month payment plan.  I owe some other doctor 27 dollars, another one 34 dollars. I'm drowning in bills. I need new underwear and a new windshield on our van, and don't have money for either. 

 Elon Musk who believes all the homeless are "violent addicts", wants to cut every government benefit. He also wants to flood America with cheap H-B1 labor from India. He probably can't wait to impose a new caste system here. I like Indian immigrants, they are nice people, but why isn't our government trying to get Americans jobs? I don't think the poor and working class are going to get a break in America anytime soon. The only politician who even mentioned our existence, Bernie, got side-lined for good. The woke don't care about the broke as my one poem said and the Republican party just wants to push us all into the gutter with a giant shovel. 

Will I end up homeless one day? I worry about it. The way things are going far more Americans will end up in tent cities. Many are already there. The city I lived in during college and a few years after now has endless tent cities along the rail line. That place was already overwhelmed by the homeless in the 1990s. There's no stopping the billionaire oligarchs who seem to want to turn us all into slaves. DOGE may shut down some government waste, but they aren't going to cut the endless wars, they are going after the disabled and poor like usual. America is in severe financial trouble. There are a lot of people suffering out there. We are ruled by narcissists and psychopaths, who have no empathy for the growing despair. It's like living in a narcissist family on the macro level now. 

Mommy Doesn't Want You Making Any Money

When I was around 14 years old, I wanted to join a young person's entrepreneur club. It was the Jaycees and they were going to teach us how to save and invest money. We were going sell these big plastic buckets, made into small stools and storage containers. The club was in the downtown of my medium town. The bus went there but I talked my mother into a ride down there. I had a paper-route as a kid but we had moved from a big city to a fly-over medium sized town. I was dependent on sporadic spending money and needed more steady income. This group was great! After just two meetings, my mother told me, she wasn't going to take me anymore. I said, "Fine, I will take the bus!" but she refused to let me to take the bus. I should have disobeyed!

Goodbye entrepreneur club and learning to make money! This was a long held regret. She had no problem taking my brother for years to his downtown freemasonry for boys club [Demolay], but when it came to my needs, the answer was always "No". Lack of rides really impacted my life young especially after we moved to the medium sized town and lived on the outskirts of everything. Unless it was within 5 miles and biking distance, I didn't get to go.  If only those money lessons had happened! Years later, I would read books on how to "make" money and how to invest, but I never had money to carry any of that stuff out.  The expendable income wasn't there. Two years later, I would be in my dead-end restaurant jobs, and on the way to the financial failures of my adulthood.

I'm not sure what is wrong when it comes to money and me. I just don't know how to make it. There's never enough of it.  We sell things probably more than the average person, my husband runs the ebay but its really only pin money.  Some seem to have it rain down on them. I worked hard, my 60 hour work weeks just led to illness. My husband worked 10-14 hour newspaper days to end up on the edge. My exhaustion was intense. The same energy was never there. Social Security is now so little money after inflation. It scares me. Some disabled people can go work part time. I'm not one of them. Just two hours sitting up wears me out. I write in bed, this article took weeks. I'm getting older and slowing down so the time to figure this all out has run out. 

When you are disabled so many things cost money. I'm worried about $300 I owe the hospital.  Three other doctors, I owe around 30 bucks too for a total of $90 and there's a $100 bill for my CPAP and nebulizer company. I need $30-40 for some needed supplements soon. You have to eat special foods, like falafel, lettuce, fresh vegetables and lean meats that cost more money. The functional doctor says I have Celiac Disease, more on that later but that means more money for special foods. I paid off the electric company from last year on a payment plan but trying to keep the heat low in an attempt to keep from ending up in the same hole. I wanted to maintain our heat at only 62/63 degrees but after freezing too much and husband saying it made him feel ill, even with us in blankets, we compromised at 64-66 degrees. The evening is always the coldest, it gets dark, and I'm chilly for a few hours, even with the blankets. It still hit $250 for this month. It was $60 dollars for the month of October when I needed no heating and no cooling. 

My subsidized housing hasn't come up. Its worrying. People are holding on to whatever housing they can get, and the numbers of the homeless and more are skyrocketing. If a place is nice, and this one is, they don't want to leave. We will keep waiting for it. I still consider moving to a cheaper apartment but I was going to move to the subsidized housing town for the sake of the great housing to start with. Otherwise why start over just to move into a dumpy place? I like my present apartment, so staying here is not punishment for me as long as we can afford it but we definitely need subsidized housing long term. One social worker, he meant well, told me to go to a bigger city but bigger cities have far more competition and longer waiting lists. The housing isn't nice little apartments in a park but big towers. I've looked around everywhere. I still think it is crazy even if we both are just on Social Security, we will cross the cut-off line for HUD. So I am limited to a minority of places with more specialized programs.  

I told husband maybe we should move into a cheaper private apartment, I looked in one poorer town, everything at the $800-900 mark, was only 400-500 square feet, I need air conditioning to stay alive, there's no laundry of course, stairs and disability access are a major problem too. Some have the doorways that hit the toilet, better be under 200lbs to even fit on the toilet. Many of these apartments are in old houses and are privately owned. He says he doesn't want to move, and wants to wait for our good subsidized housing. Asking friends to help us move twice is too much. One can't break a lease legally to go into subsidized housing unless you have been there for over 13 months. I worried too much the good place would come up while I was moving into a cheap place. It got very confusing. We probably will just wait things out for now. 

I didn't make it out to my art club for awhile due to money. Traveling 25 miles can be a big deal for the poor. We made it recently, I was relieved and happy to see my friends there.  Most of the time there is very little money to do anything.  I'm someone who can easily avoid boredom, but the piles of needs build up when you are broke. I need a new keyboard, this one goes in and out, some decent watercolor paper, will the cheaper stuff pass muster for an art show? Since we cut off the cable, we are living in a time warp from the firestick, all the TV shows we watch are from the 80s and 90s and before. That's the free stuff.

 We never were rich before Covid, and you can see my old posts on poverty from then, but things just got squeezed tighter. We are always crushed by bills. The feelings of fear never abate. While this has been going on, I did have some good art stuff happening with my show last year and art in other shows, I have three paintings hanging in art shows now and with two good friends, I was visiting an art show opening just a month and a half ago. So those things are bright spots in my life recently.

This week was a bit better, he got some additional freelance work but there's been very bad periods of struggle too.  I had fears of ending up homeless during some worse months and the "family" finding out and laughing at me. There was one recurring dream, where I was dressed in rags, and heating up beans over a trashcan fire living in the streets in some kind of make shift shack made out of pallets. A big car with relatives pulled up and they were laughing at me. I dreaded this for years, in my awake life, I don't care anymore, I'm gone but in dreamland it still haunts me. She would celebrate it if it ever became known. 

We have turned everything off we can, we got rid of one beater car, I am telling him to turn off one phone line's long distance but he says he needs it still for work.  I'm looking into cheaper phones, they will be shutting off land lines supposedly in 2029. I waited until December 3 to turn the heat on, and the only reason I allowed him to turn it on, was to keep the pipes from freezing. 

My mother wanted me to fail. That was the truth of the matter. She gloried in it. It took me some years to see this truth but she was happier when I suffered or failed. This is the reality, narcissists want you to fail, and this can impact an entire life. They desire your suffering. Many will use you as a comparison point to focus on their own superiority. I've been gone for years now but during my earlier no contact year I had to face these facts. ACONS once they come out of the fog realize how they were set up to "lose" in the greater wide world. Our parents wanted us to fail. They did not want us to succeed. 

My husband hears my woes about "failure" and money and just says to me, "You got sick, that's not your fault!"

Many of us wonder about the potential we could have reached without the abuse. When I was young I was tested as "gifted". I was deemed to have art talent young too. Potential was lost with the lack of sleep, no time to do homework--constantly having to clean like Cinderella, and having all my interests mocked or looked down on.

It is hard to get old and look back on a life of economic struggle. I am responsible for some choices, I never should have majored in art education. I was 17 when I made that decision and clueless about the world.  Over the years I've faced and been honest about some of my limitations. Some people who read this blog mocked me for being fat and being a "woe-is me" person who failed to get their life together. I got tired of just being beaten down, beating myself down wasn't going to fix any of it. Take responsibility for what you can and do what you can but beyond that it serves no purpose. 

More recovery came from depression in ending the mea culpas, and being honest about serious limitations. I have this weird fantasy about watching some normal functional adults, and how they make and spend money. How do they pull it off? I'd love to know. Whatever the secret is, I never figured it out. Blame me or not, it is what it is. All I know is when I needed a good stable job especially after I lost the art teacher one and entered the low paid hell of being a residential counselor, I never was able to turn things around. 

I was more a "thinker" than a doer, and even now hate being pulled away from books or learning new things to get things done.  Maybe the internet was a bad invention for someone of my personality.  I watched these fascinating fossil videos of this guy cutting open rocks for an hour. Distraction can abound. Severe obesity problems even though mine have medical causes also are a sure way to end up in poverty. You are rejected. Your too big body impacts your whole life. It is hard for me to get things done, I'm not sure what it is.  The clock is always spinning for me even though I have no job. Chronic fatigue? ADHD off the charts? A brain that doesn't work right?  Being fat of course means you move more slow. Mobility issues really slow things down and I'm someone who can still walk--well sort of. 

