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shminux comments on Open thread, August 26 - September 1, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's a hard decision, I feel for you.
Having observed several people in a similar situation, I saw them go through the reasoning you describe. If you discard the virtue-ethics non-consequentialist reasons, like "One should love one's relatives" (regardless of how bad they are), or "You owe them, for their past good deeds " (despite all the poisonous and mean stuff they inflicted on you), you are left with enumerating options and calculating utilities.
At least one person I know had decided that the emotional damage of maintaining contact outweighs any potential financial benefits and severed her connections with one part of the family entirely, instead relying on her friends for socializing and emotional support. When her parents passed away some years later, they left their millions to some church charity and nothing to her, but that was already factored in her decision and so was not a big upset.
Another managed to learn to detach himself emotionally from whatever is going on at the meetings, by treating his family as low-level NPCs who simply follow their faulty programming and are no more worthy of being upset at than a wordprocessor program with a bug in it. I think nurses go through this kind of training.
If you are not sure that you can implement the second option (and you clearly have trouble ignoring at least one overly critical LW regular, who is not even your relative), then maybe finding some convenient excuses to avoid family gatherings is a better approach.
Oh, another approach I have seen was to build an alliance/support network out of the less bigoted part of the family. YMMV.
There is also a number of decent self-help books on the subject, like Toxic Parents.
Good luck!
Do you know where I might find information about implementing this technique? It sounds really useful. Did your friend follow some methodology for accomplishing this?
Keep in mind that the definition of a sociopath is more or less "one who treats other people as low-level NPCs".
Point well taken! However, this still seems like a potentially useful skill to have when you must interact with someone but wish to defend yourself emotionally.
Indeed, and people would do well to remember that there may be situations wherein you are in fact the relatively "low-level NPC".
Also known as "the mark". The good news is that you are rarely aware of being one.
I am not sure this is good news from the standpoint of consequences...
I don't know of any sources he used. This is one of those hard self-modifications that require highly developed emotional intelligence and introspection skills.
I know that when I tried to do something like that (not getting annoyed at a person for constantly bringing up the same settled point over and over for years), I failed. Basically, the feeling of annoyance flares up before I have a chance to consciously deconstruct it. I managed to quell it quicker, but not prevent it from happening. I tried preparing myself for the situation in advance, but that only made it worse, as I would get annoyed and upset during the simulation, as well. Actually alieving that a person close to you is basically a moist robot is hard.
Might it help to think of the person as running on habit about a particular subject or in response to a particular stimulus rather than them being pseudo-conscious in general?
Over time, they can be reprogrammed to some extent, if you are not just straightforwardly responding to their actions or ignoring them. Raise your own status in their eyes and then teach them skills that enable more accurate control (i.e. more efficiently changing their minds as opposed to facing pointless arguing or deep wisdom). Finer control can be used for further skill development and for making them more useful or pleasant to be around (including developing their cynicism, so that they become capable of not responding negatively to things like this comment).
Ignoring them is actually an extremely powerful tool for reprogramming people, particularly when it comes to the kind of toxic emotional interaction habits that can be failure modes in family relationships. I'd go as far as to say it is one of the best.