Probably this is in your control. You bumped the ask BAP thread to rekindle a months-old discussion and now your feelings have been hurt over it.
I bumped the thread to fulfill an unspoken obligation that resulted from his request. I asked him the question he wanted me to ask, exchanged niceties in the form of a polite discussion, then bam! He changes the subject and starts trying to convince me that he knows my father better than I do. That's kind of a berserk button, right there; the reason it is so shall be explained in the last paragraph of this post.
But point taken. I could have and most likely should have worded the response less harshly. It
is his thread, after all.
I am going to talk about myself, telling the story of MY father. If I didn't say something that would not be fair to you.
On 2nd thought I wonder if I'm ready to tell it. I can't just lift out some pictures and expect them to tell the whole story. Furthermore I'm not sure I want to tell this:
Fathers & Sons. Who can tell a man's life?
Thank you for sharing this. It explains why you still have some faith in humanity left. It also explains why you used to be insecure about your role on this forum, but that's beside the point.
Now that I have enough information to understand your side of the story, I apologize for my harsh words: you are not to blame for misunderstanding my mental state, since you didn't have the knowledge needed to interpret my explanations. If you are willing, I will continue the discussion and explain my conclusions in the context of your life so as to return the courtesy you have extended me.
First of all, I'd like to point out that my experiences and beliefs do not invalidate the abuse
you have experienced. Neglectful parents
are traumatizing their children, there's no question about that. But they're traumatizing their children differently from other kinds of abusers, with different consequences.
I'm not sure
I can share the story of my relationship with my father - recalling all the bullshit he put me through fans the flames of my rage like nothing else can, and I'm told that patricide is a socially unacceptable course of action, which means that I have to keep the rage under control at all times - but here's a brief list of the differences between our relationships with our fathers:
1) Your father ignored you, brushed you off. While it is, indeed, a form of abuse, fearing to ask your father a question and feeling alone because he ignores you is not the same as tiptoeing around him all the time, carefully wording your responses to him, dreading the moment when he comes home from work, basically bending over backwards so as to not set him off.
Do you know
why I took that kind of precautions? Because if someone set him off, he'd hound them for days, screaming at them, gaslighting them, accusing them of things they did not do, waking them up with loud noises in the middle of the night, violating their personal space and walking into their room uninvited just to tell them what an ungrateful piece of shit they are.
Not to mention that he'd lash out at
everyone in the family, not just the "offender", in "subtle" ways, such as cutting off our only source of income and then blaming
us for not buying any food for him(which we couldn't do without money).
2) Your story is that of an absent father figure, jealousy and teenage rebellion gone bad. I'm not going to say that you're to blame for it, but I must notice that my teenage rebellion never happened: it was too costly for the entire family if I confronted him. Simply put, the circumstances have denied me the
freedom to rebel.
In other words, my relationship with my father over the years was that of a cold war: I was living not merely with a
despicable man, but a
hostile one, and that hostile man held a
lot of power over my life and choices.
3) Your father's abuse is easier to forgive, because the abuse depended entirely on your actions, it was under your control; it was an extension of your freedom... even though
he was actually accountable for the abuse.
And my abuse? It wasn't under my control at all, despite what good ol' dad claimed when he was trying to guilt-trip me. He abused people whenever the hell he felt like it; the only time
they had a choice was when they decided whether to confront him(and give him an excuse to escalate the abuse, all the way to smashing furniture and cutting off money) or take the abuse silently(which diminished their self-worth more than confronting him did). He really loves giving his victims a painful choice like that.
That particular difference explains why you feel guilt over hating your father and I don't. That, or maybe my emotions are just broken. I don't know for sure.
4) Your father's relationship with you was that of "tough love" that you appear to advocate: he didn't demand anything from you, he didn't threaten you. To be fair, he did neglect you, which incorporates a certain level of abuse into the relationship.
My father, on the other hand, did his best to punish me for actions that he didn't like, crush my personality, enslave me emotionally. It's not tough love in the least; it's abuse, pure and simple. I have
nothing to love or thank him for. Not. One. Thing. Not even my continued existence, which has been quite miserable up to this point in no small part due to his actions.
5) When you were young, you were jealous of your father, and when you grew up, you started to feel guilty about the way
you treated
him.
When I was young, I was afraid of my father, and when I grew up, I became enraged at him for what
he did to
me.
That's kind of a big hint as to the nature of our respective father-son relationships, isn't it?
The one thing that our stories
do have in common is that we both hated our fathers and yet became similar to them over the course of our lives. You grew up to be the ordinary, "weak" person that you used to think of as despicable, and I have noticed not too long ago that, if I let go of guilt, I actually enjoy making people miserable with accidental cutting remarks. (If I
don't let go of guilt, I inadvertently wound others anyway, but then I at least feel bad about it and start making amends.) The irony is pretty freaking rich, if you ask me.
To summarize: your experiences and mine differ
very much. It wouldn't hurt you to accept that there are people with
even crappier fathers than yours, the same way I accept that there are people who experienced much worse abuse than I did.
Acknowledging this doesn't diminish the role of abuse in your life, but it makes you recognize that sometimes
your experiences and
your ways of dealing with the abuse can't be extrapolated onto everyone else.
And not extrapolating your experiences onto other people is, unfortunately, a pretty important part of dealing with emotionally unstable survivors of abuse; if you extrapolate, it implies that you think you know them better than they do, which is remarkably similar to what most emotionally abusive parents to do their children.
(But it's not like advice can help an abused person, anyway. You're not their psychotherapist -
they didn't choose you to help them - and most of the time they simply aren't ready for advice in the first place.)
