Healing Feelings About Delinquent Dads

In a bitter confrontation, David Basner, a young advertising agency executive, tells his father, Max: “You ran around and had your fun and came here to eat and sleep like it was a boarding house. . . . Tomorrow I’m going to make a commercial about a family who cares for each other and loves each other. I’m faking it.”

Max, a cantankerous, lonely old man whose anger and inability to change have driven away his wife of 36 years as well as his only child, yells: “I did the best I could!”

David may feel that wasn’t good enough, but when his father gets sick, he finds love underneath his anger and puts aside his high-powered job to help Max recover from surgery.

As David pushes his father’s wheelchair out of the hospital, Max says with wonder: “You’re the last person I thought would ever come through for me.”

Some may recognize David and Max as the characters played by Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason in the 1986 film “Nothing in Common.” But many will see themselves in this scenario, because the difficulty David has with his father is not just movie melodrama--it’s all too real for men and women who feel their fathers have failed them and have so much anger they fear they wouldn’t be able to come through if dad needed them.

Jane Myers Drew, an Irvine psychologist who specializes in helping people make peace with their fathers, says the prevalence of women in the work force today is increasing the pressure on dads to be nurturers as well as breadwinners. With more attention focused on the role of men in child rearing, many adults are examining the impact their fathers have had on their lives. That emotional journey can be both devastating and liberating, Drew has discovered in her own life as well as in her work as a psychologist.

At a recent workshop called “Healing My Relationship With Dad,” which Drew teaches through Coastline Community College, she told her students that her father died when she was just 14 months old, and the loss had a profound impact on her life. She now sees that it was responsible for the rough years in her 20s and 30s when she went through almost suicidal depression, confusion about what to do with her life, a series of bad relationships with men, some long periods of not dating at all and, finally, a marriage to an older man that broke up after eight years.

Now 45, she says she had to overcome her anger at her dad for leaving her before she could set her life straight. Part of that process was writing a letter to her father, which she includes in a book of exercises called “Healing Inadequate Fathering.” She writes: “I’m angry about all the times that I needed a dad and you weren’t there. I needed you to like me so that I could believe that other people would like me too, especially men.”

Telling her story at the Coastline workshop last week made it easier for her 13 students to share theirs. All had come with a deep need to bridge the differences that prevent them from relating to their fathers--or to come to terms with dads who have died or dropped out of their lives.

Frank, for example, said his father, a retired military officer, is an alcoholic who gets drunk and abusive whenever they’re together. “My dad was gone a lot when I was growing up,” he said, “and when he was there, he was always critical. He said I would never make anything of myself, and so far, he’s right.”

A recovering alcoholic himself, Frank said that in spite of the way his father has put him down, “there’s a cry in me for daddy.”

Karen never knew her father. When he left her mother, he walked away from four young children, too, and never looked back. “I’ve always thought all men were jerks. I’m tired of feeling that way,” she said, noting that she’s also afraid she’ll take those feelings out on her 8-year-old son.

Stephanie said her father was a workaholic who spent little time with his family and was remote whenever he did come home. “He was there but he wasn’t there. We could talk about things like money and cars, but he couldn’t deal with anything emotional.”

He remarried after divorcing her mother and had two children with his second wife. Stephanie feels he has cut her out of his life, and she doesn’t speak to him at all any more. But she thinks their unresolved relationship is responsible for her habit of attracting men who, like him, “are very aloof and cold.”

Ann’s father was a perfectionist. “I never did anything good enough,” she said. “Now I’m a perfectionist. I really struggle with trying to feel I have some sort of worth. I seek approval from people, and I have trouble with criticism.

“It’s hard for me to love men because they’re not perfect, and all I can see are their flaws.”

Drew’s students were seeing only their fathers’ flaws until she asked them what a “good enough” father would be like. The composite profile that emerged was of a man who would accept them as they are and be honest and open enough to show them who he is, who would listen and guide without being critical or controlling, who would be supportive emotionally and financially and who would help them recognize their special abilities by showing that he appreciates them.

Drew pointed out that women gain their sense of femininity from attentive fathers: “As the saying goes, a girl learns how to be a woman from her mother, but she learns she is a woman from her father. The nonverbal cues are important. It’s the way his face lights up when you walk in a room or he puts down his newspaper to pay attention to you.”

Drew’s message to her students was full of hope. She said she’s seen many people reconcile their differences with their fathers--or at least reach a point where they no longer allow unconscious anger to ruin their lives.

The first step toward healing the relationship--and yourself--is awareness, she said. Next, you have to allow yourself to express both your anger and sadness. “If you don’t release those feelings from the past, you really pay with less aliveness today.”

Drew recommends that you confront your father directly only if you feel there is a good possibility that he will respond and you’re strong enough to handle it if he doesn’t.

“Often the father was so wrapped up in his own problems that the basic bonding didn’t occur when you were young. Now that he’s older, he may be more interested in that,” she noted.

But he may not be able to change, she cautioned. Still, you may be able to forgive if you can begin to see your father as someone who’s gone through pain in his own life and who is part of a chain of inadequate fathering--or perhaps even abuse--that may go back generations in your family.

It’s important to try to forgive, she said, because “the more compassion you have for him, the more you have for yourself. These are your roots. You’re a part of him. If you hate him, in a way you hate yourself, too.”

A lot of tears were shed at the recent Coastline workshop, but by the end of the evening, the participants appeared to be seeing their fathers in new light--as men who, like Max Basner in “Nothing in Common,” did the best they could.

After an exercise during which the students paired up and addressed each other as though they were speaking to their fathers, one woman said: “I realized I adored my dad when I was a kid. It was nice to remember what a beautiful man he was.”