23M here. Been looking here and there through red pill stuff the last couple months. I have started to develop a strong desire to be a more masculine Christian.

Something that has been hitting me hard is my upbringing. My mother is basically the lead of the house while my dad is usually passive. She also oftens yells and has anger episodes. As I got older I realized that since there was 6 of us kids she was under a lot of stress. But more and more it just seems like she is a bully who has no emotional control and commicates through yelling.

Earlier this year when I was still living at home, she went on one of her episodes at my two younger sisters. She basically paced from room to room yelling that my sisters were stupid idiots. It started because they didn't want to go to some youth event. I got sick of it and became the next victim. A few weeks before this, I saw a tab she left open on our home computer. To sum it up, she often posts comments on Yahoo articles and it's incrediblely hateful. It was sad to see the toxic things she says. She uses foul language which is something that actually shocked me because she doesn't in real life and often told us not to. She often comments on gay marriage and immigrantion articles where she bashes gay people and says racist things. Anway I ended up deciding to show her what I found during her episode. She then said I stalk her, i'm crazy, i'm mentally ill, and yelled repeatedly that something is wrong with my head. I didn't say a single thing. I just stood there and stared her down. I would always argue in return and it just made things worse, so I wanted to try something new. In retrospect it wasn't the best time to do something like that. But in the moment it was so frustrating to see her go off at my sisters. I know how it is and I took it very personal. I was keeping inside what I found to, and that was irratiting and stressful to deal with. The toxicity of her actions online made me sick. My dad was there the whole time to and he gets up finally when she starts the yelling at me and it was to reason with me to back off since the situation wasn't good.

Anyway, last year when I was 22 I had my first relationship....with a 30 year single mom. It just screams mommy issues to me and after spending time to look rationally at it, i'm convinced. My mother never said I love you or said anything encouraging and positive. It seemed like she only spent time trying to disciplining me. Meanwhile the woman I was dating was incredibly caring and loving to everyone around her. The way she treated her daughter especially was really inspiring. I feel fairly confident that I wasn't looking at her as my mother figure though. Most of the relationship consisted of me simply coming over and us just hanging out, talking, watching tv, etc. To me, nothing really indicates to me seeing her as my mother. But the fact that she was a great mom was really encouraging to me because it was a comfort to know that I had a partner that is capable of being a loving mom.

I wasn't a leader in the relationship at all. I was anxious often and was indifferent to a lot as a result. I was comfortable with just spending my time getting to know her. Honestly we were like some kind of super friends that had perks of a realtionship.

I want to be better than this. I'm still not a leader, or confident, etc. I'm struggling with different things and it's hard to get a good start. The examples I had growing up, I don't see as healthy. I see my father as an enabler of my mom's behavior. There have been other family members who said they see him get treated bad by my mom and he just allows it. He is always called the nice guy. I have been as well and I don't want to be stuck like that and desire to grow to be more. I honesty feel like my dad wasn't a leader and I can't learn from him and that's frustrating and sad to me.

I half hearted decisions to come to Christ several times for many years. I now have a strong desire to be baptized soon. I'm ready, but I have been struggling with involving my faith and God with these issues. I am aware of these issues I have with my mother. She is how she is and I don't see her changing anytime soon. I definitely do see her as toxic and have distanced myself from her, but still keep somewhat contact to maintain a relationship with the younger siblings. These family issues just seem to continuously impact me and I think about it often and all I want to do now is grow from it.

Confidence in myself is something I really want to work on as I don't have to much going for me as a individual. I'm natually a quiet person so that doesn't help. English is my second language so that makes it even worse as I still stuggle with words here and there. Talking with confidence and asssertiveness is really difficult for me and it's annoying at this point. Wanted to know where to start on that.