The Chain: Love, Hate, Fear, and Orange Alerts; Daddy's Boy
I went with my dad to nearly every methadone clinic visit as a child and beyond and he was there for almost all of my surgeries. I learned to play the drums on my dad's drum kit, starting at four years old. We would eventually write music together. My dad's story in short was that he was a hippie and a junkie who got clean and found Jesus. I thought my dad was the coolest human on the planet. To childhood me, he was the living embodiment of a rockstar and I wanted to be just like him, minus the rage and addiction. In my early adolescence, I dressed like my dad, we even had the same shoes and glasses. I quickly learned none of that was cool.
As a teenager, when my dad and sister would go to war with each other, I usually took his side. I did that so much, my sister called me his lapdog. She wasn't wrong. I didn't understand that I was responding out of codependence and fawning. My dad may have been my hero and I never stopped taking notes on the things I needed to do differently. While telling me stories of his peace and love hippie days, he also told me stories of rage and violence. No one had to tell me that these things were destructive to my dad's life and relationships, he more or less told me himself. I learned to fawn out of fear. I was afraid of my father's wrath and as a kid with Cerebral Palsy I was more afraid of getting hurt than the average kid.
I objected as a teenager when my father said in an argument with me that one day I would hate him. I really didn't think it was possible and didn't understand the projection. I don't think my dad loved himself very much and I can say with certainty that his addiction was the most important thing in his life, but I didn't recognize that until one of my other family members died a few years before my dad died. Frankly, I don't think my siblings or other family members that had umbrage with my father understood how much my unwavering devotion to my father was built on fear and control, in addition to love. I don't really blame them because I didn't either (therapy and twelve steps helped a lot with that).
It's mildly difficult to understand the amount of criticism I carried on behalf of my father and how that shapes the way I live today. I was wrapped in the chains of my father until he died. I never told anyone that I had hatred for my father until after he died because that was the only time it was safe to admit it. I'll never forget the first time I said that I hated him to someone in person. I wasn't met with the judgement I expected but understanding and compassion. The chain broke that day.
Over the past five years, I've learned to hold space for the love and the hatred I have for my father. The patterns of fear are much harder to break and they go into every setting I do, customer service, meetings, meetings with authority figures, interpersonal relationships, parenting, and so on and so forth.
“Break the silence, damn the dark, damn the light.”
I've started to share these personal stories professionally because they influence how I work and lead every day. Codependent behaviors can make me great at solving other people's problems, staying calm in the pressure cooker (because I'm like a frog that you can slow boil to death), and they can also get in my way or hold me back if I'm not paying attention to what shows up for me in every interaction.
I am equal parts like my father and equal parts nothing like him at all. Sometimes my kids remind me of my dad and that scares the shit out of me because my father is someone I want them to know about eventually and not someone I want them to be like. He demanded a lot from others and not in a good way. He took more than he gave. He altered the lives of many people. It's not my aim to shit on my dad, but those are important acknowledgments that some kids from dysfunctional families never get to make.
What I need from writing this is awareness of how family dysfunction from the past shows up in the present at home and at work. Recently, I was in an active shooter training and they talked about the color codes for situational awareness. If you're unfamiliar, white is completely unaware of what's going on around you, yellow is good situational awareness (alert and relaxed) and ideally where you want to be, orange is ready for the probability of danger, red is the emergency alert code, and black is immobilized by panic. I audibly joked that I'm always in orange mode. I share this because it wasn't a joke.
Between living with cerebral palsy and having to map my environments constantly and growing up in my father's house (churchy wordplay intended), I am always looking for the danger and expecting it, whether that's tripping over something, someone else being in danger, someone looking to cause danger, managing disapproval or disappointment. It's not a way I'd recommend living and it's a great professional tool because I'm paying attention whether I want to or not. For example, one of my kids once asked why I was listening to them when they were talking to someone else and my response was “hypervigilance and I'm not really listening to your conversation with someone else, but aware of what's happening in my surroundings.” It's why I can hear conversations from a sizable distance and I can barely hear in a crowded room because I'm hearing everything at once. My goal isn't eavesdropping on other people, it's safety and threat recognition. For better or worse, these habits were formed out of living with a disability and growing up in chaos.
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