Abusive fathers, abused sons. Has this affected you in your life?
Probably another TMI post. And also very, very long. If this stuff makes you uncomfortable, please ignore. If this isn’t the kind of thing the moderators would like to see on this forum, please let me know and I’ll delete, TIA.
How many of you were ever victims of abuse, physical or mental, at the hands of your own father? How did it affect your life, goals, self-esteem, your ability to be a partner to your SO, and most especially your ability to be a father to your own children?
Unfortunately, this is something I know first-hand. My father was a monster, pure and simple, no other way to say it. Was it all his fault? No, not entirely. I was diagnosed as bipolar this past summer, and I can see clearly a long history of mental health issues going back to past generations in my father’s family, so I believe there is a genetic, biological component to this. But there is also an environmental component. In my father’s case, although I have no evidence, I have long conjectured that he was the victim of sexual abuse by his mother, because of things he did as an adult, and things I witnessed as a child in his interactions with her. Whatever the causes, the effect was that he was a horrible, brutal devil of a man, who abused my mother and myself terribly for decades. Let me be clear, the abuse was not physical, I can count on one hand the number of times he ever hit me, and those were actually pretty normal childhood/teenage punishment as was typical of those times, the 60’s and 70’s. His form of abuse was extreme cruelty, controlling an manipulative behavior, and reigning with an iron fist by means of terror. Kind of like growing up in some kind of closed, harsh, repressive society along the lines of North Korea, where no one was allowed to question anything about the ruler, and his word, no matter how bizarre, was law.
Late in life, through involuntary treatment, my father was diagnosed with “paranoid delusional disorder” – essentially, per my understanding of it, abnormal thoughts that lead him to believe that people were “doing things to get him” – basically like schizophrenia except without the auditory or visual hallucinations true schizophrenics endure. His particular delusions revolved around a couple of things, the first was that my mother was serially unfaithful and promiscuous to the point of having tens to dozens of “lovers” every day while my father was at work, and the second was that my mother’s family was “out to get him”. Because he would go into a rant at any little thing, such as a letter with an unknown return address showing up in the mail, or a cigarette butt along the roadside, we lived a life of constant surveillance to try to minimize his extreme outbursts, which could be hours of screaming, shouting, cursing, berating us, and usually ended in my mother sobbing and complaining about chest pains, which was her own little delusional coping method, I guess. At any rate, as a young boy and teenager, I was always living in fear and waiting for him to kill her. He hated me with a passion, denying paternity before I was even born, and telling my mother that he “knew” the milkman was my biological father. As an adolescent/teenager, it turned darker, he liked to pin me down in the site of a gun, berate me, and tell me it was a shame he couldn’t pull the trigger, because I didn’t deserve to live but wasn’t worth going to prison over. I got guns, my mother got knives, where he would pull out a large hunting knife, make slashing motions against his throat, and then point at her. Needless to say, not a happy childhood. This didn’t happen all of the time, perhaps once or twice a year, usually in the fall around hunting season, when he got the weapons out to clean/maintain them and an opportunity presented itself.
I also mentioned above that I believe my father was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of his mother. Aside from his jealous, violent side, he also had another “secret” – for many years when I was young, and about 15 years before, my father was a closet transvestite. And not in a manner which lead me to believe he might be gay, but in a very creepy, hard to describe manner. I guess I’ll just say this – I was about 20 when I first saw the movie ‘Psycho’ and it left me completely freaked out, because I instantly recognized a great deal of my father in the character of Normal Bates.
