Dear Crawford:

You are welcome. You shared today that your father suppresses his emotions, therefore he is emotionally unavailable- meaning he is not available for you to connect to and therefore emotional closeness with him is impossible. He “puts up a façade where he acts happy and ‘normal'”, an “illusion of no emotion and everything is fine”, and even when you are angry with him and your anger is noticeable in your tone of voice, he acts as if you are perfectly fine with him.

You wrote: “I was thinking that if it won’t get better soon, or I figure out some bearable way to relate to him, I will have to talk about this with him”-

My thoughts: you can talk to him about what you shared here, but if he is and has been closed off emotionally for years, maybe throughout your lifetime, there is little chance that a talk with him will make a difference in how he operates.

It is very frustrating to try to connect with someone who will not connect with you, especially when that someone is your father. And it is very frustrating to be angry and him not noticing. It feels.. almost like you don’t exist, doesn’t it?

Humans are not robots, we are emotional beings, like other animals. Your father is trying to be robotic, that is, free of emotions. He can’t be a robot and he is not being fully human, so he is in between, in a way.

If you do talk to him on the matter and you get nowhere with him, maybe you can pretend that he is a robot and connect with him as human-to-robot, respectfully but keeping the connection strictly rational. What do you think?

anita