Feelings About the Enabling Parent

[Calsun]

I am an adult child of a mother who has all of the symptoms of being an uBPD. She would rage, denigrate, undermine autonomy and feelings of self-esteem and well-being in her children, was terrified of abandonment, split, the whole nine yards.  It was a very dark and dangerous place to grow up.  My father was a very nice person, had many wonderful qualities.  He was certainly the more benign one.  And I was supposed to be close to my father and was in many ways.  I knew my father loved me, and I always expressed love for my father, the official feeling I was supposed to have toward this fragile person, this person who was terribly abused himself.

The problem I have is that those aren't my only feelings towards my father.  When my father died a few years ago, I gave this wonderful eulogy in his honor and meant what I said. But since then so many of my feelings towards him have become sanitized.  He's gone.  I'm not supposed to feel anything "bad" about my deceased father.  The reality is that my father emotionally abandoned me as a child.  When I would cry to him and plead with him to see what my mother's abuse was doing to all of me, to all of us, when I would hope beyond hope that he would finally stand up to her and protect us and protect himself, he never did.  In fact, he denied my reality and invalidated my reality all of the time.  He would say that I had her wrong, that she cooked and cleaned for me, that she was really good to me.  He would even refer to me as a flake because I had problems with my mother's behavior which I now understand were BPD behaviors, egregious and abusive.  And because of my father, I have problems honoring what I really feel and knowing what my reality is.  I also felt because my mother used to say that I was just like my father, just like his side of the family, that I was.  That I had to honor my father and be like him because I was cast by her as him.  And I was so torn, I loved my father, but why should I have to be like someone who accepted so much abuse, had little self-esteem to stand up for himself and who didn't  protect his children from abuse and invalidated his son's reality that he was being abused.  He was beaten down by my mother at every turn. I didn't want to join in beating on him either or reject him. He manifested physical illness and I have manifested it as well.  He was stunted and was small in his life, and I developed that too.  He was certainly the less bad parent to model, but not a great choice either. My father had such wonderful qualities, but could never stand up for himself and us.  And I feel disloyal to say I don't want to be like Dad.  I want to stop being like my father, stop the feeling as though I am my mother's projections onto me, that I am just like my father, stop feeling the guilt that I feel for being in touch with the reality that my father sold me out and wanted to invalidate the reality that he was doing that. I want to be healthy and have healthy relationships, and my father was not healthy, physically or emotionally. He tried to convince his child that his perceptions were off.  How alone and abandoned I felt with a mother who was abusing me without consciousness or restraint and a father who was not protecting me, leading me to feel that I was supposed to protect him and denying my reality.  What a lonely painful experience, and now that he's dead I feel like a bad person for admitting that that is how I feel about him.  I feel like I'm supposed to defend him by having his illness, and my leading a full life with self-respect and having a loving and respectful significant other, which I haven't had is a kind of disloyalty to my father. To not want to repeat what my father did is not looking down on him or abusing him the way my mother did, which it sometimes feels like.  I don't want to join in that. But I want to psychologically detach from him, and I feel like as I did when he was alive, to do that is to abandon him.  Has anyone experienced those feelings or had those experiences?  You love the non-BPD parent who had some wonderful qualities, but you feel sick about the abandonment and invalidations and you want to feel free to not follow in their footsteps, and yet you feel that you're abandoning him or being disloyal and are going to be punished somehow for that?

Calsun

[Kwamina]

Hi Calsun,

I think as we start healing from the past and becoming our own person, we also learn to see all our family members with new eyes. Not only the BPD relatives but also the enablers, in this case your dad. You're right when you say your father basically abandoned you too by not protecting you and not standing up to your mother. But I also understand why when you were growing up you only wanted to see the good in him. As a child it probably would have been too much to acknowledge the reality that not only don't you have a real mother but your father has abandoned you too. I grew up without my father and had to depend on my uBPD mother for everything. Even though she treated me badly, I didn't want to acknowledge the fact that she's a horrible mother because she was all I had and without her I would be all alone. In reality I was already alone because living with an uBPD mom and in your case also an enabling dad, often if not always means that you're on your own. If you need help, you're on your own. If you need protection, you're on you own.

I think it's good that you've come to the point that you can see your father for who he really was, not as the fantasy dad. It's difficult to accept his shortcomings but to be able to move forward and heal, it's very important to acknowledge this truth about him. The way you describe him also makes clear that he in many ways probably was a broken man and very scared of your mother. The only coping strategy he could think of seemed to be trying to not make your mother angry. That's probably why he defended her behavior and blamed you, I think he hoped this would lead you to not seek any confrontations with your mother about the abuse. However he was wrong to do so, because his behavior only allowed your mother's abuse to continue.

Your feelings of guilt are very common and natural because you feel like you're betraying the wonderful dad who could do no wrong. But that isn't really so though, that dad was only a fantasy, not a real person. It's almost like splitting, in your mind he was all-good. Now you're learning to see him for the man he really was, you can still love his good qualities but it's natural to also feel angry, sad etc. about his faults and the things he didn't do. Letting go of the fantasy parent is a very hard thing to do, but it's a necessary step to take to grow as a person.

