Dear Nea: Just wanted to let you know that I’ve been working on what looks like a long reply for you in the last couple of hours and it’ll take me some more time.

Dear Nea:

Back to the computer sooner than expected.

I am using upper case letters in the quote below for emphasis:

“Seeing him treat the person I love and rely on this way makes it even harder to accept WHO HE IS and what our relationship may need to look like… What hurts most is that I still want a relationship with my dad… BASIC RESPECT is necessary.”-

The question I’m asking today is the following:

Is it possible for you, your husband, or for any other person to have a relationship with your father that includes mutual basic respect?

My answer (after hours of rereading and studying what you shared): No.

I don’t think that your father can relate to people as equals. I think that he relates to people through hierarchy. In his mind, respect flows downward from him, and obedience flows upward toward him. That means ‘mutual respect’ — where two adults speak openly, disagree safely, and repair conflict together — simply doesn’t exist in his worldview.

He sees disagreement as disrespect, boundaries as rebellion, and accountability as humiliation. Because of this, any relationship with someone he considers below him will always require the other person to shrink themselves, avoid triggering him, apologize first, and accept his version of events.

People with this pattern don’t suddenly shift into healthy reciprocity, especially after decades of behaving this way and openly saying he will not change. You can have contact with him, you can have politeness, you can have surface peace — but a relationship built on mutual respect is not possible with someone who doesn’t believe others are entitled to it.

* I figure he can show respect toward someone he sees as superior because he relates to people through hierarchy. So, if he meets someone he believes is above him — more powerful, more successful, more authoritative — his whole internal system can flip. Instead of dominating, he may become compliant, agreeable, even admiring. But this isn’t emotional respect; it’s strategic respect. It’s built on the same structure: power → obedience. Just reversed.

I think that his worldview is dominance‑based: he respects ‘up,’ dominates ‘down,’ and struggles with anyone ‘equal.’

In your original post you wrote: “We actually owned our own place and were living independently… we were led to believe that would become our next housing situation, so based partly on those assurances we rented our own place out… so we ended up living with my parents much longer than I originally wanted or felt comfortable with, almost one year…

“This also overlapped with my dad involving my husband in one of his businesses. From about 1.5 year, my husband was repeatedly told that certain opportunities and work were going to materialize… But there was very little clarity, and whenever my husband tried to ask reasonable questions about timelines, finances, responsibilities, or what exactly he was supposed to be doing, my dad often responded with some version of ‘just do what I’m telling you,’ Rather than having an open discussion.”

By keeping you or your husband uncertain, hopeful, and financially connected to him, he ensured you stayed in a position where he remained the center of the household. So, it’s possible that he misled you, not necessarily through conscious scheming, but through a long‑standing habit perhaps of using promises as a way to keep people close, dependent, and “in their place.”

When someone’s sense of power comes from being the provider, they feel threatened when others gain independence. So, he overpromises about housing and work, gives just enough support to keep you tied to him, and withholds clarity that would allow you to stand on their own.

This is not love but a transactional system where his ‘help’ maintains his authority. In that system, you becoming secure, autonomous, and able to make your own decisions would feel like a loss of control to him.

So, his pattern can lead to behaviors that undermine your financial stability, not because he wants you to suffer, but because he wants you to stay ‘under his roof’, under his influence, and within the hierarchy where he feels powerful.

To summarize, I don’t think that you- or your husband- can build a relationship with him based on mutual respect — because he sees people as above him or below him — never side‑by‑side. For him, relationships are not built on equality, listening, or mutual respect — they’re built on rank: ‘superiors’ he must obey and ‘inferiors’ who must obey him. So, when he interacts with you, your husband, his wife, or his younger daughter, he automatically places you all in the “below” position, which means he expects obedience, loyalty, and silence instead of conversation or boundaries.

Based on everything you described, the probability of meaningful change is extremely low because
he is older and explicitly said he will not change, his patterns have lasted 35+ years, he has never taken accountability, he believes his behavior is justified, and he has no internal motivation to change. People with these patterns rarely change without external pressure, and in his case: the family adapts to him, he faces no consequences, and he sees himself as the victim when challenged. So, the system reinforces his behavior.

He may soften temporarily — but that is not change. It is just part of the cycle: anger → coldness → softening → anger again.

This is it, Nea. I truly hope that this is not too much, that I didn’t overstep and that you feel comfortable to consider, accept or reject any part of this.

🌿 Anita

Good morning, Dear Nea:

This is what I see happening:

Your childhood pattern (“growing up, the pattern was often to apologize, smooth things over, or let something go in order to restore peace”) was anxiety management.

