Yesterday we met with a new therapist. Overall it went very well, and we’re tentatively hopeful about continuing to work with her.
She was asking us questions about our relationships and history with different family members, which of course included our father. She had to keep prompting us to talk about him...we offered information about other members of our family rather freely, but kept leaving him out of the discussion. “And what about your father?” she would say. Over and over.
We talked about how our relationship with him has always been strained. “He was very authoritarian,” we said. “He had a short temper. I never knew what was going to set him off.”
She asked what our relationship was like these days, and we talked about how he seemed to be trying--on the surface--to get closer. How he would tell us “I love you” on the phone. She asked if we said it back. We said yes, and she asked “Do you say it because you want to, or because you feel like you have to?” and without hesitation we answered “Because I have to.”
She asked “What do you think would have to happen, from him or from you, for you to want to say it back to him?”
I looked somewhere far away. She told me it’s okay if I didn’t have an answer right then, or if it was something I just plain didn’t want to do that was okay too.
I said I didn’t know. That I would have to think about it.
But I knew the answer: He would have to own up to the shit he did to me as a child. Not all of it necessarily--just the fact that he hurt me and made me live in fear. Then I could possibly think about wanting to say it back. No guarantees.
Part of me wants to give him the benefit of the doubt--that maybe he doesn’t know how it all affected me. And that’s bullshit.
At a young age we wrote him letters outlining the things he did that hurt us, and how it made us feel. Asking what we could do to be better so he wouldn’t have to do those things. That’s the kind of child we were. We wrote him letters and left them on his dresser while he was at work.
He never acknowledged any of them, although they disappeared after he came home.
The last letter we wrote to him talked about how we had to stop loving him. We must have been in middle school--around 11-13 years old. I remember the phrase “I have to harden my heart because it hurts.”
He knows. He’s always known. We made it very clear to him, between those letters and all the times we cried inconsolably to our mother asking why he treated us that way, only for her to tell us it’s “just the way he is” and “he doesn’t mean it.”
I don’t have a father. I never have. I’ve been hammering that into my skull and heart my entire life. It’s no concern to me that now, 26 years later, he’s just starting to realize he doesn’t have a daughter.
Waking up is a strange thing. Normally it takes hours for me to be conscious enough to actually wake up when I'm alone. When our partner is here, it's much quicker.
We are a notoriously heavy sleeper. We will sleep through alarms, ringing phones--any kind of ambient noise, except for someone entering our room. But there's a catch: we wake up instantly to someone entering the room, but we stay frozen. We observe through slitted eyes, listen for recognizable breathing or footsteps. 99% of the time it's our partner, so we allow him to come "wake us up" even though we've already been awake and alert since he entered the room. It makes us seem deceptively docile upon "waking" because we can filter our words and actions by that point.
I'm saying all this because sometimes, we're exhausted enough to sleep through him entering the room, and he does actually wake us by gently touching us (which is normally fine because again, already awake and somewhat coherent.) And on those days, everything about the experience is extremely unpleasant.
We tend to wake up confused, in a panic. Some very loud parts scream "don't touch me!" internally. Rather than leaning into his touch like we usually do, we recoil away from him. Our body is tense and unyielding. We growl and make low whining noises in the back of our throat rather than speak.
Our partner chalks these days up to us "waking up on the wrong side of the bed," and we let him think that because it's an easier explanation than the truth.
It’s odd, the way we twist definitions to protect ourselves from the truth.
We say we weren’t “hit” because
It never left a mark or bruise
It was never on our face (?)
It was “only a swat” or “just a smack” or “just a spanking”
It was punishment / we deserved it / we could have avoided it
The list goes on. But the truth is, we were touched with the intention of harm and physical intimidation. We behaved out of fear of being physically hurt.
Maybe I’m salty about this topic because I have more memories of the instances than the others do. I remember the feeling of outrage and betrayal and just soul-wrenching hurt. The sting of reddened flesh. The lump in my throat.
I know it’s not the intention of the others to slight the painful memories I hold, but it does hurt when they insist that “we were never hit” or they question “if we really suffered physical abuse.”
