People need to be held accountable for their actions.
Do they? Or do you feel that people *should* be held accountable for their actions? I looks like your dad doesn't feel any *need* at all to be accountable.
I feel like ignoring it and working on ourselves is impossible. Our whole lives we have known this isn't the way an adult should act, and yet we feel confused because it's happening.
Ignoring something is to say that it doesn't exist. You will not be able to ignore your father's behavior because it does exist.
How *should* he behave? What *should* an adult act like exactly?
I keep emphasizing the *should*s because they were a huge source of problems for me. My therapist finally got me through this problem by pointing out that there are no "should"s in life. There really aren't. "Should"s are based on how you think the world would be in an ideal situation - ideal situations simply don't occur in reality.
You can bypass the "should" angst by reframing your statement using one of the following three statements:
I wish
I want
It would be in my best interest if
These statements do not imply an expectation - which "should" does imply. By saying "My father should behave this way", you are placing an expectation on him that he will. And he is obviously failing to meet your expectation. Repeatedly failing to meet it. And yet you continue to say 'should' and he continues to not meet the expectation.
You *wish* he would behave like a responsible adult. There is no expectation implied in that statement. It's a statement only of desire. I wish my parents weren't alcoholics. I also wish I had a pony. Yet I do not expect that my parents will stop drinking, nor do I expect I will ever in my life own a pony. That doesn't mean I can't wish for it.
You *want* your father to treat you with civility. Again, this does not imply any kind of expectation. It's simply a statement of desire, just like the wish is. The focus here is on something YOU can control though, and the outcome of the want is based on your actions. You can change what you want - you can't change how he behaves. You can modify your own behavior to get what you want, and even what you need, but you may also find that in that journey, what you want changes.
The "It would be in my best interest" statement was more for things like when I would say "I should clean the bathroom" and then would beat myself up for not having enough energy to do so. "It would be in my best interest to clean the bathroom" removes the expectation that I *will* do it, and therefore the guilt if I happen to run out of steam before I get to it.
I hope this helps in some way. The "shoulds" will drive you insane if you don't find a way around them. There are many other ways of dealing with "shoulds", mine is not the only one, but it is the one that worked the best for me.