The loss of the love of an adult child

A recent glance in a drawer he had ignored for some time revealed old documents and greeting cards, the latter for occasions like birthdays and holidays. They were not what I had received, but what I had given. Somehow bound by one, I opened it. It was for my father and the stick-shaped print that I had once used, but had long forgotten, indicated my childhood handwriting. However, the most significant thing was the inner feeling.

“Dad, I love you,” he would say.

Immobilized, I felt trapped between the child I once was and the adult I became after enduring an unstable, insecure, and sometimes predatory para-alcoholic upbringing.

“Daddy, I love you,” I read again.

Who, I wondered, was the person who wrote that? My life with my father apparently started 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 was to what it was not.

A retrospective look at the painful path I was forced to follow provided many clues as to why.

My father, imposing the same patterns of abuse that were directed at him when he was a child victim of an angry alcoholic, did not understand the origins of his behavior, ignored the difference between right and wrong, had no empathy or feeling for harm that he inflicted on me, and he was as drained of love as I was.

“As children and adolescents, we were not given a true or constant example of love,” advises the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (World Service Organization, 2006, p. 6). “So how can we know or recognize it as adults? Our parents shamed or belittled us for being vulnerable children. In their own confusion, they called it love. They conveyed what was done to them, thinking they were being supportive parents. What many children do. adults described it as love or intimacy … it was actually codependency or rigid control. “

One adult son said that his parents “said they loved him, but that he did not remember feeling safe or loved as a child (ibid, p. 270). His alcoholic father threatened the family and cursed his children.”

Trying to grow and develop as a person in the midst of such conditions is like trying to build a 100-story skyscraper in the middle of a hurricane. Discerning the love within him is equally difficult, especially within and between episodes of verbal, emotional, and sometimes physical abuse.

“To feel as loving as we can within a relationship, we need to feel safe, and we cannot feel safe while being bullied or emotionally manipulated,” according to 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 tends to withdraw in its absence.”

Personal perception, as has often been said, is the determinant of reality, and repeated parental transgressions create hairpin triggers in a child and, ultimately, in an adult child, causing him to distrust his reality and deprive him of trust in others, many of whom represent authority figures displaced by parents later in life.

“We do not need to be objectively correct when we perceive that someone is bullying or manipulating us,” continues Breggin (ibid, p. 228). “Our personal point of view is what counts. If we feel emotionally hurt, we have the right to act on our feelings by demanding to stop them or by distancing ourselves from ourselves.”

Those who were subjected to such treatment in captivity during childhood had no choice but to endure it, yet it was progressively diminished and reduced at the hands of the caretakers who served as their most important role models. That this has been administered by such people only adds to the distorted definition of “love.”

“When faced with the effects of verbal and emotional abuse …, we generally resist”, according to the textbook “Adult children of alcoholics” (op. Cit., P.30). “We couldn’t believe that people who said they loved us or cared about us were lying. If they called us lazy, embarrassing, or embarrassing, it must (have been) true, as the words came from the most important people in our lives. If we keep an open mind, we learn that this was verbal abuse presented as love, but a loving parent does not say those things to a child. “

Although children do not question their harmful and degrading treatment, deluding themselves into believing that it is due to their own inadequacy and shortcomings, it is a thin veil for the deficiency of the parents, and very treacherous.

“Love may have hurt you,” writes Breggin (op. Cit., Pp. 222-223). “Love may have let you down. Love may have betrayed you. Betrayals in your family or church may have made you distrust anyone who says the word ‘love’ or refers to a loving God. Your pastor may have threatened you with hell. and you may have been told by your father that you were doomed. Having lost love too many times, you may have fallen into chronic anger or numbness. “

Enduring an alcoholic and abusive upbringing is nothing short of insane, which is practically the opposite of love.

“It is impossible to be loving and to be crazy at the same time,” notes Breggin (ibid, p. 244). “This is because love connects us with people, and insanity is about disconnecting us from people.”

Toolless and undeveloped, a baby, defenseless against this insanity, seeks protection and shelter through the only channel available to him, namely, burying himself deep within, creating the enveloped inner child, which, unless he realizes it and it is understood, it remains eternally suspended. at the time of creation throughout his life. It is replaced with the pseudo-self, which, as a false construction, is unable to genuinely connect with others and with God, who is the very essence of love. Like a smokescreen, he processes it as skewed static, unable to internalize it.

Alcoholism, a major cause of this survival enhancing action, kills.

“The cost of our continued allegiance to alcoholism is the loss of our capacity to love”, according to the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (op. Cit., P. 357). “We lose our ability to give and take as a result of not resolving the violent conflicts that threatened to destroy our families. We internalize these conflicts and carry them into adulthood, constantly seeking to control the unmanageable chaos within.”

Unstable parenting generates codependency, a disease of lost individuality, which causes a person to “connect” with others in an effort to gain attention, affirmation and love, usually from those, like their parents, who cannot. provide it to you.

“Our experience shows that the codependent breakup, which creates an external focus to win love or affirmation, is created by a dysfunctional childhood,” according to the textbook “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (ibid, p. 60). “… This breakdown of the soul is abandonment by our parents or caregivers. Abandonment prepares us for a life of looking outward in search of love and security that never comes.”

“Love is the most precious spiritual good in the world”, affirms Breggin (op. Cit., P. 222). “At the very core of our being is the ability and desire to love and be loved.”

“(However), all the pain and suffering apparently associated with (him) has to do with the faulty ways in which we human beings relate,” he concludes (ibid, p. 244).

When I put the card back in the drawer, I know that I have been the product of all this, and I realize that the presence and absence of love were the differences between the father I had and the one I lost.

ARTICLE SOURCES

“Adult children of alcoholics”. Torrance, California: World Organization for Services for Adult Children of Alcoholics, 2006.

Breggin, Peter R. “Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming Negative Emotions.” Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2014.