u/Live-Being1593

Hey everyone, 39M here from the UK. I’ve been lurking on this sub for a while, and while the validation here is incredible, I notice that the vast majority of posts and resources seem to come from women. While I welcome everyone's story I would love to hear from any other guys out there who have lived, or are currently living, through my specific nightmare.

Up until about 18 months ago, I thought I had an incredibly close, loving family. I was heavily enmeshed with my parents and my brothers, but I didn't see the toxicity because it was always masked as "family closeness."

Everything shattered when I became a dad.

The moment my son was born, my loyalties naturally and correctly shifted to my wife and my son. I started setting healthy, basic boundaries to protect my wife’s postpartum recovery and our new little family unit. But because I was no longer the compliant, obedient son who put my parents' egos first, the entire family system collapsed into absolute chaos.

Instead of reflecting on their own behavior, my parents and brothers completely flipped the script. They invented a narrative that my wife is "controlling and manipulative," and that she has somehow brainwashed me and "changed" me. They subjected us to verbal abuse, passive-aggressive text chains, and absolute psychological warfare, completely projecting their own issues onto her to avoid looking in the mirror.

The speed of it has been dizzying. Within the space of a year and a half, I went from being completely enmeshed to total estrangement.

Through therapy, I've had to uncover a lot of childhood trauma I’d suppressed for decades just to keep them on a pedestal. I grew up with a dad who had volatile rage issues (literally punching holes in the walls then my mum would hide them behind picture frames). When I had an emotional breakdown at age 30, their solution wasn't comfort; it was to hand me a prescription pill to make the big feelings go away so they wouldn't have to deal with them.

Right now, the mind games are the hardest part. My brother has remained completely compliant in the toxic system. He just had a baby too, and on the surface, he is carrying on his life exactly as he pleases, getting all the family praise, while I am the outcast for standing up for my wife.

It is a brutal, daily mental battle. The self-gaslighting is intense, and I constantly find myself obsessing over the unfairness of it all. But I know I did the right thing. I chose my wife and my son over a toxic family script, and I broke a generational cycle with my bare hands.

Is there anyone out there who has gone through this? How did you handle the rage, the grief, and the feeling of being completely isolated? Would love to hear your stories.

Hey everyone,

I’m a long-time practitioner (about 6 years in), but since having a kid and working 6-7 days a week, my training has dropped from a few days a week to once every 2-3 weeks.

Last night I had a rough session that has me questioning if I should even keep training with this schedule.

During the last round, my coach called me out. I managed to hit an X-guard sweep we had practiced, but as he rolled through the scramble, his leg got tangled up and we landed in a position where I instinctively collected his heel. We were in the Gi.

He stopped the roll immediately and got very firm and serious about not doing heel hooks in the Gi because of his knees. I apologized right away—it was pure muscle memory collecting the leg during the scramble, and I had zero intention of applying an illegal submission or hurting him. We finished the round, but he was clearly taking it easy on me afterward, and my confidence was completely shot.

When you only train once or twice a month, a bad night feels magnified by 100. I left the gym feeling embarrassed, out of practice, and like a dangerous rolling partner.

Has anyone else gone through a phase like this when life got overwhelming and mat time plummeted? How do you shake off a bad interaction with a coach when you don't have the luxury of coming back the next day to smooth things over?

Thanks in advance.