My Daily Reflections: on Father's Day

Today is father’s day and in many ways I struggle with how to remember and honour him.  My father has long moved on to whatever lies beyond life and I have grieved losing him before I got to know him better, before I got to ask him some important questions that will now probably never be answered unless we meet in the hereafter.

My father was a good man and a good provider. I think in his own wounded way he was a better parent to me than his parents were to him.  I also know that moving to a new country, starting over after a war and escaping from a country that was being taken over by Russian armies left lingering trauma upon his soul.

Having said all of that I am still faced with the struggle of healing my childhood wounds that were unintentionally caused by his unresolved woundedness. 

Yes for sure; I fully understand that he did the absolute best he could with the skills that he had.  I am not in any way detracting from the amazingness of what he was able to accomplish.  Starting from zero as an immigrant and building a business and buying a home he made sure that I always had the security of a roof over my head, a bed to sleep in and food to eat.  I was allowed to go to school and get an education (still considered somewhat a privilege in those days for a girl), heck I was even exposed to music and music lessons because of his love of the accordion.

But after all the good things are accounted for there are also all the things that did not happen, the omissions;  that are actually what causes the lingering wounds that I continue to struggle to heal.

I came across this poem today called: How do we forgive our fathers?

How do we forgive our fathers?
Maybe in a dream
Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us often or
forever when we were little.

Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage
or making us nervous
because there never seemed to be any rage there at all.

Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying
our mothers?
For divorcing or not divorcing our mothers?

And shall we forgive them for their excesses of
warmth or coldness?

Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning
for shutting doors
for speaking through walls
or never speaking
or never being silent?

Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs
or their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it?
If we forgive our fathers what is left?

~poem from smoke signals~

The fact that someone put words to paper lets me know that I am not the only one with lingering questions that remain unanswered.  I am not the only one working through issues of feeling abandoned, unheard, discouraged, frightened even.  Things that a child feels but can’t express in words only internalized in feelings and emotions; that remain buried in the subconscious as values that don’t quite reflect the reality.  The experiences of a child are shaped by the feelings they have in response to their environment, and when that environment feels unsafe, the child internalizes (not knowing any better) that it must be their fault, that they are not good enough, not lovable enough to receive what they need.  And that child grows into a wounded adult with a false core belief that they are somehow broken, for if they had not been so unlovable they would have been nurtured in the way that they needed.

The adult in me can see that my father was a man of integrity.  He worked hard every day of his life.  He strove to be kind and loving and caring.  I think in many ways he cared more deeply even than he let others know, maybe because he was taught that men are supposed to be tough.  I saw him smile and laugh and sing, and I saw him fall asleep in exhaustion during even the most festive of family celebrations.  He was talented and creative and built amazing furniture with even the most primitive of tools, much of what he made was before the advent of power tools!  He loved nature and cared for birds and bees, planting single handed fields of clover. These are just a few of the characteristics he demonstrated and a few of the things he accomplished.

But his working such long hard hours meant I rarely saw him and I so wanted to be with him.  His caring seemed to directed almost exclusively to my mother, and he smiled most often when with his friends.  And I was not welcome in his workshop, possibly for fear I might get hurt, but I felt it was because I was a girl and not a son.  I felt I was not what he wanted; I had failed in in some inexplicable way by being born female.

And so I struggle every father’s day, how do I honour this man, who fathered me, but was so rarely around to be a father.  This man who was the proverbial threat when I misbehaved “just wait till your father hears about this!”  This man; who taught me to love reading because he loved books, but never sat at my bedside to read me a bed time story.  He taught me to love history and to be curious because he demonstrated those attributes, but I learned by watching him (hoping that if I became more like him then he would pay some attention to me and show me that he loved me) not because he shared these passions with me.  There is so much that I admire about this person I never really got to know, the intimate stranger in my life. 

I cried so long and hard when he died.  But now I wonder if my greatest grief was not that I had lost a father, but rather that I never really had the opportunity to know who my father really was, and that when he left this earthly plane, I lost the opportunity to ever gain the acceptance and love that my inner child still craves to this day.

“I love you Dad” seems a pale imitation of what I really feel, a sense of personal loss.  That what I actually love is a fantasy of what might have been, what could have been if life had not placed so many obstacles and challenges in his path.   

