Piercing the Veil Is the Secret to Handling Toxic Family Gatherings

Make it a Thanksgiving miracle and become a paid subscriber :) Sponsor me for $5 a month ❤️ Sponsor me for $4 a month 🧡 Sponsor me for $3 a month 💛 Sponsor me for $2 a month 💚 Thank you! 💙Hello Friends!Well, I hope this article doesn’t come to you too late. I wanted to start off the morning with positive sentiments, but I know that many of you are still succumbing to the absurd social pressure that we must “endure” horrible people just because they’re family.I saw a celebrity say that liberals should “get over themselves” and just sit for a meal with their disgusting, racist, misogynist, pedophile enabling relatives.We live beneath this veil. The veil is what allows people to pretend everything is fine and good and even “great.” The veil is the delusion that makes them think it’s okay for a handful of people to have billions of dollars even as veterans and children are forced to sleep out on the street.Bow your head and give thanks.In this society, even the people sleeping on the street feel pressure to give thanks. They have literally nothing and that’s what we expect of them.I’m publishing this at 11AM. So, by now, you’re probably either driving to your Thanksgiving gathering or you’re already there. You can still turn back! If there has been a pit in your stomach for the last few weeks as you’ve awaited this event, you can still turn back.Actually, just do a little experiment for me. You don’t have to decide to turn back yet, but pull over, turn around, and go the other way for a few minutes. Do it just for a few minutes. See if you feel better. See if that internal pressure that’s been making you sick disappears. If it does, just keep going my friend. Keep going.That’s how I ended up in Peru.I remember these Thanksgiving gatherings when I was growing up. My rural family in a conservative community really appreciated these social indoctrination times. They could do the work of months in only a few hours. They stuck their knuckles right in my eye sockets and ground, ground, ground.The house had a coat closet next to the door. There were hangers, I presume, but we all just threw our coats in there like a bunch of animals. Then we kicked off our boots and threw them in there too. It became a wet, tangled mess. When it came time to go home, we had to scramble to find our boots and our soggy jackets.Everybody’s Thanksgiving dinner has the same collection of characters. There are kids. They aren’t too bad except for the 10% that are genuine hellraisers. My family had a higher than average percentage of hellraisers. It was maybe around 90%.There are usually one or two nice women who somehow got stuck in your family. They aren’t allowed to talk much. They just sit at the table and look around nervously as if they’re trying to deflect attention.Then there are a bunch of mean old ladies, or at least there were in my family. If you were likely to get hit on Thanksgiving, it would come from them. They’d track you down and smack you with a wooden spoon.But, let’s face it, it gets worse when it came to the men. At my family gathering, there were dozens of men, all of them obnoxious and crude. There is always one who is the worst of the worst, who only comes to Thanksgiving to push boundaries and say socially inappropriate things and groom the kids for abuse.Around 80% of children who are sexually abused know their attacker (most of the time it’s the father). It’s important to talk about this, especially on the holidays. We want to protect our children don’t we? Well then, let’s rip away the veil and look at some real statistics. The majority of child sexual predators are men.It’s actually really important to arm yourself with these statistics for a family Thanksgiving meal because these traditions are designed to fortify our patriarchal model of authority. It really irritates me that your gross old uncle that everybody hates gets to come to Thanksgiving dinner and sit at the head of the table as if he has a crown on his head. That’s all simply due to the fact that he’s a man. He doesn’t prepare anything and you wouldn’t want to eat it if he did. The unwritten rules are that he can say whatever he wants, but the rest of you have to maintain the rules of decorum.It kind of feels like a microcosm of our political world doesn’t it?Well, here’s the secret that I’ve learned in the last few months: we can’t try to change political seats from red to blue, we have to change districts from red to blue. That means we have to do work in the HOME.It’s time to dismantle the damn patriarchy. After all, look at the numbers. The people out there abusing children aren’t immigrants, they aren’t LGBTQ+. The people doing it are the damn fathers. So, you have my permission to take the fathers down a notch this Thanksgiving.All this b******t pressure to just “suck it up” and endure these people is entirely misplaced. You should feel no obligation to sit and be silent and look around nervously while the gross uncles size up their nieces. That makes me gag.In regard to my own family, I became less and less welcome at the gatherings because I began to speak my mind. When I was young, they’d just get on me about all the ways I failed. But as I started to grow up and have some achievements to my name, suddenly they didn’t want to talk at all.As a child, I’d assumed that they would begin to celebrate when I actually did something, but that turned out not to be the case. My positive achievements were also swept behind the veil of “things we don’t discuss.”In fact, the only thing that is considered “appropriate” at most family Thanksgiving dinners is reverence for the patriarchal male who is, as statistics show, the one most likely to be a child sexual predator.You could argue that our family ceremonies are a form of grooming.But it’s not the eating or the gathering or the conversation that’s the problem, it’s the silence. It’s the pressure you feel to not discuss politics or religion or the various ways the men in your life has failed.They want to be propped up on a golden pedestal while the rest of us are struggling in the darkness and fighting over scraps. Well, to hell with that! Pull back the veil, let in the light, and demand change.If you want a discussion topic for Thanksgiving, mention how women are dramatically less likely to be child sexual predators and that’s why we are much better off if we elect women to positions of power. It’s literally the only way to protect our children from monsters.Maybe your comment will create such a stir that you’ll be able to eat your dinner in silence.Maybe your comment will open the gates to unleash a flood of pent-up rage and accusations.Either way, you win! In fact, the only way you lose is if you remain silent.Heck, if your gross uncle who everyone knows is a pedophile is allowed to speak, then you should too.As for me, I spend Thanksgiving with my wife and kids.You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year.Upgrade at 30% offUpgrade at 40% offUpgrade at 50% offUpgrade at 60% offI’m so happy you’re here, and I’m looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.My CoSchedule referral linkHere’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. 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