Dear Luke:

I read  your recent post and re-read your previous posts. Two things occurred to me:

1. You are not afraid of your father and you have no problem asserting yourself with him. When you found out about him having had an affair, you “laid into my Dad and told him how I was feeling and that our relationship is now not good.. I let out at him which I think was needed.. I made it clear when I was letting him have it that he has needed therapy for probably decades and that I can’t take this stress level anymore and he agreed to go to therapy”-

– you let him have it, told him he needs therapy and he agreed to go to therapy- an aggressive father would have not stand for you letting him have it; would have told you something like: how dare you tell me that I need therapy! An aggressive man/ father would have ended that exchange with you quickly.

“When I blew up at him I mentioned that he just doesn’t have the emotional vocabulary to deal with other people  in a decent way”- you talked to him as if he was a child and you were the parent scolding his child for misbehaving, or for not using words correctly.

If you were a child who grew up scared of his aggressive father, you wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing what you did, and he was a scary father, he wouldn’t have submitted to your demand that he goes to therapy.

Thing is, you didn’t assert yourself with your wife, which leads me to think she was not passive and submissive. So it is not that you learned to be assertive with all, including with a scary father; it is that it is easy to be assertive with him because he is.. passive and submissive, at least in personal relationships within his family.

2. Your empathy is with your mother and not with your father. You blame him for everything and she gets none of the blame, he was the one “cheating on my mother, telling her and us a bunch of lies. Insulting my Mother by going behind her back”-

– but what is it that she did to him?

I suppose you heard her blaming your father for cheating on her, telling a bunch of lies to her and to his own children… and insulting her by going behind her back. It may be that you are simply repeating what you heard her say to him, when she fought with him, or to you when she told you what happened.

It is possible that you heard her blaming your father for and belittling the positive he did for the family throughout the years (scapegoating him), and you believed her. Children believe what they hear over and over again, and often enough what children hear one of the parent say about the other is not true.

I suggest that you re-think your beliefs about your parents- question your father being the-bad-guy, the Guilty One,  and your mother being the-good-guy, the Innocent One.

anita