The tragic thing is I was good at art education and enjoyed it. It's even hard to explain how I felt so driven in it, and how my early 20s were spent being so dedicated to pursuits related to it. Recently someone told me, you had to be elitist like a rich kid to choose that major.  This wasn't true.  I just wanted to do something I enjoyed and was good at. Sometimes when a life is more bleak, you grab on to the good things you desire. I can go back in my memory, and relive fun times in art rooms as a student or a teacher. 

 I spent too much on phone bills and had to eat healthier food instead of cans of Chef Boyardee. Coming from a family as well-off as mine, I was utterly clueless about money, saving or investing or how hard it was to make a living. Multiple shocks awaited me. My husband and I disagree on money, I always wanted to live more austerely where there would be extra money. He finds my ideas extreme.  We don't live high on the hog, but I wish I lived in a very cheap apartment of around 600 dollars instead of one that is 1200. He doesn't like my ideas of moving to a very small place and "country" town. America is designed to punish the poor so I investigated moving to a cheaper state and then learned for most of those, I would never qualify for any medical help ever again. This place is set up like a rat trap, see a piece of cheese? There's a trapdoor below it. 

Some of his reasons make sense like access to medical care, so it's life as a maze. Even now he doesn't want to move [except to our good subsidized place] citing that he would lose some money he makes at this one newspaper which is around 500 a month. I know he's afraid of repeating our earlier experiences, living in harsh places especially in Chicago. Poor cheap apartments bring more crime, and less safety and troubles [like the mice we had] and why do you want to let go of a safe place you've lived in for a long time? Other friends have shared their troubles, of meddling neighbors, ignored repairs, and broken into cars. We have had it pretty good at the place we are in now. 

 I should have never moved to Chicago, maybe we stayed in this affluent town too long. Maybe not, the other day I wanted to paint an old building in my old town for a series of watercolors related to poems. Anyhow moving along the Google Maps "street view" of my old town, I am horrified. The last time I was there in person was 2011. Most downtown store fronts are empty, the ratio is around 60 percent vacant to 40 percent filled. I almost burst out in tears it was that bad. The town worsened economically after we left.  Yesterday I was talking to husband about life here.  I know I won't fit in places very easily, but living in a wealthy town as a poor person took a toll.

There were positives, I definitely advanced more in art and cultural things, and had art shows. Beautiful scenery, art, galleries, art centers, nice libraries, good restaurants [before Covid], stamp club, book clubs, and activities at UU church were all enjoyable things. I went to some interesting bible conferences, had my self-help group which is now defunct for many years and participated in many things. The medical care here was far better, I had specialists and home care that kept me alive longer. There were things to enjoy especially before Covid. I am trying to focus on the positive parts of my experiences here too and have recently enjoyed the Senior Center and a second art center. It's kind of hard to grapple with the fact we will have to leave yet another place for good affordable housing eventually.

Autism and abuse also played their parts in my career and financial failures. I realized being on video often at one church I participated in, how autistic I appear even in my speech patterns. I do appear "different" even if you take all weight problems and other issues out of it. It troubles me, how no one was honest to me in college and how I slid through the cracks so badly. 

ADHD to the extreme affected things as well. My focus is spotty. Life is overwhelming often. Even today, while I made some medical phone calls and a housing call yesterday, my apartment is messy, I made some eggs, onion and peppers, for breakfast and ate a spoonful of sauerkraut and did my insulin. I have to clean the kitchen, hang some pictures and made some cabbage soup. Later I did get more stuff cleaned up after having friends visit, so don't feel as panicked about the cleaning. I got rid of a lot of stuff. I plan to get rid of more.

I had Occupational Therapy around 10 years ago and they said it was severe, and related to sensory disorders. I'm one of those type people who has a very hard time being clean, and what some would call "disciplined". To function as an adult, I have to make "to do lists" to remember to do things and live rigidly to stay alive. This means I have to eat meals, go to sleep and take medicine on a schedule.  To-do lists are required to keep the bills paid and to manage appointments. The therapist helped with life management back then, and breaking down tasks. 

It is not a good thing I was raised around those who never wanted for a dollar. I just was utterly clueless, they had amounts of money that are awe inspiring to me today and how they wasted it too! I grew up watching my parents fight about money as they basically got out matches and lit it up on stupid stuff like Queen Spider's notorious thousands of ceramic snow man collection. My values became very different.

Her shallowness came to sicken me. One day we got into a fight on Facebook, and I wrote "you are so shallow", it made her really mad, she threw it in my face, using some help for a car repair, "I helped you even though you think I am shallow". She was. She only cared about appearances. I felt uneasy around the whole family because all they cared about was hedonism, materialism, things and status. Many of us ACONs who come to have different financial lives as a result of this will come to very different world views from our families. My family loves this system, after all it works for them. They think homeless people are all losers who are on drugs. They are programmed into the Truman show. They never questioned anything.  They never practiced any altruism. My mother volunteered once at a soup kitchen to hook her second husband and I was shocked hearing about that one, but it didn't last.

I'm not perfect or an icon of austerity, though I've had some weird thoughts maybe I would have been a happier person free of constraints of this system. Maybe if Catholicism had worked out for young me, I would have been happier in a convent able to share economic responsibilities with others. It's funny as a young child, I had some real spiritual aspirations but those were stomped out by my parents. I am glad to be with my husband so those are just some vague musings. I live in a system that didn't work for me. The NPCS of the world are better at being worker bees who conform.

It always bothered me that the family came to represent everything wrong in society and I can't even describe my disappointment that there wasn't one other freethinker in the group. My mother only cared about appearances and things and that is what she lived for. This outlook on life spread to the entire family. There are no ideas about economic justice or fairness or caring about the plight of others in my family. You are either a "winner" or a "loser". Sadly these sick attitudes have set up Americans in general for more oppression by the ruling class. Let's not forget this is how billionaires get themselves in positions of power.

My own personal reasons for why I am poor, are complicated. My family's evildoings were part of the picture but not the only reasons. I am disabled, fat, autistic, have poor focus, and barely function as an adult and find life incredibly overwhelming. I have no assets to increase wealth. I live in a country where the billionaires are on a tear to pick everyone's pockets. I am married to someone who has health and other challenges and could be a fellow autistic.  Newspapers failed wiping out the foundation of his career, 20 years ago, and while my husband remains connected to the field, and still writes good articles for money, it doesn't provide the same amount of money. He is very talented and that was proven via many things he did achieve in life such as with the books he wrote and had published. We haven't given up, I still do many art related things, and he still writes, now has zines and has future projects he is planning out..

Here's the thing we could be poorer. I could be far poorer. If I was single, I would have to live on my SSDI check. Its not much money. We did get to enjoy some working class years of stability, I remember our shared income in the early 2000s was in the low 30s, so there's lots of people who are poorer. There's many people living far worse. I didn't consider myself "poor" during those times, we even had some years like that here. There's lots of Americans living worse than me in the streets, shelters or lower quality housing. Many cannot afford food. There's levels of poverty far worse. I've been poorer than I am today. We have food to eat, and we will pay some bills today. We have kept our rent always paid on time. I don't take that for granted.  It is scary how wealth divides are growing in America. 

However in my family unless someone made 6 figures they were "poor". I grew up watching my parents mock poor people and condemn them. They usually followed the most right wing politics, not the libertarian free speech branch but the kind who wanted to throw everyone in the gutter. My mother was gung-ho for the Tea Party for example. She and other relatives would refer to cheating welfare people and even openly condemn those who "lived off the government" in front of disabled people's faces. They complained about those "bums" and openly made fun of the family members who were poorer. My father condemned one uncle for going on strike at his factory with the other workers. There was no support of the working man there. 

                                            Homelessness is more likely for the scapegoat

The Homeless are Often Lonely Scapegoats

How many homeless people are scapegoats from their families? I have known several people who have been homeless in the past.  You think about it, they have nowhere to go. There's no parent, sibling, cousin, aunt or uncle to take them in. Homelessness is far more of a risk for a family scapegoat where you don't have the same social networks or family ties. Many mentally ill people and others who are abandoned by their families end up in the streets.  Schizophrenia is one problem that leads to a lot of homelessness. There's no one to look out for them or advocate for them. Some people end up homeless from the abuse of the narcissists directly, thrown out once they hit 18 or thrown out of another family home. I've known some homeless people over the years usually online but some were local. Some ended up homeless breaking up with a partner, others fled abusive parents who even hit them as adults and tried to control them. It can happen easier if you are in a scapegoat role. Cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews see you as the "bad one". That's the worse thing about being the scapegoat in a family, people cheer for you to fail and to come to a bad end.

I saw it with Aunt Scapegoat, they seemed to derive joy listing off her horrific medical problems while clucking their tongues. Her poverty too often was the stuff of legends..."she hoarded food you know!", "Grandma had to buy all her clothes!" "Her trailer was full of trash!" As a child, I lived in terror of ending up as poor as her, as she was put down constantly in front of me.  It would only occur to me later, that my mother had the means to make her life a lot better instead of letting her sink into such extreme poverty. I would end up as poor, though unlike her, we got some better working class years and her level of poverty was definitely worse.

Sometimes the stories about her did get extreme, I saw some of her poverty so some they told me about her was true. At that point I didn't know what to believe. Imagine the stories that can be told, as you are hunched over a walker or a shopping cart with your life packed up in plastic garbage bags. The narcissists can and do have a field day!

