Sometimes, you realize that your entire immediate family is awful, and that for decades, you’ve had the feeling like you’re in the midst of an endless war that you didn’t start and are powerless to end. And the only point of the war is to keep the anger, unmet expectations, grudges, and made-up problems coming. The…

Really feel this. It surprised me the overwhelming rage I felt at my parents after the birth of my kids. You just see how helpless they are. I had already put thousands of miles between us but I cut my dad off completely and severely limit contact with my mom now.

My relationship with my parents was always strained, but it really deteriorated when I became a parent myself. Before, I could make excuses for them: they had lousy childhoods themselves, they had to leave their home country because of war, etc. but now I know there are no excuses for treating a child the way they…

Im working on this right now. Im trying to cut my mother out after years of her substance abuse and putting her mental health on my shoulders. Its extremely difficult.

Thanks for a well reasoned article on this. Really, this is a good primer.

Thank you for sharing this. My husband grew up with two great (not perfect, but very loving) parents and I couldn’t help but pick up on his unspoken suspicion, early on, of “what’s wrong with her that she’s not close with her parents?” Then he met them and it clicked. I didn’t cut off my mother for over a year because…

This is very good advice. My family wasn’t perfect, but we managed to figure it out. One side of my Wife’s family has been nothing but toxic for her pretty much her whole life.
When we first met we were in our early 20s and in a phase of life where lots of people are trying to be more independent of their families.…

My mother committed the worst mistake of divorcing parents: she threw my sister and me out of the house for visiting my father. My sister never saw her again. I saw her a few times but walked out on her when she started to air her hostility to my dad.

One of the other things to think through is how to work with your SO on this. I came from a pretty idyllic family, my wife did not. When she started to talk about cutting one of her sisters completely out of her life, I looked at her like an extra head just grew out of her shoulders. I resisted and pushed her to do…

Really glad to see this content. After a long time of emotional abuse that turned physical, and numerous boundaries ignored, I cut ties with my immediate family nine years ago. Can’t agree more with anything in this article.

Excellent article, and one I will share with my wife. She has a horrible mother who essentially abandoned her at 12. The paternal grandparents, two of the best people I have ever met, raised her. Mom has repeated the narrative that my wife left her for the grandparents money. My wife had no choice, but appreciated…

Have a 95 Celica that has 280k miles. Been trying to break it so I’d have an excuse to buy a new car for years. I started my experiment at 150k miles and have done nothing but tires and brakes. No oil changes for the last 100k... just needs a quart of oil.... whenever that pesky oil light comes on!

There does come a point where it’s just not worth it, though.
My last car, I hit 300,000 miles and almost immediately tore up the protective cover under the car by running over a curb I didn’t see. Went in to get it fixed and they told me I also needed new shocks and struts, which would have been about a $2,000 job for…

“If the car otherwise runs fine, just fix the leak.”

Or don’t fix it. My 06 Fusion has a leaking valve cover gasket. Everytime I pay someone to do something maintenance wise, they try to upsell me on some ridiculously overpriced replacement of that gasket. It isn’t pretty with that leak, but there are a few important…

Straight up nothing annoys me more than when people get out of my car and SLAM the friggin’ door. 

One guy said he wanted to get a new car because his current one needed tires and brakes...

One trick I have developed to keeping older cars is to just fix them when they break and to just replace worn out parts. I don’t know how many people I’ve talked to that are thinking about replacing their car because it needs shocks and struts. One guy said he wanted to get a new car because his current one needed…

it is! Thanks! It looks pretty good for not having spent a single day in a garage and spending it’s first 20 years in a rust belt province.

Is that yours? very nice!

I definantly use “upmost” but irregardless, I could care less which one you use.