Chapter 26
Duality Part I
This image was one of many that appeared after searching ‘duality’ in Adobe Stock. I found it painful as I pictured my daughter in the middle. Painful for two reasons:
I don’t think for one minute she’s entertaining a paradigm shift. Those fuckers don’t like shifting. They’ll cling on often to the bitter end; I remember my last moments in rehab during a one to one with the only other Heyoka I’d ever met (although I didn’t know the word Heyoka back then. He was on the outside what I was on the inside but never dared show the world). It was last chance saloon to get honest. The self-inflicted punishment if I wasn’t? Three months back to drinking alcoholically in the abyss when he’d drop me back home straight from the centre. Honesty required me to tell him how scared I was and how that informed many of my undesirable behaviours. I had spent a lifetime hiding that shit from the world because showing fear as a child wasn’t be met with care or love or validation. And truth be told, if all you’ve ever known is fear, it’s really tricky to label it as such.
My intent has never been to place my daughter in a position to choose a parent but to choose herself by me laying out all the painstaking evidence in this blog. To invoke her curiosity. To ask herself why is she still so anxious despite removing her accused father and brother from her life? Why does she react so defensively to anyone challenging her belief system? Why can’t she make any decisions without ringing her mother? Why does she think that her controlling of her boyfriend is both needed and ok? Why do her emotions get so out of control? Why she never thinks she can be wrong and when people question her ‘rightness’ why are they excluded from her life? Why she has never had friends that last? Why did she change school so many times due to ‘bullying’ but settled in a private school that miraculously sorted everything? How, when I abandoned her, did things get worse if I’m the issue? Why didn’t her mother help her foster healthy relationships with friends but instead actively divided her friendships by not offering a healthy balanced view? To question if it was healthy her being taken for drinks by her mother to TGIs from such a young age and to ask the difficult questions such as was this a healthy mother-daughter bonding routine or nothing more than grooming and emotional incest and to maybe, just maybe, seek the independent opinion of professionals as both her father and brother have done.
Until then, let’s crack on with the dot-to-dot picture by cheating a little and using the help of independent sources available to all within a few clicks ….
From the very start, my daughter was to be her mother’s princess Golden-child by passing on to her daughter the experience she had with her own father. My daughter would become her mother’s designated ‘protector’ through parentification, whilst her brother, being older and with a relatively firmer sense of self and agency, was to become her scapegoat.
Once the penny drops, as it did so heavily with my son, those relationships become starkly evident in the family photo album. Photos and events that lingered, as dots in his very own puzzle, suddenly made painful sense.
A child obviously has no means to compare the parenting of other children; to assess whether it’s healthy or abusive. It destroys us because we believe our parents love us and have our best interests at heart. Abuse isn’t just the things we are forced to endure, it’s also the healthy and loving things we don’t experience and if we have nothing to compare to, we don’t know that things are really messed-up and that what we have been taught is so so wrong.
Finally, when we get let out into the big wide world, we find the world doesn’t sing to our tune nor our souls. In fact, we can’t hear our souls for they have been firmly silenced.
In my case for four decades.
And a life without Soul is no life at all.
Where were we? Oh yes! Duality and my beautiful daughter.
One..
My daughter’s truth:
Another truth:
My truth:
Chapter 7 ‘The Enabler Parent’ in Growing up as the Scapegoat to Narcissistic Parents, (Jay Reid): ‘The enabler parent buries themselves in work, alcohol and extra-marital affairs.’
After my daughter was born my services as sperm donor were completed and following a vasectomy in 2004 (for the men reading this, don’t believe anyone that says it doesn’t hurt!!), I was deemed too ‘unattractive to have sex with’ (remember Chapter 7?) and was to spend the next five years in the spare room before leaving the family house. It was during this time that I sought love from outside my marriage and with that, set off on my path to abandoning my children.
I’ve learnt that one of the worse things an enabler parent can do is to ‘leave his children behind, bury himself in work and fall into addiction’.
Two…
My daughter’s truth:
Another truth repeated:
My truth:
My daughter has been conditioned to think that I am the ‘bad parent’. She doesn’t know that after I was the last to be told of her pregnancy, her mother spent weeks at mine trying to convince me to tell her that ‘she must have an abortion’. She doesn’t know that when she decided to leave school, again out of sight, her mother demanded that ‘you have to tell her to continue with her education’. I constantly countered her mother’s frustration and angry demands by saying ‘she’s her own person’ and ‘it’s her life! She has the right to choose.’
My daughter’s reasoning?
I never told my children about any of their mother’s antics. Not once. I protected them about everything she ever did. So who could blame her when she’s only ever heard one side? Unfortunately that’s had to change.
Both my children were subjected to a long term insidious conditioning called ‘parental alienation’ , something my son confirmed his mother did for years despite my family’s rejection of such an idea in the early days of our marital separation.