There is the reality too that if you fail in life whether it be your fault or not [disabilities and other bad luck] or a combination, that many families today that are wealthier or middle class especially among white people, will reject you. You are seen as the "family failure". I am realistic enough to know, that my inability to travel for visits affected things negatively. You can't give the same gifts. You don't have a nice house for people to come to dinner at or to sleep in a guest bedroom. There's far less to talk about. What does a wife of a high level executive making high 6 figures have in common with me? She never wanted for a new outfit or car or trip she desired. Those old pictures when I run across them still trouble me as she sneers in my face and looks around my decent but humble apartment with disdain.

The years chip away, and the distance grows bigger especially if you end up in a different socioeconomic class. It's weird to me how this is never talked about. How many people in Gen X, millennials and Gen Z ended up far poorer than their parents, and saw their own families break up? We sadly live in a society where if someone becomes poor in a rich family, you become the "embarrassment" and needing help for a family visit at age 29 is a little bit different than 49. They give up on you, and don't want you around. They don't relate or have any empathy either for your poverty problems. If you get old enough and "don't make it", expect to be cast out of many families in America today.

If you are no contact or seen in a negative way by a family you are in contact with, who is going to take you in? Being disabled I have more of a safety net for homelessness, I would go to a small town with instant openings for disabled housing.  My aim is to always have us live as an independent married couple with our own household.  I may have to live more remote than I want for a time, but it would be better than the streets. A working person though is one paycheck away from the streets if they are working class. If time without a job goes on too long or they are newly disabled and waiting out the time to apply for disability, they can easily end up in the streets or the shelter. 

I got into a discussion, talking about this issue. Family wealth for the scapegoat is not protection from poverty. One guy told me online on reddit that they should study what happens to the financial security of the disabled who come from better off families? He wrote:

Do children of wealthy families with disabilities or visible abnormalities have a measurable difference in financial security relative to siblings, similarly-aged people from middle/upper class families, and comparable peers from poor families?

He said that someone should do a graduate thesis on this, it would be an interesting sociology topic. I was in a disabled group, and a group for autistic adults [on Zoom] and a group for those with serious pain disorders and chronic disabilities [on Zoom]. Family support for the people I met, was far far higher. Many of the autistic adults lived at home with parents including 2 men at my level of autism, who were well into their 50s. There was a few married women like me, they encountered career problems and some were physically disabled, but they had supportive families. No one related to my level of poverty. It surprised me.

 One woman did live in subsidized housing but had a loving family which probably bolstered her feelings of independence.  In the pain disorder group, one lady who had lupus related problems but was still employed, lived with her mother and it seemed to be a positive situation. In the disability group, I met a man who lived with his brother, and another man who lived with his mother, who were locals and had about the same level of autism as me [what was referred to as Aspergers for decades] The latter man was very overweight at my size but he didn't have the same health problems and could still walk, function, drive and work. 

Many of these people had challenges, and in the case of the autistics, career troubles, were common, some did work very hard, and one man did volunteer work during his unemployed periods. Their families seemed to help them. The fellow fat man admitted to me he did face some judgment from his family but others seemed cared about and looked after. Their challenges were not used to reject them as people, like what happens with someone with narcissistic parents. All of my disabilities were seen as "my fault". The weight issues complicated that but they had no mercy for anything else including deafness and breathing problems. 

Disability can be a pathway to homelessness especially if one is on the lower paid SSI, which is around 900 a month now. Maybe some can get rental rooms, but there are many mentally ill people who don't have the social skills to manage, I would be too ill and impaired to live with most people in a house-share situation. Yesterday I had a severe IBS attack and was crying it was so bad. My husband even asked me if I needed to go to the hospital fearing it was another kidney infection. I was dry heaving too and lugging around a plastic trash can to puke into. With roommates, I would hide the emotional of turmoil of illness but they would hear the puking and wonder why I was living in the bathroom for hours.  I am okay now, but not many people especially if you are not that close to them are going to want to live with someone so challenged.

My weight alone often caused instant discrimination when it came to housing. This is one reason I am more apt to rent in an established building rather than privately. My present apartment people have treated me well. This is a huge barrier, I've been lied to and turned away based on my weight before, and this goes way beyond the places that have stairs. 

Some of the disabled people in my groups got really sick, and their families looked out for them. Sometimes it was hard for me to hear about because my situation was so opposite. I have a husband who has looked out for me so am not saying my glass is empty because he's definitely stepped up for decades. There's a lot of disabled people with serious health problems on their own. I get scared for them.  There's no one there for them. Some describe having out-patient surgery and then having the problem of no one to drive then home when they are finished. It was just interesting to see the different attitudes of more loving families towards disabled members. It's pretty sick that narcissistic families will get out the hammer on people with serious health problems. 

But outside of illness, how many scapegoats find themselves in the streets? No home to go to? I dare say there's probably a lot of abuse victims who end up homeless who end up as "orphans" out in a harsh world. Social workers, churches and the world assume everyone has a family. This simply isn't true. For those of us without one, there's no one to turn to. Some of us lucky ones have friends, but not everyone does.  I learned the hard way, going no contact many years ago, no one in the family cared that I was gone. During my most extreme poverty in my 20s, no one cared about me. I missed meals [yeah I know that's ironic as fat as I am] and went without needed possessions, there were times I had literally nothing but ripped up clothes to wear. 

We all want dignity and sadly poverty can strip that from people. Add in an abusive family who looks down on you, and it can be a nightmare. I have many bad hang-ups when it comes to money. My husband has told me, "we don't live that different from a lot of working class and poor people out there and there's a lot of people like us". However I always feel alone in it. I have a few friends as poor as I am or who are worse off but most of those are online friendships. Money is the great taboo, no one tells you if they are struggling though with a few you can see the clues. In media, I only saw my own experiences represented on the show Good Times although I did not have to struggle with racial discrimination like they did. That's one thing that's happened in America, the poor and working class have grown invisible, no one talks bout their lives and they are not represented in media. During the 1970s, we got to see some working class people in TV shows like Alice. 

I went no contact from my family and have been for over 12 years but there's no one to catch me if I fall without my friends and husband. Many friends have stepped up which is wonderful, but life in this scary world without a family is not easy. There were some who told me I should not go no contact I was too poor but I couldn't take the put-downs anymore or being in the role they wanted me to serve, it would have cost me my physical life and soul. When I see homeless people I wonder how many of them were the scapegoats in their families? It's probably a sizeable number. If you our own kinfolk send you out to the desert, where is there to go? 

Many people move in with a relative and younger people with parents when they hit hard times. This is not so much an option for the black sheep, who may face mental health problems and not have the confidence to have many friends or to do well socially. They end up with nowhere to turn. Social workers can be impersonal and if well-intentioned overwhelmed with the sheer numbers of the impoverished.  A few have been helpful but I've hit brick walls with others. You end up alone and with nowhere to go. Disability kept me from the streets but then that has the price of the pain and suffering of disability. Some disabled people are abandoned by their families as "embarrassments". My Lipedema definitely served a role in what went wrong with my family as, my own mother refused to be seen in public with me for 20 years, and because she had so many office friends and others there, disinvited me from her own wedding. 

It is far easier for a scapegoat to end up poor, because we face soul murder and financial destruction of our lives. Here are those reasons.

My Crazy Mean Family Literally Made Me Sick!

First and foremost due to ACE scores, stress, scapegoats can have health problems. You are on high alert, never can relax, your parents never let you sleep or even physically toss you on the floor from your bed. This wrecks children's health adding hormonal and obesity problems especially. As a child I never could relax or sleep. I was always on my parents schedule, for years I had severe insomnia, I never felt safe enough to fall asleep I always had to be on my guard. 

As your physical health is decimated, your mental health is at risk. Severe stress, and trauma all take their toll. Some people will get DID, disassociation, PTSD/CPTSD, anxiety disorders, depression and more. I have talked about this very much just here and there, but my anxiety disorders were very severe. They included almost daily panic attacks, and a feeling of "unease" and fear at all times. I have been diagnosed with PTSD/CPTSD by three different therapists, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder and OCD issues during my life. My anxiety disorders were not career enhancers. I had to learn to hide my worries and anxiety because I realized my "neuroticism" made people angry. There were years checking things for hours almost took over and this had to be hidden from others. My anxiety is in a far better place now, I still struggle but it's nowhere as severe as it was.

Sometimes at work, I could barely keep it together. No one during my student teaching when I had to move back home knew I was going from working with kids all day to having people scream at and threaten me. I saw some old pictures from myself from the 1980s, and I'm always cringing, I always look like I'm ready to dodge an incoming hit. Well, I had to be ready to duck at any time. 

                   The amount of bills even for a simple life is overwhelming!

Mean Parents Don't Teach Their Children Anything

One thing many ACONs attest to is the lack of life skills! One does not acquire much knowledge from narcissists, they chase their kids out of the kitchen or garage and slap at kids who don't become instant experts. Dad's good at the stock-market? He'll never tell you it's secrets. Dad's good at fixing cars? While he's screaming at you about being lazy and to hand the tools over quicker, he'll never give you the chance to try and fix it yourself. Mom's good at cooking? She certain doesn't want anyone to outshine her, so you don't learn one cooking trick. You are given low knowledge tasks like whipping the mashed potatoes or wiping the counter. The only way I found out what my mother actually put in recipes was by finding her old handwritten cookbook in a notebook. 

