Abusive father in intensive care.... how do you forgive someone who won't admit they did anything wrong?

[Mapley]

Feeling very raw. The man who is my father, who emotionally abused me and my mother and siblings all my childhood (they finally divorced when i was 12) is apparently dying. I say apparently, because in the 20 odd years since i last saw him he's been about to die many times. But apparently this time it's the end.

I chose not to see him again after fighting the court enforced access of my early teenage years and made a life trying to forget the abuse and ignore the hurt and anger. But now I find myself again wondering what i will feel if he dies.

Last night I felt so angry, I wanted to go and see him in hospital and tell him how much he hurt me, how much I hate him and stop him being able to die thinking that he did nothing wrong. (which is apparently what he thinks). i feel so angry, i just want to hurt him. Or i want him to say sorry, I want him to take responsibility for what he did to us. I want some kind of closure, I don't just want him to be able to get away with it.

My mother and sister both think I should not do it, that I'll end up getting hurt and that i should continue to ignore him. My boyfriend said he was shocked by the hatred and revenge in me, that it scared him and he didn't know how to react. He wouldn't take to me about it apart from to say that no good could come from negative emotions, and that I should forgive him and that he wouldn't support me getting in touch with him.

I feel as if I'm not allowed to feel what I'm feeling. I feel judged and ashamed that I feel hatred and anger. But i really do. I was a child, I cold never express how hurt and angry I was, I WANT TO . I want to hurt him. I want him to apologise.

I'm so raw today. Feel sick and awful now. Don't know what to do.

Anyone any experience or perspective?

I found (when getting over an abusive ex) that I was hanging on to the anger and hurt in the way you describe, even 5 years after we split. I made a conscious decision to only allow myself to think of the hurt he caused me, and all the angry things I would like to say to him, at certain specific times of day (I had lots of angry showers and heaven help you if you got in my way during my commute). At other times, if I found myself thinking about things hr had done or what I want to say, I deliberately put it out of my head and focused on thinking about something positive in my life.

It took a long time - 9 months or so, but now I have broken the habit and barely think about him at all. I do still recognise that what he did to me affects the way I think and feel at times but I have stopped picking that horrible scab of hurt, and it really is helping the wounds to heal. Even a year ago I was thinking about exactly what I would say to him to tell him how awful a human being he is if I ever bumped into him. Now? I honestly think I would walk right by with the barest acknowledgement of his existance.

I hope that one day you can feel the same release.

If you really want to see your Dad before he dies, to get some closure,, then do it. You haven't seen him or had any contact in 20 years - in your mind and memories he is still the abusive, frightening father from your childhood / teenage years. In reality he is now a frail, sick, old, weak man. Seeing him like that before he dies might help you to let go of the anger. This happened to a friend of mind who had been abused by their Dad and not seen him for many years. When he saw him, instead of feeling rage as he had fully expected, he actually felt pity and realised he had nothing to be frightened of any more. It helped him a lot.

Just to say, if you really want to go, and you think it would help your healing process, then go because once he's died you'll never know. Maybe he would welcome the chance to apologise - people often want to make amends before they die. Maybe he won't and he'll deny it all and frustrate you. I don't know, no-one does. Your brother's way of dealing with it by ignoring him might work for him, but maybe that doesn't work for you.

Maybe seeing a counsellor for a session or 2 might help? Just to talk to someone removed from the situation who can help you decide?

Good luck, I hope you find peace whatever you decide to do :)

Feeling a bit calmer today. Apparentlynhe's out of intensive care and now on HDU. Another cry of wolf maybe. This man who is my father makes me believe in karma. If all these illnesses aren't his punishment then it is a fortunate coincidence. Yes, I hope he is feeling sad, weak and alone. But somehow I think he's probably got someone to blame other than himself.

I hate that there's so much hate in me. I don't hate anyone else, and mist people I know think I'm so positive and always see the best in people. But maybe it's just because the daft things people do pale in comparison to the lifetime of hurt this man has gifted me.

Mapley

Go and see a counsellor. Get someone to talk to.

I confronted my abuser. I was sexually abused and bullied by a person with a close family connection. It was from my very first memory until into my teens. It obviously had a massive impact upon my confidence, relationships, self-esteem etc etc.

Confronting him just resulted in a smirk. It didn't help much except that I suddenly realised that I was now letting him control whether I moved on or not. I had actually brought myself to the point where I was letting him affect the rest of ny life having been unable to stop him controlling my childhood.

Think about it. You are rationalizing a situation where somehow only he can set you free.

