What Occurs When an Origin Story Is Withheld

The absent father creates an absence in the child that leads them into dangerous and emotionally unavailable relationships in their adulthood.

Warning: This is a personal account evidencing my memories and stories. It contains themes of parental alienation, neglect, abuse, and descriptions of the consequences of absent fathers. Please look after yourself. Do not read if you wish to keep your therapist on a pedestal:

Parental Alienation:

My mother prevented me from understanding my origin story. It just wasn’t of significance for her.

She used him as a weapon against me. This man, whom I should be afraid of, but wasn’t known.

She would threaten to send me to him when I was naughty, sometimes coldly, sometimes through manic explosions; I am not sure she even knew I was there.

When she saw something she didn’t like in me, she would say ‘You are just like your father’ or ‘Your father used to do something similar to that’. However, I had no concept of what she was talking about. I did know that meant that there were parts of me that she didn’t like. Which would have led me to question whether I was likeable or not.

Sometimes her rage would order me to grovel to her, or she would send me to my father. I would duly do so, pleading with her to relent.

When my mother would get in a rage, she would go all Shakespearean on me and shriek that ‘I was the dark spot, she needed to remove’ or that ‘my father said to her that he would send a dark shadow to her, and I was that dark shadow’. I don’t know what she meant by that.

I did feel that my Father must be a fearful person to have the power to make me a dark spirit sent to haunt her. I knew I wasn’t bad, but I did not know how to convince her of that. Because her rages were more terrifying than what she was saying. However, I am sure that over the years, this idea of me being a black spot on people’s lives started to sink in.

It became quite boring listening to her trying to horrify me. At times, I probably told her so, and I knew it wasn’t okay to be made to grovel for forgiveness, and yet that was what was required to regulate my psychotic Mother.

The Absent Father Figure:

At the same time, there was a man whom my mother had brought into our house, whom I was to call Dad! If I didn’t, there would be consequences. This man, who lived with us, called me ‘Stupid Little Girl’ and didn’t like being around me much and certainly didn’t like the way I behaved. I would often be chastised for just being me. He tried his best to change me to suit, and I tried my best to stay the same. I hoped he really didn’t represent a father figure because he failed in every way. He disappeared through work and avoided all family connections except for when I needed disciplining, which would take hours of lectures, which were for my own good, of course.

It was like I had two separate parents who did not acknowledge the incorrectness of each other and would further enable the abuse. I wasn’t the only one who felt this because my friends refused play dates as my ‘Dad’ scared them. No child wanted to be around him.

So, I grew more isolated. Yet, adults seemed to love him, and they would often tell me so. He was intelligent, educated and created a career around caring for others. He appeared to love animals and his son. So, that is confusing and creates cognitive dissonance. Which is trying to hold onto two perspectives in your mind at the same time.

Conflict appeared to be normal, both parents appeared to be seeking calm, and I was the one who disrupted it all. Yet, he also displayed cold anger, and she was so red with rage, so is it really a child’s responsibility to quell? I saw through this veneer.

The Uproar:

I remember she had started to threaten me to send me back to my father, so I turned on her and snapped. ‘Well, why don’t you just send me to him, because he can’t be worse than this?’.

She hated this; she knew she had overstepped. From then on, my origin story was met with indifference. She couldn’t remember much. She had to leave him in the middle of the night. Even, that I had saved her by being born, she had reason to get away from him. She didn’t know where he lived and wouldn’t know where to start looking.

So, I confronted her with her behaviour of late. How her threats are empty, and now I do not trust whatever she says about my father’s force. That made her angry. I didn’t know there was more.

Parentification:

In later years, when I would open up to her about being bullied at school. I was bullied a lot as a child. When I would ask for love and support, I might get a form of that, and I would soften on my mother’s chest. Then she would tell me of some of the awful things that had happened to her, mostly at the hands of my Father. My body would tense again because now I must be a witness to her pain, and my pain wasn’t good enough or should just pass because it wasn’t that bad. I would soothe my mother through her tears, and she liked that. And learnt lessons from her to fear men. This is called parentification, which is also child abuse.

The Search:

Despite my mother’s attempts to disparage him, the stirring in me about my father never rested. I wanted to know who he was, and I wanted to see him so I might be able to understand what part of my face represented him. I ransacked my house and my mother’s things, and I found a photo of a man, and I asked her ‘Is this him?’ She said ‘No’, and that was that.

I remember walking on the street and looking at every man that I passed with a question of ‘Could this be him?’. I became suspicious of my mother’s male friends and wondered if I was their secret love child. I would often fantasise about a man showing up at the house and declaring his right to fatherhood and taking me away from whatever this family was. It never happened. Traumatised children often dream of alternative scenarios and dissociate from reality.

