Family Rage

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m not sure why this boiled up today, but WTF.

My father raged daily – more than daily. He would shout and scream, his face would be absolutely beet red, and if one of us 3 kids had a piece of his rage, likely as not we would get a powerful open-handed slap across the face, the kind of slap you can hear all over the house. I never saw him strike my mother, but she certainly took her share of screaming and belittling from him.

He was set off by any words or actions that he perceived as a challenge to his authority. This took many forms. If we asked to go someplace and received a no from him (an almost certainty), and said another word about it, we get a slap and his face in ours demanding, “What did I just SAY?”. If we asked him a question he couldn’t answer, he would respond as though we were deliberately trying to make him look stupid. “WHY would I know such a thing? I’m not a ___!”. Almost any conversation with him might end with him literally screaming in someone’s face. IN the family, though. I never saw him behave that way to strangers, but he would among his 5 brothers and their wives and children, and the same among our mom’s side of the family. By my teens, our nuclear family was completely isolated from all the aunts, uncles, and cousins. I never saw any of them again until the older folks started dying off and we started meeting again at funerals.

When I stopprd gong to church around age 13, dad beat me quite badly, and I’m not sure if he stopped because he got tired, or he realized there was no point. I was just standing there daring him to hit me more. It was the last time he ever hit me, though the screaming fits went on for decades more.

In fact the worst behavior I ever witnessed from him was aimed at my mother when both were in their 60s. The day she came home from a hospital stay after a heart attack, barely able to walk and dazed with drugs, she reached out to balance herself against a wall. Unfortunately she put a handprint in some fresh spackle – a contractor had been working that day installing some handicap rails.

And it set my dad into this awful screaming fit at her. “DIDN’T I TELL YOU TO WATCH FOR THAT? YOU’RE SO STUPID! WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO PAY THAT GUY AGAIN TO COME OUT HERE!”, and so forth. My mother basically collapsed in tears and was hardly conscious. My dad jusd went back to bed and was snoring soundly in 5 minutes (this happened around midnight and his screaming woke me up).

My sister and I were visiting and helping get the house ready for mom. After the outburtst, we got mom back into bed, then got in a car and drove around the area aimlessly crying our eyes out for hours – we just couln’t stand to be in the same house with him but we couldn’t leave either. We were both in our mid-30s.

The next day we took mom out of that house and brought her to my sister’s for the next month. Then mom went back home, under what conditions I don’t really know because by then I was back at my own home 800 miles away. She died about a year later.

Dad mellowed a lot after that. You could here it in his voice – the first word or two out of his mouth would be the start of some loud nasty crack, but then he would pause for a moment and his tone would lower, and he would make some perfectly rational response. At a holiday gathering he told us, with seeming total seriousness, that he coun’t ever remember being angry a single day of his life, after getting married, because “your mom was such an angel.” All our jaws dropped, but none of us challenged him (just as he always intended :frowning: ) He died about 8 years after mom.

I often wonder how this has affected me. To a pretty large degree I have defined myself in terms of NOT MY FATHER. I do not raise my voice. I am not married. I do not have children. I don’t let myself get close to people, I think because I fear rejection, and I fear strong emotions. And now I’m in the darker side of my 40’s and I wonder who I might have been, and whether I really want to know as much about who I am as who I’m not.

Two of the three of us never married or had anything you could call a successfull long-term relationship. My other sister, the oldest, was married to a man with a lot in common to dad, until he dumped her for a younger woman. Since then she’s had a number of relationships I can only describe as bizarre, and she’s had two restraining orders issued against her for talking ex-boyfriends.

2

Sorry, this started out as a poll but turned into a rant that should be either in MPSIMS or the Pit.

3

Off to MPSIMS.

4

My message to you is that therapy can help you with a lot of this.

My father was maybe 20% to 30% of your father in the rage department. My opinion of him is that anger was his only accessible emotion and everything else he felt was not available to him, even when he wanted it to be. He had no clue how to express the love that I now know he felt. So we either got anger, or we didn’t get much of anything.

