In the past month since her back surgery, and past two decades since her father’s death, Lenore has had plenty of time to think about how he shaped her life of 77 years. Hers is a common story with an uncommon ending. She shared a lifetime with me after reading an earlier column I wrote. Here’s part of her story.
“I was assaulted mentally, emotionally and physically by my father. My heart was bruised by his name calling. His temper and wrath created panic and anxiety. I became fearful and cautious around him. I was developing into a little girl who thought she needed to be charming, and thus I developed these skills early on.
“Wounded and lost, I searched from adolescence into my twenties for someone to love me. Over and over I remained in the same pattern looking for love, always from tall, dark, handsome and strong men resembling my father. I left home at 18 with naïve impressions of what a woman might set out to find in a man. I was destined to be wounded again and again.
“Unwittingly I went looking for someone who not only looked like my father, but was also 11-12 years older. It seemed glamorous at the time. My mantra was, ‘Older men knew how to treat a woman.’ Some women might think I lived an exciting life…affairs with attorneys, jet fighter pilots, television anchors and program managers.
“I wonder how many women carry the burden of a wounded heart. Are they looking to fill the emptiness of lost love from their fathers? How many of us have suffered from low self-esteem and despondency? How many have jumped at the first marriage proposal? How many of those marriages failed?
“I remember a romantic encounter with a man who touched my heart, because of his immense respect for me. He was the lead pilot for the Air Force Thunderbirds. We met on several occasions but it was never more than delicious moments of affection–holding hands, an occasional kiss and the memorable hug given when he departed from the air base. We both knew love was surfacing, but like some of the men before him, he was married. We parted ways. His kindness and respect left me with a newfound strength and hope that I would cross paths someday with a man just like him.
“It happened many years later….yes, he resembled my father physically, but he was strong and gentle, supportive and respectful. It was a wonderful and exciting marriage…almost 37 years. I lost him in 2007 when he elected to end his life by physician-assisted suicide as a result of a cancer that was eating him away. He was my lover, best friend and soul mate.
“He told me three days before he passed that I was the ‘best thing that ever happened’ to him. Does it get any better than that?”
Does it? I don’t think so, unless perhaps by 38 or more years that are at least as fulfilling.
Lenore asked “How many women carry the burden of a heavy heart” when they’ve been abandoned or abused by their fathers? All of them. Every. Single. One.
Nobody dodges that bullet. We come into life wired to love, and receive love from, our parents. When that bond gets repeatedly violated, we get rewired into lonely, sad, depressed, angry, or violent men and women. A woman’s deepest beliefs, her sense of herself, of her desirability, are molded like clay at her father’s hands.
Serial affairs? Lenore’s were just a symptom of an ordinary woman with a lifelong hunger to feel desired. Her father left a gaping hole in her heart. She tried to fill it with sugar syrup. She found temporary relief in one of the fixes we pour into our hearts hoping to fill what’s missing. Trysts, drugs, compulsive shopping, expensive cars, the raw pursuit of fame, fortune and power–they’re all mindless attempts to buffer our pain and emptiness.
In time, Lenore found something more: 37 years of joy with a soul mate. There aren’t many women who draw the short straw in a father who can form, much less sustain for 37 years, such a deeply intimate relationship. Her story is a triumph of the human spirit.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Medical doctors such as John Sarno and Vincent Feletti, among others, have researched and written about the link between childhood trauma, repressed emotion, and physical illness, including back pain. A day after pouring out her story, Lenore wrote to me this past Sunday.
“Hi Kevin. I felt so much energy just flowing upwards through my body. My head has been clear all day. Most importantly I feel like the story is no longer on the back burner. The pain that I have had from the surgery just seemed to melt away….almost like a miracle. I feel like I can breathe deep again. The relief I feel is just incredible.”
Dear Kevin,
What you said in this column about the impact of a father’s abusive behavior on his daughter is sooo important! Like the 77-year-old woman you wrote about, I am, at age 74, finally managing to find peace after my own childhood experience of living with an abusive father. Each of us is different, and we each make peace with our past differently, I believe. Finally, after thirty years of searching for an effective means to achieve my own peace, I am finding it by engaging in ego state therapy and EMDR with a competent therapist. I made up my mind when I retired that I was going to spend at least a few of my remaining years of life free from flashbacks, numbing, dissociative episodes, and all the other symptoms of Complex PTSD. And I am getting there!
When my father finally got himself to a psychiatrist in 1957, he was diagnosed as being “borderline with schizoid tendencies.” Translated, he terrorized me with his tantrums, his rants at me, and his physical violence, and I spent my childhood staying as far off his radar as I could. My mother was narcissistic and, in addition, had her own problems dealing with him, so she failed to protect me. By the time he got the diagnosis and also got help, I was in college, so even though he became mellower, I did not benefit from his change. By that time, I was beyond trusting him.
In fact, I went on to marry a man very like my father, and in that way, I relived my childhood throughout my twenty-year marriage. The sad fact is that I–and probably many other women in my generation–didn’t really have a frame of reference for determining what to reasonably expect in the way of male behavior. As a child, I thought all fathers were like my father, and later, I thought all men were like my father, so when my husband ranted at me, cussed at me, and physically and sexually abused me, I figured that I deserved his treatment–just as I had been taught that I deserved the abuse when I was a child.
The nightmare of my marriage stopped when I caught my former husband molesting our daughter and reported him to the police. I divorced him, finished raising our daughter, went to grad school, and finished my working years in a career I loved–teaching remedial writing to adults in a community college. Unlike the woman you mentioned in your column, I remained single. I observed too many women clamber eagerly onto the relationship merry-go-round, be suddenly pitched off, and then scramble back on only to be pitched off again–over and over, round and round. I don’t trust my ability to be part of a functional marital relationship. One time around was enough for me.
My present round of therapy was precipitated by a flashback I had when riding the MAX one day in 2009. Suddenly, I was nine years old again, cowering on the kitchen floor and watching my father pick my cat up by the tail and bash her against the kitchen wall. He was punishing me for something I had done or had not done, and he knew that by causing my cat pain, he was causing me pain–causing me pain was his goal! When I came out of the flashback, I decided that I was going to rid myself as much as possible of my father’s influence, and that is what I have been doing for these past three-plus years–trying to erase my father’s presence from my psyche so that I could live in peace. Erasing our fathers’ influence from our psyches is NOT a task that comes naturally to humans, and it is NOT a task we should have to do. But for so many females in our culture, especially those women who were sexually abused by their fathers, erasing our fathers’ presence from our adult minds is necessary in order to achieve some peace in our last years.
Thanks to what we know now about brain plasticity and the fact that the brain can change, new neuropathways can replace old and dysfunctional pathways, we now know that people can heal to some extent from the damage done by fathers–and mothers. My question, though, is “Why?” Grown women shouldn’t have to heal from damage done to them by their fathers. Life shouldn’t be this way! But it is for so many women, sadly.
Please continue writing about fatherhood and the importance of fathers’ influence on their daughters. I pray that women read your column and your blog and grow in their understanding of the functional father-daughter relationship. I pray, also, that mothers use this understanding to help and support the fathers of their daughters as these men learn to nurture their children and, as you say, “mold” them into competent and loving women who feel valued and desired for their own selves. What you are discussing in your columns and your blog posts may do more to prevent the future misery of women than all our social programs combined! Please keep up the good work!
Sincerely,
Elizabeth