When my father died, 3 weeks after receiving his diagnosis of small cell lung cancer, I was relieved. It has taken me nearly 7 years to come to terms with feeling that way. I am not a heartless person, I loved my father as much as I could, but it was easier to love him in death than in life. My father was a tortured person. He never felt loved or happy. As a result he dealt with his emotions the way that he learned from his parents, by drinking and being angry at everyone that didn’t give him what he wanted. He had learned not to ask for what he wants because his parents ignored his wishes. This led to a lifetime of distress and never feeling like anyone cared about him. That wasn’t the reality, but it was HIS reality. I feel sorrow for him. I feel pain for the little boy that just wanted to be loved. BUT he was also unpredictable and scary to his own children. I lived in constant fear of what the next thing he would do that I would have to survive would be. By the time of his death, I had given up on hoping he would quit drinking and invest the time to get therapy to nurture the little boy inside. Upon his death, I mourned the loss of that opportunity, but not the death of the man that died. You see, the man that died, had been dying for a long time. Slowly drinking himself to death, the 40 pack year history of smoking explained his shortness of breath and the alcoholism explained the jaundice and ascites which were the result of liver metastases. When he finally had his appointment with the oncologist, he asked if he could still drink. Was that really his number 1 concern? The doctor looked to me to explain and I told him that he was dying and it really didn’t matter anymore if he drank, it couldn’t get worse. Drinking was his coping mechanism until the day that he died, no matter how negatively it affected his life.
The 3 weeks between diagnosis and death were a blessing. It gave me the opportunity to say goodbye to him. Not everyone who loses a loved one has that and I am always thankful that I could sit down and tell him how much I loved him and make sure he knew that I didn’t hate him for his shortcomings. Hate does nothing for us. I feel sadness that he couldn’t get better. I feel pain that I myself struggle to deal with my own feelings and tell people what I want and what I need in a relationship. Therapy has given me the opportunity to become a better wife, mother and advocate for myself in all aspects of life. It has been very necessary and I am glad that I found a supportive partner that has put in the time and effort to attend therapy and work through this with me. Through emotion focused therapy, we worked on our negative cycle. Once we made it through that, we have been learning how to foster a positive cycle. Both of us have been able to address the negative habits we learned from our own upbringing (which were very different).
I wonder constantly why it is our generation that struggles so much to be happy. My grandparents lived through the great depression but were relatively hard working, middle class white people with all of the advantages that that suggests. But life is hard even for those that seem to have it easy, right? My dad’s mother struggled emotionally. She was a stay at home mother who drank in the evenings and “yelled” and failed to tell her kids that she loved them. My mother’s father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease when she was just a teenager and it consumed her formative years and took both her parents away from her. My parents generation were about something very different. With no financial depressions, there was plenty to be had by all. But not without suffering. There were hippies and protests and the Vietnam war. This generation, whatever you want to call us- the Millennials or as our predecessors call us, “snow flakes,” we stand up for injustice and we feel our feelings. We feel our feelings because we look at the generation before us and see the price that they paid for not feeling their feelings. We want true happiness and we aren’t settling for less.
My only advice about therapy and feelings is this: you feel the way that you feel. If you ignore it, it will come out one way or another. It may feel impossible to make that first step, to decide that you want to be a different person, but one step after another, one day, you can feel better. You can be better, but you have to put in the work. We owe it to our children to put in the work.
For those of you that like to read, whether you have kids yet or not, I have found these books helpful.
- The Conscious Parent: https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Parent-Transforming-Ourselves-Empowering/dp/1897238452
- Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child The Heart of Parenting: https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Emotionally-Intelligent-Child-Parenting/dp/0684838656
MumGene 