 Paying bills? That remains a mystery. Narcissistic parents won't tell you things like what the monthly budget is. You won't learn how to write checks, buy a car or rent an apartment unless you are one of those lucky kids who gets a life skills class. At the same time, you remain hopelessly ignorant, they get angry at you for not knowing things but then still don't tell you anything!

They want you to keep you helpless so you are dependent on them and don't want you able to stand on your own two feet. They desire your failure so you are easily controlled. They don't want you financially independent. Some narcissistic parents will even sometimes give a scapegoat a little money or help, it's random, and for control to keep you in the game but you'll never see them give help, like with a job even if they have the means to do so. You aren't taught how to function and often your attempts to gain more independent and financial independence are thwarted. They tell you to pay high rent as you desperately try and save money to get out on your own. They ignore your health problems while telling you to work long hours, they would never dream of doing, such as when I had a 7am-11pm schedule every day during student teaching.

This is a common way scapegoats are sabotaged. Many of us grow up and then realize with horror the depth of life lessons and practical know-how that were denied us. We don't know how to do anything. My struggle with life skills continues, some of this can be autism, but right now I am doing calculus in my head, to even figure out how to pay 5-6 different medical bills, the electric bill and how we are going to afford food next week. I keep a notebook dedicated to survival. It has housing lists in there, everything turned out be HUD programs we don't qualify for except for the one we are waiting for, or they were in very bad areas or ones off the bus lines. There are lists of all the food pantries, the number and address of the car repair charity place, and where one can get free furniture and clothing. When I was young, I didn't even know where to go to get charity or how to utilize a food pantry.

Yes. My parents were upper middle class. We lived in a neighborhood of million dollar homes where people hired live in nanny's housekeepers and or at least a cleaning lady on the regular.  Our house was more humble but at 5-6 bedrooms it was very large and there were other large homes around us and the million-dollar homes were just down the street. The country club was right around the corner from the house I went to in high school. Many ACONS are people who descended the ladder. The life I grew up in was not the life I got later. I was unprepared for what awaited me. I was prepared for a culture I never would live in as an adult. 

All quotes in this article are from a reddit post, that I posted. I told the folks there about this article and that I would be writing it.

My parents were very well off financially. I am living well below the poverty line after going no contact. They prevented me from learning to drive or manage my money or have a job while I lived at home. My life didn't really start until after I went no contact well into my thirties. Finally learnt how to write a resume and got and held for many years my first Job at McDonalds. Learnt how to drive. Manage my own finances etc.

This person's experience is very common. Rich parents with a poor kid set up to fail. Some with hard work can rise up later and escape but if there is illness or mental health problems that can be far more difficult. 

I would realize at a very young age, I was kept in hopeless ignorance, given endless stupid platitudes about life. Mine hid reality from me especially when it came to medical problems, weakness or failure. I was not prepared for the real world whatsoever. Outside my low-level jobs in high school, what did I know? Not much. I was kept in a bubble until age 18/21 if you count the day the university was not there to guide me, and that bubble was popped. This is the surest way to poverty too. You are dumb, you are naive, you don't realize how the world really works, and how many "get over" via social skills and conniving. You are taught via your abusive parents to be "nice", especially if a girl, and to be "compliant' and "obedient", and here comes the giant road roller of life, to squash you flat.

Young people who test well in school or get "good grades" and are quiet and obedient [mostly] to teachers can easily slide through the cracks. At home I was hit, forced to clean and never allowed to have an opinion or a real conversation, so there's all these things that come with development I did not obtain. I would observe people as I got older and ask myself what draws other people to them? Why are they successful? I noticed extroverts did far better and those who had confidence in their own opinions and abilities. 

During my many years of no contact, I did change, I learned to "harden" up. This included becoming more practical. Stoicism was of interest to me. Radical acceptance was a helpful concept. While I have returned to some religious faith, my deconstruction did teach me not to be so much of a "sucker" to religious gurus and did free me from being "corrected" and "directed" by other adults. I still don't want some rich man pastor lecturing me about life. It brought some needed changes to my life that way. Fairy tales I was given about the system disappeared in big puffs of smoke. The me of today given a decent body probably would "do" a bit better if out in the world. Some lessons came late, but it's better they came than not at all. 

As time passed, while you see me write and complain about money, I did get to a better place after no contact. There were no more jeering voices and pointing fingers. I felt more free. At least if I see a homeless shelter one day, I won't have to deal with assholes putting me down while it happens. There was relief. I taught myself to some contentment in life, realizing a lot of people were homeless or poorer. My pleasure in small things grew and blossomed. It was easier to do while no longer being in a circle of braggarts or those who constantly condemned me. I got better at solving some practical problems over the years.

My view of the world is different. I explored my real values, and knew they were different from my family. My family were materialists who desired status above all else. I have been poor and/or working class long enough, not to care anymore. I had to accept that I never was going to be rich, or even at the level most people would call "normal" .and then ask myself what was I going to do about it. 

This was part of my religious pursuits, for many years but even now, I've decided if I re-enter a religious group of any kind, it's got to be around people who are of my same socioeconomic class, or those who do some reach out to the poor.  My early Catholic churches and the nuns had a heart for the poor, I really missed in some evangelical circles. However, my old church in my old town, had community and helped one another.  That pastor dropped out of society for a time, but he ended up leaving ministry and entered a trade. I reconnected with him on Facebook, he is still a Christian but seems much happier. He was always a sincere person. 

The UUs here were nice people but I knew going in the class differences would be hard, after all I had faced that before when I was extremely poor in Chicago and even more alone in that poverty. I do question leftist politics because of their now neo-liberal rejection and silencing of the poor and working class. Some people say the left is no longer really left. I can grant that.  I have my eye on a ministry that does poverty outreach in the town I will be in when my subsidized housing comes up, Anyhow, I knew years ago, there was more to life than just being a consumer and greedy materialist, my family had adopted all those values and forced them on me. 

One question occurred to me later, why did poor people have to be put down at all? Why didn't they get my Aunt Scapegoat a decent job? They had the means and connections to get her something simple before she was disabled that would not have taxed her too much. Why was it always competition and grinding everyone into the dirt? Why was it so damn hard to get a job? I think of the missed opportunities because a job always went to someone else. If family is failing in America now, it's because cooperation is gone, it's all competition. What's the use of that? There's no love and care then. No one loved me in my family, they just wanted to crush me, so they weren't a family at all from the start.

Narcissistic parents do not teach resiliency, know-how, confidence, or the practicalities of daily life, they smack you around and expect you to serve their needs.  They teach you to separate from yourself and your own instincts. Fortunately, I could form my own identity. Many ACONS struggle with this because narcissists want "Mini-Mes" and obedient ciphers. They like being smarter, bigger and badder so they are not going to impart the things they know, they want to keep you ignorant. 

In my 30s, I had to learn multiple things. This included tax law to cooking. I could cook a pot of noodles and hotdogs--I could cook every soup and salad known to man from my restaurant jobs, but my knowledge ended there. Some ignorance in matters still exist pertaining to home repairs, car repairs, and I am well into my 50s. I caulked my bathtub the other month but squeezed too much into one corner. Every other adult always seemed so much more competent. I have to balance this though and realize one reason I feel incompetent is because I was surrounded by people who thought they were experts at everything and didn't admit one weakness.

One can learn somethings from books, the internet helped this more later, but real learning comes from doing. Narcissistic parents don't provide those opportunities to their kids. My parents had vegetable gardens for instance, but I was just the grunt who got pointed to which row to hoe the weeds out of. I didn't really learn to garden until a few years ago when I had my off-site gardening place. I learned about seeds, fertilizers, what to do during bad weather and more from a friendly UU church gardening lady, and books.

Narcissists Destroy Your Roots, Ties with Others and Relationships.

One thing that can lead to poverty is troubled relationships with others. It's not hard work or good grades that brings in the money today though they can be needed assets, its often personality. Social connections are what gets you the job. This includes the impression and communication you have with others. When ACONS spend their 20s beaten down, and lacking social skills, and AFRAID of people there are learning opportunities and opportunities that are missed with others. The narcissists often chase away the people who may open new doors to us. One is not building foundations but trying to plug the dam so it doesn't get washed away and these impacts affect an entire life. 

One revelatory thing was reconnecting with people from high school on Facebook. I realized that their lives were far more advanced than my own. I could see the pictorial proof of their active lives with their families and being an honored part of a group of people. Many had children and advanced in their life. I never caught up with my peer group, this may be mostly from the price of autism, but I know abuse served a role in this too.

Narcissists don't allow you to build community as a young person. I wasn't allowed to socialize in high school or go to parties or hang out with friends. I sometimes would "borrow" friends from my sister, she reacted to this only with resentment and derision. The only high school clubs I got rides to were two my brother and sister were in which included the Spanish club and one service club. I enjoyed these clubs but why couldn't I have my own pursuits too?

On Facebook, I could see the memories and photos of my old classmates, where they had so much time to communicate and "be with others". Narcissists will isolate you from neighbors. Even their constant bids for attention and making you into a slave, will take up all your time and destroy the time and energy for connections with other people especially as a teen.

If you are in a family that blackballs you to those around you, this isn't going to help your future opportunities in life. We had family friends who hated me. Did I get in a fight with them? No. Was I bratty and crying and ruining visits? No. My mother complained about me, and told them what a horrible person I was and they believed her. They also followed the subtle cues of her sneers, and obvious distaste in my presence.

ACONs in small towns, really bear the brunt of narcissistic parents smear campaigning them. I lived in some small towns later where some people had bad reputations, and you could tell this came from their parents. We would hear about these people. Some girls were labeled "sluts", others "hoarders" and others "troublemakers". Town gossips would latch on to the complaining narcissistic mother about her "horrible" child. I would see other fat [obesity is often a condition caused by stress] despondent people who told me, "the whole town hates me!" Maybe they weren't paranoid. They were caught in a small bubble, as the family scapegoat. Their name had been smeared to kingdom com. If you live in a small town, and everyone berates a certain young person, be mindful that they could have narcissistic parents.

This happened to Aunt Scapegoat, she grew up out in the country next to a super small town, there was a lot of relatives there, but she never escaped her labels her family role. She stayed the "pot smoking teen rebel who hung out with the biker gang" for the rest of her life. I had the blessings of being in places where I had no family, there was no one to smear me, which means I got some time to be in churches like my first church in my old small town and find other places with community. This allowed me the freedom to mold my identity in every new place. When I was young, we lived in bigger places or moved so often, I didn't share that problem with the small town scapegoats. Living so far away from my family helped my life a lot.

                       Peep is pretending not to know her....for good reason!

Nepotism is Only for the Golden Children.

My mother knew people who could have helped me get a very good teaching job right out of college, her best friend the ex-nun, I've written about in the past, had a very high level administration job in a state department of education. I had teaching experience and taught art at camps and other places. My grade point was decent too. Writing this lady for help in finding a job was a waste of time! There probably was some sort of smear campaign there. She ignored me.  My mother got her own good job from my father, he got her a job in his government agency, she didn't even have an associates or bachelors degree and was a business school flunk-out, and she made middle class income at that job.

Sometimes I do look back at my career failures, I did get a few jobs. I was good at the art teacher job at the juvenile home, enthusiasm floated that job boat and then some. Some have said to me in the past, maybe if you hadn't gotten sick, you may have been okay.  I know autism, extreme anxiety, obesity and my personality that had been formed around narcissists were all career killers. I cringe thinking of some conversations at work. Young me was a very stressed out person. During 1993 I had school or work for 90 hours a week scheduled. This was insane. I was driven to succeed and needed money which was in short supply. I was fighting to fill so many shortfalls and it's like I sunk into quicksand. 

Bosses scared me, I was always afraid of making a mistake. Substitute Teaching had a lot of personal demands. As I descended into illness, especially after I didn't have the stability of my juvenile home art teacher job to fill the financial gaps, things got harder and harder. By then I was trying to transition to a paralegal career, knowing teaching wasn't working out for me because the regular school districts weren't too keen on signing a teaching contract with a fat autistic with very bad lungs. A backroom office job doing legal paperwork was my dream. My Postbaccalaureate paralegal program director loved me and considered me gifted, however my body and mind had reached a breaking point. This breaking point, came about from years of abuse. There was no resiliency or a caring family to stem the tide,

Imagine that your uncle and brother in law have very high level positions, one is a vice president at a company, another uncle is high up enough in his corporation to go to Switzerland for meetings. They haul in high six-figures but you are the scapegoat begging for a job not to be homeless and you aren't deemed worthy of a low paying mail-room job. It's off to the streets for you. 

My mother's second husband once bragged at a dinner we were at with them, that his brother owned a factory and huge business. There were a few times, I sucked up my pride and begged my sister's husband for a job for my husband and asked my stepfather to ask his relative who owned a huge corporation, for that help too. This happened after my husband's newspaper lay-offs. I also had my husband apply to my parent's government agency years earlier as we were trying to leave Chicago--he had college and administration skills to make the work more than possible--they hired people who were only high school graduates there all the time to train them back then. He was turned down. My mother only had a high school diploma and some part time work at Sears when my father got her a middle class job there. My mother would work there for over 26 years. I know her own income hit the 40,000s by the late 1990s. The missed opportunities piled up. The answer was always "NO". 

One stable middle class job for my husband would have changed our life. It would have steered the direction another way. Remember I watch him struggle with health problems, he has no health insurance for. He got worn out. We missed out on a lot. THEY DID IT ON PURPOSE. 

I often think of what direction my own life could have taken with stable employment, and not going through the extreme stress and trauma of the poverty I faced in Chicago. I've talked about this in other blog posts. I was in the fog and denial for years, later I would know what it truly meant for a so-called family to almost let a relative die of extreme health problems and live in that level of extreme poverty with no help.

In a narcissistic family they'll never give you a fishing pole, they'll throw a few fish, and once those are eaten, throw you into a river. Some may judge me here for my wanting to use nepotism, but be real, I watched my family get jobs for others in the family and family friends all the time. As the new generation came up, I saw the same thing happening. I don't know who the new scapegoats are yet, but I suppose it will be whoever ends up poor and unemployed. I'm not around to know anymore.

I saw people leave high school and college and rise up like rockets. One uncle got an internship at his company for my cousin--she got a high level marketing job in a metro city from this internship. Others got jobs, my mother kept the address secret of that one cousin. One uncle got hired in by his best friend's father at a corporation he remained at for 30 years. That spoiled narcissist never has gone without a job or in need of a job his entire life. He's never wanted for a dollar. He's the star of the family after my mother and both are peas in the same pod.  He was hired in at the age of 18.

We figure out after we have gone no contact, that our families and abusers were drilling holes in our boat. We look back in shock. I suspected things but didn't figure it out until later. I almost had to drop out of student teaching because the college wouldn't let me live in the dorm near it, a 150 dollar a month room  I rented fell apart because because the selfish woman there kept me up until 3am with the TV blaring. My space was a sun room, with no door to close the living room out. I was forced to move home, and they were bitter about it and I had a 20 mile commute on top of things.

My parents set things up where I had to work until 11pm and get up at 6am to get to my unpaid student teaching internship that matched school hours. I was still in the fog, but later realized they wanted me to flunk out and not graduate from college. 

When I graduated both parents seemed pissed off, I sacrificed my health on that altar, but I remember how I lived back then, there were no normal meals, not enough sleep AT ALL, and would be woken up at 7am on weekends, being screamed at and being told I would have my stuff thrown out on the lawn. That was the "make or break" time for my future career. Both parents refused to attend my college graduation even though I graduated with a 3.45 and got my teaching certificate. Nepotism is not shared with scapegoats but they will also try to destroy and undermine the success you personally work for too.

I looked into my family years ago. A lot of things didn't make sense. My mother's list of friends on Facebook was extremely revealing. I did this stuff before going no contact. I wanted to see how far the nepotism went. By then I was wondering why my family seemed so connected, and why were some so wealthy and why were there so many secrets? As folks here know I found out family secrets on Ancestry, but I took my research to the "commerce" and "money" world. 

The internet made it possible. My mother hid where one cousin lived from me for three years because she got her a six-figure job via connections with her best friend the nun, [the same one who refused to help me] at a major Catholic university. This woman married a wealthy multimillionaire who worked in media. He has famous friends in national media listed on his Facebook. This was Aunt Confused's granddaughter.  This was another wedding years ago I was not invited to. I was not invited to her sister's wedding either.

Some of my relatives are millionaires. One thing I noticed is many young people who were not especially talented [no straight As, or extreme passions etc.] got very good jobs right out of college. I'm not talking 40-70 thousand a year jobs but six figures. There were no struggles with job applications or anything like that. No one struggled to get jobs like I did. My nephew got a high paid engineering job right out of college. He bought a house by the age of 23. They didn't even have to be star students, they came out and got these incredibly great jobs. Their employment also remained perfectly secure which is very rare nowadays. 

As I got older and saw nephews, cousins, nieces and others getting internships via family connections and in several cases, six figure jobs right out of high school and college, I knew my family was high up enough and connected to have nepotism be a theme. 

 This is how I discovered the awful fact that my two best friends in college may have been chosen for me. I was kept in the dark about so much, that it was extremely revelatory, the things I found out. My family kept so many secrets from me. When I did Ancestry, and found out my grandfather was not my real grandfather, and the real grandfather was the brother of a very high level union official--he was the top guy of one of the largest unions in America back in the 1950s and 1960s, it occurred to me Aunt Confused had to know, her son after all had moved way up the ranks in the union world. He has held a high-level union position for decades. She had to know!

His daughter was the one who married the multimillionaire in media. The groom's father was a NYC stockbroker. The other daughter married another very wealthy man who dabbled in the music world and took them on a honeymoon to Greece.  The cousin who married the multimillionaire, was the cousin, where my mother kept it secret where she lived for three years to hide that she had gotten a job at a place both my mother and her best friend [the nun] had connections to. The other cousin got a teaching job at the district her mother taught in. My mother's nun friend worked with high level Cardinals and bishops at a nationally known catholic university. She was in the newspaper all the time for her successes in the Catholic church. 

I also realized that as a scapegoat all those helps were denied to me. It was extreme how much was kept secret from me. Facebook brought forth some facts.  Both siblings were friends with work friends of my parents, that I never even met. That was weird. I was the fat embarrassing secret my mother kept hidden. I still remember that one party she disinvited me too where the whole family was there and many of her government worker friends. One can argue nepotism is wrong, I can go with that but remember those who grew up more well off, were invested in considering me the family "loser" so that got old. 

