"So Many Secrets and Fears..."

This month, the advice columnist answers a question about breaking patterns of emotional abuse.

Hey! I am still hiding my boyfriend from my parents (especially my dad) for many months now. It is embarrassing to say how long exactly, and I feel terribly bad for my bf who I hide. The reason I do it is that my dad is a choleric man who emotionally abused and threatened my mom and me for years, and is critical of anyone other than himself. However, my mom will stay with him no matter what, and I want to keep the contact with her, but I do not want to involve my dad in my personal life. I want her to get to know my bf finally, but I don't want to involve him in my family drama and let my dad criticize him directly or me for my choice. I am so scared, even though he got calmer and is an old man now. I am so confused and entangled with everything, so many secrets and fears, idk what to do. Thank you for your help!

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Hi friend, 

Thank you so much for writing in.

When I read your question, I thought about a pattern I used to experience with my family-of-origin.

When I moved away for college, I travelled back home for the academic breaks, and the final leg of that trip involved a short airplane ride. At the last possible moment, just before the plane began its descent, I’d go to the airplane bathroom and put my makeup on.

I didn’t like wearing makeup (still don’t) and had completely stopped wearing it while I was at college, but I still kept a little set of foundation, lipstick and blush in my toiletry bag, just for these visits. 

After all, it was already going to be hard enough to keep the peace while I was home. Why make things worse by starting out on the wrong foot from the moment I stepped off the plane? 

The visits still weren’t good. But, I told myself, ‘at least it’s easier this way.’

Another time, I was told I needed to have more grace for my folks being short-tempered with me because they were tired after driving home from weekends with my grandfather, and they didn’t like living off takeout. If I had more empathy, my father said, I wouldn’t push so hard.

The next time I was home, I filled the chest freezer with 100 different portions of chicken cooked in three different sauces. ‘Maybe things will be a little better, now. Maybe I won’t upset them so easily. When they come home from a weekend away, they’ll have easy home-cooked food to eat, and then things won’t feel so frayed.’

They found a different reason to blame me for our next fight.

Looking back at that family relationship, it’s so easy — well, easy in hindsight — to see the pattern.

And the pattern does matter, especially when it comes to emotional abuse.

Sometimes, abuse is obvious from a single moment — one violent, threatening, dangerous interaction is enough to understand that this is the dynamic at play. 

Often, though, abuse becomes visible as the sum of its parts.

After all, it’s not inherently bad to dress or decorate yourself with other people in mind sometimes (choosing to wear the red t-shirt that always makes my partner light up, for example, or using the shoulder-bag my brother gave me so he can see his gift being appreciated).

Making a pile of freezer-meals for the people in your life who have a lot on the go is possibly the most natural thing in the world.

But I wasn’t doing this — or any of a hundred other things — because it was a free, unburdened choice to offer care and connection to people I love.

When it came to my family of origin, their reactions were so big and consequential and (usually) out of proportion to the situation at hand that I felt like I had no choice but to give in and try to make it better, however I could. It’s easier. It’s safer. I can live with this, at least for a little while longer. Just this once. Just because it matters so much to them … 

Again and again and again, while my world got smaller, and I could only shrink to fit.

Even here — it’s okay, it’s natural, to have things that matter deeply to you, more than they matter to everybody else in your life, even if the people around you don’t (or don’t fully) understand.

In healthy relationships, that flows in both directions, and frictions between priorities are something to be navigated together. 

It becomes a problem when some people’s priorities are always treated as more important than other people’s wants and needs. Especially when they have the power to enforce that.

So, what can be done?

I wish I had a better answer for you; a guaranteed script or formula for relationships beyond fear.

For me, the pattern of emotional abuse started to break when I found things that mattered more to me than anything my family-of-origin might say or do; where the cost of appeasing them was just too high for me to pay. 

It wasn’t easy. It was so, so hard, and so painful. In standing firm about what mattered to me, I burned through all the little bits of comfort in the relationship, the few ‘easy’ moments I’d ever managed to squirrel away, and kept burning.

At that precipice, I could see three possible futures.

Future #1: Give in. Decide, whatever part of myself I’m fighting for, it’s not worth the cost after all. This is too risky, too painful, too exhausting. Become smaller, more appealing, needless and weightless. 

Future #2: Remind myself, I’m not a child anymore — the power my family-of-origin holds over my life is not so absolute — and I have power here too, because I have something they (at least ostensibly) want: Me. So I might be able to teach them, if they want a relationship with me, they have to play nice. If an interaction doesn’t go well, if they hurt me or try to hurt me, then I end it (removing their access to the thing they want), and we try again next time. If the interaction goes well, then we get to keep having it. 

Future #3: I leave the relationship. I find some way to go against all my instincts and everything I’d ever been afraid of. Because maybe, possibly, there is a life I could build where the people who say they love me don’t also want to hurt me.

(For the record, for what it’s worth, I chose the third option. And I could list out all the reasons why, and everything that’s happened since, and maybe if you’d been in my shoes you’d make the same choice, and maybe you’d choose differently. But it’s been seven and a half years since I walked away, and just this week, I noticed for the first time that I’ve got dimples, now. Because I’ve smiled so much in the last seven years that the muscles are actually, visibly changing the shape of my face. And I know my life is my life, and your life is yours, and I can’t know or decide which choice is right for you. I do want you to know, whatever you choose, this much happiness is possible; you don’t need to settle for less).

So I will leave you with this:There will come a time, in your life, when ‘keeping the peace’ demands a higher cost than you can pay. On one side of the equation, there’s the familiar call of ‘don’t set him off, don’t borrow trouble, don’t make things worse, isn’t this hard enough already?’ And on the other side is something so fundamental, essential and deeply important to you that the hurt of giving it up won’t ever heal properly; at best, you’ll grow scar tissue around the absence.

It sounds like this — hiding your relationship from your parents because you’re afraid of your dad’s reaction — might be that critical time for you.

You can try to rebuild a new sort of relationship with your parents that doesn’t hurt or harm you anymore, or you can choose to put your efforts elsewhere.  

But you can’t appease your way into a healthy relationship, and when has giving up ‘just this one last thing’ has ever been enough to buy you real, lasting, loving safety?

Wishing you all the best,

Hila