A recent search of a drawer that had been shelved for some time revealed old documents and greeting cards, the latter for occasions like birthdays and holidays. They were not the ones I had received, but the ones I had given. Somehow compelled by one, I opened it. It was for my father, and the stick-shaped letter he had used once, but had long since forgotten, indicated my childhood handwriting. What was more significant, however, was the feeling inside.
“Daddy, I love you,” he said.
Immobilized, I felt caught between the child I once was and the adult I became after enduring an unstable, insecure, and sometimes predatory para-alcoholic upbringing.
“Daddy, I love you,” I read again.
Who, I wondered, was the person who wrote that? My life with my father apparently started that way. But sadly, it didn’t end that way. Where, I wondered, has the love gone?
Like a growing weed, the disease of dysfunction had evidently surrounded and strangled my soul, squeezing it from what it was to what it wasn’t.
A look back at the painful path I was forced to follow provided many clues as to why.
My father, enacting the same patterns of abuse upon me that were directed at him as a child victim of a raging alcoholic, did not understand the origins of his behavior, ignored the difference between right and wrong, had no empathy or feeling for the damage he inflicted on me, and he was as devoid of love as I was.
“As children and adolescents, we did not receive a true or consistent example of love,” warns the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (World Service Organization, 2006, p. 6). “So how can we know or recognize it as adults? Our parents shamed or belittled us for being vulnerable children. In their own confusion, they called it love. loving parents. What many adult children described as love or intimacy…was actually codependency or rigid control.”
An adult son testified that his parents “said they loved him, but he did not remember feeling safe or loved as a child (ibid, p. 270). “His alcoholic father threatened the family and cursed his children.”
Trying to grow and develop as a person in the midst of such conditions is like trying to build a 100-story skyscraper in the middle of a hurricane. Discerning the love within him is just as difficult, especially within and between episodes of verbal, emotional, and sometimes physical abuse.
“In order to feel as loving as we can within a relationship, we need to feel safe, and we cannot feel safe while being bullied or emotionally manipulated,” according to Peter R. Breggin in “Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming Negative Emotions” ( Prometheus Books, 2014, p. 228) “Love grows in the midst of security and trust, and tends to withdraw in their absence.”
Personal perception, as has been said many times, is the determinant of reality, and repeated parental transgressions create hairpin triggers in a child and ultimately an adult child, causing him to distrust his reality and rob you of trust in others, many of whom represent authority figures displaced by parents later in life.
“We don’t need to be factually correct when we perceive that someone is bullying or manipulating us,” Breggin continues (ibid, p. 228). “Our personal point of view is what counts. If we feel emotionally hurt, we have the right to act on our feelings by demanding that it stop or withdrawing.”
Those subjected in captivity to such treatment during childhood had no choice but to endure it, however, progressively diminished and reduced by the caretakers who served as their most important role models. That this was administered by such people only adds to the distorted definition of “love”.
“When confronted with the effects of verbal and emotional abuse…we often resist,” according to the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (op. cit., p.30). “We couldn’t believe that the people who said they loved us or cared about us were lying. If we were called lazy, embarrassing, or embarrassing, it must (have been) true, as the words came from the most important people in our lives. If we keep an open mind, we learn that this was verbal abuse presented as love, but a loving parent doesn’t say those things to a child.”
Although the children do not question their prejudicial and demeaning treatment, deluding themselves into believing that it is due to their own inadequacy and shortcomings, it is a thin veil for the parents’ inadequacy, and very treacherous.
“Love may have hurt you,” writes Breggin (op. cit., pp 222-223). “Love may have let you down. Love may have betrayed you. Betrayals in your family or church may have made you distrust anyone who says the word ‘love’ or refers to a loving God. Your pastor may have threatened you with the hell and your father may have told you that you were doomed. Having lost love too many times, you may have descended into chronic anger or numbness.”
Enduring an abusive, alcoholic upbringing is nothing less than insanity, which is virtually the opposite of love.
“It’s impossible to be loving and crazy at the same time,” notes Breggin (ibid., p. 244). “This is because love connects us with people, and madness has to do with disconnecting from people.”
Toolless and underdeveloped, a baby, defenseless against this insanity, seeks protection and shelter through the only channel available to him, namely by burrowing deep into himself, creating the protected inner child, which, unless perceived and understood, remains eternally suspended. at the time of creation for the duration of his life. He replaces himself with the pseudo self, which, as a false construct, is unable to genuinely connect with others and with God, who is the very essence of love. Like a smokescreen, he processes it as biased static, unable to internalize it.
Alcoholism, a major cause of this survival-enhancing action, kills.
“The cost of our continued allegiance to alcoholism is the loss of our capacity to love,” according to the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (op. cit., p. 357). “We lose our ability to give and take as a result of not resolving the violent conflicts that threatened to destroy our families. We internalize these conflicts and carry them into adulthood, constantly seeking to control the unmanageable chaos within.”
Unstable parenting breeds codependency, a disease of loss of individuality, which causes a person to “connect” with others in an effort to gain attention, affirmation, and love, usually from those, like their parents, who they can provide it.
“Our experience shows that codependent breakdown, which creates an external focus to gain love or affirmation, is created by a dysfunctional childhood,” according to the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (ibid., p. 60). “…This soul breaking is abandonment by our parents or caregivers. Abandonment sets us up for a life of looking outward for love and security that never comes.”
“Love is the most precious spiritual good in the world,” says Breggin (op. cit., p. 222). “At the very core of our being is the ability and desire to love and be loved.”
“(However), all the pain and suffering apparently associated with (it) has to do with the flawed ways in which we human beings relate to each other,” he concludes (ibid, p. 244).
Putting the card back in the drawer, I know that I have been a product of all this, and I realize that the presence and absence of love were the differences between the father I had and the one I lost.
ARTICLE SOURCES
“Adult Children of Alcoholics”. Torrance, California: World Service Organization for Adult Children of Alcoholics, 2006.
Breggin, Peter R. “Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming Negative Emotions.” Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2014.