In my 30’s, after three tries that just didn’t do anything for me, I finally got into therapy with a good therapist, and over the course of a couple of years worked through a lot of my father issues. I no longer defined myself as “not him” (although I can still give myself a good scare when I recognize a similar trait in myself) and I have reached a point where he can’t hurt me any more (he is still alive, and still has trouble communicating without hurting).

But . . .

I am still emotionally isolated and have a lot of difficulty relating to people. I think that is a result of his rotten role model of how to deal with others. I didn’t learn those things at the early age when learning comes easy.

So therapy can help, but expect it to be hard work, and it won’t necessarily change you in all the ways you would like.

Good luck, please consider therapy, you’re still young enough to get a lot of benefit from it, and you won’t believe how much happier you can be.

Roddy

5

Er, that would be for STALKING ex-boyfriends.

6

I can attest to this. After many years of group therapy, having seen lots of group members come and go, I realized that some people will make amazing gains in therapy, some make almost no gains, and the majority fall somewhere in the middle. There’s no way to predict which group you’ll fall into, except to note that if you give minimal effort, you’re almost guaranteed minimal gains.

Overall, I’d say it was worth it, though, and it’s never too late to start. In any case, I wish you luck.

7

I understand, having been raised by a crazy grandmother. I agree that counceling can be a great help.
You have to be willing and ready ro work hard for a peaceful, happy life.
Even before you find a therapist, try to begin by forgiving.
You MUST forgive your father. That doesn’t mean forgiving the behavior. You have to learn who he was and why, then forgive the man, not the deed.
Next, you must forgive the child who was yourself, and the man you are today.
Learn to understand the helplessness you felt was real. The child was helpless to stop the abuse. Forgive that helplessness, you had no control over.
You are no longer helpless. You can face the rage inside, and face it down. You are the man now, and you need to refuse your father’s legacy, not just hide from it.

8

My father was similar, although different. He didn’t yell all the time, and never went off on my mother, that I’m aware of. He was an ungodly angry person. Angry at what, I never figured out. He took it out on me. With his voice, his hands, his belt, his fists, whatever was handy. It didn’t matter whether I had done something worthy of being punished for, he was liable to do damage to me at any time for any reason, or no reason at all. I could never know when I’d get strapped or beaten, or what for. And all of this happened years before he started to drink. Then it got worse. In 1974, my mother started sleeping on the couch and having migraines. By the end of 1975, I escaped. In the spring of 1976, my mother took my two brothers and sister and escaped. I had already started taking (soft) drugs. They were the first thing that ever felt good.

In 1977 he sold our house and moved to the west coast. My brothers and sister have each stayed with him for periods of time, during which he managed to completely alienate them. My parents never bothered to divorce; my mother never wanted to see him again, not even in a lawyer’s office. The fallout from that has taken many forms. My sister is now on her third, skeevy husband whom she met in a bar. She hasn’t spoken to me in years. My youngest brother is gay, and while he’s been in a LTR with the same guy for at least 15 years, the way he gets fulfillment out of life is to do things that are so sad and pathetic and disgusting that I can’t even relate it in public. For a long time, it was just me and my next-youngest brother. We were pals, and musicians together. Then he got involved with a total bitch of a woman, who proceeded to make his life miserable, and will continue to do so, because they made a baby. They stopped living together about four years ago. My brother has got so bitter and angry, he’s showing signs of being our father, and has caused me to sever our relationship. That hurts. A lot.

I saw myself and our family in your post. I have to wonder now, why our relatives never, ever came to visit us. My paternal grandparents were never at our house, and the maternal grandparents were there exactly twice. That was it. Did they all know my father was a psychopath, and were they staying away so they didn’t have to get involved? Did they hate us? I’ll never know. I haven’t seen any of them in decades. I have cousins I’ve never met. They have wives and children and grandchildren I wouldn’t know from Adam.

I spent the better part of fifteen years homeless, stuck in the system. That’s another thread in itself.

I had a strained relationship with my mother from the breakup period through the mid-90s, and it had just started to get better when she got cancer and passed away at 56. I never saw my father again. He had a brain tumor and died four or five years ago. I don’t know when it was, and I don’t care.

