Some people like to live vicariously through their children. The children become athletes or painters just because their parent wanted to but was thwarted in their attempt.

You’ve got a case of the reverse. Not so widely known of but still a thing.

Not about money in my case, but similar stuff happens too. I just stand my ground and say as calmly as I can (with varying levels of success) “I’m sure X happened this way” we don’t discuss it often, my dad usually just keeps up believing stuff happened his way, and we leave it at that.

For me, I came to terms with this by learning more about human nature and behavior and realizing that, in essence, we’re incredibly flawed beings with only a minimum of accidental rationality. That it’s absolutely not natural for us to “make sense” in a logical way, that truth doesn’t matter to us, that we are all incredibly selfish.

And that working against this nature to a “better” (in quotation marks on purpose, who really knows what’s better) state of mind and behavior requires massive amounts of dedication, conviction and constant effort, which most people simply don’t understand or can’t be bothered to do.

That humans/I have a natural desire within them/me to band together for survival purposes. This includes loyalty to family and feeling bad about being estranged to them.

That our emotions are just motivators making us do things that were/are useful for survival.

That we also have a great capacity for adaptation, which also helped us to survive.

And finally, to put it all together, that I can use my skills of adaptation to change my feelings about things after understanding them and deeming them not beneficial to me. So in other words, I use mindfulness techniques, my natural propensity for rationalizations, training/practice through repetition, my selfishness, etc, etc, to change my behavior/thoughts/feelings to a state I’d like to be in.

This is imo only possible with serious study of all these interactions and years of reprogramming yourself, which you have to decide how worth it is for you. In my opinion, it’s ultimately worth it for everyone, because I went from a state of deep unhappiness to a state of deep happiness/content, which is a massive quality of life improvement.

However, I also realize that because of all of this, I myself could just be talking bullshit and be just as or even more flawed than anyone else, so you can probably safely disregard any advice I give or things I say :D

Edit: oh yeah, and to give a superficial answer: fuck family/people, stupid people are not worth having around and making your life worse just because of some arbitrary tradition/feeling of loyalty/peer pressure. My dad is nowhere as bad as yours and I still don’t really care about interacting with him, and I like it that way.

If you can, ignore it or dismiss it as “old man yells at clouds”.

Either way, unfortunately, you have to find a way, somehow, to deal the issue so that it stops causing you problems. It’s hard and it sucks.

IMHO as a parent, my kids owe me nothing and I owe them everything. I created them after all.

This is kind of rubbish advice, sorry.

You could ask him what he expects you to do about it. Force him to follow through on his line of reasoning to the conclusion. Does he want it paid back? Does he want to estrange his children?

That can work because, rather than contacting contradicting him you’re facilitating him reasoning through his position. Hopefully for the best.