Therapy: Better Late Than Never

After my father’s memorial service in August of 1962, somebody, a friend of my father I believe, let slip that my father had been an alcoholic.  “What a pity that such a brilliant man was an alcoholic.  He was simply too sensitive for this world of ours.”  Those were the words.  I was too upset to remember who the person was, and that information doesn’t really matter, but I remembered the words and have thought about them over the past five decades. Now that I have more knowledge of alcoholism, mental illness, using alcohol to self-medicate, and the accompanying behavioral quirks of both alcoholism and my father’s mental illness, I can look with more understanding and compassion on the members of my nuclear family—and on myself.  Compassion and understanding, however, do not erase the damages, the C-PTSD symptoms, resulting from living with a parent who has an untreated mental illness and who self-medicates with alcohol.  Dealing with those damages is a job only I can do.

Despite his outstanding performance in the classroom and his other accomplishments, my father was a shy person who avoided interaction with other people, including his family, when he was not required to be “on stage.”  He spent a lot of time holed up in the bedroom grading papers when I was very young; later, when we lived in houses with basements, he holed up in the basement where he built his ham radio stations.  In a recent telephone conversation with my brother, my brother revealed to me that our father had bottles of alcohol stashed in the basement where he spent so much time, a piece of information I did not have—one more piece I can use as I work to complete the puzzle of my own past.  No wonder I was oblivious to his alcohol abuse!  Because I feared his temper outbursts, I avoided him and avoided the basement. 

Like most young children, I craved my parents’ attention, but I learned to accept the fact that from my father I would get only negative attention.  I accepted his temper outbursts as being normal fatherly behavior.  I also accepted as normal the fact that he seldom addressed me directly unless I was doing something that annoyed him, and then he yelled at me.  Most of his thoughts and opinions regarding me were conveyed by my mother.  When I was a child, I did not realize that the messages my mother passed on to me from my father might really have been her own messages to me but credited to my father or might have been her spin on what he had said.  I was too afraid of my father to check this with him.  It was only when I was about ten and began babysitting in our neighborhood and observing other families and other parents that I realized his behavior was not typical. 

For one thing, the fathers I observed talked directly to their children.  My father did not.  I lived in the same house as this male adult who was reported to be my father, but because this person seldom interacted with me or addressed me directly, I doubted my own existence.  Was I really there?  If I existed, why didn’t this man talk to me and interact with me as other fathers talked to and interacted with their children?  Was I so inferior and so flawed that he regarded me as not being worth his time?  The only way I could explain my father’s attitude toward me was to conclude that there was something wrong with me, something that made me unworthy of being his daughter, but try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what that something was.  In addition to the shame I felt from my perceived failure as my father’s daughter, I felt shame at my failure as my mother’s daughter, and the result was a burden of shame heavy enough to sink a battleship.  Later, when I was a young adult and in college and tried to commit suicide, the shame did almost sink me.

My father’s ability to maintain silence peaked when I began high school. The school year of 1953-1954 was a record year of sorts, for that was the year he said nothing to me, nothing at all.  He had been awarded a John Hay Whitney Fellowship for his excellent teaching of the social sciences at R. A. Long High School, and he chose to spend his year attending Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.  He did not want us, his family, with him during that year.  I don’t know why. My mother, however, would not accept his edict, and so while he was off working as a ranger in the summer, she planned our trip and found a renter for our house.  To this day, I am not sure when she let him know about this.  However, well before school started, she packed us up, and she, my brother, and I traveled by train to New Haven.  As soon as we arrived, she began hunting for an affordable apartment, found one, and moved us in. 

From the day my father arrived a week or so later, he refused to carry on a conversation with my mother or with me.  If for some reason he simply could not avoid telling my mother something, he used my younger brother as a messenger.  At the end of the year and after we had returned home, he resumed speaking to her, and he communicated with me through my mother as he had done before the New Haven experience. 

This is not to say, though, that our lives resumed as if we had never spent the year in New Haven.  I, for one, discovered that I could detect subtle differences between the dynamics within my family before New Haven and the dynamics after our return home.  Although I am now not sure as to whether these dynamics actually changed or whether the experience of a year’s change in living environment opened my eyes to behaviors that had always existed, I knew for certain that the family in which I lived before moving to Connecticut did not seem quite the same to me as the family in which I lived after returning from Connecticut.  Most of the change, I realize now, can be attributed to my growing awareness of my parents’ abuse of alcohol.

