My Parents Don’t Like Me

Dear Cary,

I am glad you started up again with Since You Asked, way over there in Italy. I hope Italy is not a sad place now, but it must be, a whole generation of grandparents has died off. This summer will be a season of national mourning for Italians; the Christmas season will feature so many families experiencing that first difficult holiday without their beloved parents and grandparents.

This is much on my mind because my parents don’t like me. They never have, really, but I have ignored it and spent my life buying their love. I bought them trips to Vegas and cruises to Alaska. I bought my mom expensive jewelry for birthdays and Christmas, and power tools for my dad. I would always ‘forget’ and leave the price tag on so they would know how much I spent – I thought that would make them like me better, clearly I was honoring my father and mother with my gifts.  When I moved away, I made sure to visit home frequently – at least twice a year. I would send birthday cards by FedEx to make sure they arrived on time.

Nothing has changed them. They tolerate me but do not approve of me. People insist that parents love children but my parents do not hug or kiss me (I can count on one hand the times either of them have done so). If anything their dislike has grown over the years, and especially lately.  I don’t know if it’s the virus keeping everyone inside, so they are glued to Fox News more often than usual…or if my differences from the rest of the family have just become too insurmountable for them.  They go to church, I do not. They want abortion banned, I do not. They are openly racist, I try never to be.

I’m angry about their continued rejection, because I grew up in a household with a lot of psychological and emotional abuse; actual physical abuse was not as common, but the threat of it was a daily thing.  My dad hasn’t  laid a hand on me for a long time, but the last time he threatened me, I had to flee the house, and I have only been back one time since then, for a wedding of a sibling, and that’s been the only time I’ve seen them in a decade.

I call on holidays, mother’s day, father’s day, birthdays.  If the conversation goes well – by that, I mean, if no one calls me a godless baby murderer, a feminazi, a Dim-o-crat, or some other shitty slur of my values – then you can be sure the next conversation will go badly.

I’m 60 years old. I don’t want to hang up from talking to my parents feeling like a teenager, crying hysterically. My husband is tired of it – he’s not unempathetic, but he doesn’t see why I can’t accept what is plain as the nose on my face – my family doesn’t like me, never has, and despite my obvious good qualities, I am never going to win their affection. Most days I can accept this, but lately – the past year or so – it’s become very difficult. I find myself thinking that they must be right, that I am *not* in fact a good person, or loveable in any way. I start mentally going through the list of my flaws and mistakes; I get so despondent, I don’t see the point in living anymore, which is not exactly the same as being suicidal, but it is a close cousin.

My parents will not live much longer. I see my friends with their close relationships with their parents, how badly they miss them when they pass away, and I am filled with a frantic, panicked longing. My mom had a close relationship with *her* mom – what the fuck is wrong with me, that she can reject me so consistently for sixty years? Whatever is wrong with me, why can’t they forgive/accept me?

During this pandemic, so many people are full of sadness they can’t be with their families. I’ve found it freeing to know that I can’t be with them even if I wanted to, because I have an excuse – the virus.  I don’t want to be with them, though – it is far, far too painful. I thought I could stay away and have a phone-only relationship but even that is not possible, unless I am willing to just totally subsume who I am, and accept every terrible thing they say to/about me without comment. I would like to be able to do that, but the resultant self-hatred is just too difficult and could end up hurting my marriage.

How do I accept that my parents are never going to love me? Do I keep trying to stay in touch with them? They have never once called me, nor visited me, in my entire life, so if there is to be a relationship it can only be one way – that much is clear. I think of them dying and I become overwhelmed with the grief I have carried my whole goddamn life. I guess I am asking for a way to think about this that doesn’t make me feel even worse than they have already succeeded in making me feel.

Black Sheep

Dear Black Sheep,

This is such a great letter. People are going to love this. Because you have opened a Pandora’s box. This is so taboo, this idea that parents would not like their kids! Because there is apparently this unwritten law, or maybe it’s actually written, that parents must like their kids. They must in fact love their kids and show this in a million different ways, demonstrate it to their kids, make sure their kids know it, lest they ever doubt it. Lest their kids ever be so ungrateful as to doubt that the parental love is all-powerful and enduring and ever-present.

Yeah. News flash dude. Thanks for presenting a clear counter-example. Parents don’t always like their kids, and sometimes they don’t even pretend to like their kids.

Bravo! But it hurts. It hurts bigtime. Because we kids have expectations.

Now. You don’t have to suffer about this. It doesn’t have to be your problem. There is a way to live a happy life in spite of this behavior of your parents.

