A recent rummage through a drawer I had disregarded for a few time revealed old documents and greeting cards, the latter for occasions like birthdays and holidays. They weren’t ones I had received, but had given. Somehow compelled by one, I opened it. it had been to my father and therefore the stick-like print I had once used, yet had long forgotten, indicated my childhood handwriting. What was more significant, however, was the sentiment inside.
“Daddy, i really like you,” it said.
Immobilized, I felt caught between the kid I once was and therefore the adult I became after having endured an unstable, unsafe, and sometimes predatory, para-alcoholic upbringing.
“Daddy, i really like you,” I read again.
Who, I wondered, was the one that wrote that? My life with my father apparently began that way. But, sadly, it didn’t end that way. Where, I wondered, had the love gone?
Like a growing weed, the disease of dysfunction had evidently encircled and strangled my soul, squeezing it from what it had been into what it had been not. 성인용품사이트
A look back at the painful path i used to be forced to follow provided many clues on why.
My father, enacting an equivalent abuse patterns on me that were directed at him as a toddler victimized by a raging alcoholic, had no understanding of the origins of his behavior, was unaware of the difference between right and wrong, had no empathy or feeling for the harm he inflicted on me, and was even as drained of affection as I.
“As children and teenagers , we weren’t given a real or consistent example of affection ,” advises the “Adult Children of Alcoholics” textbook (World Service Organization, 2006, p. 6). “So how can we all know (it) or recognize it as adults? Our parents shamed us or belittled us for being vulnerable children. In their own confusion, they called it love. They passed on what was done to them, thinking they were being caring parents. What many adult children described as love or intimacy… was actually codependence or rigid control.”
One adult child stated that his parents “said they loved him, but he couldn’t remember feeling safe or loved as a toddler (ibid, p. 270). “His alcoholic father threatened the family and cursed his children.”
Trying to get older and develop as an individual within the midst of such conditions is like trying to create a 100-story skyscraper within the midst of a hurricane. Discerning love within it’s equally difficult, especially within and between episodes of verbal, emotional, and sometimes physical abuse.
“In order to feel as loving as we will within a relationship, we’d like to feel safe, and that we cannot feel safe while being emotionally bullied or manipulated,” consistent with Peter R. Breggin in “Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming Negative Emotions” (Prometheus Books, 2014, p. 228). “Love grows amid security and trust, and it tends to be withdrawn in their absence.”
Personal perception, as has often been said, is that the determinant of reality, and repeated parental transgressions create hairpin triggers during a child and, ultimately, in an adult child, causing him to distrust his reality and robbing him of his trust in others, many of whom represent parent-displaced authority figures later in life.
“We don’t got to be objectively correct once we perceive that somebody is bullying or manipulating us,” Breggin continues (ibid, p. 228). “Our personal viewpoint is what counts. If we feel emotionally harmed, we’ve the proper to influence our feelings by demanding a stop thereto or by removing ourselves.”