What am I going to do with my dad?

Untitled with Rose
Artist: Margot Lovinger

This is another one of my, ‘I’m going to blather in writing and see if I can make any sense of what is going on and where I am going’ posts. So it is probably going to ramble even more than normal.

So, this past week I went through another crisis related to my dad as shown in the previous two posts. Mama Bear was very direct with me in our session on Friday, she is concerned about the pattern that she is seeing. In short, I feel like I need to understand what happened with my dad before I can decide how I am going to proceed with my dad, so I start to get some bit of suggestion as to what happened with my dad and I just throw myself at it. But it just leads me to a quick trip down the rabbit hole. And all for nothing, because I don’t even believe what information I seem to get. I end up tearing at myself by fearing that I am delusional, while at the same time my insides are clamoring that he hurt me. I just can’t win by putting myself through this time and again.

I have to say that I agree with her. One of the things that I wrote to her the day before our meeting was that I was afraid that I was doomed to repeat this cycle over and over and over. Anything that sends me into a self destructive crisis cannot be considered successful. But I couldn’t see a way out of it.

Her position is that I simply need to decide now how I am going to deal with my father. Maybe once I have done that, the pressure will be off enough that I can figure out what happened. Maybe I won’t be able to. But either way, at least I won’t be tearing myself apart. She pointed out to me that we know that I clearly have a fear response to him. At this point I am pretty much convinced that something happened, but can’t say what or how often (although I strongly suspect that whatever it was happened “now and again” rather than regularly). He was not emotionally supportive of me and I can’t remember feeling loved by him. He competed with me for my mother’s attention. He knowingly sent me to stay with someone who had abused him, because he wanted time alone with my mother. He wounded my soul in so many little ways through the years. My grandfather may have started my not feeling like a person, but my interactions with my dad also left me feeling as though he had taken a bit of my personhood, as well.

Even as an adult, our interactions can leave me feeling as though the fact that I am a full person has been chipped away. But that’s part of the reason he still feels so dangerous- in our current interactions, I am left feeling diminished and harmed. But I didn’t even realize that it was happening- I just knew that I came out of the interactions feeling badly about myself and figuring that it was a problem with me. He would do something ‘generous’ and the way that it would play out always left me feeling obligated and as if he owned a piece of me.

I have my doubts as to whether he is aware of what he is doing. I think that he needs to see himself as ‘generous’ and a ‘good person.’ I suspect that he is incapable of seeing himself as manipulative, because that is something he hated about his own father. He wanted to be nothing like his father, but I am coming to accept that he is a more palatable version of my grandfather. My father lost my grandfather’s most damaging traits: he isn’t sadistic; he doesn’t want to make everyone around him miserable; and whatever else it was that made my grandfather go to the extreme that he did. However, my father does have toned down, almost under control versions of many of his father’s characteristics. He is all about what he wants and his interest is what another person desires is important because of how their happiness interfaces with his ability to get what he wants. From all appearances, his capacity for empathy is stunted. Appearances are what matter. He had a need to feel more powerful than me. I can’t say whether or not he feels love, but he certainly didn’t know how to demonstrate it in anyway that made me feel loved. He certainly doesn’t seem to have any ability to nurture or to give from the heart.

So, he is is difficult person to have a close relationship with. It hurt to have him as my father. He isn’t someone that I would pick to have a relationship with of any type, if I could avoid it. And really, I don’t want to have a relationship with my dad now, but I have been so caught up in the belief that the only way that I can have my mother in my life is to have my father in it as well that I haven’t been able to see that. I have been saying more and more clearly for months that I don’t want to have anything to do with my dad, but I haven’t been able to take in that my saying that means that I really don’t want to have anything to do with my dad. In fact, this past session, Mama Bear spent most of the session trying to help me hear what I have been saying, and I could tell that I was missing something very important, but it was as though I had a huge blind spot and I simply could not see what was in it until I was talking with a friend a few hours after the session.

I don’t just ‘sort of’ want to not have anything to do with him, but even a brief consideration of contact with him brings up feelings of revulsion, nausea, and an absolute need to retreat. In some ways the strength of my reaction puzzles me because he doesn’t present any actual physical danger to me now and I know that he most likely wouldn’t even do anything deliberately emotionally damaging to me. I feel as though there should be a way that I could protect and armor the vulnerable parts of me, so they would be safe from the subtle sorts of damage that he could do to me now. But the message that I am getting is “Don’t push it.” I am struggling to understand what is a reasonable accommodation to these hurt parts that have held so much for so long and who I owe it to create a situation of safety and what would be giving in to my fears when I would be better served to push through and find a way to deal with them and understand that he can’t really harm me now.

And if I should resolve that question in favor of protecting myself, then I have to deal with the question of how to I cut my father out, but still keep my mother? Because as flawed as my mother is, I still love her and I know that she loves me. There is a lot to be said for a mother’s love.