Dear Dave:

You are welcome! Good to read that (1) you went away to Portugal with Kate and had an incredible and very peaceful time, (2) Kate has been by your side since the return, and you expressed your emotions healthily to her,

(3) Kate is a good person and a supportive partner: “I expressed my sadness and cried with her. She explained that she saw this as strong, and nothing to be ashamed of. These times really give me the comfort to know that good people don’t judge you for showing such emotions as a man“.

(4) you are speaking with a counselor again, working on your attachment issues and gradually feeling more comfortable and calmer.

In regard to your father “locking carers out of the house which required police to break in and then the next day found fallen in his home with evidence of self-harm” – angry, he locked care workers out of his house, and indifferent to his son’s emotions, he is taking away your calm/ making you miserable.

There is a tendency, when a parent is sick and/ or aging, to assign bad behavior to sickness and aging when it is the same-old-same-old behavior as when the parent was young. When your father was a young man, and you were a child, he was primarily angry and indifferent to your emotions, making you anxious and miserable (then and now): “my father’s temper and his dislike of children meant I definitely walked on egg-shells around him so as not to make him angry. He would often be very angry at normal child-like things, such as dropping something, or not understanding a difficult concept… I was scared to see but was forced to be with every other weekend, I would often cry whilst at his house“.

His sickness and his age are not his choosing/ his fault, but much of his behavior is still his choosing. It’s helpful to keep our perceptions true and balanced, taking everything into account, so that we see people as they truly are.

anita