Coming out of a rich family as a scapegoat can be a mind screw. Everyone rose to the top, while my fortunes sunk. I don't think scapegoats are paranoid to suspect that machinations behind the scenes may have happened to them. There was no one to relate to me. I think one reason I was thankful for my no contact, was there was no more stress in being surrounded by all these wealthy people who looked down on me. For years, they told me I was a loser and constantly bragged to me. With my disabilities, I never was going to be their financial equal and we had nothing in common. I had thoughts years later, it was only natural with no affection or common interests in these relationships, that even if I hadn't gone no contact, they would have definitely faded away. We had nothing in common. 

The nieces and nephews all become obedient STEM bots, there wasn't one rebellious or free-thinking soul in the lot. They never had curiosity and most of them barely talked. So they were impossible to get to know. I had some happy moments with my sister's two older children in the early 2000s during a week I went to go visit, but after they arrived in their pre-teens the phones came out and there was no opportunities for true conversation at my mother's house. We all stayed strangers. 

Even the autistic nephew majored in computer security and surveillance. I'm not sure if he will be scapegoated or helped to get a job by the family. He is very overweight so that alone could be a strike against him.  I'm simply not around to know. There weren't going to be any "rebels" in that lot to relate to.  I know when my husband was in newspapers and getting his books published, we were still young and had hope of some future middle class "respectability" I was disabled but he was/is extremely gifted in writing and we had hopes of moving up via his efforts.  Now that we are older, I just want contentment and being left alone. When you are poor you are never left alone. It's good I was no contact during these last few years. I'm gone, I don't have to try and win respect or compete with these people anymore and that will always be a relief. 

As I got older I was able to accept being of more meager means, and deal with it. I was fine, but sadly in America, they sure seem invested in putting the screws to the poor and working class. Maybe I was spared becoming a sell-out by not allowed into the family circles. There was punishment for non-conformity. I saw those who "sold out", maybe they knew I'd never be one of them, anyway, money or no money. Some of them sold their souls long ago for their wealth.  It's given me a lot to think about. 

The Special Turmoil of Those in Poor Narcissistic Families

Scapegoats have their own burdens to bear coming out of poor families, they seem to get abused for their money more, with demands to take care of the parents or donate to the family coffers keeping them trapped at home, kind of like Gilbert Grape. Some may even say well at least you got to go to college and that's true. Poor scapegoats are often in danger too of being used as perpetual free babysitters or caretakers if they are at home long enough for an older parent to need one. I remember some young scapegoats in my old small rural town, where they escaped caretaking and impoverishment by joining the military. Who can blame them? For some of them, it was their only means of escape.

Most narcissists who don't have money or fail to earn it usually are the parasitic sorts that live off other people or family members. Some engage in substance abuse and some had earlier careers but lost them due to malfeasance, legal troubles or substance problems. These kids won't be in the situation where the parents are the pillars of society. Their neglect will be even more acute, the parents will demand that they pay their bills and they will grab on to them like leeches. You will see situations where the scapegoat in this case is not sent to the desert to die of poverty like in a rich family but used and abused to pay the family bills and support their parents. Enmeshment is more possible. The parents will often waste money or gamble or refuse to work or apply for disability or subsidized housing and then demand the scapegoat literally stay home forever instead of building their own life and family to pay their bills. They will drain them utterly dry and a young person who gives in to their demands will miss out on a chance to build their own life.

These scapegoats also will have their education neglected. Some will be home schooled, and miss out on education.  Lazy parents will subscribe to homeschooling and not bother to educate their child at all. The "unschooling" movement with abusive parents, means they just want to sleep in and keep how they are treating their kids from the prying eyes of the public. Some do homeschooling right but for abusers, it's a way to keep a kid isolated, abused and away from connection to a community. Some toxic parents will be in cults, that add more abusers to a kid's life. 

Sometimes the poor family will pour resources into the golden childen and having little there will nothing left for the other children. So Johnny the golden child gets the hamburger and the scapegoats get left over rice. 

The Four Fs [Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn[ Will Make You Poor

The Four Fs are the trauma responses of many scapegoats. All of these trauma responses make you poor. They all applied to me at various times. 

Fawning is a given. Sometimes people brown-nose bosses but it only takes you so far. It makes you look weak and like a push-over. People treated me badly until I got on the clue bus in my 40s about not sharing so many problems or showing weakness to others. Those behaviors don't bring in the jobs, and if you do get jobs, you get the grunt low paid or dangerous work no one else wants, or they can't fill the positions for. It almost entitles that you remain at the bottom of the pyramid. 

Freezing also limits one's life. You freeze like a scared rabbit, and actions aren't taken, you get frozen into space and time. Your life does not advance like other peoples. For many ACONs, we struggle with the voices in our head inherited from our abusers where nothing is never good enough and being told we are worthless or our lives had nothing to show for them. Freezing can make one put off responsibilities and put things off to avoid fear and stress. It is not a career or money enhancer. 

Fleeing/Flight also has dangers. Geographical cures don't always fix a life if there are internal health problems or mental health challenges. Some of my moves worked for me but many forget that they take themselves with them when they go to a new place. Many ACONs lack the roots or feeling of "home" of other people. I know I was psychologically damaged from losing one town. There is this endless yearning to have a "home" and a place to belong. This too can interfere with wise decision-making. 

Fighting if you do it literally can cause court and cop problems and give you a record. If you verbally fight and lash out, it can bring problems too and put you at odds with neutral or helpful people. Even misdemeanors can make it hard to get jobs. Those who served prison time, know how much of a struggle it can be to regain economic viability. For those who go the verbal only route, many narcissists can do DARVO and then make you look like the aggressor or the bully when they instigated things. I fought back many times verbally and just ended up losing, while my abusers came out smelling like roses. Money problems will put you in a weaker place. I have a lot of regrets about life, that I would have put money making first instead of growing up to be a financially struggling person, but then I forgive myself knowing what road all the abuse put me on.  

Narcissists will seek to destroy and undermine your successes.

Remember when I wrote about the book contest I won in elementary school and my mother embarrassed me in front of my teachers condemning their book award and making me look bad? Well she tried the same again! This happened during a hoovering event of a couple years ago. It concerned something successful I was involved with and she contacted the people and made strange requests that troubled and scared people. They were good people who were not fooled by my mother. I was able to hold to my no contact. All my successes growing up were minimized, there's a reason both parents refused to go to both my high school and college graduation ceremonies. There's a reason, she ignored art shows, mocked my stamp collection and both never gave me one ounce of encouragement.

 So if you are a scapegoat that somehow rises above the abuse and manages to get a career, and money, this doesn't stop the narcissists toxicity. I've read stories where scapegoats did well for a time, and then when the bottom fell out from a spouse dying, or they got disabled or they lost their jobs or careers, the narcissists in their lives gloried in it, and were another boot stomping on their head. I had hope of doing well up to my early 20s and things switched especially after I lost my juvenile home art teaching job, it upped the abuse a few notches. When my husband had his health and career difficulties from his newspaper lay offs and then losing the job as a copy ad writer. She reveled in it. My family became far more abusive after my husband's job lay-offs. If his newspaper jobs had continued our path would have been a lot better. 

I do believe given my family's connections, that there could have been sabotage in the background, there definitely was enough in our faces. So even success will not make you immune from their abuses, the rule that they don't want a scapegoat to succeed remains intact, so even if you have money and do well for years, realize they could be waiting to pounce at the first sign of weakness. This can happen even for aging ex-scapegoats if their abusers are still living.

If you do succeed, they will do everything to undermine you. This will range from mocking your career choices to parasitical attempts to grab your money. Some will try and get you fired. Some ACONs have written online how their parents got them fired from jobs, doing things like showing up at the work place ranting and raving or calling bosses and co-workers and making up lies about them. I've read stories of kids winning full-ride scholarships to universities where narcissistic parents ruined things by refusing a few small fees or travel money so they could get to the university or making up more lies or demanding the adult child stay home to "take care of them" putting their education on hold.

 Most narcissists have money and are lords of the manor but some people do have what I personally call parasitical narcissists, these are the types who learned to live off others and suck them dry to support themselves. I once had a wealthier commenter on this blog tell me, even if I made it big and had money, my family still would have treated me like trash. She was wealthy and they still treated her bad. It also didn't escape my attention later, my money-worshipping mother, didn't like my millionaire ex-friend either just because she was my friend at the time. For the scapegoats who do succeed or are wealthy, their abuses are just as abusive and a force to reckon with. 

So lets say you ducked through the maze and came out financially secure via hard work, luck, talent or a combination of all. Narcissists will still focus on your failures [made up or real] and will still call you a loser. They still will criticize you no matter what. Steam will come out of their ears if they see you in the newspaper for an art show, or they think you have even one dime, they think you don't deserve. 

Years into no contact I faced facts about what it meant, that with an upper middle class family, I was extremely ill and forced to live with the mice and rats and had no car, medical care and other things I needed to live. I almost died at that time, and it didn't occur to me until years later and the fog had cleared how much I had been betrayed. I never had a family in the sense of the word whatsoever. Many ACONs will go under betrayals like this. One can hear the horror stories all over.

