Warning, this song makes some people really angry.

 

Personally, I find it amusing as hell.

So. My father. Larry. My inner prosecutor. My terrible myself. .  The glowering eye in the sky eternally torturing the life out of me by holding me accountable to a systematically engineered to be  impossible standard and then punishing my noncompliance.

And the worst thing is that I have been believing everything it says about me.

It has to come from my father. He is the only abuser in my life. The only one who has perpetrated the classic abuser’s fraud of convincing you that it is possible to escape their wrath and that therefore everything they do to you is your fault.

After all, you could have spared yourself just by doing the right thing, right?

But there is no right thing. The abuse requires no justification because its purpose is not corrective, it’s sadistic. The abuser abuses because they need to abuse. It’s how they deal with stress. They take it out on others. That’s the very essence of sadism. Inflicting pain on others makes the sadist feel good because it externalizes their inner pressures.

At the expense of increasing the inner pressures in others.

It’s like a transfer of pain. Boss yells at Dad. Dad yells at Mom. Mom yells at Junior. Junior kicks the dog.

So it has to be him that is the killer inside me. I have not seen that before now because I thought the fact that his tirades were never directed at me, and that I not only saw through his bullshit. I called him on it and won,  somehow meant I was immune to him.

Seems silly when I put it like that.

After all, I still had to live with him. I was still afraid of him. He might not have focused his dinner table tirades at me but I could still bring his wrath down upon me with “wrong” action. I was walking on the same goddamned eggshells as everyone else.

And I bore witness to those dinner table tirades. I was there, I felt his anger, his insanity, his evil, and I saw the damage done to Ann and David by it. That’s why I interposed myself between father and child-victim when I was absurdly young.

I couldn’t just sit there and let it happen. And my illusion that it was all just a matter of poor communication and misunderstanding lasted a long time.

But then I saw through it all, and that’s when he and I did battle. And for what it’s worth, I won. I verbally kicked his ass so hard that he started eating his supper separately from the rest of us.

And we were much happier. Like I said at the time, if he can’t behave in a civilized manner at the dinner table, he doesn’t get to eat with the rest of us.

That was a pretty big step for me. developmentally speaking. I can see that now. It is the nature of fathers and sons that, at some point, there has to be some form of battle between them to sort out the hierarchy.

It can be as simple and innocent as the first time a boy beats his father at chess, or it can be as intense and dramatic as what I went through, or it can be as explosive and violent as someone storming out the door, never to return.

Most of the time, I imagine, it’s nothing more than a somewhat tense and awkward conversation where the father assures himself that his son still respects him even though the son has surpassed his father in some way, and/or the son gets reassurance that his father will always be a father to him no matter what.

See, this is the sort of insight I could bring to a family sitcom.

But that has nothing to do with me and my father. I really resent this new knowledge that he lurks within me still. I feel like it is yet another way that asshole is ruining my life. When I moved away from the Island, I foolishly convinced myself that because he was out of my life, he no longer had any effect on me.

And to seal the deal, I locked all my feelings toward him inside a deep vault made of acid bitterness and ice cold contempt.

That gave a sense of detachment, I suppose, but I see now that it was not a real solution. I still have a lot of his anger and the fear it generated and the long term stress of living around a fucking animal like him in me, and that is where my deadly pattern of being my own abuser came from.

I have not yet dreamed up a way to confront this about myself. Right now, when I contemplate this newly revealed truth about myself, all I see is a hard white void between me and it. Reaching out to it and integrating it back into my personality will be hard work.

I could write him that letter I have been meaning to write him. I feel more ready to do it now than I ever have before. I know that the process of doing so would un-can a very large can of worms and unlock all kinds of crazy shit in my mind, but it would be worth it if I could finally halt my inner persecution and feel comfortable being myself at last.

It might not happen soon. But I can feel this letter growing in my mind, and therefore it is only a matter of time before it is born unto the world.

Before now, I have been unable to even truly contemplate writing him because even the possibility of opening a line of communication to him made me so angry that all I could imagine doing is screaming at him incoherently for hours.

Once that was over, any letter I would write would be an act of aggression against him. An attempt to make him suffer for all he has done to his own goddamned family. Everyone he ever claimed to love. It would be an act of pure revenge.

And I am not saying he doesn’t deserve it. But that’s not the path I want to travel. If I write this letter, it will be an attempted not to hurt him but simply to make him understand.

That may well hurt him. But that would not be my intention.

I just want him to get that he fucked up big time with us.

After that, I can go back to having nothing whatsoever to do with him.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.