Five months have passed since I cut off all contact with my father.
To many people on the outside looking in, I know I must seem insane. Everyone in my life from friends to distant cousins living across the Pacific Ocean has only ever told me how much my father loves me. I was told that he even decided not to have any more children despite originally wanting four because I took up the rest of his heart when I was born. I was told that my father spoiled me rotten which is why I had such a lazy and entitled disposition. Without a hint of suspicion in my mind, I believed every word.
I used to think that my father and I were incredibly close. He was the one person I trusted without question and I confided in him without reservation. I thought he was wise and kind. The ideal person to aspire to be like.
I was a fool.
My father is a covert narcissist and I have been subject to narcissistic abuse for most, if not all, of my life. I have spent the past two years slowly coming to grips with this fact. I never would have used the word abuse before. I didn't think the severity of the word suited my situation. To be brutally honest, deep down I am still afraid that I might be exaggerating. I always thought the problem was just me and my dysfunctional brain, but I have learned that this is just one of the ways a narcissist tries to exert control over another person.
I can't believe it took me so long to see it and now it feels like my entire life has been turned upside down.
Maybe I am looking for a kind of validation that I never received. Maybe I have ruminated on this for so long that I need to write down all of my thoughts to try to keep them straight. Maybe I am just reassuring myself that the things that happened to me were real and not something trivial or fake. I have spent so much of my life convinced I was just crazy so I beg you, the reader, to please take what I'm about to say seriously.
Gaslighting Since Childhood
Did my father ever love me?
For as long as I can remember, my father continuously reinforced the idea that my mother didn't care about me at all and that she hated our family. My father would always repeat the following statements as if they were some sort of mantras.
My mother was a cruel and heartless woman.
If there was a homeless man in front of our house, my father would gladly invite him in for a hot meal but my mother would not only NOT invite him in, she would call the police and give the man a good kick.
My mother didn't care about our family at all. In fact, she resented us for making her work so hard and she wished to return to her family of origin.
My mother was stupid, irrational, and completely unreasonable. Talking to her was nothing but an exercise of futility. (This was repeated by my father so much that other family members such as aunts and uncles still think this is true to this day.)
Around the age of 13, I started to fight viciously with my mother. Whenever she and my father would argue, I would jump in to defend my father. Why wouldn't I? I was just protecting my adoring father from an evil woman. I don't remember everything I said to her during those fights but I remember the pain in my mother's face and the tears that she cried. I also remember my father's proud face whenever I gave my mother a good trouncing. By the time I was around 16, however, I started to regret fighting with my mother so much. Things were getting so out of hand that my mother decided to send me to Taiwan that summer just to get me out of the house. Before I left, I wrote her a three page apology letter saying how I realized that I had been incredibly immature and how I wanted to find a way to reconcile when I got back. Upon returning to the states, my father informed me that my mother only took a cursory glance at that letter before tossing it away and he had to retrieve it from the bin. I'm not even sure anymore if this was true but I certainly believed him then and a deep hatred and distrust for my mother formed a pit in my stomach. I carried that pit around until my mid-twenties and while some aspects have gotten better, things between my mother and I are seemingly irreparable at this point. My father completely destroyed my relationship with my mother.
Are these the actions of a loving father?
I used to think that there was something really wrong with me. I was supposedly extremely adored by my father. I was supposedly given everything I wanted. Yet, I was always so unhappy. I felt as if I could disappear all together and no one would even notice. The dichotomy between what I was told and believed in my mind versus what I felt in my heart was so severe that I came to conclusion that I was just defective. Obviously, my brain was broken and my sense of reality was inaccurate. I lost all of my confidence and any sense of self-worth.
Devaluation and Invalidation
My experiences can best be described as a death by a thousand cuts. For the most part, I didn't go through major traumatic events. Instead, it was little things that happened everyday all throughout the day.
When I was around 10 years old, I developed an uncontrollable nervous laugh that would occur pretty much at the end of every sentence I spoke. I'm not sure why this happened but it may have been a consequence of being raised by a father who just wanted to control me and a mother who just wanted to ignore me. My father would tell me day in and day out that no one else besides him would ever tolerate being with me because my nervous laugh was annoying. I became fearful to even speak because I didn't notice that I even had a nervous laugh most of the time and I didn't want people to dislike me. Then my father would ask me why I had become so shy over the years. I used to have the courage to dance and sing in front of customers at our family restaurant. Why had I suddenly lost all of my confidence? I was his daughter. Supposedly, having a father like him was reason enough to be confident. So, I am so unlikeable that no one wants to be around me but I should still be supremely confident. Makes a lot of sense, right? But I suppose confusion is the name of the game when it comes to narcissists.
My father did all that he could to keep me obedient and belittled everything I thought or felt. All of my interests were dismissed and all of my faults were amplified. Again, my father would also repeat the following statements as if they were my life mantras.
Why are you wasting your time doing [insert any hobby or slight interest]?
You will never be good enough to do that professionally.