Many of us face severe neglect as children. Some ACONs don't get the medical care they need. This happened to me. Many don't have the right clothing, or material goods even with families that have enough money to provide properly for them. There is emotional neglect but also physical neglect where narcissistic parents don't take children to doctors or make sure they are happy or healthy. They will have new clothing while their children wear rags. 

Even those with rich parents, feel a constant strain of neglect. I used to love those Scholastic book sales that came to our school but my parents would never give me money for books, fortunately I could get some with newspaper delivery money but my parents were like this person's parents, I owned only two pairs of pants often while in high school, I couldn't go on trips or buy books or do activities like the other kids because my parents were so cheap when it came to my needs. I wasn't allowed to buy lunch at school, and had to eat a gross bologna sandwich every single day and sometimes I would ask for a little money to buy a salad or hot meal at school and the answer was no. It was ironic seeing the poor kids eat better than me at school because they got free meals and mine were too stingy.

So I related to this person on reddit.
My parents are both software engineers that make about 100k salary each. They have multiple rental properties, and are worth over 1 million.

However, as a kid, they never gave me any money for anything ever. Even something like needing $10 for a field trip, they wouldn't give it to me. Always saying shit like "what have you done to EARN $10?"

There was an allowance system in place, but if I missed one chore at all in a week, then it all went away. The time the chores needed to be done by seemed ever changing, and I literally never actually got any of that allowance.

Any time I needed to see a doctor or needed them to come to some school event, they would make me feel terrible for making them miss work or for the price of healthcare.

This sort of thing almost assures that a kid won't reach the same financial level of the parents. It teaches the kid you do not deserve anything and you must scrape, bow and beg for everything which puts a later adult child in a subservient mode where success is far less possible. I always was treated like a burden and that I was in the way. It made me subservient. The message given here is you are trained to believe you don't deserve anything and that can play out in a negative way in a life. She'd grab me and literally pull me across aisles for strangers. They meant a lot more to her than I ever did. If you don't feel worthy, then it's hard to get others to see your worth. 

Later this person admits they ended up in the streets and had to scramble to survive and still live in poverty as an adult. They were set up to be poor by a family of means. 

Disinheriting the Scapegoats!

One way poverty will come to scapegoats is via being disinherited. As long time readers know I have gone through extreme poverty in my life that even makes today's diminished means look like candy-days in comparison. Why did my father leave every penny to my mother, when he knew before he died, that I was severely ill and disabled?  He didn't care about me. My mother got him to "blame" me and throw me away like yesterday's trash. She became wealthier, it was at least $500-750,000 and could have been as much as a million dollars if not more via life insurance. He had told us kids he was leaving everything to her when we were growing up, as he wrote weird letters to "cut us out of the will" every time he got pissed. I've already written about my mother telling two relatives that I was cut out of her will years before I went no contact and how everything will be left to my golden child sister. 

Scapegoats can end up poor even coming out of a millionaire family. Some will have their millionaire parents leave them a small stipend or even 1 dollar for legal reasons while giving millions to other siblings and family members. These experiences are very common. The scapegoat can be very poor living in SROs, boarding houses or even in the streets. My sister never knew want or poverty. It only occurred to me later, as I nearly died in Chicago, she had the means to help too and simply refused. One odd thing to think about during high school is my family was considered one of the "rich" families in town because of my father's position at a government agency and the fact we lived in one of the "better neighborhoods" in town. Some kids would make fun of us for this. That's a bit of irony I know. 

Here is one experience shared to me on a message board. 

"That’s me. My sisters got everything. I was on my own at 15 after my father died. I didn’t get the insurance money left in trust for me. I went to a homeless shelter. My mother is worth millions. I’ve done ok for myself but struggle hard. I never had any family help at all let alone financial or favors or even emotional support. I’ll be 47 in a couple weeks. She felt guilty recently and offered me $50k for a house. I have three kids in a 250 sq ft trailer that she’s embarrassed about. I said help me increase my income instead by paying for a $4k certification for me. I’ll double my income after that and can help myself. Well, she paid the first $900 then changed her mind. Now I can’t finish and am embarrassed in front of my professional colleagues. Nothing even happened. No conflict. It’s just how she is. When I said maybe you can apologize for setting me up like this, she went off on how I made my choices in life and made it out to be all my fault.

That poor person is having the usual sabotage. Notice the refusal of help where the ACON could provide better for herself in the future. Multimillions in the family and she's left to clamor. I'm glad she's employed but sad she was put in this position to begin with. Sadly many narcissists rise in ranks in our society and are the ones with the money. This poor person is in one of those proverbial "Don't give me a fish, give me a fishing pole" situations.

I know of another case, where a scapegoat was left money and property by a narcissistic father, the mother was a narcissist too, but the parents were divorced. Their golden-child sister cleaned the accounts out and got the father to sign papers 5 days before he died, transferring all the properties over to the golden child sister. This scapegoat tried to fight in court but lost, the sister had deep pockets to fight legal battles with from taking all the money. The court and banking system in their area seemed to be very corrupt and there were many professionals who backed up the golden child sister. The lawyers took their share, leaving the scapegoat empty-handed. 

I was blamed too. My parents were against my marriage, "he's too poor", my husband was a newspaper reporter by the time we began dating with a journalism degree from a major state school. I was told I was "lazy and fat" and this is why I couldn't get a "good enough job". I was always working before I was disabled so they focused on the fact my jobs were low paid, my juvenile home art teaching grant job wasn't the SAME as a full time permanent teaching contract. It occurred to me later, that for someone who was only 21-22 years old, that was a decent job for my field. Nothing ever was good enough. I was told over and over the opportunities provided to others were denied to me, because I was not good enough. Added to that was a thick layer of guilt and gaslighting such as when my mother told me, "I did everything I could for you and here you come wanting more!" What an absolute joke!

If a scapegoat is disabled or autistic, that's a danger zone too as far as inheritances, I've heard stories where the disabled person [especially on SSI] is told you will lose your Social Security if you get any inheritance, so we are going to write you out of the will. They will be made afraid and intimidated. I know several disabled people this happened to.  There are special trusts families can set up for disabled members but don't expect a narcissistic family to investigate those things. Many disabled older adults who lived with one elderly relative who may be decent and not a narcissist will be thrown out of the house so the narcissists can come in and clean the place out. There are a lot of abuses with probate out there. I don't know why probate law seems written to protect narcissists but often it is. Sometimes in less toxic families, they may be left money in a trust but then that ACON enters the hell of having a narcissist or golden child narcissistic sibling in charge of their financial life as a payee representative. I'm not sure why the disability advocates are failing to protect so many people but I've seen too much funny business with guardianships, and well-intended relatives being outgunned by money-hungry narcissists. 

 I had spiritual troubles watching the wicked prosper. There's times I wake up and wonder why have such mean and cruel people done so well, and never faced economic or other troubles? A giant divide would have come over our class differences anyhow. Even if I didn't go no contact, I was the red-headed bastard step-child they were hiding out of "embarrassment", I didn't live the same life styles, didn't look the same. I didn't have the new clothing, the new cars, they lived lives I could only dream of, as they flew overseas and owned vacation homes. What use is a family in those circumstances? I have rich friends who live different lives from me, but in the case of my family they made it clear I was not one of them. Many of us are told we do not belong in many ways before we walk for good.

I came to the conclusion mid adulthood, I never really wanted their life. I was happiest living a more simple life. The suburban go-go life was never for me. I've always desired the safety of money but always have known if I ever came into money, I would not spend it on the same things. It was too mentally exhausting, taxing and fake too. Let's be real, I am someone who questions society and is of an artistic bent, redecorating a suburban house and putting on dinner parties was not the way I wanted to go. Artists and writers have a drive to be artists and writers that is hard to explain to others. It's like you are born to be that way. 

I've heard of this same disenfranchisement coming to many. As I wrote 10 years ago, the boomer generation and above was far more wealthy than later generations. Yes, there are some poor and some decent boomers. There are all these clueless articles going on about estranged families but no one has examined one main point, that as younger generations fall down the ladder and can't afford to build the same lives or own houses take trips, or hit all the expected milestones in a family, they aren't the same social class as their family anymore. They don't fit in. The class chasm alone is a yawning cataclysmic effect on family relationships.  The sociologists have ignored these effects on our society as the economy collapses. These issues are never addressed. Younger people are entering their 40s and 50s knowing their lives will never be like their parents and in the case of those with narcissistic parents the blame and shame never end. The worse of it is, is that you really don't have a family just "competitors" who smashed your face into the ground as they walked over you.

                   Peep watched her parents shop until they drop, while she went without.

Narcissists Waste Money and Practice No Frugality. They are Bad Examples

My family were snobs, and probably still remain so. There were financial cracks in the family. Both my parents would mock anyone who had financial set-backs. This included laid off relatives who were otherwise middle class. There was absolutely no mercy. Materialism ran the show. One major problem with my family is they were extremely materialistic, and while they always got the money they wanted, they wasted it. There were years when my parents were making six figures during the 1980s, that they went deep into debt. They were both shopaholics, and even though there was a lot of money coming in, my mother got her government job around 1983 from my father, they spent it like crazy. 