[GeekyGirl]

Calsun, I can relate to a lot of what you said. Your father did emotionally abandon you as a child, despite his many wonderful qualities. That's very hard to come to terms with, and even though your father is gone, it's ok to be angry with him. You can love him and his memory and be angry that he didn't stand up for you at the same time.

I've spent a lot of time in T and here exploring this, and what I've learned: it's very common for the enabling parents to be codependent. My father is so afraid of losing my mother that he tolerates things that most healthy people wouldn't. He's willing to sacrifice his own children to keep her happy. Does that make him a bad person? Not necessarily. It means that he isn't strong enough or healthy enough himself to do what's right for himself and his children.

By not repeating your father's behavior and psychologically, you're not abandoning him or being disloyal to him. You're individuating. You're learning from the past and changing things that you see need to change. Even if your father had been supportive and strong, it's healthy to work on yourself and separate from your parents.

Can you give yourself permission to grieve and mourn, but then move on? What healthy parts of your father do you see in yourself?

[Calsun]

Thank you, Kwamina and GG for your responses.  They were both so insightful and supportive. 

I really have become so much more atune over the last bit of time to what really was going in my family when I was growing up and how this really was a family illness.  And I took on illness from the BP, the way I took on the negative identity she projected on me.  And one of the things that was projected onto me was that I was just like my father.   I felt as though I had to be just like my father, I had no choice, ill-health and all.  That's who my mother said I was, and don't our mothers know us better than anyone? 

I think one of the things that is so terrifying about individuating is the experience of abuse from the BPD for trying to do just that and the abandonment that came with trying to grow and be my own person.  Be dependent and take on the identity of what is projected onto you by the BPD, and you can have the illusion that you're not being abandoned, but really try to grow and become who you are, and you're going to be abandoned.

"But that isn't really so though, that dad was only a fantasy, not a real person. It's almost like splitting, in your mind he was all-good." 

Thanks, Kwamina for this insight.  It's true there was so much black and white thinking, so much splitting, that if my mother was the "bad" one I had to see my father as the "good" one.  And I wasn't able to really see how unhealthy he was because I was focused on how unhealthy my mother was.

Once again, I appreciate the feedback.  It's been a help to have this site.  In the past, I could talk about my mother's abuse or have kinship and understanding with people  who came from alcoholic backgrounds, for example.  But there is something about communicating with others, like yourselves, who have experienced a borderline parent and a family dynamic that is built around it, that has been so helpful.  I feel for the first time in my life that experiences that were invalidated or misunderstood now make sense. In the past I could see the tip of the BPD iceberg, which was my mother's abuse and rage, now I can see increasingly what part of the iceberg lies beneath the surface, the fear of abandonment that fueled it, the discouragement from individuating, the enabling parent's role, the splitting. I didn't make this stuff up to provide an excuse for why I didn't end up being more successful in my life.  There really is a schema to what went on.  It's very validating and very healing to know that there is a specific pattern of destructive behavior out there that fits what I went through. And I am not alone in this healing process!

Thanks,

Calsun

[GeekyGirl]

You are most definitely not alone.   We all have a lot in common here.

As children, we needed our parents to make us feel loved, protect us, and teach us right from wrong. If you did split your parents, it's because you recognized at an early age that your mother was disordered, and you needed someone to be the loving, nurturing parent all children want--so if Mom wasn't that person, Dad had to be, right?

Shedding that persona that our parents (in our cases, our mothers) wanted us to have is not easy. You were programmed at an early age to be like your father, and as a child, you can't be expected to question your mother. That wasn't your choice, and even now as an enlightened adult, it's understandable that you're struggling to really figure out who you really are.

I didn't make this stuff up to provide an excuse for why I didn't end up being more successful in my life.  There really is a schema to what went on.  It's very validating and very healing to know that there is a specific pattern of destructive behavior out there that fits what I went through.

You didn't make this stuff up. Like you, I wasn't "good enough" as a child, even though I was a straight-A student, an athlete, and generally obedient. I struggle today with that "Am I good enough?" doubt, and it's something that gets easier when I give myself permission to make mistakes, be imperfect, and shy away from the person my parents wanted me to be and focus on who I am.

[ScarletOlive]

Calsun,

I do understand how you feel. It makes sense that you would love your dad, even if he wasn't there for you as he should have been. For me growing up, I decided my dad was the good one since he wasn't as abusive as my mom. Sure, he still beat me, but less hard and less often. Kids need love and security growing up. If you have one parent who sometimes shows love, and one parent who rarely shows love, of course you're going to cling to the one that has more love to offer, even if it's not as much love as there should be. 

To heal, I think we have to recognize the good and bad in both parents. In the Kubler-Ross model of healing from grief, she says you have to feel denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. So, you recognize that your dad wasn't there, even though he was loving too. You've moved past that denial, which is huge. Now, it's okay to feel angry at your dad. And it's okay to not be exactly like him. As you see him with the eyes of an adult, you can see his good traits and his bad flaws, putting together a whole man. You can choose which ones you want to copy. It's not easy, believe me I know. Our parents are supposed to be good examples, the ones we hold up as the standard. Still, you can succeed in life. You can move forward. Just take it one step at a time as you figure out who you want to be.