Forgiving My Father
I forgive my father for his emotional unavailability and reconnect with self-compassion and security
In his book “The Forgiving Self,” Robert Karen gives a great explanation for how secure attachment in children is developed. It comes from a healthy cycle of fight and repair between children and their parents. Children start out with the idea that their parents are perfect, then they begin to realize that their parents are imperfect beings who care for them immensely and at the same time cause them much irritation and pain. The child begins to bring love and hate together. There is an imperfect parent who can lose her temper, who can make a lousy meal, who can talk too long on the phone and yet remain a good and loved person.
In addition to love and concern, children are able to feel a range of negative feelings toward their parents, including fury and hatred, but all within an envelope of love. The child thinks, “I’m hurt precisely because I love you and because I need you to love me. I’m angry because I love you. I criticize you because I love you. I hate you because I love you. I want you to be different because I love you.” It is the parent who keeps demonstrating and re-establishing that the children live in a country of love, that in this country all feelings are allowed, even hateful feelings, that the children don’t have to leave this country because of the other things the children feel. Children get to experience the greatest of all freedoms: the freedom to be. This is the foundation and mindset for developing a secure attachment.
I have a terrifying memory of my father from when I was just a kid. He was yelling loudly one day, so loudly it reverberated around the house. I remember seeing his face with his cheeks red and his mouth wide open. He was screaming like he was a madman. I must have been traumatized by seeing that. I remember thinking to myself, even as a child, “Dad is scary. I’m going to stay away from him and spend time with Mom instead. At least she doesn’t yell and isn’t scary.” My father was emotionally dysregulated. He was not aware of his emotions and did not know how to manage them at all. In addition, societal and cultural expectations dictated that he couldn’t share his emotional struggles with the family. Thus, he would bottle emotions up until they exploded, generally as anger.
Unfortunately, my mother was not emotionally regulated or available either. I had figured this out even at a young age. I remember going to her with a question I had. She was busy cooking, so she told me to go away and play. She didn’t follow up on the question either. I remember thinking my concerns were not addressed. I continued to worry about the issue (it was about my health) for the next few days because no one was there to offer me any reassuring words of comfort. My heart aches thinking about a confused nine-year-old walking around my parent’s house, keeping worries contained in her head instead of being able to confide in someone and get words of comfort and support.
This memory reinforces the idea to me that neither of my parents was emotionally available to me in my childhood. My mother was not available because she was barely able to handle her daily chores and personal troubles. My father was emotionally volatile and scary to me. The in-laws I lived in close proximity to were the cause of many of my parents’ marital tensions and didn’t offer me any emotional support. It wasn’t possible for me to develop a secure emotional attachment style in the circumstances of my childhood. I didn’t have anyone around me who had a secure attachment style either. These experiences led to many relationship dysfunctions I had to work through later in life, particularly with trusting others, developing secure relationships, and forgiving my parents for their limitations and shortcomings.
I responded to my parents’ lack of emotional availability by becoming very independent. I didn’t express my needs often because I figured that I needed to take care of them myself and there were not many people around to help me. I became very resourceful and used my wit to help me out in many situations. I learned to do many things on my own and became quite good at it. I read many superhero stories while growing up, and I unconsciously knew that I had to become a superhero of sorts to take care of myself and endure the pains of my childhood. I did all sorts of things on my own like moving to an apartment, moving to a different state, even to a different continent by myself.
Unfortunately, it was difficult for me to get out of that “survivor” way of thinking. I carried the “survivor/lone wolf” type of thinking into my relationships and had the belief that I needed to be extraordinary to be loved. I felt I needed to prove to everyone that I was always having a great time and was extremely successful. I only recently started to tell myself that I do not need to be a superhero to be accepted or loved. I can be ordinary and accepted and loved. This realization left me with a slightly bitter taste in my mouth. For a lot of people then, extraordinary success could be a sign of inner pain, struggle, and emptiness that the successful person is trying to fill with their success.
I was most angry at my father for how he let his toxic relationships with his family, his parents, and his siblings, spill over to affect his wife and kids. I believe my father let himself be taken advantage of by his family for many years. I’m assuming he felt powerless to change the situation. For some reason unknown to me, he did not or could not change it. I think deep down he knew he was being taken advantage of and this long-running situation was a major contributor to his anger management issues. Anger is usually a signal that one’s rights are being trampled. My father exploded into fits of rage daily at the slightest trigger. I witnessed many of his outbursts and found these moments extremely adverse and frightening. He took most of these rage fits out on my mother. Sometimes it was on me or my brother. I was deeply hurt seeing my parents fight like this. Some mornings, I would wake up to them yelling at each other.