I grew up watching constant fights about money. My mother did the bills, but there was always screaming and shouting. This wasn't a good example in learning how to handle money. My father wasted thousands of dollars wanting to rebuild a muscle car from the 1960s, he never finished it and our second garage was filled with a hunk of junk with no wheels and endless boxes of car parts, that later was sold off in the 1990s. My mother bought every fad and followed every decorating trend which meant stripping rooms down to "remodel" them. She would show off to family constantly so when relatives came to visit she would go all out. She bought $400-500 of groceries once for one family visit, this was back in the 80s too and that was two large filled grocery carts. Every new gadget that came out they'd buy from lawn tractors to fuzz busters to new phones.

After my father died, my mother did not change her spending habits, she spent thousands to put this old 1880s wagon in her yard and bought the legions of snowmen to fill the house. Both of them ate out several times a week at fancy restaurants with glass goblets of wine and waitresses, My mother having no fear even though she was allergic to shellfish, would go to these expensive "all you can eat" snow crab leg buffets and eat for hours. That was one very strange attribute about her showing her lack of fear, she would pig out on a food she was allergic to. She ended up in the hospital twice, and would take allergy pills before eating the crab. Most people know this is a very bad idea when it comes to food allergies. These crab buffets even in the 80s and 90s were above 30 dollars a person. My father was the same, still eating potatoes even though he was badly allergic to them because my mother wanted to serve them. My mother would remain a weekly customer of Red Lobster for years.

Shopping was a hobby for my mother. Every week there were extensive shopping trips to the gardening miniatures/dollhouse, clothing, Hallmark stores--our house was plastered in those expensive Christmas ornaments, Ethan Allen, and out of town trips to "go shopping". She would lay out at least $5,000 dollars on Christmas. My father wasn't any better. He would buy the car parts, go to endless auctions, the hardware store, the bookstore and he shopped quite a bit. Both collected "collectibles". My mother collected these expensive "country houses", and ceramic/glass owls and filled the shelves with them. Later she collected decorative plates. My father collected ceramic/glass whales. They would go to gift stores all the time looking to add to their collections. My mother would follow trends, she spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on 

My parents were very proud of their possessions. Things mattered more than I did. Most of their identity came from what they owned rather than what they did. The only "positive" conversations I had as an adult with my mother was her showing off to me what she had purchased. When I was still in the mode of trying to connect, that's the only time she had conversations with me that were not about criticizing, or putting me down.  Get her to talk about her shopping trips. It may be a nearly pleasant conversation then. My poverty put a giant chasm in any possible relationship. What could I afford to buy? Not much.

Credit card debt was an issue for my parents. I heard whispered discussions of bankruptcy in the 80s and early 90s. I'm not sure if they ended up declaring it, but since they kept their houses and cars probably not. She probably ran out of credit for my sister's wedding, which is why she took my credit card out of the mail without telling me and stole it. She had to have her money. Frugality was not a path for her.

The sad thing is why my parents shopped until they dropped even as a minor I went without. I befriended the "project" kids in high school because I dressed like them. There were only 2 pairs of pants to wear at one time. I only owned two pair of shoes usually ugly sneakers I could not stand, and some boots for the winter. While I got Lee jeans and a couple sweaters, I did not get to dress anywhere near how my classmates did. My mother would blame my weight, "you are too fat for clothing" but I was still midsized enough there was some clothing available. There was no money for prom, I had a job by then but that cost hundreds of dollars I felt was beyond me. There was no money to go to go on trips or the Senior Class trip. I went to a rich high school, where the kids there with the exception of the "project kids" who lived with their often single mothers in an apartment complex, hung out the country club and went to Florida for every spring break. I did not relate to them and they maintained lifestyles like this into adulthood, seen on Facebook with golfing trips, cruises and dinners out.

I had one foot in poor land from pure neglect but one foot in rich land. My family lived in one of the best neighborhoods in town and even in the town before that we were considered a "rich" family because of all the material possessions. My brother's newer Trans Am with a giant bird on the hood was the envy of the males in my high school. He got this car after he owned a cherry red Firebird.

My mother brought lavish food to neighborhood parties. My father had a high up enough position to be in the newspaper on a regular basis. I would go visit these high school acquaintances that lived on the edges of the golf course and country club just down the street from my house on very rare occasion as I was not well liked and a couple times I saw their bedrooms. My eyes bugged out at their full closets, shoes, make-up, and lovingly decorated rooms. I definitely wasn't living like them. One girl was even nearly as fat as me, and that gave me weird feelings, her closets were busting and when her mother hugged her hello, it almost made me cry. 

I cried when I outgrew one prairie skirt, after my earlier weight gain, it was made out of red corduroy, and I knew she'd never buy me another skirt. I watched my sister and mother wearing new clothes all the time. Narcissists will often dress their scapegoated kids very poorly so others will look down on them and treat them badly. I told her I was being made fun of at high school for wearing the same clothes too often, she didn't care and would just yell, "It's because you are fat!" I would have to rewash my too few clothes almost every other night to have something to wear the next day. She bought me unflattering clothing all the time on purpose, especially these especially very ugly navy themed sweatshirt and sweatpants and shorts that had horizontal lines. I wanted slimming black clothes and she refused. 

This is extremely ironic but as a child, I hoarded money. It's funny to think that as a child I had more money than I would as an adult. Because of my constant part time jobs to babysitting and then restaurant jobs, I always had a few hundred dollars stashed away as a child. Maybe I knew there was safety in money. I hid money from my parents. She would steal some of my newspaper money but to do the job, I had to get some money and I would keep it.

Sometimes I did a few fun things like play Putt-Putt when we still lived in the big metro city or go to the arcade, but overall I kept my money. The family mocked me for my attitudes about money and called me a "miser". All the time they would lecture and harangue me about being tight with money. It's weird now, they probably didn't want me saving. They didn't really know how much I had which is good.

During my last year at home, I lied about how much I was making to hide and save some money. She was demanding rent and refusing to let me eat much at home, fortunately the juvenile home let me eat meals there. I told them I made just above minimum wage around 5 an hour at the job [minimum wage being a mere $3.35 at the time] instead of the actual 14 an hour. The job was 30 hours a week so I was able to save some from it and other jobs. I was stashing money to get out. At one time I had 5,000 dollars, sadly car repairs and medical would vaporize that money but it got me out during my first no contact. It would be the most money I ever had at one time in my adult life. 

There was no sanity around money. No example of frugality or the practicalities of daily living. Watching people spend money until they dropped did not prepare me for life or even how hard it would be to make a living. There was no preparation or saving for the future. There were no family assets to depend on. Today as a poor adult, the way they burned through money is horrifying to me.  This is one area where scapegoats can be cheated out of a future decent financial life. 

Hide Your Piggy Bank from Mom and Dad!

Another thing that can happen to scapegoats beyond being directly disinherited, many will have money stolen from them. I wrote about this years ago but my mother committed identity theft against me using a credit card in my name and putting almost $2,000 on it. Some scapegoats will have their paychecks grabbed as they live at home: "you need to help us with expenses" or will have inheritances from others stolen from them. If there's a narcissist about and someone dies in the family, they go running to clean the newly deceased's house out. Some will have their stuff sold off, and even cash will disappear from their piggy banks. My mother used to "get into" my newspaper money when I was 10 years old. What could I do? I was just a kid. I learned to hide some money.  I wonder if people who used to buy savings bonds for grandkids and others realize much of that money disappears into the coffers of the narcissistic parent. 

from Reddit:

My mom stole my college funds that my grandpa gave to me after he passed. When I asked her about the funds she promised, she said "what funds?"

My Advice for Young Scapegoats to Escape the Poverty and Abuse Trap:

If you are a young scapegoat, and want to have a better financial life. Here's my advice...

1. Be practical and focus on what you can to be financially stable and independent. Scapegoats more than anyone have to focus on making sure they can provide for themselves. Read books on money-making investments and more. 

2. Find and foster community where you can. It's not easy and some communities may fade away but some succeed in finding close friends or churches like my first church in my old town and communities like my art club and later self help group that can be places of support. This is very important to those without a family

3. Be very practical in your career choices, balance out things if you desire to be in the arts and really face reality. I've written of my regret in these areas. For abused ACONS, making a living and seeking financial independence is very important. It is very hard on me that I never achieved financial independence or a stable money life. I don't want others to suffer what I have. 

4. Protect your health as much as you can.  Get needed rest. Avoid processed food, join the gym if you can afford one. If you lose your health, the money goes away. Disabled people are very poor. 

5. Protect your interests. Financial suffering and shortages can really hinder your healing or even in the cases of some people be threats to full no contact or independence from the narcissists. My financial need kept me in the game far longer than I wanted to be.

6. if you are poor or unable to escape poverty, learn extreme frugality as much as you can. I'd already be in the streets if not for some habits. Always pay rent first no matter what. Do not gamble or take up expensive habits. Also look into stoicism. I had some depression that lifted when I started practicing stoic acceptance but even that must be balanced with protecting your interests and looking out for them. 

7. Realize the reality of this world. There are people who will help you out there, I've encountered many but also realize this world is a greedy place, it is a "king of the mountain, dog eat dog world". Narcissists leave us naive to the reality of the world. It's better to face how things really are then to look at them as how we wished they would be.

8. No contact is not easy but life for any socioeconomic class is far easier being no contact. 

Housing for the Poor

Five Hundred Pound Peep: The Expensive Trip of A Lifetime--1996

Five Hundred Pound Peep: Are you the Family "Loser"?

Are Your Bills Crushing You?

Classism Stinks

A Profoundly Sick Society