You may never forgive him, that is up to you. I think oeople talk about forgiveness because it is a way of letting go - disconnecting from the past and their abusers control.
I don't know if I have forgiven mine or not because I don't think about him any more. He was a sad bully who tried to fuck up my whole life. But he can't . Because I won't let him. It wasn't up to him. It was up to me.
I moved on. I chose to. He doesn't affect me anymore.

As it happens I went to his funeral. I felt nothing except a quiet satisfaction that it was over and he couldn't hurt anyone else.

(can I just stress, because I talk about him on here, that this man was entwined in my family but was NOT my dad who was wonderful and whom I miss every day)

I'm not sure what is the right thing for you to do, for yourself I mean.

My mother was furious when her abusive father died, because it meant as you say that the hope that one day he would apologise was gone. There was no one to tell how much she hated him any more, even though she had never done so.

I think, if you'll forgive me chiming in when I haven't experienced this type of abuse myself, that you need to give the anger back. He's spent a lifetime letting all of you feel really, really bad and never putting his own toes in the water.

I would think that going to see him and just shouting at him or somehow letting your anger out AT him might be one answer. I don't know. He won't respond how you want him to and will never be that nice dad you wanted and deserved. But you will have let it out.

I can't really compare it but I lived in a house where thoughtless, rude, selfish students used to pass by the bedroom window singing and yelling and fighting at 2am every single night. this went on for months and i would lie there, unable to get back to sleep, furious and shaking and my heart going at 1000 beats a minute, convinced if I was smart enough, knew how to play them, I could 'win' - I could make it stop.

I was always asking them politely to go home. They just took the piss and laughed at me.

One night I got up, leaned out the window and yelled as loud as I could 'FUCK OFF HOME YOU WANKERS'. They looked at me terrified and scarpered.

Finally something had changed. It didn't stop it continuing with different students randomly, but I had some power back - I was free to say what I felt, to give my anger to them, and nothing bad had happened.

I was then able to sleep and ignore the buggers every night. I no longer blamed myself, i wasn't trying to be clever or defeat them - I'd won by giving back what they were throwing at me. It was such a release.

So perhaps it might work for you - stopping thinking about it and just letting yourself react. I don't know but I am thinking of you xxx

My childhood was miserable; I left home as soon as I could and never saw my father again. I spent my twenties feeling sorry for myself and the childhood-that-should-have-been. Then, in my mid thirties, I realised that I has spent longer away from the relationship than I had spent in it. I vowed that, although my parents has messed up the first half of my life, I wasn't going to give them the power to ruin the rest of it.
OP you are the only one in control of your feelings, no-one else.
BYW, why did you want to forgive him now? Just cos he is dying? If it was the right thing to do then you would have done it way before now.

Living well is the best revenge.

Mapley ((hugs))

I don't know what you should do :( I wish I was your friend IRL so I could hug you and help you through this.

Maybe you do need to go and see him, talk to him, hope he apologises etc then be prepared to fully vent your spleen at him if he doesn't - and leave either with an apology or at least knowing you have told him what you really think of him. I don't care how sick he is or isn't - this is not a 'pass card' for being a bastard.

I agree that 'living well is the best revenge' and that you own your own emotions etc - but at the same time, there's a lot to be said for getting it off of your chest while he's still alive.

at " there's a lot to be said for getting it off your chest"

Yes. That is true chipping.

I did say what I wanted to. I did stand in front of him and say " you did this. You are a poor excuse for a human being"
Maybe that vent helped ?

But my rant at him caused a breech in my family that caused many years to overcome.

I stood in front of him as a small child overcoming her fear and hurt at an adult who humiliated, shamed and abused her.
The world saw a 20 something professional woman shouting at a sick old man.
It is hard. The disconnect between how we seem, how they seem. It gets terribly confused.

Pag - no his behaviour caused the rift. You had been papering over the cracks until then and you shouldn't have had to x It took a lot of guts to do what you did and you should be proud of yourself - fuck what anyone thinks that isn't fully supportive of you.

Marley - I would also be reassessing the relationship with the boyfriend - he sounds spectacularly unsupportive. He doesn't have to agree with everything you say or do, of course not. But he's refusing to talk to you about it and he's prioritising your fathers feelings over yours - most blokes would want to go and deck the bastard, not just say 'forgive him, no good will come of it'.

"I feel as if I'm not allowed to feel what I'm feeling. I feel judged and ashamed that I feel hatred and anger. But i really do. I was a child, I could never express how hurt and angry I was, I WANT TO . I want to hurt him. I want him to apologise."

