Question I am a man in the late 1950s. My parents were teenagers when I was born. They got married so that I would not be illegal, it was the sixties. My parents divorced. My mother and wife moved to the north, and my father got married again and stayed south.
My father and his wife have three children, now in the 1940s. My husband killed himself when I was in my early twenties, but I realized that he was more than my father than my actual father.
My relationship with my father was always difficult, because there was no connection. He didn’t put time for me. He is an academic and is supposed to be a smart person but any discussions It revolves around how he knows and how everyone else is wrong. I am not a professional person, but I visited the university. I am a cleaner for their own account. I feel that he rejects what I do and know and appreciates an intellectual right Things On anything else. I am divorced and live a simple life with my dog. My children moved the nest and I am proud of them alike. My father did not show great attention to them, and nothing was since they were teenagers.
Two months ago when we met the last time, I felt annoyed after that, because he did not try to talk to me. There is a rupture between us and I do not want to try to reform, because I will make myself at risk again. He is the father, but he did not take an initiative to ask me how I am.
My mother always says that he cares about me and he is just an angry and embarrassing fool, but I am nearly 60 years old now; It will never change. Why is this important?
Filipa’s answer It is a deep humanitarian request for approval and recognition from one of the parents, even when we fully extend. This longing is hard -line in us. As children, we see our parents almost similar to God, the source of safety, love and validation. What they think about us, and how they treat us, is our feeling of self -esteem in ways that we do not fully realize. But parents, being an ordinary, disappointed human, do not always get to know the strength they hold. They do not see themselves as the characters that we have seen in our early years, so they do not necessarily understand how this early imprint continues in us, even in adulthood. It seems that your mother, at a level, realizes this. I think she says “he cares”, what you may really mean is that you deserve to take care.
For this reason, although your logical mind knows that he was just a very young man, shortly with your mother, then separated from you with distance and circumstances, you still feel the loss of the father who should have been. You know that he is your father and part of you always eager to ascend and admit that he looks meaningful. The additional pain of your mother’s husband’s loss of suicide is only deepening in that yearning, because you only lost the person who took a truly patriarchal role, but perhaps he left an unavailable gap, a feeling of abandonment that makes your father’s biological absence more clear.
When people abroad look at such situations, they might wonder, why did they continue to chase the relationship when the other person does not seem interested? But for most of us, the approval of our parents, or their absence, has the ability to make us feel eligible or inaccurate. When one of the parents is absent or emotional rejectionist, he not only feels refusal, this appears to be a basic statement about our value. For this reason the pain is real, and not only about the desire for the relationship, but rather a feeling as if we are important, as we were sufficient.
The important thing is to realize how this psychologically formed. This longing not only related to your father, but rather your feeling of value and identity. The more you can see it, the more healthy other ways to fill this need. Methods that do not let you depend on someone you have never appeared to you the way you deserve. This does not mean denying pain or pretending that you do not care; This means converting the focus from trying to fix this relationship to understand what you need and find it elsewhere.
We carry copies of ourselves from every age, especially the smallest. This two -year -old part of you who are eager to his father is still there, is still expected to be seen and appreciated. But now, as an adult, it is up to you to take care of this child inside, not your father, nor anyone else. You can decide how to care for yourself, how you seek to communicate and how to determine your value.
In 50 or 100, we are still formed by our past, but we are not obligated to it. You have the ability to choose relationships that feed and give up those who cause you to harm you only. If you get yourself out of your father brings you peace, allow yourself to do so as well. Whatever the option you do, let it be one of the one that confirms your value, and not the option that keeps you in a course awaiting verification of health that may never come.
Every week, Philippa Perry treats a personal problem that the reader has sent.
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