“Much has been written about co-dependency. All agree that it is about the loss of selfhood. Co-dependency is a condition wherein one has no inner life. Happiness is on the outside. Good feelings and self-validation lie on the outside. They can never be generated from within.”
― John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You
I reminisce about the day my father told me he loved me and I could smell the whiskey on his breath. I was around the age of eight. He had just broken into our home through a bedroom window. Our house was a prefab built during or just after the Second World War, so it wasn’t terribly secure and fairly easy for any of us to break into.
I recall my mother had talked about arranging a legal injunction to stop him from bothering her, as even though my father didn’t want my mother in his life, he wouldn’t let her go either. He had a jealous streak and toxic behavior, which was bizarre because he was the one who had the other lovers. My mother also spoke to me about wanting to stop complete contact and I started to sob deeply and heavily. My tiny body shook and I felt the sheer grief of my brokenness from the bottom of my heart. My father, to me, was somehow, the better parent. My mother was eccentric, religious, and ruled by an iron rod, a large wooden spoon, and a hard set of knuckles. She was the mad one.
Looking back at that moment now, as an adult and a mother myself I can see why she wanted to do this. Being that my father wasn’t dependable, he was terribly immature, and a chronic alcoholic. He would more than often turn up late when collecting my twin and me. And many other times, he didn’t turn up at all. Like the day we waited after school in the freezing cold snow and eventually giving up after an hour had passed. We had counted hundreds of cars go past us. We always counted the cars passing us each time we waited and waited for him to turn up. So, we headed back to the school, forlorn, having to find another way home to our neighbouring town. The expectation of being let down became part of our default setting.
When my father did pick us up from wherever the designated place was, as it was hardly ever outside our house, he would check our teeth, necks, and heels of our shoes to make sure they were all clean. He was so ashamed of us, our poverty, and our existence, being that it was outside of wedlock and that our mother was a divorcee. His toxic shame leaked into our own essence and core. We were young and aware that his character was flawed and that he liked to drink but when you are that young you don’t have the maturity to understand fully about adults or how they become who they are. Or why they hurt you so badly?
My twin and I knew what to expect as soon as we climbed into the back of his car. His dialogue would be as automated as a recording. Without fail, it would begin with a quick hello, in his Italian accent and straight onto, “I thought your mom was on the pill, I was meant to go back to Italy and be a doctor!” And then he would continue with, “Your mom, she’s mad!”. He would talk on and on, usually about himself in anything to ramp up his ego. We knew the drill and yet his words would still feel like nails down a blackboard.
We would arrive at his aunts’, Toni, and Lucia, who were drenched in the religiosity of Southern Italian Catholicism. As we stepped into their old-fashioned kitchen, with the delicious smell of Italian coffee, expressed from a pot, the aunts both would retort, “How is your mom, is she still mad!” Then they and my father proceeded to banter away for a couple of hours in their rough Napolean dialect. They didn’t even come up for any air, as they continued with an obscene amount of profanities.
My twin and I would step back outside the house, completely ignored, and search for ways to deal with the monotonous boredom. This scenario filled up most of the few hours spent with our father. Once he pushed the boat out and completely surprised us. He had arranged to take us both on a small aircraft. It was a short local flight, and it was his flying lesson, but we were thrilled. It was the highlight of our childhood, with him.
It was the early 1990s when I fell in love with a local Italian boy. I was in my early twenties and still very much an empty shell from my addiction-driven short life. His parents came from the same village in Italy as my father. They were all from the same Italian community in my hometown. My boyfriend’s father told him that if he continued to be with me, he would be digging his own grave. The trouble is that in staunch Catholicism, my mother being divorced and having children from another marriage and my parents not being married made me have a devil’s mark on my head. And that’s the way the story went all my young life. There was so much shame. Everything dripped in shame.
I was twelve when my father met Lynn, an English rose with a rich father who was the CEO of a major oil company. You could see the £ signs of love in my father’s eyes. To give her dues, she has eloquently put up with an enormous legacy of toxicity from him. They have two grown-up children, the eldest being a doctor! You can imagine his pride or is it an inflated ego, when he tells all of the Italian community back in his homeland.
Should my twin and I be in the vicinity of my father’s restaurant when we were in our teens, my father would proceed to convert us into cousins or friends from Italy so that our identities and his old life were dug deep into the bleak vastness of where it all originated from. And the essence was sadly bleak, that is what shame feels like. From then on we were only ghosts of his past.
So many of us bear shame from family and we do not fully comprehend how we can carry this shame into the form of shyness and blushing profusely, lack of confidence, and feelings of worthlessness. Or simply being our self-conscious self. This is shame being played out in many of its guises. It lives in addictions and a false sense of grandiosity. Shame filtered down from my father from the ideology of Catholicism and from his father dying when my father was a small infant. The family were left with little to live on. Shame smashes through family dynamics and gives birth to more shame through the next generation.
Shame should and can also be healthy when it is used in the correct way, as John Bradshaw who wrote, Healing the Shame that Binds You, says that a healthy shame is important.
‘Shame is the emotion which gives us permission to be human. Shame tells us of our limits. Shame keeps us in our human boundaries, letting us know we can and will make mistakes, and that we need help.’
But when shame is toxic it is the master disguise in so many of our behaviors. It is behind addiction, grandiosity as well as worthlessness, and self-loathing. Another of Bradshaw’s quotes on toxic shame address this.
‘Toxic shame gives you a sense of worthlessness, a sense of failing and falling short as a human being. Toxic shame is a rupture of the self with the self.’
My twin and I were raging on the inside unknowingly, and my rage was hidden in my addiction to alcohol and drugs. We were seventeen and drunk when we rocked up at my father’s restaurant. We went there to warrant ourselves a place of importance in his life. I remember being rude to the waitress and it was carnage. My father dragged my twin and myself out and as far down the road as possible. He was a strong man, his arms as strong as his legs. We had embarrassed him, job done. I woke the following day feeling ashamed. I wasn’t really an angry person, but I was desperately hurt, unloved, and rejected.
I crashed through many more years feeding that wound until, having my own daughter, and fighting to survive encouraged my own growth and healing. I have also experienced many epiphanies over the last ten years on my healing journey. I now see my inner child very clearly looking at me asking to be loved and accepted. That’s how I see the visions anyhow. So my journey is about having that joyful relationship with self.
I haven’t seen my father for many years, however, I have now been able to thank him spiritually for any good intentions and I have also come to a place where I am able to lay him to rest emotionally and can only wish him well, quietly in my soul.
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