Their mother has to look good to the world. She has to be seen as the ‘good parent’. A parent whose pathological control masquerades as care.
My own undiagnosed cPTSD responses.
It absolutely matters not where my behaviours originate in terms of my children’s experiencing of me. Controlling is controlling. Anger outbursts are anger outbursts. I’d create an insecure environment at times and certainly one that lacked consistent nurture that my children desperately needed and deserved. That’s what happens when one is in survival mode all their lives being constantly driven by fear.
Sometimes it’s been easier for my daughter to see things as ‘control’. It shifts the responsibility and keeps her sleeping in the comfortable bed she’s made for her and her young family, totally blind to their own acting parts in my family’s generational trauma.
‘Your mom’s an addict. My dad’s an addict. We need to stick together and be safe.’ I hear her say to her submissive boyfriend. She controls who he speaks to everyday. I first heard the coercive control directed to her unhealed lover on her 18th birthday at a restaurant with her mother, brother and her now deceased grandmother;
‘Don’t talk to my brother!’ she snapped at him early on in the celebrations. My heart sank as his shoulders shrugged forlornly.
I last saw her boyfriend at their new apartment earlier in the year. It was the second time I’d seen it but this time they had moved in and I had arrived with my son to fit an under-sink vanity unit I’d built at home from measurements I’d taken during my first visit. We were both laden with tools as he rang her from outside the door we used the last time to gain entry to the complex, except this time she wasn’t letting us in. Instead, despite her brother’s and my repeated requests, she insisted we walk around to the newly commissioned remote access door at the opposite side of the building. It would have taken 30 seconds for her to have popped down, a point I raised when entering her apartment. My insides stirred with the familiar feeling of being loved for my ‘doing’ and not my ‘being’.
When you have the See-Feel you know instinctively the difference between the actions of a typically selfish teenager and something that is much darker.
My discomfort increased as I was shown around her newly furnished pad; it was beige, homogenous and perfectly presented. To anyone else, it was a beautiful home. To me, it reeked of both my ex wife’s current abode and the former family home; controlled, theatrical and soulless.
I told them it was lovely and that they’d done really well to get this far; they are both young and ‘J’, her boyfriend, had worked crazy hours getting the funds together for their mortgage. He’s a ‘doer’ too.
‘J’ was half-way through a flat-pack furniture build and asked me for some help with which I was more than happy to oblige but not until I’d held my beautiful grandson. An absolutely stunning little man that I’d fallen in love with nearly a year ago.
I hadn’t seen ‘J’ for a while. I always sensed that my daughter did what she could to keep us apart (her mother’s parental alienation of me together with my addiction history and my challenging of her toxic behaviours at times would finally cause her to end all contact with me). He looked drained and had a slight tremor. A little bit like the proverbial rabbit in headlights.
Before my son and I left, I spent an hour or so with ‘J’ completing the flat pack build whilst also teaching him methods to use in other DIY jobs; ‘teach a man to fish’ and all that.
After I hugged my daughter and her family for the very last time, I pointed to a wall in the living room and said to my daughter, ‘bring some colour in. Just a little bit on that wall.’ I smiled.
She didn’t understand that it was never about the colour. It wasn’t about control. It was about what the colour represented; love, kindness, warmth, respect, peace and…….hugs.
She would love my hugs often saying ‘I love your hugs so much Dad!’, But that stopped years ago as her’s morphed into the previously mentioned ‘pat on the back’.
There’s a beautiful Welsh word that describes how I tried time and time again to get her to See through holding her;
I believe ‘J’ has restarted his ADHD meds since we last met. ADHD symptoms worsen greatly in the presence of stress……..and abuse. That news sent a shiver down my spine as I was reminded of a time 25 years ago; my ex said I should go to the GP to get antidepressants. I think I’d stopped ‘doing’ for a while and that wasn’t a good thing in our house, so obviously it needed sorting quick sharp.
There are ‘ADHDers’ everywhere throughout this blog it seems. You only have to do a quick Google search to see how common it is that narcissistic folk and ADHDers get together for relationships that don’t end well; it took my best friend (‘B’ from Chapters 22 and 24.1) four months of living here to finally See his pattern for choosing narcissistic women to mother his children (he moved in temporarily, a month after my son, to exit an abusive relationship, and unbeknownst to himself, to start working on his own healing).
I chuckle (‘please could I have a first class ticket to hell please?’) as I recall his repeated cries from the shower upstairs the moment the penny dropped for him as it did for me in Chapter 22;
‘Noooooooooo!!!’
‘You have to wake for the Others to See’ has become a weekly headline here but sadly not for some over the past few months- their triggered narcissistic ways being more comfortable than the effort required to get honest, to open their eyes and to heal. Sadly they continue with the delusion that they are the victim whilst continuing to harm their nearest and dearest.