The Love-Hate Relationship with our Parental Perpetrator

How many times have I thought of how much I loved my father? How many times have I thought of how much I hated him? I’m not the only one with this conflicted problem. Many survivors of incest talk about what a difficulty this is in their lives, especially if their parental perpetrator is still alive. In my case, my father passed away many years ago and my mother several decades before he did. As cruel as it sounds, I’m grateful. If my parents were elderly and needed care, I doubt if I could bring myself to help them. Yet, I would feel terribly guilty if I didn’t. Fortunately, that problem was taken out of my hands.

When I was growing up, I adored my father, thinking him the wisest, kindest, handsomest, most loving person in the world (sound familiar?). Even my mother paled beside him. In fact, I was rather ashamed of my mother. She was only five feet tall and so thin that she looked anorexic. Her hair was lackluster in color and she wore rimless glasses. She had almost no curves to her body with a bust that looked like someone had shoved socks into the top part of her dress. She wasn’t loving and kind, understanding and humorous. She was controlling, rigid in her belief systems and always so happy to believe the worst of me. She was also quick to punish me if I ever thought any part of me was good. My father had some of those qualities only I didn’t seem to notice.

We all see what we want to see. I wanted to believe my father adored me, which he did. Once I turned 13 and that adoration turned to lust, I was thrown into chaos and confusion. I still adored my father but now I was terrified of him as well, only I had no idea why. As children, it is natural to love our parents, even to idolize them. It doesn’t matter what their shortcomings are. It is as if we see them through a prism, one that has distorted reality, creating what we want to see. Some of that is perfectly natural. As babies and then small children, we are 100% dependent on our parents. They provide us with food, clothing, shelter and sometimes good things like affection, knowledge, and spiritual guidance. If we were fortunate, we were able to filter out the dark things they brought in to our life and hold on to the good.

If our perpetrator were not our parent and especially if they were a stranger, it would be easier to see only the dark side to their nature. There would be no churning inside us as we tried to make sense of our quandary. We must sort this out as best we can. Yes, we loved our parental perpetrator because that’s what little kids do. But once we figure out the part they played in bringing pain into our life we should have no qualms about letting them go.  If we don’t we run the risk of duplicating this in our adult relationships. They were our sperm and egg donor and that’s it.

We can do the rest of the raising ourselves.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *