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People whose parents have become fascist, how are you dealing with it?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Asklemmy
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I feel for you. My parents also drank the Koolaid, but my mother is dead now, and my father has slipped even further down the rabbit hole. He's also a horrible person in general, and while I used to engage with him if he were behaving himself, I've effectively gone no contact now. I've only spoke with him once in the last few years, and when he launched into a racist anti-immigrant tirade I told him not to be a coward his entire life and hung up on him. It was on my birthday.
This is essentially the same story with my in laws. MIL is gone. FIL is getting angrier day by day without her to be his bullshit caller. He won't behave himself when he's 1 on 1 with my husband. It's tearing my husband to pieces.
And he's barely still able to live on his own. He's been hospitalized 3 times in the 10 months since MIL passed. I noticed that if we have more contact with him, he does better, we catch things and can intervene. But if we go low contact because of hateful behavior then we get blindsided by a hospital trip where we drop everything and screw our schedules all up to deal with his illness & recovery.
It fucking sucks. I think I've started treating him as I would a dementia patient just to be able to be around him. I like another poster's tactic of declaring something batshit "seems meanspirited". Maybe it will curb the worst of it. Who knows.
I'm sorry for you, me, anyone who struggles with whether to sever contact with a (formerly or currently) loved one.
There is no good answer, and you have to find what is right for you. I've been around too many toxic people for too long, and at this point I feel like I don't owe anyone my time or attention, family or not. Setting solid boundaries has worked wonders for my mental health. While I would love to have a good, healthy relationship with my family, I cannot make that happen by myself. They have to meet me halfway, and when they engage in behaviors that I wouldn't tolerate from anyone else, it reminds me that I shouldn't tolerate it from them either. People get so hung up on "but he's your father" or "it's your family," but the people that say that have no idea what I've been through and no frame of reference. It is absolutely 100% the right thing to minimize or eliminate contact with abusive people, even if they are your family.
I think that's a valid option for you, and may not be for others. But there can be other reasons besides "but they're family."