max keeble's big mood

I've been tinkering with a longer piece about just this because a few years ago I infiltrated about half a dozen estranged parent groups on Facebook, and here's the short version of what I observed: - evangelical Christianity is by far the most dominant belief system. It almost goes hand in hand with parental self victimization - all coded language goes completely out the window when amongst themselves. "we weren't perfect" or "we made mistakes" becomes "we just don't accept our gay daughter" or "we don't approve of our sons transgendered lifestyle". - there is a pathological refusal to offer apologies to children. it is treated as a defeat as though they're negotiating with terrorists. - therapy as a concept is detested, for reasons that become quite obvious. The therapist is a third party who snaps the child out of the normalcy of tyrannical family dynamics, so they are in turn interpreted as a sort of overarching hand stealing their child from them. - these groups unanimously lean conservative, and most of its active participants are women. this is where the tears of grand/mothers are weaponized in an attempt to get what they want. - there is a hatred for the concept of "found family", or anything that diverges from the family unit. There is also hatred for any public support of estranged children, as anyone who receives it is accused of "replacing us with fans/yes men" - there is a contradiction in the parents desired interpretations of their personhood in nearly every post. I've read literally hundreds of multi paragraph long screeds about how their children must "see them as more than a mother/father and as people with flaws" while also saying they must "return to and honour their mother and father." There is a dissonance in wanting the forgiveness of a human but the authority of a tyrant. - colleges and universities are openly treated with skepticism, especially if the child moves away to attend them. there is a near total overlap in the child refusing contact once they experience the world freely. - there is a common assumption that the child takes pleasure in distancing themselves from their parents and that it is part of some liberal and/or secular brainwashing - prayer is commonly prioritized as a self soothing technique rather than meaningfully engaging with their children's pain - although therapy speak has absolutely become weaponized by a vocal few for political purposes, terms like toxic, grey rocking, trauma and narcissism are trigger words to the estranged parent. they lose all ability to engage once they hear any of these words. - somewhat related, there is a general denial around the prospect of unintentionally traumatizing your child. the accusation of such is an unbearable attack on the ego, hence why the most common experiences I read surrounded refusing to accept their gay/trans child, lifelong body/sex shaming or physical abuse. I have a much longer version of my findings in the works, but that is the gist. Nearly all estranged parents come cut from the same ideological cloth, like a toy store row of Buzz Lightyear boxes. There is an incredibly clear archetype in both the estranged child and parent: the child, who has been rejected for who they are and the parent who is more upset at being informed of their child's pain than the child's pain itself.