Just read back the OP. Mapley, I hope you don't think that we are joining in with the 'telling you how to feel'. If you want to see him to tell him that what he did was wrong then do it but only if it makes you feel better. Don't try to hurt him - that is sinking to his level. Don't expect an apology - that is giving him the power to disappoint you and hurt you anew. I think that Ingrid makes a good point that if you try to be "clever or defeat" him then you are on a hiding to nothing. Rise above it, and don't let him be in charge of your feelings.

BTW, it wasn't entirely truthful to say that I never saw my father again because I saw him at my mum's funeral. I didn't approach my dad but made damn sure that I was in the same room so that he could make an approach to me, to apologise, to make amends, to fall on my neck in tears saying "I have missed you all these years, I treated you badly, how can I make it up to you" and we could spend his twilight years playing happy families. It never happened.

I have been in a similar situation. I hadn't spoken to my dad for a few years before I found out he was in ICU and we had never had a good relationship.
I visited him, and I'm so glad I did. He wasn't the manipulative alcoholic bully I had always known anymore, he was just a frail old man who was dying.

A few times I visited when he was unconscious and I just sat looking at him, thinking and crying, then when he came round I went to see him and although he was barely conscious he told me he'd always loved me. He died the next day.
I feel like I kind of made my peace with him by visiting him in hospital. I did have a bit of a meltdown not long after the funeral and got some much needed counselling, but now when I think of him I don't think of the bad stuff like I used to, just feel sad that he was never the father he should have been and even remember the few good times.
My brother refused to visit and is still very very screwed up by his childhood.
Hope this helps.

It all helps.

Thank you all.

To be honest I'm sick to the back teeth of counsellors and therapists and their note taking and ikea plant pots and tissues and proffessional distance. I'm sick of living well and not letting him get to
me. I'm sick of it all. It doesn't help!

But equally the thought of being in the same room as him
scares me rigid. It seems unachievable. Especially without support. But good to hear from those who have done it. Were your fathers nearby when you saw them? I'd need to travel, probably a days travelling to get there.

I don't know what hospital he's in. I know general area, but not town or hospital. If I rang up all the hospitals in the area would they tell me he was there?

I think they probably would if you said you were his daughter, had just heard he'd been taken into hospital and didn't think to ask the person who called you which one (in your obvious distress ).

Do you not have any friends who would take you?

I've not read all the thread as I'm sneakily mning at work! However, I had a similar situation in that I grew up in a very violent, abusive house. Mum died when I was a teenager and I left home with my younger sister and never went back. For years I carried around the hatred of my father, and I was so angry that I knew he thought he'd done nothing wrong. I felt I needed him to suffer, and an apology. I woke up every day, and shouldered the huge weight of unhappiness and misery of how I felt.

One day I realised the only person I was hurting was me, my father neither knew nor cared about how much pain I carried. I was never going to get an apology, and he was never going to be made to pay for what he'd done. So I made the decision to forgive. But it's my version of forgiveness - I haven't forgotten and I have never been in touch with him. But I let go of the pain and the sadness.

It honestly felt like I'd dropped a huge burden, and I literally felt lighter like I was floating away. Now I feel much stronger about my past.

So, all I can say to you is that if you let go of the need for an apology (which you know you are not going to get) I think you will feel better. There is nothing to be gained from a confrontation in a hospital, he won't apologise - he probably doesn't even understand that his behaviour was unacceptable - people capable of that sort of behaviour are very good at justifying it to themselves.

Mine died.

I was quite shocked as I'd always imagined having THE conversation where I told him exactly what variety of shitbag he was/is. I had no contact (court enforced) for over 30 years.

Now I just tell him what I think out loud or in my head. Somehow along the way I've realised that I have managed to forgive him. Old fucker that he was.

My abusive father died after a long illness. He was unconscious for weeks before he did die, and I went to see him twice a week for a long time, trailing two toddlers with me on two hour journeys each way.

I never told him how angry I was, or expected an apology in the months when he could have given one. He had no self-awareness that he had been abusive, and his illness made him much more aggressive and nasty than he had been before he was ill.

At his funeral I just felt that I had finally won. I couldn't actually believe that I was finally free from him. Fifteen years, and two years of psychotherapy later, I have not forgiven him. But he does not figure at all in my thoughts or my life.

I did my grieving years ago for the father that I wanted but never had, and I know that he was the product of his own childhood, which was horrendous in many ways.

You feel what you feel, and you must do whatever you want to do. No-one else can tell you how you should be feeling or what you should be doing.

I tackled my insane and abusive mother a few years ago, after she did something dreadful, even for her. The rage just overtook me at the time, and I just let it all come out. Unfortunately this was in public at an airport. All that everyone saw was a middle-aged mad-woman shouting at a defenceless little old lady, who was crying.