You're not ugly but you're definitely not the prettiest.
Your singing is only tolerable to me.
You’re too slow.
You’re too fat.
You’re too lazy.
You’re only somewhat smart because I’m so smart.
Doing that is useless.
That is a waste of money.
That activity is for boys, not girls.
No one will want to stay by your side if you are like this.
No one will love you except for your parents. (But my mother is evil so really no one will love you except for me.)
No one else would be able to put up with all the annoying things that you do.
Your friends don’t care about you. They will leave you as soon as they can.
Only stupid people get sick. (This will come into play more and more as my physical and mental health deteriorate.)
On and on it went until I felt like all I was had been completely torn down.
Ever since I started forming memories, my father would always tell me that no one believed anything I had to say because I had not built up enough credit. I had to prove that I was trustworthy in order to earn this "credit" and only then would I be taken seriously. So when I told my parents I experienced near constant abdominal discomfort, nothing was done about it. When I called them everyday in college right before my mental breakdown, all of my crying was written off as me being immature. When I told them that I could no longer work a normal 9-5 job due to me vomiting almost every day, sometimes multiple times a day, I was accused of just being lazy and exaggerating my symptoms. When they witnessed first hand how much I was vomiting, I was accused of purposefully not taking care of my body which is why I was in such a state. I didn't realize that this was all just a form of manipulation. No matter how much I toe the line to try to be a good daughter, my "credit" never increased. My words meant nothing then and they still mean nothing now.
More of my father’s best hits were:
Girls who sleep with men before marriage are like old shoes you find at the side of the road, dirty and unwanted. (One of the first questions my father asked me after he learned that I was suicidal was if I had slept with my then ex-boyfriend. Because that was the most pressing matter at hand, right?)
Once a girl is married, she is like the water you toss out on the street in the morning. You can never get her back. (Implying that my position in the family was only temporary.)
Somewhat Traumatic
Now, I said that I didn't go through major traumatic events FOR THE MOST PART. That doesn't mean they never happened at all. I was in my last year of university when I went through a bit of a mental breakdown. I self-harmed and became suicidal. At my worst and lowest point, my father, instead of showing any compassion or understanding, would incessantly berate me. He called me weak and useless and broken. I was forced to stay at a mental health facility for three days because I mistakenly told a therapist that I was suicidal. I was still regularly self-harming. Yet, my father saw fit to bludgeon me with insults on a near daily basis. He would complain that I was the biggest burden that was forcing him to stay with my mother. Apparently, he would have divorced her long ago but my weakness was keeping him trapped in this family. He claimed he was just trying to help me by motivating me to become tougher. What do you think? Was he helpful?
The saddest part about all of this was I worked hard on myself to forgive him. I reasoned that he was of a different generation that knew nothing about depression. I convinced myself that his anger only stemmed from ignorance and that once he was educated, he would be different. A little more than 10 years have passed since then and before I had cut off contact with him, he once again said that people with depression are weak. He would say extremely hurtful things completely out of the blue and without any provocation. He repeatedly told me that he once had hopes and expectations for me before trailing off to imply I was just a disappointment now. He also told me that he didn't need me. That is when everything started to come crashing down around me. In 10 years, he hadn't bothered to read even one article or to watch even one Youtube video I sent him explaining depression. His anger at the time wasn't due to ignorance. It was due to him feeling as if I had wronged him somehow. I was supposed to be the perfect daughter to fulfill all the dreams that he couldn't fulfill in his life and I ruined that for him. Even after all of this, I still tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. I tried to tell him to not say things like that because it hurt me a lot to hear them. Again, however, he said that he was just trying to help me and refused to stop. I guess in the end he did help me. He helped me see his true character or lack thereof.
Narcissistic Rage
Speaking of my father's true character, I would be remiss not to mention another rather traumatic event that took place in April of 2019.
My husband and I had decided to move from Los Angeles to Denver for various reasons. One of which was to save money to pay for our wedding that was going to take place in September of the same year. We started living with my father in my childhood home. I thought that this was the perfect arrangement. My husband and I could save money on rent and I could look after my father who, in addition to getting older, had been living alone for the past few years. At first, my husband and I put in extra effort to do chores around the house, especially more labor intensive chores. We wanted to get along as a family. Right from the start, however, my father would constantly criticize me. While this wasn't anything new, I had lived some years apart from him at that point and wasn't accustomed to it. My skin wasn't as tough as it had been in the past. Whenever I experienced pain or vomiting due to my stomach disorder, he would always say that I must have done something wrong despite being told by me and various doctors that my disorder is not something I can necessarily control. It's rare and not well understood which means there is no specified treatment. My father believes that only stupid people get sick so such an explanation was utterly unacceptable to him. Everything must be my fault. I can't wave a magic wand and cure myself of all of my ailments so I must just be too stupid. My father would also start petty arguments over anything and everything. If I had known that this behavior is common in narcissists in order to try to throw the other person off kilter, I wouldn't have taken the bait so many times. I would repeatedly tell him that I wasn't interested in arguing and that I was absolutely exhausted but he was relentless. Had living with my father always been this painful?
