Originally Posted by
kudzujean 
Gosh, WTBH, your father sounds like as much of a jerk as my father was.
Sorry you had one too!
Thing is- I held my dad up in my mind as a kid, as a young adult, even AFTER what he pulled when I was in Ecuador, as a great Dad. Compared to my mom he was "there for me". But in reality I lied to myself more about him than I did my mom. At least she was overtly abusive and terrible. My Dad, when he was around, said the right words, acted like a caring parent but really was NEVER around and when it came to stepping in when abuse occured and he knew of it, it never happened.
I think so, to stay sane, I created this fairy tale of how loving he was to me bc he was the better of two evils and I think I might have gone crazy if I'd acknowledged to myself that neither parent was there in any way for any of us...
So, some of what I am waking up to is the fact that my father, who I believed was a saint for so long, in actuality NEVER was.
I gave him the same credit I've given my AH. Be awful 100 times and then nice 1 time and I'd cling to that 1 time of goodness and bury the 100.
It's shocking to recognize that the things I have done with my AH I've been doing all my life.
But it's freeing too-- bc it's letting me see/believe that it wasn't about me not being worthy of being treated well by the people who were to love me and who I wanted to love me, but about those people being unable to love anyone- and that it was never about me at all...