I am still, at 47, struggling with the legacy of all of this. My deep anger over this came out earlier in the summer, as a form of rage very out of character with my basic personality. It progressed to the point, along with some other events and incidents, that yes, I ended up spending three weeks in a psychiatric partial hospital program in September. NOT something I am proud of, and frankly the circumstances of my ending up there involved my own inability to stand up to authority, and a completely uncaring, unsympathetic physician who I feel betrayed my trust to the point of committing grave ethical breaches and serious illegal violations of my basic rights under Michigan’s Public Health and Mental Health codes. But that is a separate issue, not relevant here. Let’s just say, though, that the circumstances left me devastated, I truly felt I didn’t belong there, I was utterly terrified of going there, and of my entire diagnosis and treatment being “found out” by anyone in the flesh and blood world. And after I got there and got over my fears, I got a lot out of it, and actually felt as if it were, on some level, the vacation from the everyday that I needed for a long, long time. Ironic, probably bizarre, but yes, I did enjoy my stay in the psych ward. The fact that it was a very nice hospital, and a very well-run program, helped a lot. I mean, honestly, who can’t like a psych ward where you can come and go as you please, run downstairs to Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts any time you want, get an hour and fifteen minutes off for lunch, a hospital with no only an enormous cafeteria, but a food court with local and name-brand restaurant kiosks, a shopping area, and a major shopping center around the corner?
At any rate, I essentially grew up not with a father, but with a tyrant whose goal, it seemed, was to make me miserable. And I desperately craved his attention and approval in spite of this, which I now realize was a fool’s errand at best, and sad and pathetic. Little things stick with me, such as the first morning of kindergarten, when I got up early to find him sitting at the dining room table in a white t-shirt with a padded bra on underneath, or when I was about 7, in the springtime, and I desperately wanted him to teach me how to throw and catch, and he had no interest, but my mother forced him to take me out in the backyard, where he threw the baseball to me twice before he left, silently, to go indoors and “dress” as we called it, where he would put on his female paraphernalia and stare into space on the sofa, with all of the drapes in the house drawn tightly, in his Norman Bates mode.
It has affected me, but thank God, not in the way some would probably imagine. I knew, when I was five or before, that what he did was wrong, and sick, and I had nothing but contempt for his little “hobby”. And I grew up to be a “normal” guy with appropriate and healthy sexual attitudes. The overall experience left me with extremely poor self-confidence, and frankly I have only been in a few relationships with women, and had a few more opportunities I passed up, including one that could have been, I believe, the love of my life, but I declined because she was older, married, and I didn’t want to go there and be the guy that broke up a marriage and family. Because of the isolation, being alone with him in the house, no brothers and older sisters who were out of the house, and “prison camp” atmosphere I grew up in, I was socially isolated, had no friends because none were allowed, had no opportunities for any outside interactions other than what happened during school hours, as I wasn’t allowed to participate in sports, band, or any of the normal things kids do. I wasn’t allowed to have a job as a teenager, my first limited work experience came in college, my first “real” job when I graduated. It was a very isolated and sad life. I still fight a great deal of social anxiety, but I am doing much better with that than I was.
The biggest effect, though, is the fact that I made a decision years ago, when I was about 18 or 19, that I would NEVER pass these genes, and the burden of living with this type of disease/condition, onto another generation. I had always thought, in spite of everything, that I would make a great husband and father, because I recognized what happened to me as a grave breach of the normal father-son relationship and ran with my life, my attitudes, and my behaviors in the other direction as fast and as far as I could. Even this late in life, a small part of me always thought I someday might find a SO who would be interest perhaps in adoption. Now with this latest development in my life, I could never justify that, and frankly probably never be allowed to, so another thing my father, 14 years after his death, has taken away from me.
I could have gone either way. The day I was diagnosed and then “sentenced” to the psych ward, I drove home down the freeway looking for some solid concrete structure I could drive straight into at 90 mph and effectively end my problems. Then I thought about my mother, who I have tried to take care of with the utmost respect and love since she was liberated from my father’s terror, so that her last years could be happier, and I couldn’t do that. So, I went through with my “sentence” and actually, good has come out of it. I’m now on mood stabilizing medication, have a new doctor who is kind, compassionate, and understanding, not cruel, cold, and brutal like the first one. I am seeing the same therapist I have seen on and off since 1999, who is great. I feel like I have been given a second chance, despite a mental illness diagnosis, and, while I still struggle daily with memories of what happened, and some weird quirks like being literally “gun shy” if I see one, I think the future will be better than the past.
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