Letter to my Father: A New Draft

Started by Milarepa, April 03, 2015, 08:16:48 PM

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Milarepa

Dear Dad,

Whenever we talk about my childhood, I invariably try to prove my truth to you as if I were presenting a case in court. I lay out my evidence, telling you story after story of the things that hurt me. But individual stories are not the issue, it is their accumulation over time that did the damage. Each story I tell you reverberates with the intensity of many half-remembered incidents that made me feel the same way. Each time I share any of my painful memories with you, I re-experience the sheer volume of misery they collectively represent and am left nearly incoherent with grief.

I get the sense that you find these trips down memory lane confusing. It is as if I were pointing to a lit candle with the intensity normally reserved for forest fires; and you, seeing only the candle, were becoming increasingly confused as to what all the fuss was about.

It is very easy to dismiss someone as hysterical or overdramatic when she weeps and screams over what you see as a candle but she sees as a forest fire, and so this exercise rapidly becomes disempowering for me and unproductive for both of us.

The future of our relationship depends on my experiences and feelings being evidence enough that something has been seriously amiss with us for many years. So in this attempt to explain gravity of my injuries, I won't be presenting any more stories-as-evidence. Instead, I'll try to give you a broader view of the whole forest fire, how it burned me, and what it left in its wake.

You've made it abundantly clear that you want, and feel entitled to, weekly contact with me. Whether or not this becomes possible for me is entirely up to you. I will allow you to be in my life only to the extent that you respect the validity of my feelings, experiences, and boundaries, and adjust your expectations of our relationship to reflect my needs as well as yours.

I am uncertain of your willingness to look at the impact of your choices with enough curiosity and compassion to make any kind of real relationship between us possible. I would prefer that you opt to do the work, but I am prepared to accept that you may not be up to it.

It's your choice. If you wish to continue, I will get to the heart of the matter.

You have said that your job as a father is to encourage your kids to live up to the potential you see in them, and that their emotional well-being is the exclusive domain of their respective mothers. Under the most uncomplicated and ideal of circumstances, your approach might result in reasonably healthy children; but life is very rarely ideal and free of complication and our family was no exception. For the majority of my childhood, you and my mother shared neither a home nor a loving relationship. Two people who were as disconnected as you and she could not possibly have successfully struck, let alone executed well on such a bargain.

Anachronistic gender roles and joint custody complications aside, your approach had at least two other major flaws, both related to our specific situation and the people involved:

The first was my mother. You were married to her. You knew how unstable, angry, mean, and bitter she can be. I have a hard time believing that a man of your intelligence would think that such a person was capable of holding up her end of that division of parenting labor.

The second was me. I possessed tremendous intellectual and artistic gifts, it's true, but I was also an extremely sensitive and intense child. Those personality traits are the well-documented downsides of what we call "giftedness." Under ideal circumstances, the parents of so-called "gifted" children help them to develop the skills they need in order to cope with these downsides, but as I've said our circumstances were far from ideal.

I suspect that you didn't factor the downsides of my "giftedness" into the potential you were cheering for me to live up to; and we both know that you weren't willing to support my emotional needs. You seemed to me to be far more interested in cheering for a fake daughter who was doing well and shining brightly than caring for the excruciating suffering of the child you actually had; and that made me feel profoundly abandoned.

You also seemed far more interested in creating your new family and making me fit into it than in  attending to or understanding anything that was going on with me. This made me feel relegated to second class status in favor of your new and ostensibly better life. I still feel this way almost every time I interact with you, or any other member of your second family; and it hurts me greatly.

My feelings of abandonment and being second class on their own would have been bad enough, but I also found myself feeling manipulated, criticized, and occasionally physically forced into attending to your emotional needs at the expense of my own. It was as if your need for me to be a certain way trumped my need for even the most basic physical and emotional boundaries.

The lack of unconditional and total acceptance and belonging, the constant permeability of my boundaries, and the role reversal of being made responsible for an adult's emotional well-being at the expense of my own, hurt me further.

I know that you and my mother made an honest attempt to help me by sending me to [Therapist]; but I was a young child, and not developmentally prepared to process complex and difficult emotions on my own with the help of a therapist for only one hour each week. The fact that she was willing to treat me at all under those circumstances leaves me skeptical about her competence as a mental health professional.

The psychologist Pete Walker writes that the core wound at the heart of all adverse childhood experiences is the emotional abandonment of the child by their primary caregivers. Children are evolutionarily hard-wired, as a matter of survival, to seek their parents' approval. When unconditional witnessing and holding of a child's whole self is not present during during the vulnerable and developmentally sensitive years preceding adolescence, "children feel worthless, unlovable, and excruciatingly empty. It is so injurious that it changes the structure of the child's brain...Eventually, any inclination toward authentic or vulnerable self-expression activates neural networks of self-loathing...The ability to support himself or take his own side in any way is decimated."

Walker notes that this happens even without a child having been abused "noticeably and dramatically" through physical or sexual violence. In other words, a child need not have been starved, beaten, or raped to develop a severe case of PTSD.

