Posted by LlurpsieBlossom on December 3, 2006, at 17:38:37
I talked to them for almost 2 hours. I called them with the intention of talking about this stuff, but I was about to chicken out. Then my mom asked me "do you think your depression is a situational thing? a transitory thing? will it get better when certain things are resolved? (silence) um, well, I'm not diagnosed with depression anymore. Oh? (silence) yeah, now my diagnosis is post-traumatic stress disorder. (silence). I couldn't elaborate. My dad started by saying was it ___? no. was it ____? no. and after about a half-dozen of the yes/no questions, they asked was it something that happened in your childhood. yes. what? and I said that there was a lot of violence in our household. (my dad thought I was talking about violins. geez. he was confused for a while)
long story. all the crap I could bear to dump on them, like how I had spotted the abuse trigger in my pediatric record (mom had no memory of that. denial. denial. etc.) It wasn't an angry denial, but just a firm statement that Dad never hit his children. Dad on the other hand, said that he could not rule out the possibility that he might have done so.
We talked about my dad's childhood. In our discussion this afternoon, I found out more about his childhood than I had found about in my previous 27 years combined. Abusive.
We talked about my mom's childhood. yep, abusive. She kept on talking about how her confrontational personality led her dad to beat her. hmm. I said- was it your fault, then? no. she said. She kept on saying really contradictory things like that. My T was right. Both of them have a lot of physical, emotional psychological abuse in their histories.
Nobody got angry. We all tried really hard to understand each other. I tried to express what I have been struggling with, in terms of flashbacks and depression. I think my mom is the most stubborn. I feel like she still maintains that she did everything possible for us. I kept on probing her more and more (a trick I learned from all those hours with T!) and eventually I think she was able to concede some specific situations in which she could have done better. On the whole she was an odd mixture of sadness (she felt my pain and was sad that I had to go through all of this) resent (at Dad, mostly for being a crappy husband and an even worse father), and denial.
I'm kind of like that too. Like mother like daughter.
Dad was extremely apologetic. Since his half-dozen brushes with death in the last 2 years, and his dementia, he has probably become more reflective about the past. Especially as he struggles with his memory of whether events actually happened or not. He wanted to say that everything was his fault, and that he was a selfish person with a bad temper, and that he did a bad job as a father. At the same time, however, he also really didn't want to talk about how to help me. He kept on saying-- why does talking about this bad stuff help you?
Mom said that if there's anything that she and Dad can do, that they are more than willing to do it. She even said that she would be willing to fly with Dad, stay in a hotel, and go see my T with me, or separately, or whatever it took to help me.
So. That's about as good as I would have ever imagined this conversation to go. Now I take the next step. T said I have to take the first step- get the passive parent to acknowledge the abuse (mom), which I did. I even got the aggressive parent to acknowledge and repeatedly apologize for his behavior/transgressions.
the door's been opened. and we're all walking through it.
what's on the next side, I dunno.
I feel really weak and faint right now. I'm going to take a shower and see if I can snap back into my body. I'm kind of out of body right now.
my hands are really good at typing. I should let them do their own thing from now on.
-ll
poster:LlurpsieBlossom
thread:710023
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20061123/msgs/710023.html