I’m like you. I still define myself as NOT HIM. I don’t raise my voice, either. I don’t know how to get close to people. I’ve been ripped off to the tune of thousands of dollars worth of stuff by people I thought were my friends. I’ve only had a few friends of any worth. I never had a real girlfriend, never went on a date, none of that normal stuff that everybody else seems to do. I stopped taking drugs often, about ten years ago, when I met my wife. It took until I was 37, but I did manage to find a kindred spirit who just happened to be female, and I got my shit together to be worthy of her attention. This adventure has been my salvation. For the most part, I am all better now. Or, I hope to give the impression that I am. I do not argue or fight with my wife. Each of us has good reasons for not wanting to have any children. Mine are all due to the above.

I also fear rejection and strong emotions. I can’t drink alcohol, it reminds me too much of him and what it did to him and our family. I could be a very angry person, too, but I won’t allow myself to be one. Above all, even in the worst times, I knew that I wasn’t truly mentally ill. There wasn’t anything wrong with me as a person. My faculties were all intact, despite what those closest to me would have me believe. I just needed to get away from all these people who seemed to delight in making my life miserable. So I did. 1200 miles and a border away from them. Permanently. The last ten years of my life have been the best. My wife helped me become who I am today.

Now she’s going to need my support. She’s entering a phase of the same thing about her parents, who are a pair of freakin’ nutbars. What is it with fathers, anyway?

9

It took my sisters and me years of comparing notes about our father to figure out that he suffered from about a half-dozen undiagnosed conditions ranging from sleep apnea to depression.

Once we realized that he had no more control over his mood swings than our mother had over her cancer, a lot of things suddenly made sense to us. He wasn’t a villian - he was a victim.

10

Your dad sounds just like mine. He’s a maniac. All he does is scream and yell, belittle’s my mom and my brother and has done so all our lives. He’s basically a dick. He didn’t touch us too much though, just verbal abuse. He’s at it every day with my mom and it pisses me off because she takes it, too. Her reasoning is, “Where am I gonna go, I’m 60 years old?” or “I can’t, I have to think about the grandkids, their parents are already split up, I am not having their grandparents split up, too.”

Basically she’s old school. Stand by your man no matter what, either that or she’s a masochist because I can’t stand him. We have had some fist fights as adults though. It’s ashame because my dad is nice to strangers, just like yours. He has good days where he is nice as can be, too. I don’t get it.

11

Mate, and I say this in all sincerity and empathy, seek help. You may wonder what could have been, but there’s still plenty that you can do; but the first thing you have to do is to get the specter of guilt and fear off of your back.

Without going into detail, I’ll say that I had a somewhat similar–but far less extreme–experience in my upbringing. It’s taken me almost twenty years after essentially severing ties with the culpable individuals, along with a failed marriage, inability to effectively initiate or maintain friendly (much less romantic) relationships, underachievement in academics and career, a few stints of near-suicidal depressive episodes, et cetera, to get to the point where I can start to cope with it, and then only with a significant amount of professional help, the kind of which I would have automatically eschewed (thanks to my upbringing) a decade ago.

The situation–your upbringing, your father’s anger, your problems–are not your fault, you’re not weak for feeling the way you do, and you’re far from the only one. You are not alone.

I couldn’t state it more plainly and succinctly. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to say than do, and the first step–breaking the cycle of affected helplessness that tells you that you can’t take any step–is the hardest.

I’m not a big believer in “self-help” literature, most of which seems designed to allow you to entertain the notion of improving yourself while not actually providing the guidance to do so, Terrance Real’s I Don’t Want To Talk About It is a good introduction to the topic of how the behavior of disturbed/depressed parents, particularly fathers, can impact the emotional and social development of their sons. It’s full of the usual–and frankly, badly written–anecdotal therapy-office psychodrama, but it also contains a lot of insights, particularly those coming from the author himself who describes his dysfunctional upbringing, academic failures, descent into drug addiction, et cetera. Despite it’s literary problems (and my inability to not critique everything I read on that basis, much to the lament and disgust of co-workers whose memos I edit) I found the insights very useful.

You don’t have to live–and end up–like a character in a Russell Banks novel. Get porfessional help. And if it helps you get things out or organize your thoughts, rage away…you’re not going to hurt anybody on a message board.