I recommend the book “Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy” by Dr. David Burns. The basic approach is cognitive therapy, which is a method of replacing the crazy thoughts that are causing you anguish with a set of true, undistorted thoughts that will not cause you anguish. I know I’m not explaining it very well. You’ll have to read the book. And may I say that the book talks a lot about depression and you don’t sound like you’re depressed and neither was I when I used this book. I just had a situation in my life that was causing me pain and I wanted a solution to it.

Here is how it helped me. I’ve told this story before but I will tell it again because it is true. I had a problem. It had to do with wanting certain other people to be a different way. And while your problem is better than mine, in that you seem to have a perfect right to want your parents to treat you with love and respect, my problem was different, because there was no rational reason why editors at a hip New York magazine should love me. Yet I sort of wanted them to and it was causing me anguish because every interaction was difficult. So I had stopped calling my editor. I was pacing the room, picking up the phone, putting it down, pacing the room, wanting to call my editor, not calling my editor, starting to call my editor, stopping, putting the phone down, pacing the room, deciding to call later, not calling later, worrying.

So I actually went to a therapist. I didn’t know that he would have the keys to the universe of my suffering but he did. He told me to buy a book and read it and I did. The book was the Dr. David Burns book “Feeling Good.” What a dumb title, right? But OK as an obedient patient and student (I do what I’m told) I bought it and read it and it worked.

For instance, it is clear that your parents are lacking in some of the feelings that many people take to be normal. They are apparently not only unwilling but incapable of behaving in the way that you wish they would behave. They are never going to do what you want them to do. They can’t. They won’t. They never will.

Because your wishes are in many respects normal, I suspect that it’s hard to let them go. Your anguish comes from having fervent wishes that are never granted. It happens over and over. Every time you encounter your parents you feel that longing for an expression of love and esteem. Every time your wish is denied and it is very painful. And it’s hard to let go of that wish because it seems right and normal.

It might be less painful if your wish were to throw a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball. That wish is a little unrealistic. Your wishes seem utterly normal. And yet. And yet the reality is that they will never be granted.

Therefore, the cure is to let go of those wishes, and the trick is, how do you do that. It can be a great release to let go of those wishes, to recognize them as dysfunctional thoughts, in that they run counter to reality, and to combat them, using Dr. Burns’ simple methods, with thoughts that are true.

Burns’ method involves a process of listing those “dysfunctional thoughts,” taking daily inventory of them as you go about your business (I used a little notebook and rather than disturbing it was actually interesting!), and then countering them with true thoughts. You find the subliminal thoughts that flit through your mind, below the threshold of awareness, you make them visible, and see how ridiculous they are, and apply truth tests to them. These truth tests reveal how untrue they are. As you see how untrue they are, they lose their power. You gradually replace those “dysfunctional” thoughts with thoughts that are true. Often these true statements are reassuring. They are verifiable, undeniable, and perhaps even compassionate, and they make you feel better.

It worked for me. That was many years ago and I continue to use those methods to this day.

In my case, I had one dysfunctional thought that was “ruining my life.” (To be true to the cognitive therapy approach, it wasn’t actually “ruining my life.” It was actually preventing me from calling my editor.) Well, actually, it’s not even true that the thought was preventing me from calling my editor. I was choosing not to call my editor based on my belief that calling him would be painful and humiliating. I was afraid to call my editor because of what I feared might happen. I had an unrealistic belief about what would happen when I called my editor. I also had untrue beliefs about my own capacities. I had this dysfunctional thought running through my head that said, “I can’t write, I can’t write, I can’t write.” I feared that in some way this belief would become evident to my editor, and then I would feel humiliated and hopeless and I would sort of want to kill myself. Not that I was ever clinically suicidal but, like you, I sometimes wished it would just all be over.

Anyway, my thought was, “I can’t write.” That was the untrue thought that was causing me depression and anxiety and, more practically, preventing me from calling my editor.

(Oh, god, it’s even doing it now. I am not out of the grip of this professional trauma, this awful sense of dread about my professional relationships. I felt it just then!: A slumping of the shoulders, a sudden feeling of tiredness, hopelessness, distraction.)

So, I replace that thought with a dose of reality. What my therapist, bless his heart, told me to do was to collect tangible evidence to counter that thought. In my case, it meant making an inventory of the stories I had actually written and had published. It turned out there were a lot of them. They were, as the lawyers like to say, prima facie evidence. I saw before me evidence that the thought in my head was untrue.