Not only did I have to deal with my father’s rage at the toxic situation with his family, I also lived in close proximity with his family for many years. I had to deal with my grandmother’s emotionally manipulative ways for twenty years. Failure to protect children from abuse is often a feature of dysfunctional families. My interactions with my grandmother led to many dysfunctional ways of thinking and acting that were ingrained in me from an early age. There was no room for disagreement in my interactions with her. She was very clever in manipulating all family members to do what she wanted. My parents applied enormous pressure on me to listen to every word she said even when I completely disagreed with the request or idea. Because of these interactions, I suppressed my instincts to say “no” for many years and caved to manipulation. I had to spend months in therapy developing my “no” muscle and find the strength to set boundaries whenever I encountered her attempts at manipulation as an adult.
I realized how bad the manipulation was during a role-playing exercise with my therapist. My therapist acted as my grandmother and we practiced my reaction to her if she made a request and insisted I comply even if I don’t want to. My reaction at the first sign of pressure was telling: I stopped breathing. That was how stressful it was to deal with my grandmother. My therapist noticed and pointed this out. We worked on how I can remember to start breathing again, and then speak up to firmly keep my boundaries. Unfortunately, the potential to be manipulated by my grandmother remains very real to this day. I find I have to be vigilant about it in my dealings with her. This continues to cause friction in my relationship with my father when he tries to convince me to spend time with her or communicate with her. The memories and scars from my grandmother’s past manipulations are still too fresh for me to be receptive to any interactions with her.
I was mad at my father for a very long time. In the beginning, I had no idea of what I was mad about. The past transgressions were buried deep inside me and unconsciously overlooked. Over time, they slowly unraveled in front of me as I worked on my unresolved issues one day at a time. Now I am very clear-eyed about what I don’t like in my interactions with my father and what his family brings into my life, and I set boundaries around it. I was pretty disappointed when I came to several of these realizations. I guess that’s part of growing up from a child into an adult. I stopped idolizing my father many years ago and see more and more of his deep flaws the older I get. He was supposed to be my protector. He couldn’t protect me from his manipulative family. I forgive him for not being able to protect me from toxic family members. I am old enough and wise enough to protect myself now.
After processing all this, I do want to maintain a relationship with my father as I still want to maintain a relationship with my mother. I am very intentional about what I want out of the relationship, the amount of time we will spend together, and for what occasions. I am also very clear about my hardline “no’s” and I do not let him or his family pressure me into doing anything I do not wish to. Although it’s a difficult relationship that requires work, I feel it’s worth it to maintain it. The more time I spend with him as an adult, the more I understand what his emotional limitations are. I understand that he is emotionally immature and what that means about his capacity as a father.
In addition, doing all this forgiveness work helps me with my relationship with myself. Although my father was not emotionally there for me, I can look out for my needs and find ways to meet them. I have people in my life now who are there for me. I have created my own family and circle of friends and support resources who are emotionally available and can support and encourage me as needed. I can practice self-compassion and honor my feelings and needs. I see my father’s limitations and acknowledge that I have real needs, even though he wasn’t able to meet them when I was a child. I no longer need to censure needs; I have the means to get what I need now. By practicing self-compassion on a regular basis, I continue to move towards healing and security. I get back in touch with love and can operate within a “country of love.”
“[A “dead zone” develops around an untold] anguish, as well as rage at the cultural stigma attached to the entire event. If a woman desires, however, to retain all her instincts and abilities to move freely within her psyche, she can reveal her secret or secrets to one trustworthy human being, and recount them as many times as necessary. A wound is usually not disinfected once and then forgotten, but is tended to and washed several times while it heals…Part of healing from a secret is to tell it so that others are moved by it. In this way, a woman begins to recover from shame by receiving the succor and tending that she missed during the original trauma.
“What is valuable here is the true cleaning of the feminine laundry once and for all…The can of worms you were worried about opening is better off being out there than festering inside yourself. Whatever the secret is, we understand that it is now part of our work for life. Redemption heals a once-open wound.” — Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés
