l0st in th0ughts...

[L0stH0pe]

Hell0! I am a bit l0st....

I have a question...

what do you do when you have thought about suicide ever since young adolescence, because a lot of things, but basically because your father always made you feel worthless and awkward, and left you constantly feelling like a kid left in the middle of the desert, truly, with the supplies required to ensure his physical survival, but no other direction or destination. It still happens today, many years after adolecence ended...

WHat happens if apparently the same was true of your brother, but there was no saving him. How do I deal with a dad who still makes me feel worthless every time i see him- weekly- a mother in pain and a grave with a cross and what could have been a beautiful life burried six feet under. And I am the only one who really sees the picture.... I blame my father for my thoughts of suicide. I blame him for my brother's suicide. Yet he still does not have a clue of his role in this, or that he is sick.

Where do i go from here?

[Bitsy]

Hi losthope,

First I want to say that I understand, to a large extent, how you feel. I had a very debilitating father too. In fact, I have no contact with him now, going on 2 years. I was also suicidal since I was 20. I was able to get away, though, when I went away to college, basically from age 18.

It looks like a tragic and very emotionally difficult situation that you are in. If you have any possibility to do so, I recommend that you get a lot of time and distance between you and your father. The purpose of that would be for you to put yourself together without the harmful influence of your father. You can't heal or become mature while still in harm's way. I don't know how old you are, but if you can go away to university, I would do so, and maybe also seek out experiences that will help you to grow and find out who you are, to stop hearing your father's voice.

I don't recommend something I tried to do for at least a decade--don't try to get your dad to see. I doubt your dad is so different from mine that you would succeed in enabling him to see what effect he has and has had. You'll probably be wanting some kind of justice or acknowledgment, accompanied by an apology of sorts, from him. I recommend not seeking those things. You may surely want to write him a letter or do something of that nature when you begin to learn from a more capable perspective what he has done, and you may want to let him know how you feel in the letter and so on, but the key is not to get stuck in that phase of healing. I'm middle-aged now, my brother is even older than I am, my dad is in his 70's and he is befuddlingly exactly the same as he always was, a broken record, and despite the fact that he seems to have spent his life alienating everyone from himself through his treatment of them, even now with me not contacting him anymore, he continues his behavior with my brother, who is now also seriously considering cutting ties with him as I have done.

It would be best for you to get some distance, a lot of distance from your father, heal the damage he has done in you and that has resulted from your brother's death and once you are on your way to getting better and finding out who you are, when you have a firm foothold on who you are (as opposed to your father's version of you) you can return with a good and true perspective on yourself, and also able to better help your mother.

Unfortunately, the only answer I'm aware of to your question is a life path, not a quick fix, which maybe you were looking for. I don't believe there is a quick fix to damage done by parents and upbringings.

I hope you will find your way and I'm sorry my answer is not a simple one.

[The Cloud]

I had a similar childhood. Thankfully, it didn't involve suicide, but I was suicidally depressed for a significant portion due to my step-father's verbal abusiveness. There is one piece of advice I can give that will help you.

Don't blame him.

The events of your childhood happened. You can't deny it. You can't change it. If neither are possible, then blaming anybody for those events will do nobody any good. Blame will never make you happy, it will never make your family happy, it will never change anything for the better and will usually just make things worse. If you make it his fault, you will never be able to do anything about it because you will always be waiting for him to make it better.

Your thoughts on suicide and your brother and father and mother are your own. They start with you, and you are the only one that can end them. Your father acted as he did, as did your brother, and neither could have done any different. Once the past has happened, it is irrevocable. Things could not have turned out differently because that would have required that the entire universe alter itself around those events, since everything is connected. Things happened, and that is it. There is no reason, there is no why, there is no fault and there is no blame, there is just the truth of it.

[m18pak]

Put some distance between yourself and your father. Accept that he is the way he is, and that in all likelihood he will never change or realize he did anything wrong. Once you have accepted this then you will be able to let go of him, and you need to let go.

He is your father; that is why you cannot let go of the hurt and blame. His abuse has created a trauma bond that chains you to him.

I understand how you feel: I had a childhood like yours. You want him to understand what he did to you, to see just how much he's hurt you. You want him to be sorry for what he's done.

I can't tell you what to do, but I accepted my situation and in life and I reacted as best as I could to it.

I accepted the fact that my parents, my father especially, were simply negative people, that they were harmful to be around and would simply go on causing me pain and suffering for as long as I let them.

I accepted that they would never change, or at least, that nothing I could do or say would ever change them.

I accepted that I could not hope to make them understand what they had done to me, and that they would never admit they were wrong. They would likely never realize that they were sick, that they needed to change.

I accepted all this and I did the best possible thing for me, which was to leave and never come back. I have cut my parents out of my life, and my life has been better for it. I lost nothing except my pain and hurt.

What I did was I surrendered. I surrendered all the anger I felt towards them, and I accepted that in the end it didn't matter if they were wrong, or if I was right.

Good luck.

[L0stH0pe]

Thank you all for your answers

Probably the reason why I took so long to answer is basically that I was frustrated with pretty much all your answers.

Hear me out...

Bitsy: I was indeed looking for a quick fix to a problem I know doesn't have one. I think all of your advice is very pertinent, and I will try to apply it on my own way, since a physical distance is not possible now and because of my mom I can't stop seeing them altogether while being in the same city. I am old enough (27) to have been trying myself to make him see for a while and arrived at the same conclusion: that I can't. Despite being a very smart person, he is too conservative and cannot seem to comprehend outside the little psychology skills passed on to him by his own parents.

Cloud: your post I found particularly debilitating and frustrating. What do you mean it's not his fault?!? It is all his fault!! It really is!!! He should somehow pay for it!! Look where it brought my brother!!! Look where I'm standing!!!

But although that`s what I really think, deep down I understand what you mean and I actually sorta share your philosophy, that we are responsible for our own destiny. But that means letting him go with no payment. I`m tired of being the better person out of the two of us. I know I am. I want him at least to acknowledge it. But that`s also not an option. Your solution is incredibly zen and I am not sure I am there yet so your post was painfully idealistic and like `Man, that was what I knew was gonna have to happen and didn't want to happen!`

18pak: accept?! More??

Never change?! Really?

Never admit he was wrong?!

But this is what I had to take until now!!

You mean to tell me this is as good as it gets?

And again the distance... Impossible now.

I know, I know. WIth acceptance comes peace. But it also results in no change. I want to make a change. I want to make sure other parents don't do this.


But you are all right, and it took me some time to come to terms with it. The past is the past. The only thing that can still be affected is the future. If I want to make a difference, it is too late for me I am lost and will be lost until... one day,... hopefully,... I find myself. But I can affect the future by making sure other people don't act the same way. Maybe i'm still "young" and idealistic, but I believe we can educate people to be better parents, we just have to make this a big enough issue that people will care.

Thanx for making me feel less alone.
It sux that the only solutions were the ones I always knew they would be...

Not easy.

[Lauxa]

Hey there l0st,

Blame isn't so bad, just check out the Abraham-Hicks emotional guidance scale and you will see that there are a lot of emotions lower than blame. But remember that the goal is to move up the emotional scale and not get stuck. So if blame is where you are right now, see if you can move up to disappointment.

Also use affirmations to focus on what you want. Use affirmations on yourself (I am at peace with my father, I am confident and secure, I am well-equipped to face life) or on your father (My father makes me feel good, My father promotes my self-esteem). If these affirmations feel like lies and your ego is putting up too much resistence, try using what I am currently experimenting with, negative affirmations.

[The Cloud]

Originally Posted by L0stH0pe

Cloud: your post I found particularly debilitating and frustrating. What do you mean it's not his fault?!? It is all his fault!! It really is!!! He should somehow pay for it!! Look where it brought my brother!!! Look where I'm standing!!!

If where you are standing is dependent on your father, then you're always going to be standing exactly where he puts you. What will revenge accomplish? Is revenge justice? If he pays in blood or money or misery for what your brother did, who will be benefited? Will it prove to you that the universe is a just place, even if it does nothing to help your brother?

You can blame him and hate him, there's no doubt about that. But is that how you want to feel? Do you enjoy blaming and hating? I surely don't, it eats me up inside. It becomes a poison, polluting everything that makes me happy until there is nothing left to feel but anger and sadness. Is that what you want? So blame if you want, but know then that it is you that is choosing to pay the price for your brother's death.

[uberinquisitive]

I read this once:

Anger is like you drinking poison and expecting some one else to die.

Your father sleeps fine at night. How about you?

Eckhart Tolle also mentions this in his books, about how we often think, "if I'm resentful enough for long enough, then the universe will realize that something is wrong, and dole out rightful justice."

However, the world simply doesn't work that way. In fact, that sort of thinking is often referred to as "magical thinking" or "childlike thinking." The name comes from the way children think: a lot of kids think they have the power to cause their parent's divorce, for example.

The traditional definition of justice and closure may never apply in your situation. That is simply life. It is not a reflection on you as a person - it's just typical of how life works for everyone - lots of loose ends, lots of unsaid words, lots of regrets and what-ifs.

I would highly suggest you go to a therapist and work out these issues. This sort of mentality hurts you and only you. And, the thing is - it's no longer your father victimizing you.

You are victimizing yourself.

Think about it.

[liverpool footballer]

I don't know what you went through but i have this sense that some of the posts are far too disconnected with the situation you are in now. It's a bit like telling a drug addict to stop taking drugs because it harms their body and expecting them to change just like that.

For me, i guess the problems i had in life were on a far smaller scale but i too had issues with blame, anger, fear, abandonment, etc. I came across The Power of Now which taught me how to transcend those feelings. If you haven't read it, i believe that you will find the book helpful to deal with the issues you are facing now.

People can tell me to "accept" this or "accept" that, but without the explanation of the book, i just went "EFF off please!?!?". The Power of Now was what gave me the ability to do whatever the previous posters said about acceping or taking full responsibility.