Have you had actual psychotherapy rather than counselling? I found counselling bloody useless tbh. But psychotherapy is good.

I have and continue to struggle with similar issues. One thing that helped was a series of visualisations that I did when I was feeling really consumed by anger. I imagined myself saying and doing all the things I wanted to my father. I started by talking, then yelling and then hitting and beating him up. I beat pillows as substitutes etc etc.

The thing that came out of all of this is that there is NOTHING I could do to him that would make me feel better, I simply couldn't hurt him enough to make up for all the hurt that he'd caused me. That once you have beaten someone up and you are still angry there is nowhere left to go. You can only kill someone (in your head, obviously) once and if that isn't enough, then what. In some of my visualisations he was apologising as I hurt him but that still didn't help.

And, in a strange way, that was also a form of release. I realised that there was really no way back from what had happened. There was nothing I could do to him that would make me feel better. Somehow, alongside that, I also realised that if there was nothing I could do to him to make me feel better that maybe that cut both ways, maybe there was nothing he could do either. And I started to let go of the idea that maybe one day he might have apologised.

He was dead by this point, so some of this was easier. I still struggle to get to the same place with my mother. She is less extreme but, in spite of what I've learnt, I still hope for an apology and changes that I know I won't get.

Good luck with whatever you decide. The only thing I would suggest is that you do what you want to for you, not because you hope for a particular outcome.

I've been pondering similar situtions regarding my mother and father lately...what would I do if I ended up in a similar situation to you...

Tbh I'm not sure what I would do...but have an inkling the time for anger from me and apologies from them has past.

I don't know if I care enough anymore to do anything... except carry on with my own life as usual.

This is a very insightful thread.

Firstly I would like to say that you DO have the right to feel everything that you are feeling. It is your lived experience and that means you decide what is valid and what isn't. It is hurtful when those close to us let us down by not understanding, but that's their failing.

I agree that none of us can tell you what you should do in terms of visiting/not visiting, shouting/not shouting etc. I would say that whether you go or not, please don't ever expect validation or closure or indeed any acceptance on his part that he did wrong, because you won't get it. A lifetime of self-justification and lie upon lie doesn't just wipe away in the throes of illness. Unfortunately.

From my own experience (very briefly), when my abusive grandfather died, alone and unmourned, I did feel the weight lift off me. All the things I had thought I needed to say to him just melted away, because at last the old fuck was dead and gone and I could finally dismiss him from my thoughts. I didn't go to his funeral and I rarely think of him now.

My dad, his son, who had spent a lifetime hoping and waiting and trying for that apology that never came, has also told me he's never felt freer.

I hope you find the right path and put him in the past where he belongs :)

"my father ... is apparently dying. I say apparently, because in the 20 odd years since I last saw him he's been about to die many times. But apparently this time it's the end."
"I haven't got his address and I refuse to give him mine. He has one of my siblings phone number, and he rings them to tell them to pass on messages. Which they feel obliged to do, and also because it isn't fair they should shoulder the load when he singles them out."

Why does he ring? What does he want? What is he expecting?

I think that you are in limbo. Just as you get yourself into a good place, he pops his head up again and rattles your cage. I think that it might be an idea to settle this, once and for all. Either

• go and see him now and have The Conversation, or
• decide he is dead-to-you and ask the sibling to stop passing on the messages (except the final message to say that he really is dead). The "not fair" arguement is baloney - they could cut all ties, like you did. They decide not to, so they should live with the consequences. I don't see why their decision should be a guilt-trip for you.

You are letting his periodic near-death experiences set the agenda. Change the dynamic and take control.

"I hate that there's so much hate in me. I don't hate anyone else, and most people I know think I'm so positive and always see the best in people. But maybe it's just because the daft things people do pale in comparison to the lifetime of hurt this man has gifted me."

It's a different dynamic (word of the day!). If anyone does daft things to you as an adult then you can fight your corner as an equal. Whereas, as far as this man is concerned, you have never moved on from the hurt little girl whose only way of handling this is to lash out (no reflection on you: that's what all children do when unempowered). That is what your anger is - all the primordial emotion that you weren't allowed to express years ago.
This feeling of hurt and anger is not good for you. I think that, instead of incubating it, you should do something with it. Either let it go or let it out but do something, stop vacillating.

I haven't been to the Stately Homes threads but there is a chance that there may be an understanding MNer, who has been through similar to you, who may be local to his hospital and will able to go with you if you decide to visit him, wherever he is.

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