The situation was already starting to go sideways barely two weeks into living with my father. I overheard my father speaking with my mother over the phone one morning and, once again, he was saying hurtful things. This had not been the first time I woke up just to hear him talk about me behind my back. My husband saw how much I was hurting and reacted like any good husband would react. He leapt out of bed and walked out of our room to tell my father to stop. My father immediately responded with explosive anger and screamed at my husband to get the hell out of his house. Mind you, all my husband did was tell my father to stop saying hurtful things about me. My father raced upstairs toward our room with sounds of my mother's voicing screaming at him to stop coming through the phone. To be honest, I was frightened. My husband and I closed the door to our room because my father seemed to be out of his mind. My father aggressively pushed the door open and my husband stood in front of me ready to confront him. Luckily, my mother's wailing voice finally reached my father's ears. She threatened to divorce him if he didn't calm down and he walked away before things could escalate any further. My husband wanted to move out immediately.
Maybe I was in shock. Maybe I had been conditioned all of my life to rationalize these things away. Whatever the reason, I convinced my husband to give it another try. Cohabiting with other people is harder for some than for others. My father was just old and stuck in a traditional Taiwanese mindset. He really is a decent person. He just lost his temper. He never would have actually hit us. Excuse after excuse came flying out of my mouth. My husband saw that I was hurting and didn't want to hurt me any further so he agreed to give it one more chance.
About one week later, after more criticisms and hurtful comments were directed at me, my husband decided that we really needed to sit down to have a heart to heart with my father. My mother had flown back to Denver in the interim so a family meeting just to talk things over made sense. My husband approached my parents and politely asked if they were available to have a discussion. My mother said yes and we all made our way to the kitchen table. My husband only managed to say that he wanted to talk about how hurt I had been the past few weeks when my father suddenly exploded with anger once again. He yelled at my husband for being rude and for being a lousy human being. He aggressively raised his hand at me which my husband promptly blocked. I didn't know if I was about to be hit or not. My mother pulled my father into the kitchen and yelled at him to calm down. She was using her body to block him in the kitchen because I'm sure she was also afraid that he might become violent and she wanted to keep him away from us. My husband and I were stunned into silence. We had just wanted to talk and we didn't even get a chance to say anything that justified this type of reaction. My mother tried to control my father but perhaps he was frustrated that he couldn't reach his intended target so he violently shoved my mother, almost knocking her off her feet. My memory goes blank after this.
I was a 30 year old, fully grown woman, and yet, when I saw the rage in my father's face, I was paralyzed. I couldn't speak. I couldn't think.
After three days of nonstop fighting, my mother finally convinced my father to apologize to my husband for behaving like an absolutely maniac. My father, with a smile on his face, gave the most insincere apology I had ever witnessed. But still...He was my father. So I pushed down my growing apprehension and spent the next year walking on egg shells and awkwardly trying to coexist with my father. I was desperate to salvage whatever was left of our relationship. My father, on the other hand, spent the entire year completely ignoring my husband. My father would only speak to me if I initiated the conversation and the hurtful comments never stopped.
My husband and I should have just left that house that day. I just couldn't let go. I felt like I was losing my father, a person I had wholeheartedly trusted up until then. I couldn't accept that I had lost him a long time ago. Maybe I never had him in the first place.
I felt as if I was standing at a precipice with the edges falling away at both sides.
The Final Straw
A horribly long year crawled by as I tried to come to terms with my newfound realization that my father was a narcissist that didn't have any capacity for compassion. Ever since his violent outburst, he showed absolutely no interest in my life or wellbeing. I spent a year running errands, buying groceries, cooking meals, and fruitlessly trying to start conversations all in the hope to mend bridges. My father spent the year disrespecting the few boundaries my husband and I asked for just so we could all live together more easily. My father also ignored me whenever I cried out due to physical pain. Even when I would dry heave so hard that it felt like my rib cage was crushing my organs or when my legs would cramp up for 10 to 20 minutes with sharp, stabbing pain that brought tears to my eyes, my father would just walk right past me without so much as a word of concern. Was this the same father that supposedly loved me with all of his heart?
All of the frustration of living in a pretty unfriendly environment culminated with our last major fight in May 2020. Boundaries were again completely ignored and my husband couldn't take it anymore so he confronted my father one last time. My father responded by once again exploding with anger. I guess civil discussions is not a skill my father ever learned. He screamed at my husband and I to leave the the house immediately even though we were in the throes of a global pandemic.
I could not keep it together anymore. I ran out of justifications. I ran out of excuses.
So my husband and I immediately started look for apartments that day and signed a new lease just a few days later.
My very last conversation I had with my father was short and bitter. I couldn't continue pleading for him to show me just a modicum of compassion. I was emotionally drained and could only muster up enough energy to ask one question. I asked him if he thought he had ever done anything wrong or mistreated me in anyway.
He replied no.
I haven't spoken to him since.