Caution: suffocation hazard

So my dad visited last weekend. I’m not over it yet, but I’m working on it. Don’t get me wrong, It wasn’t a terrible visit. He didn’t openly criticize or yell at us. Still, it was tense and uncomfortable and HARD.

Like I mentioned in my last post, these visits never seem to go that well. For example:

• The last time my dad visited was late October 2004. A week after he left, I started experiencing mild psychosis, the police took me to the hospital and I was committed for a week. Oh and while I was an inpatient, the outpatient program I’d been attending for a year and a half kicked me out.
• The only other time my dad came to the Bay Area by himself was in September of 2002. Midway through his visit I started having intense suicidal urges. After he left, I spiraled down into a major depressive episode that culminated in, yup, you guessed it… the police and a month long stay at a local psych unit. Fun times.

So frankly, the fact that I’m still loose and wandering the streets a week after this most recent visit is quite an accomplishment. Or so my doctor says.

I wish I understood exactly why my dad’s visits are so toxic. The best answer I seem to come up with is that he’s just way too controlling. He’s a gigantic bully who demands that everything: every thought, every action, every moment to be the way he wants it. If it’s not, he’ll throw a hissy fit and make everyone’s life incredibly difficult. NOBODY would want to spend that much time with anyone who acts like he does.

In between our visits, I always seem to forget just how self-centered and full of anger he is. I want to believe he’s not that bad. But then when I’m with him again, I feel shocked and confused. How did I ever think he’d change? How did I live with my parents for seventeen years? Answer: I stayed away as much as I could.

Still, that’s the only kind of family I knew so that’s what I adapted to. When I’m with my dad, I see how I MUST have grown up warped. I’ve tried to unbend myself but thirty plus years of twisting has to leave permanent damage. Sometimes, it makes me feel like I shouldn’t even try, like I’ll always be crooked.

A while back, my doctor said that I had to shut down and drown my natural instincts and personality to survive with my parents. I stopped trying to be myself. I stopped feeling like myself. I shut down any and all natural responses that caused me trouble. The only time I ever let myself off the hook was to get drunk and that stopped working after a while. Nothing. Was. Ever. Right. And when you keep everything under such control for that long it causes a kind of paralysis.

I have to be very, VERY careful when I’m around my dad. He had me twisted around for so long that when I’m with him, I feel like I can’t even trust my own thoughts. I lied to myself and forced my real self down so I could exist with my parents. Still, it was the only way to survive, like the woman in that movie who muffles her baby’s cries to hide it from the enemy, only to discover that she’s suffocated it.