Good luck to you.

Stranger

12

Another thing about my dad is, my mom has been a stay at home mother/wife all her life. She has no income. She literally never has a dime, he won’t give her any either. There’s only food in teh fridge that HE likes, nothing more or less either. He doesn’t have any bank accounts because he’s extremly racist and says “they’re all owned by the jews, I ain’t giving them my money” and idiotic crap like that. He’s so racist, he won’t even eat food that corresponds with the race it’s known to belong to. For instance, he hates italians so much that he won’t eat spaghetti or anything like that. I’ve asked him why he doesn’t eat certain foods and he says it’s because he hates the f*ckin ______. He won’t eat chinese food, mexican or anything like that. Sick, isn’t it?

Everytime I have to drive my mom some where her car is bone dry on gas, the tires are bald, and she always complains that he doesn’t give her any money. She literally never has a dollar. He REALLY keeps her down and out.

He’s a very cruel person. Very cruel. He went to Tennessee over the weekend because his cousin died and I stayed with my mom. It was so peaceful and the air was so…clean. I loved it and so did she. There was no misery in the air.

13

Boyo Jim, I think you and I had the same father. When I was a kid, I remember lying in bed at night, thinking of ways to kill him. I couldn’t take all the physical and emotional abuse; and the emotional - the ridiculing and humiliating - was the worst of it.

At some point, in my 20s, I started thinking that my father had a father of his own, a man who had been very strict and abusive. I knew that this wasn’t an excuse for my father’s behavior, but at least it partially explained it.

During his 70s, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. My mother took care of him single-handedly, and it was a nightmare for her. He became very violent and abusive at times, but he would forget what he was mad about, and quieted down. As his mind (he had been extremely intelligent) gradually slipped away, he lost the strength to maintain all that anger, and just became a pitiful old man. When he finally died, we all had the feeling that he had already been gone a long time.

Now, when I look back at his life, I can see the whole picture more clearly than when he was alive. He was, in many ways, a remarkable man who was tortured by a lot of internal conflicts, and didn’t know how to express them constructively. And yes, I see many parallels with my own life, but also many differences. I can finally admit that yes, I take after him in some ways, and after my mother in other ways, and have become my own person in still other ways. I guess, all things considered, he did the best he knew how to do, and that’s all that can be expected of anyone.

14

You know, the more I learn, the more questions I have. What makes a woman want to marry a man like that? What makes her stay? What option could possibly be worse than staying and putting up with it? Why would a woman let her husband abuse her children? Why does a man want to scream at and/or beat his wife and/or children into submission? What kind of satisfaction could he possibly get for strapping a five-year-old for knocking over his milk, or asking a question? Do men like this not realize that they are raising damaged individuals? Do they realize it and not care? Do they want to send emotional cripples into the world? Is it a variation on “I knew you’d have to get tough or die?”

No experience I have ever had was worse than the 15 years I spent with this asshole. I don’t know what he could possibly have been preparing me for. It seemed he wanted, as much as he could, to make me regret having been born. I will never understand it.

15

As much as people would like to think they have self-awareness, volition, and control, the vast majority of people do exactly what they were taught by their parents and adult role models growing up. That’s an extremely hard mold to break out of, even when it means making apologies for someone who just knocked half the teeth out of your head.

“And if I ever have a son, I think I’m gonna name him…Bill or George! Anything but Sue! I still hate that name!” – Shel Silverstein

Stranger

16

After years of being around my dad I think it boils down to, “misery loves company”.

17

Mine was my mother. Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say she was the driving force of fear and anger in my childhood. She didn’t hit us, although we got in some physical fights in my teens, but I guess I was as much responsible for that as anybody. Unfortunately, my dad was pretty checked out when I was a kid, though he tried to defend us to her when he could.

She’s dead now, and I’m not sorry about it (though I hate the way it happened to her). I hate to say that to other people, but it’s such a relief from anger, from the manipulation and paranoia and grief.