I was always aware that my parents kept bottles of liquor available in one particular kitchen cupboard, but I never paid much attention until I was in junior high. Also, I noticed that when my parents came home from their teaching jobs, they regularly mixed themselves drinks.  I didn’t pay much attention to this until I was in high school.  Then I noticed that they often had more drinks after dinner and continued filling their glasses until bedtime, pausing only if they had paperwork to do. 

As I was about to graduate from high school, I realized that my father’s “sick headaches” that kept him home from work more and more often appeared to be related to the number of drinks he had.  And then one hot summer day when I was in high school, my father, who had been working at Mt. St. Helens as a park ranger and was usually gone all week, came home in the middle of the week.  He revealed to my mother that he had caught himself standing behind a co-worker, axe raised, ready to bring the blade down on the co-worker’s head.  He told her that he was going to Portland to find a psychiatrist and get help.  And that is exactly what he did.

I found out many years later that he had been suffering for most of his life from a serious and complex mental illness.  He diagnosis was “Borderline with schizoid tendencies,” a diagnosis that described his behavior accurately.* I learned this when I was in my early forties, and now that I know more about his illness, I understand and have forgiven his behavior toward me.  Forgiving him has not, however, taken away the marks his behavior left upon me.  At age 72, I’m finally getting relief from my Complex PTSD resulting from abuses in childhood and abuses in my marriage. *(See the Mayo Clinic website on the Internet for a list of symptoms of borderline and schizoid personality disorders.)

Along with my understanding of my father and his illness, however, and probably also because I am now seventy-two years old and somewhat wiser than I was when I was living in the same house with him, I have become aware of the courage he showed in deciding to take the step toward health.  The hope embedded in that act of courage may be the greatest gift he ever gave me, for his act inspires me to continue working toward my own healing. I witnessed, as a young adult, the change in my father after he began his work in therapy, and because my father proved that he could change his inner life, I know that I can heal. 

Because he entered therapy when he was in his late forties and died young, at age fifty-two, he did not have many years of relief from his demons, but I believe he did enjoy life more in those few years.  He joined the Unitarian Church and seemed to derive satisfaction from that.  He also seemed more relaxed at home, and I remember feeling I could be in his presence without experiencing some of my old anxiety and watchfulness.  He also talked more to me, although he never did mention how he felt about me nor did he indicate any regret he may have had concerning his treatment of me when I was younger. 

After my father died in August of 1962, I grieved not for the loss of what had been but for the loss of what might have been.  Now, however, in the year 2011, when I think of my father, I remember his courage in recognizing his demons, in seeking help, and in using that help to change his life.  I am inspired by his example at a time when I am working hard in therapy to heal the wounds of my own past. 

After Shame

If you read my last post, “Of Shame and Snowballs,” you know that I recently turned an important corner in my therapy.  All my old feelings of Shame suddenly seemed to melt away, and along with the Shame, went a part of the “old me.”  Now, I know the truth of the statement “Nature abhors a vacuum.”  Every time I have had an important insight into myself, and every time I have abandoned a dysfunctional part of myself, I have been in a state of discomfort until I have filled the empty space.  So what am I doing now to replace Shame?  What will I find to fill that empty space?

If you have been in therapy, you understand the problem I am having.  For one thing, the rest of my psyche has not heard the news that Shame is no longer with me.  In my experience, there is always a lag between insight and emotional response to the insight.  It seems to take a while for the news to trickle down through all the layers of wiring in the right side of my brain and for that part of my brain to realize that the old emotional responses are no longer functional or appropriate.  It’s as if the responses related to my feeling of Shame are now sitting in my right brain waiting to kick into action, but they no longer are wired into a live circuit.  They wait for the old switch to activate them, and they don’t know that the wiring has been cut.  What will happen to all those Shame responses?  I hope they just wither and die from disuse. 

Now I am in the process of finding a replacement for Shame, a tenant/tenet to inhabit the space that Shame occupied in my psyche.  While I am doing this, I feel a sense of imbalance.  My paradigm is shifting, but as it shifts, I feel somewhat off kilter.  Having gone through this process in the past, however, I know that the feeling of being off kilter is temporary.  All I can do is endure until the world rights itself.  That will happen.  And what then?  A beautiful rainbow?  We’ll see.  I’ll let you know.