Since you had given me the distinct impression that my tremendous suffering was totally unacceptable to you, I concluded that I would only be good enough for you if my pain ceased to exist. I followed your lead in abandoning the parts of myself that were sensitive, afraid, or suffering in an effort to please you. I strove for perfection and invulnerability in all areas of my life.

At times, I strove to please you by pretending that all was well in our relationship, all the while continuing to suffer; sometimes quietly, sometimes with great vehemence when circumstances brought my buried pain close to the surface. I have given up on these futile efforts at perfection and appeasement by fits and starts; seeking balance, relapsing into unhealthy patterns, and collapsing under the weight of my own exhaustion and self-loathing before restarting the cycle.

For as long as I can remember, I have too often felt that I am a worthless, pathetic mistake, and that I was never supposed to be here. I have felt that I am not worthy of love, belonging, or support. I have felt that any sign of weakness or expression of need will result in my immediate abandonment and total obliteration. In those moments, suicide seems to be the most self-compassionate course of action because I feel too broken to continue living.

To paraphrase Walker, that sensation is the neurological echo of my childhood, and it is built into the very structure of my brain. It can be evoked at a moment's notice by a seemingly minor violation of my boundaries, a voice raised in anger, or the sense that someone I love, or even a total stranger, is displeased with me.

If something truly awful, destabilizing, or scary happens; that sensation is amplified exponentially and reverberates so powerfully through me that I forget there ever was, or ever will be, any other emotion. I collapse and must work to rebuild myself piece by piece.

That reality is difficult enough to live with, but if such a trigger comes from you or my mother, and I am not in the best of all possible places emotionally, the interaction will leave me feeling particularly suicidal. This is why I sometimes react to your bids for my attention with such fear. I am quite literally afraid for my life.

The world is a minefield of such triggers. I never know what seemingly minor experience will cause the bottom to drop out of my reality and send me reeling. As a result, my life is in a constant state of tension between the enormous possibilities my gifts create for me and the viciously unpredictable limitations imposed upon me by the sensitive temperament I never fully learned to manage and the reactivity of my traumatized brain.

If a child is well met by her parents, she is set up to claim for herself a life which brings her contentment most of the time and joy often enough. Perhaps those people do owe some measure of contact to the parents who saw them for who they were and met them fully when they were young.

This is not the case here. For me, the search for a life of contentment and joy is a constant, painstaking fight to reprogram my own brain. I am winning that fight day by day, but too often, being around you re-activates the old, dysfunctional mental circuitry that I am working to re-wire. Quite bluntly, our relationship as it has been, is not safe for me.

If our dynamic had changed, my response to your requests might be different; but to me, it seems as if you are still operating from the same set of expectations and assumptions that got us to this point. I still feel pushed by you to prioritize your needs over my own. I still feel that my suffering, my experiences, and my perspective carry little to no weight or validity for you. I still feel that, whenever I engage with you or your second family, I carry the burden of my suffering alone while the rest of you carry on with your lives. Worst of all, I feel judged by you for being angry about all of this, and for not cleaning up the the mess that you made of my developing brain fast enough to suit you.

I understand that all of this is probably painful and shame-inducing for you to look at. Facing it may even bring up some of your unresolved feelings from your own childhood. I understand why you'd rather I just send you a nice one-line e-mail once a week. It would be so much easier for you. But for my well-being and recovery, I cannot participate in perpetuating the lie that we are okay while coping alone with the painful legacy I have described here.

Writing this letter has been an excruciating task for me. As I've said before, revisiting these truths about my past often leaves me breathless with sadness and anger. But by taking the time and emotional energy to lay things out in this way, I have made a tremendous effort at truth and reconciliation. My aim is to transform our relationship into one that is generative, authentic, and mutually sustaining.

I invite you to join me in this effort. Here are some suggestions for how to do that:


  • Respect the magnitude and gravity of the damage I sustained as a child.
  • Accept accountability and acknowledge to me and to your second family that you are responsible for a large portion of this damage.
  • Acknowledge to me and to your second family that my continued struggles, my long absences, and my anger with you are not due to any personal or moral failing on my part; but have been the natural relational consequence of your choices.
  • Get curious, rather than defensive or shame-stricken, about the long-term consequences of your actions and the work I am doing to recover.
  • If I cannot see you at any point, respect my answer of "no" as self-protective. When I say "no," or withdraw my "yes," wait for me patiently and know that I will come back when I can.
  • Recognize that if you engage in any behavior towards me that feels to me like badgering, berating, shaming, guilt tripping, bullying, or manipulation - even if that is not your intention - I will have to pull away further.

And so we come back to our options. Closeness or coldness. The choice is yours.

If you can be an active, consistent, and respectful participant in my recovery by implementing these suggestions, I am willing to explore the possibility of more frequent contact with you. If not, I will need to have minimal contact with you for my own well-being.

No matter what you decide, please stop worrying about me. I have, through my own agency and initiative, surrounded myself with a loving, healthy, functional family. I will rewire my brain and find the contentment that is the inalienable right of each precious human being. I will continue that effort, with great skill and courage, no matter what happens with us.

Love,
Teresa