I’m beginning to understand, though, and trying to forgive her for what she couldn’t help. She had a worse childhood than I did (mostly because of her mother), and she had a mental illness that I’ve spent too much time trying to categorize. Her marriage was miserable, and I see now that we kids were just pawns in her attempts to get our father’s attention. I will never be able to forgive her actions but I’m trying to understand them.

Even now I feel guilty for sharing this, like I have something to be ashamed of, or that it doesn’t count because she didn’t hit us. But I will echo what others have said about therapy. I’m still in the early stages of working this out, but I can see the road ahead when I am finally free of being trapped under my mother’s thumb.

18

My dad had some rage issues of his own, and they gave me a fair amount of problems in my emotional life. They were substantially less than those mentioned by others in this thread - and accordingly, what I had to go through was proportionately less - but it was fairly difficult, at least I thought so. You never knew what foot you were on with him - whether something that would have been winked at a week ago would set him off. He alienated me pretty thoroughly - although by the time I was in my late teens it was more his controlling behaviour than his rage behaviour - and I moved out when I was 18, even though I was going to university in the same city.

I’ve mostly forgiven him and gotten over my own stuff, but I do find myself wondering. I have a tendency to scream and curse when I’m frustrated at things, such as the computer or repair projects (not people), and I worry about that.

19

I think "not my father’ is not a good way to lead your life. Your father had an abusive relationship with his wife and kids. You could have a good one.

Your father isolated himself from people. You do that as well.

I’ll also say, that thearpy helped me with these sorts of issues. It took several tries to get a thearpist that I could work with to get the job done. But I did, and it was worth it.

20

I’ve thought about counseling many times and not gone there. In my younger days money was a big factor (or so I told myself), and still is to some extent, though my insuance would cover at least some of it. My good sister has gone to several sessions and says it was somewhat helpful. And poor choices are passing to a new generation of my family courtesy of my idiot nephew.

But I have found a reasonably comfortable place, if not exactly a “happy” one. I work in a rather remarkable place, the only man in a department of 15 women, where I beleive I am actually loved (not in a romantic sense, since every one of the women I work with is married with children), and they know some of my history, and they are trying very hard to provide me with a kind of family, if maybe a little unconventional one. I am very resistant to it, but I believe I have opened up to some extent. I even throw a party every six months or so, as a conscious attempt to counter my mostly mole-like existence. This is something I never would have done earlier in life. I have more of a social life now than I’ve had since college.

My dad’s been dead about 4 years now, and I have felt a weight litfing off me at times. Ahortly after his death, I had a sudden recollection. During my teens I had a realization I could never marry while my parents were still alive, because I couldn’t possibly bring some poor girl into my horrible family. This is was not path that I consciously followed through my teens and twenties and thirties, but it’s what happened, and it was lurking back in there the whole time.

I even know exactly why I’m alive today, because I thought a great deal about suicide in years past. I was very seriously considering it at age 15, when I made one of the more mature (and correct) decisions I ever made. I decided that I was too young to make a decision like that, that good things might still happen, and I shold wait til at least age 30 before killing myself. By that time I would know whether I was fucked up or the world was.

At age 30, I thought about it at length again, as I had had several bouts of misery in the interveing years, and had just told myself, “Wait til your’re 30”. And my rationale for continuing after 30 was that “the world” world was not worth killing myself over. I’ve since thought of it as my “I am a rock, I am an island” period. I am my own justification for existing.

To some extent I’m still there. I don’t thinlk much about suicide any more. But as I’ve gotten older and fatter and slower, I’ve come up with a new question for which I haven’t yet come up with a satisfactory answer. Now that I’m settled that the world isn’t worth killing myself over, I’m not clear that it’s worth living for either. I can’t say I have much of anything left in the way of ambitions or expectations.

And I can’t say that that is a bad thing. I have at times struggled and failed to do some things, more often failing than succeeding, and had hopes and expectatins dashed to despair. On the other hand I have had more positive things happen without effort, Sometimes I feel that I am drifting in a stream and good or bad things basically just bump into me. Struggling hasn’t accomplished much for me.

I feel relatively safe and stable. Posting as honestly as I can, and reading the many well thought out responses, is probably as close as I’m going to get to formal therapy.

I have to give more thought to this, but I don’t have the energy left tonight.