The rest of your comment also presages chapters to come. You’re way ahead of me! I hope this doesn’t mean you won’t finish reading the work as it is published, serially, over the next few months.

And thanks for the compliment.

s.

I found it interesting you identified your mother as being narcissistic, but not your father, although he sounds more clearly narcissistic than she was. (He could have felt entitled to be abusive to people and animals because of his narcissism.)

Long ago, I heard that anger is frustration turned outwards.
I think some really important ways to deal with frustration is to force one’s self to seek out the other person’s perspective, or to physiologically calm down, before taking irrevocable action. It’s probably a lot harder to do that if one’s own parents didn’t do that and instead automatically vented their frustration onto other people and animals. It’s hard to unlearn that, but we *can* set guidelines for ourselves in order to change the way we respond.