“I miss you Dad” not because you have gone on to the afterlife; I miss what we never had the opportunity to cultivate, to create; a relationship where I knew who you really were, what you dreamed of, what dreams you had to give up, and where you were interested in my dreams and sorrowed with me that I too had to give up on so many of my dreams.

“I honour you Dad”, not because we had a successful relationship but for doing the best you could. 

“I do forgive you Dad” not because you did anything overt that requires forgiveness, but because you are human and we humans make such a mess of relationships simply because our past leaves us so ill equipped to do a better job.

Renate Dundys Marrello

2018 – 06 – 17 



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My daily reflections: Push and Pull we Experience in Relationships

I had this thought today about how there is a push and pull effect we experience with relationships that are less than wholesome. 

First off there is this feeling of being used / manipulated controlled where a certain person usually someone we care for deeply and whom we wish cared for us. They know us well enough that they can easily “push our buttons” to arouse certain feelings in us. Maybe they are the ones who installed those buttons, those precipitators of  “not good enough” in the first place through comparisons and judgment and statements of insufficiency or lack. 

Or maybe they are people who watched our buttons being pushed by others and learned to emulate those pushing actions. Sadly those buttons are most often used to push and trigger our feelings of inadequacy.  And anytime we feel inadequate there is that subconscious play that unfolds as a result that always leads us to the same conclusion that we are somehow defective. 

And then when our emotions are heightened, when we are struggling when we are trying to understand, to work through, to find answers these same people have a fear response. They fear we will see the truth of their actions, that something will be revealed that is unflattering to them so they try to pull us away from our own healing. 

A common way of doing this is by implying that we are “too sensitive."  But a more harmful one is implying that "all you need is therapy, you are broken and therapy will fix you!" 

I have found that such people use the “you need therapy” line to deflect away from the fact that they are the cause of us needing therapy!  They don’t want us to realize that the way they treated us, judged us, complained about us, belittled us, condemned us has  anything to do with the way we feel.  They want us to jump to the conclusion that we feel the way we feel because we are intrinsically defective rather than explore that we are hurting because of what we have experienced / what has been done to us or said against us.

Another example is when you start to heal, start to create boundaries, start to say “NO”, start to care for yourself and show yourself self-compassion, start to go after your dreams, they try to pull you away from healing by calling you names like selfish or narcissistic.  They want to imply that the way you are healing toward knowledge and awareness is bad because knowledge and awareness exposes disturbed character patterns, reveals and exposes the truth about the  evil and or ugliness with which you have been treated 

So first they push us through their words and their actions into feeling insufficient, ineffective, not good enough, and then when we start to do authentic healing, they attempt pull us away from really exploring our innermost workings by implying that superficial talk therapy will expose our shortcomings, and that we need help exploring what is wrong with US rather than what is wrong with our relationship with them.

I sometimes get the feeling that those people in my life; who want me to put a bandage on my hurt emotions, who want me to stuff my feelings away in a dark corner, do so because they don’t want me to truly learn and expose that the problem I have is that I have for so long accepted their version of our reality.  Now that I am exposing my own reality, and see how they have tried to control my perception of my reality, they are afraid. They attempt to pull me away from healing, and too often they do so by trying to imply that my better, healthier more self-compassionate me is actually not healthy.  Of course if I comply they can then once again push my “buttons” of inadequacy! 

And so they attempt to push and pull again.

They push me away by calling me names or ignoring me, or excluding me.  And then as I distance myself in response to their pushing, they then resort to trying to pull me back in by implying that if I don’t forgive them and accept them the way they are (so they don’t have to change) that I am not being a loving caring person.   They try to pull me back in by implying I am defective if I don’t.  They imply that I am the problem for wanting to distance myself from their hurtful words and actions.

And so the circle could continue, if I let it. 

In stepping out of that circle, in creating a new path through my own discoveries, in learning that I don’t need to simply “talk about WHAT happened to me” but what I need to do is change the core beliefs programmed by what was DONE TO me;  I have become a threat.  I have become a threat to those who don’t want to see what I have exposed.  My discoveries lead me to the power of knowledge and they fear that my knowledge power will override their power of manipulative control. 

I have decided to take charge of the push pull in my life. I push myself to heal and I pull away from all situations that try to undermine my healing.

Renate Dundys Marrello

2018 – 06 – 05

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