Today is Father's Day, celebrated around the nation, often with fond memories, by families and children, about the loving relationships they had and continue to have with their fathers. Opening my Facebook account, I see many posts by adult children warmly and lovingly bestowing fond compliments upon their fathers, whether they be biological fathers or step-fathers.
For me, with the painful relations that I had with my father, Father's Day is a mixed blessing. I know many men my own age, who have families, and those families appear to warmly embrace them and display a distinct joy in their personhood. I know of other adult children who speak fondly of their fathers who live nearby or in other states, or whom have passed on, about whom the adult children tell wonderful and loving anecdotes. And I listen and smile for them, while at the same time I feel a profound sense of numbness in my own heart about my own father, who died 5 years ago. In those moments, hearing fond reminisces from other children, for me to feel numb is a positive and necessary defense, given what I often feel about my father.
Mixed Emotions About "Loving Feelings"
One of my father's most cherished statements, about 'loving' his children, was "I only beat you because I love you". For him, that was love! As I've said in previous blogs, one of the only ways my father knew how to 'reach out and touch' his sons was with his fists, in a fit of rage. My father was filled with rage on a consistent basis, as though it was his most 'familiar' feeling.
As I stated the day he died in 2011, "my father was a sadist and a pedophile" and rather than feeling sadness upon hearing about his death, I felt incredibly delightful joy. It was one of the happiest and most liberating days of my entire life. Finally, this man who had filled my life with intense brutality and a profoundly dysfunctional concept of 'loving parenthood' was gone. Yet, in his passing, it wasn't as though all of my painful memories died with him. To this day, whenever I'm out in public and I see an older man who reminds me of my father, a distinctly searing SHOCK runs through my body, causing me to tense up my muscles in defense, before my conscious mind kicks in and reminds me that I'm only being triggered by past painful memories and that this can't actually be my father since he's now dead.
Working Through Angry Memories
In my family, it was simply "not ok" to feel anger about our father's brutality. Feeling anger and having that anger seep out in the form of resentment always resulted in being beaten even more brutally by our father. He made sure that he was the only person in the family who was allowed to express anger, and his anger all too often came in the form of seething, loudly shouting rage, followed by the use of the metal end of his belt on our buttocks, or the back of his hand on our face, or his fists ploughing into our bodies.
I was the third of three sons, the youngest member of the family. I was given the same name as my father (although he was 'Donald Ward' and I was 'Donald Bruce'), I looked the most like him, having inherited his English/German facial structures far more than my older brothers [who inherited more of our maternal Hispanic features], and from an early age I was the child who was less athletic and therefore was around the house more often, instead of departing into the outer world, like my brothers, to escape the emotionally poisonous atmosphere of the family home. Additionally, as I've come to be aware of through many years of painful and disorienting (though eventually liberating) mental health therapy, I was the child who was most subjected to his pedophile behavior, being anally raped at 9 months of age, and raped, either anally or orally, on several other occasions until the age of 11. Recently, I've come to realize that I have almost no memory of my life between the ages of 5 - 10, as though there is a 'blank slate' in my memory bank. My therapist recently termed it "traumatic amnesia", caused by being in such a state of terror, during that period of my life, that the memories are locked away in a dissociative part of the brain.
I had several instances of seizure disorders during my early childhood, which the doctors finally labeled as epilepsy, but which I've come to realize, through intense therapy and extensive reading on issues of psychology and sexual abuse, were more likely caused by traumatic mental and bodily responses to violent rape. I was placed on anti-convulsive medication at the age of 11 (through the age of 22), which paradoxically increased my feelings of often 'being numb' as I entered my teenage years, when the violent brutality of my father also increased in intensity, thereby placing me in a physical position where I was unable to adequately defend myself. Given my father's later denial of his brutality (when I finally accumulated enough courage, with the assistance of my therapists, to confront him about his beatings), it was amazing that I was able to hold onto the clarity about his behavior and actually survive that terror and continue to be alive in adulthood. "Survived", though, was for many years a mixed blessing: it took many, many years of difficult and painful mental health therapy to finally move beyond an emotional state of profound and more or less continuous dissociation, given how terrifying it was 'to be safe and comfortable within my own body'.
One of the most liberating 'exercises' my therapist has motivated me to engage in, to assist in breaking through the wall of terror which continues to be the background landscape of my life, has been anger workouts. The nature of the exercise is to express my anger in a safe environment, whereby others around me don't feel threatened by that expression and simultaneously in such a manner that I can feel safe to express that anger without being further traumatized. The point is to get in-touch with the anger and create a relationship with the anger without being the anger. Many people engage in the anger workouts as a walking meditation, expressing the angry feelings either in their minds or in an area where they can shout it out without threatening others.
