If he’s American like me, TV probably.
I had no support either and I’m ok. Not everyone is strong enough without support though so I’m just lucky I was smart enough to recognize bad behaviors. (Not including the self destructive kind sadly)
How did you learn what a decent human is?
WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
SenK@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
So you thankfully was able to live in a place where the only media you were exposed to wasn’t fascist propaganda?
WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Not all of it lol. I grew up mostly watching cheers rerurns and family ties, family matters, stuff like that. I’m sure there was plenty of propaganda, thought not at the level we have today, but my parents were very young when they had me and spent a lot of time partying. Not paying attention to news or anything beyond the sports. They were never supportive of me but instead had numerous amounts of adults at the house all the time. I grew up around mostly adults who lived to get fucked up so I spent a considerable amount of time letting the TV be my support network. I knew from tv that the way my parents and their friends behaved was not typical of a normal family and I be l quite literally had my TV family to take care of me. I always got good grades, never in trouble, and lied constantly about my home life. I have no doubts it’s why I grew up to be, amongst things, a great father/husband. I was smart enough to use my parents as a sort of D.A.R.E. program of living. Don’t do this, do the opposite sort of thing. I’m also extremely good at manipulating people around me but never to cause them harm. Anymore. I had to learn that one the hard way lol. That’s a lot of text, sorry, but it was therapeutic to type it out.
SenK@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
That’s a lot of text, sorry, but it was therapeutic to type it out.
Actually I’m really glad if so. Thank you!
My point is that you don’t have to have a perfect support network that’s always there. Sometimes even indifference is better than actively having one’s teeth kicked in for trying to be kind.
I always got good grades
The fact that you had an education at all is also a support network.
I don’t mean to belittle your own efforts at all, but it’s easy to overlook a lot of environmental factors that help shape who you’ve become.
My OP on “support network” was vague on purpose. I’m seeing a lot of people take it to mean wildly different things.
TheDoctorDonna@piefed.ca 20 hours ago
She, Canadian, and not from TV. Most of my growing up we didn’t have TV. I just didn’t want to make other people the way people made me feel.
TheDoctorDonna@piefed.ca 20 hours ago
By knowing how shitty it felt to be treated badly and not wanting to make others feel that way, unfortunately.
SenK@lemmy.ca 19 hours ago
It takes incredible resilience to consciously choose a different path when you haven’t been shown a healthy one. My point is that a support network acts as a buffer against radicalization or becoming an abuser yourself. Without that, it requires extraordinary mental effort to not pass on that pain, effort that not everyone has the capacity for. And if they inherently don’t have the capacity, I don’t see the grounds to judge them as monsters: they literally cannot do otherwise.