What do you do when you're going to (voluntarily) visit your primary abuser?
The person who shaped the things you hate about yourself and the fact that you hate yourself (though of course you're supposed to be over this because you are an adult and you've had oodles of therapy). How do you prepare? Maybe you'll spend the plane ride sniffling back tears and repeating your mantra "it's not your fault." You might feel nothing, as you've prepared for this in therapy for weeks ahead...you're nothing if not a good student, a good study, and you've been through this countless times before. And experience should count for something, right? You should have grown layers and layers of tough overskin, an exoskeleton and force field, but you never did--some missing gene, perhaps--and you're secretly glad of this because at least you still have your feelings, roller coaster often, sad and depressed, certainly, but joy, and love and love of color and depth--song and rhythm--he couldn't take that away, could he and there is comfort in that. Maybe you think of the recent conversations where you've had the strength to stave off the harshest barbs, to parry them, to say "I'm not going to discuss that with you," or 'NO!" without having to shout or curse. Progress. Baby steps. The best progress is that you don't really, deep down, believe that he could ever change, even though age and pain and loneliness have softened his rhetoric somewhat.
But the real kicker is, now that he is old, alone and sick, perhaps preparing to die, he EXPECTS your compassion, is desperate for any little drop of attention though he would never ever admit it. Once in a blue moon, he's rueful. It'd be easier, of course, if he was just hard, hard, hard all the time, but he's a master abuser so he has a sense of when to pull back from the edge, at least with you. For some reason, maybe because you are female, maybe because he recognizes your efforts to connect, or maybe because he's terrified that you'll cut him off completely, but you are the one person he doesn't cut off altogether. Or maybe he enjoys seeing your pain because it's almost impossible for you to hide it for long, especially the pain of him having abused others you love and feel protective of. They don't really need your protection, because they don't engage with the abuser anymore and have grown the exoskeleton that you lack. You can see the scars in their hearts, but they are close to healing and that is a thrilling thought. And you suspect that you'll only fully heal when he's dead because then maybe he'll be at peace. And you hate and love that part of you that wishes him peace.
You've been educated, so you plan as little time with him as possible, and set up an agenda of what to discuss in your mind. It's important this time, because he is slowly failing, and you want to scrupulously follow his wishes as to his care, you want to let him know that you care, and can be trusted to do what he wants. You also want to see beneath the drama and lies he creates because he's been dying for 35 years though maybe it's getting closer to being the truth. Above all, you want to be the person you know you should be, no matter what he says or does or lies about. You don't want to ever hurt anyone or anything the way you've been hurt, you don't want to lie to the people you love or push them away, you don't want to abuse anyone, and you value the time and effort it has taken to teach yourself how to live a healthy life. You try not to think about the family you could have built or the career you could have had, or the impact you could have made in some way if you hadn't had to work so hard to get to normal. You try to turn the bitterness and anger into fuel for the creative fire and you let the tears fall when and where they may.
What you really really really really hate is that in some ways, still, you are his victim. You want to stab him in his soul for this, but he doesn't have one.