The Pause:

In secondary school, I became self-centred, which is totally natural. I stopped caring about locating my father. I had acting out to do, I was rebellious and attempting to create a social life, trying to grow away from the lunacy of my family.

Fortunately, one of my mother’s fantasies was to own horses, so I was given an escape. I honestly think learning to ride and keep horses and being in a mutually respectful relationship with them saved my life. It became a source of calm, as horses naturally help your nervous system. I cared for the horses, I knew they loved me, and therefore I began to realise I couldn’t be a dangerous person. Strangely, because of this being my mother’s fantasy, I became golden for a short time, and I became so focused on loving the escape and the validation that competing with horses gave me. I am so grateful for the refuge I was granted.

However, when I hit sixteen, the need started up again. I reached out to the Salvation Army and the Missing Persons charity. I attempted counselling, but the counsellor didn’t understand because I had been adopted; everyone assumed I was loved and was chosen and therefore lucky. I couldn’t explain, I wasn’t. I think my voice got smaller.

My Awareness:

Now, I am in my forties, married with a child. I have realised that I have always searched for my dad, a dad. I have looked for it in the wrong places. I have looked for it in dangerous places, and I have been seduced by men who have purported to care for me and then again seek to control. Now, I understand the pattern and how I fell for it repeatedly, hoping to correct the pain of childhood. This is what fatherless daughters do.

I would hyper-focus on achievement and work because that is where I got my validation or a feeling of ‘good enough’. Yet, I felt no relief, as the credit given often flew over my head, or I just gave it away. I would just work harder, as if I had something to prove. I understand that somewhere within me was a hope that if I succeeded at something, my Dad/Step-Father would notice.

I understand why, each time I was let down by a man, I would feel such stirrings within me that it would be added to the list of betrayals I have endured. I understand I have had a disorganised attachment, which means I was set up to be betrayed and misunderstood because I have been conditioned to know that the source of safety is also the source of fear.

I would navigate each social setting and seek out the most dangerous man in the room, and I would befriend him, in the hopes that he would not harm me. Maybe even be fond of me, so he might protect me, and I might soften him. In return, he would soothe my nervous system temporarily because it was what was familiar in my soul. Ironically, the healing is about being less vigilant in relationships when you are set up to be hurt.

I would seek validation in the wrong places and set myself up for danger because I did not know what safety was. The few times people truly wanted to care for me, I was scared because I felt responsible for their happiness, and I thought I would be rejected as soon as they got to know me. That was then.

Because now I know what safety should feel like. Now, I can witness it with others. I can see the spark that flashes in my daughter’s eye when she is loved fully by her dad. Now that I have created safety for her, I have been able to locate it within myself. I have broken the chains of the cycle of intergenerational trauma. My child gets a dad. And now I can feel the grief. Because I can let go of that fantasy of ‘what if’.

Accepting Grief:

I realise that I grieve the loss of a man gazing into my eyes and telling me I am everything to him. The gaze of unconditional awe and wonder, I have never felt, as it can only truly come from a father figure. So, I wouldn’t even recognise it if it happened. That experience was never meant for me. I am no longer blaming myself for the relationships I have endured.

How can a child access safety if they have never been held protectively by their first relationship with a man? An absent or indifferent father is the worst kind of Dad. It is not about their absence; it is about what that absence does to a child’s psyche and how they relate their absence to themselves. It is about the lack of safety or boundaries that a child creates because they look elsewhere for safety. The hole that can never be filled becomes low self-esteem and a need to be loved by whatever version is on offer. Often, only locating emotionally unavailable men or those who are critical and controlling. With the inability to leave dangerous situations, even when the red flags are glowing hot. It is so much more than ‘daddy issues.

Activating my Voice and Finding Witnesses:

I offer my story again as a sacrifice for others. So, they might realise where their relationship issues stem from and so, with boldness and courage, address them. I also need to have this witnessed in type, as this story has so often been passed over as fiction, and I need to bear witness to the horror of my childhood and the reality of how this affects childhood development. Even now, in my cognitive dissonance, I wonder if it was really that bad. Because my story is not what people think of as child abuse. I was not beaten and left for dead, nor was I starved. Although now I might argue that I was because this is a consistent psychic attack on a child, the starvation and beating were from the lack of love and that happens in the dark when no one is watching. A refusal to be given an origin story is an abuse of a child; it is parental alienation, it is wanton neglect. I am the only witness to the impacts of this cruel intent. Except that many people have experienced this similarly and find it so hard to find the words. I have found my voice, and it will not be quiet now that it is safe to speak.

If you read this and this speaks to you, please comment, please share. Because I know that there are many people who this will affect. I know that sharing stories creates a balm to help someone not to feel so isolated in their pain. Together we can voice some part of our story and unite in the shared suffering of this not being okay to have endured this. That is the start of healing, to not be alone.