You learned that the fastest way to stop the fear was to submit. So now, in adulthood, you unconsciously want your husband to use the same strategy (“I actually ended up having an argument with my husband… part of my frustration is that I wish he could see that sometimes, in moments of anger, de-escalating or disengaging can prevent things from becoming worse — even when you haven’t done anything wrong.”) because it’s what you had to do to survive, it’s the only method you know to prevent or soothe your father’s explosions.

Part of you needs your husband to take on the pattern so that you can feel safer.

About the imbalance you pointed to (“everyone keeps coming back to what my husband could have done differently: he could have stopped talking, walked away sooner, de-escalated, etc. Yet nobody can really have that same conversation with my dad because they know how he will react.”)- people critique your husband because of the two, your husband is the flexible, reasonable, and safe person, and your father is the rigid, explosive, and dangerous person.

This is the family’s survival logic: the father cannot change. The husband can. So, everyone pressures the husband to adapt and change.

* If your husband breaks under the pressure and adapts, the consequences are not likely to be small or temporary because when a man is pressured to submit to someone who is mistreating him — especially in front of his wife — several things are very likely to happen inside:

1. He loses self‑respect. Submitting to someone who is bullying, intimidating, or disrespecting him forces him to violate his own internal boundaries. That creates shame, resentment, a sense of weakness, and a feeling of ‘I failed myself’

2. He feels betrayed by his wife. If he apologizes only because you need him to, he will feel unsupported, unprotected, and emotionally abandoned, like his wife chose her father’s comfort over his dignity.

3. He internalizes a permanent ‘lower position’. Once he submits to your father, the hierarchy becomes fixed: father on top, husband underneath, and you caught between them. Husbands do not forget this. And fathers like yours never let them forget it.

4. He becomes anxious around your father forever. He will walk on eggshells, avoid conflict, and silence himself — not because he respects your father, but because he fears repeating the humiliation.

5. He starts withdrawing emotionally from you out of self‑protection. He will stop sharing, trusting and being open- because the marriage no longer feels like a safe partnership.

If your husband breaks and apologizes, he will pay the psychological price, and the marriage will pay the relational price. Your father will not change. Your husband will not forget. You will be stuck in the middle forever, and your daughter will be seriously affected by all of this.

The only path that protects the marriage is the one where you stop asking him to carry the emotional burden created by your father.

Your mind keeps revisiting the incident (“My anxiety keeps wanting to revisit the incident, analyze everyone’s actions, talk about it again, and somehow find a resolution.”) because you’re still living inside the threat zone — your father’s house.

If your anxiety gets to be too much, it’s way better that you leave your father’s house (you wrote a couple of days ago: “we do have backup options if we ever genuinely felt we needed to leave. His brother is here, and we also have close friends we could stay with. And, of course, if it really came down to it, we could always get a short-term rental.”) than for your husband to take on your childhood pattern to any extent.

Let’s say you tell your husband something like, ‘Please apologize just this one time, it’ll take only 3 seconds to say, ‘I am sorry’, and he does just that. The effect, I imagine, would be immediate anxiety relief for you and serious damage to the marriage, a damage that can be prevented. I hope.

🌿 Anita

You are welcome, Nea 🙂. I’ll reply more in the evening (it’s noon here), but for now I want to say one thing clearly: I wouldn’t ask — and definitely wouldn’t pressure — your husband to say “hi” to your father. If I were you, I would step out of the referee role completely. Let your husband have full authority over how he chooses to interact with your father.

Back to you in the evening.

Anita

Good evening, Nea 🙂

What your husband told you about the argument 3 years ago, him then saying “hi”, and your father proceeding to humiliate him- that explains why he wouldn’t want to say “hi” after the major recent argument.

You wrote that you and your husband attended counselling because the two of you wanted to work on yourselves and grow as parents.

Can you imagine your father wanting to work on himself and grow as a soon to be grandfather?

So, your husband yelled at your father, the two yelled at each other during the recent incident?

Question, if I may: did your husband ever yell at you; did you witness him yelling at anyone else (other than at your father, if he did)?

It makes sense to disengaging when things are escalating so to prevent violence.

But after a disturbing scene such as the one you described- without talking about what happened and resolving the conflict- it doesn’t make sense to keep living under the same roof.

And it isn’t right to blame your husband (the victim)- however subtly- for not reacting perfectly (and disengaging just at the right time) to having been victimized.

Looking forward to reading your thoughts..

Anita

Good Thurs night (here), Nea:

Sincerely, you are positively special and unique. It’s difficult to come across people like you in everyday life.

It makes me wonder how a wonderfully insightful, honest, deeply introspective daughter emerges from the parenting you received.

(I will continue this in a little while)

Anita