Dear Ben,

my relationship with my parents is/was confusing.

Perhaps a part of the confusion is that they never fought, at least not in front of you, but once they had a fight, it resulted in a nasty divorce:

My parents divorced, loudly and hatefully, when I was a child. It’s something I’ve never faced down or fully processed.

The first time I saw them fight, it resulted in divorce. I don’t know what to make of any of this.

It seems you didn’t really form an emotional bond with either of your parents. It’s not a child’s fault, but the parents’ fault. It’s like you observe your parents from the outside, almost like two strangers, but don’t have any emotions towards them. You’re not angry or resentful – that’s not the reason why you never reached out to your father (or vice versa) or didn’t go to his funeral. Rather, it seems like the lack of emotional bonding.

Your father felt like a stranger to you. He probably showed minimal interest in you, he was physically present but emotionally absent. You said he drank a lot of beer – so he was probably a drunk already then, but a functional drunk – he went to work every day. But beyond that, he seems not to have been involved much in family life, nor in your upbringing. He had a relationship with the bottle, it seems, and there didn’t remain any interest in you.

Your mother was passive aggressive, you say. She didn’t dare to challenge his drinking openly, but would do “mean things” to him while he fell asleep drunk in front of the TV. If you never saw them fight, it means your mother must have suppressed her anger for 14 years, until she couldn’t any more. Maybe she disassociated from her pain, but she disassociated from you too? Maybe that’s why you couldn’t form a bond with her either?

When did she become religious fundamentalist? After the divorce? Because it seems that a “righteous” person wouldn’t tolerate a drunk and useless husband, unless she was taught to be obedient and look away?

As anita says, it seems there was a lot of emptiness, a lot of emotional neglect going on. Would you say this is true? Emotional neglect can be as devastating as emotional abuse (“sin” of omission vs commission…). Perhaps that’s why you’re confused, because there was no direct abuse, no one yelling at you and beating you up, and yet it felt abusive and hurtful, so much so that your “cup” was filled to 95% already in childhood. Does this sound true to you?