My intimate partner of many years, who cares deeply about my emotional recovery and who has come to understand and have great empathy about the nature of my trauma, has agreed in the last week to be in the same room with me, to act as a witness, while I vocally express my anger about the abuse I experienced as a child at the hands of both of my parents. She knows and holds quite ably to the knowledge that the anger has nothing to do with her, and therefore she needn't feel threatened by it. I am able to engage in the anger workout more safely, because with her in the room, I can more successfully 'titrate' the anger and not feel (as I often did in the past when I tried unsuccessfully to engage in the exercise on my own) that I will be overwhelmed by the anger and be thrown into a state of terror by my own expression of anger [given, once again, how it was 'not ok' in my family-of-origin to safely express anger].
Breakthrough Generated by 'Anger Workouts'
Just this past week, following an afternoon 'anger workout' wherein I allowed myself to shout out the anger I had built up from years of traumatic abuse, I had a most significant dream that night. In the dream, my father [who was an Air Force officer] was on a stage with several other military officers. They were discussing some sort of military task, and I turned to my eldest brother and said "he's doing a fine job", in reference to the officer who was talking. For some inexplicable reason -- my father had a lot of inexplicable, completely non-rational reasons for his anger -- my father became enraged by my comment (how he heard it was not explained by the dream). A messenger came up to my brother and I and said our father wanted to 'talk' to us. I turned to my brother and, pounding my fist, said "Let's both beat the crap out of him!"
We walked down this long hallway, through what was a baroque version of my grandparent's former New Mexico hacienda, and came to the back room where my father was. He demanded that I 'apologize' for the comment I had made "or else pay the consequences". I, who in the dream am my present 64-years-of-age, angrily retorted "And what might those consequences be?" My father's eyes became even more enraged and he noted I knew what he meant. I then said "Fuck you, I'm not going to apologize for expressing my own opinion." This alone was a major breakthrough; as a child I was terrified to ever express any open resentment, knowing full-well what the consequences would be and knowing I could not adequately defend myself from his brutality.
In the dream, he proceeded to pull off his belt and wrap it around his fist, with the metal end exposed. And I pulled off my own belt and wrapped it around my fist in the same manner and shouted "So you want to brutalize me? Let's go for it, asshole, except this time there will be two of us fighting!" My father becomes over-the-top enraged and reaches for a baseball bat and says "You have no idea what I'm capable of doing to you!" [When I was in my last year of high school, after my brothers had left home for college, my father often shouted, as he was beating me unmercifully "If you ever get too big to fight back, I can always use a baseball bat!"] I, in the dream, reach for another baseball bat and shout "Again, as I said, there are two of us in this fight! You want to beat me? You're going to get the same in return!"
At that point, the dream ended and I woke up, feeling both surprised by my reactions in the dream, though truly liberated by that, and feeling disturbed by the overt brutality of the dream.
Expression of Anger in Adulthood Almost Always Emotionally "Triggered" Me
As an adult, I have always been frankly frightened by any overt display of anger or threatened brutality, given how often that was expressed, to my profound disinterest, as a child. Far too many of my short-term intimate male/female relationships came to a sudden and, for me, terrifying end when my female partner would, for any number of reasons, hit me on the shoulder with their fists (often playfully, or to make an emphatic point). I, who was overtly frightened by such displays, just stood there in terror and said "This relationship is at an end. NOBODY hits me, ever!!" I never, ever, hit a woman in anger or for any other reason, and was terrified to be hit by a woman. On top of that, whenever women would become angry at me, in any overt manner, I departed immediately, since I would become emotionally 'triggered', fearing that, just like my childhood relationship with my own mother, the woman was going to 'set me up' to be beaten by another male (who that might be was something I was unaware of, but the trigger was enough to obliterate my feeling of safety in the relationship). Needless to say, this undermined a lot of my relationships, since a lot of women are socialized to believe that guys are 'tough' and can take that kind of playful hitting without flinching. Not so in my case, given the traumatic nature of my childhood!
Here I am, at the age of 64, a man who, while having been well aware that he was quite angry about his childhood abuse by his parents, followed by what he interpreted as abusive treatment by many, though thankfully not all, of his adult female partners, was too frightened to express that anger openly. And now, with these anger workouts, I am finally allowing myself to openly shout and be intimately aware of the reservoir of anger and corrosive terror that resides within my body. This expression is truly liberating and is breaking through so very many levels of fear and resentment that have for too long worked to my emotional disinterest and somatic breakdown.
Hence, as I stated at the introduction to this article, my feelings about Father's Day are painful and mixed, to put it mildly. I want to feel loving emotions about my father, just like so many of the people around me, but the fact is that I have very few loving memories of my father and frankly the vast majority of the memories I do have are filled with terror and resentment. When I hear others talking lovingly about their fathers, I often want to cry and cry deeply, not because I once had a healthy love for my father and lost it, but because it never existed (or, if it existed at all, the few times were obliterated by that continuous overt nature of his brutality). So, to the extent I can muster such warm feelings about this event, I complement my friends and relatives and wish them well, and express my loving feelings toward them, as adult children of fathers, or as adult children who have become fathers. While my painful feelings about the subject surely influence my perspective on the cultural holiday, I try as best I can to separate the 'past' from the 'present'.
That's a difficult passage, but one that is necessary for my personal journey to emotional liberation.