Here is a side note. About my relationship with my parents. Oh, gee, I’m just remembering this now. This is odd. Because when I was drafting this reply, I went into a whole long thing about how great my parents were. and yet, in this session with the cognitive therapist, I realized that, counter to my belief about my undying and complete love for my father, I was in actual fact living in fear of him in one respect: That my writing was not good enough for him. Because he was a harsh critic of other people’s writing. That I often heard him say things like, “this guy can’t write worth a damn,” and “that lady can’t write,” and “why can’t these people learn to write for heavens’ sake!” For that was part of his professional role, to write, to edit, to judge and evaluate writing, to fix people’s writing, to teach people how to do it, etc. Oh, gee. No wonder I was afraid. He was a very kind and loving man but he had this thing about writing. And it turned out, lo and behold, I was actually living in fear of my father’s disapproval! And I had no idea. I actually did not know this. So that was a big insight. I live with it to this day. I am to this day afraid of people’s disapproval of my writing and it blocks me in many ways. Maybe I should go back to therapy. I probably should.

But anyway … as therapists are wont to say, “This is about you, not about me.”  ha ha it’s always about me. I’m so self-involved. And

I must say, speaking of being self-involved, I am a very lucky person. Right now, I am sitting in my house in Tuscany. The doors are open to the garden, which grows seemingly with a love and life force all its own, and the pomegranate tree and the grape vines and the flowers we recently planted, and the lawn and the birds, it’s a lovely, lovely setting for me and I realize I can turn my attention to that, to my uncanny luck, to my luck in surviving cancer and avoiding poverty and fleeing San Francisco and landing in a beautiful place where the people are kind and the food is good and inexpensive, as is the housing, and I will be OK. I can think about that, or I can think about the grinding despair of my disillusionment with literary editors and agents, my hopelessness about publishing a book of fiction, my fear of trying to publish a book of poetry, the thought that it’s just useless why bother, that they hate me, that I am worthless, that I am a terrible writer, that I’m a lightweight, that nobody will take seriously the literary work of an “Internet advice columnist,” that all the serious writers live in Brooklyn, that I SHOULD HAVE MOVED TO NEW YORK AFTER COLLEGE AND IF I HAD ANY GUTS I WOULD HAVE, that I have always taken the easy way out, the immediate rewards of journalism as opposed to the Olympian heights of “true literary art,” and there goes the sound of the truck that picks up the recycled paper and I am back to my desk here, my gratitude, my gratitude based in reality: That I am fine.

That’s how it works, this whole dysfunctional thoughts machine. Blah Blah Blah.

So I know that Dr. Burns’s analysis is true for me. I just experienced it, just this moment. But it takes work to uncover those dysfunctional thoughts. I didn’t know I had them at first. It was only by making a daily record of dysfunctional thoughts that I came to be conscious of them.

They were operating below the threshold of awareness. That is the tricky part. It is hard to believe in the existence of a thought you are not conscious of, until through the application of a method, you become conscious of it and it becomes real and magnified.

Also: You have to do it. The method in that book worked for me because I did it. It doesn’t work to just know about it. It doesn’t work to just read about how to swing a baseball bat. You have to actually practice swinging the bat. Same thing with this. Reading the book on its own probably would not help. But the book has exercises you do. It tells you how to do them They’re not hard. They help a lot. They helped me.

It is true that I did this under the direction of a therapist. I would recommend that but if it’s not possible I would recommend buying the book and doing the exercises on your own. Maybe get somebody to be your accountability buddy and make sure you do them.  I probably wouldn’t have done the exercises on my own. I need somebody telling me what to do. I need consequences, like, being really embarrassed with the therapist that I didn’t do them. It’s the same with learning Italian. I won’t do it on my own. I’m too whatever. I don’t want to label myself and cause another crazy spiral of self-loathing so I’ll just say that reliable observers will confirm that I don’t study my Italian unless I have a lesson coming up.

OK, so that’s the whole thing there. Cognitive therapy works, and where you need to change your responses to a condition beyond your power to change, it can be a life-changer. Go get that book! Find a therapist to help you do it. I really think it will make it possible for you to live comfortably with this ridiculous situation.

And it is ridiculous. I’m not making light of it or making fun of you but it’s kind of cathartic to just say it’s ridiculous. People will say it’s tragic and oh so sad and all that, and it is, and it causes you great pain, and your own pain is nothing to laugh about, but you do have the power to end that pain and feel comfortable with the situation which while it’s sad and awful is also, let’s be honest, just fucking ridiculous.

You know what I mean? I’m not hurting your feelings when I say that, am I? I’m not violating some unwritten code? I mean, it’s like a situation in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” It’s so awful that it’s ridiculous. Parents not loving their kids? Who ever heard of such a thing?

So, I send all my love to you. I really believe there is a cure, a solution, a way out, and I pray (do I actually pray? Yeah, ok, sometimes I do, sometimes I actually get down on my knees and pray for things. I don’t think I look very cool when I do it, but I do it) that you will find this solution and you will put it into action and you will feel much, much better.

Thanks for writing. That was a great letter.

Cary T.