God the Father, and my father

“The most damaging thing about our relationships with our parents growing up, is that we incorporate the messages we received from them directly - and indirectly through their behavior and role modeling - into our relationship with our self.”

“That image of an angry patriarch has been a fundamental component of the template for the way men were trained to express their masculinity and deny their feminine side in Western Civilization. The similarities between the way our fathers treated us and the image of the judgmental, abusive God the Father has been devastatingly wounding to not only many men in society - but also the many women who have tried over and over again to win the love of the emotionally unavailable, abusive males that were recreating the ways they were wounded in relationships with fathers who were emotional cripples like my father.”

“The combination of the reality that my father did not ever treat me in a way that made me feel that I was lovable and worthy, but rather the very opposite - along with the concept of a Father God who would send me to burn in hell forever because I was inherently sinful and shameful - are at the core of the toxic shame that is the foundation of my codependency. I have been working on healing - and have made great progress in eliminating - that shame about my being in the years of my recovery. I count my codependency recovery as beginning on June 3rd, 1986 - so I am coming up on my 19th CoDA anniversary.”

On this page is an article by inner child healing pioneer / Spiritual Teacher / codependency therapist

** 5 years later - grieving for my father who DID LOVE ME!!!

Today would have been my Father’s birthday. June 14th. Flag day. He used to tell us they put the flags up because it was his birthday. It never felt to me like my father loved me. He was never able to say “I love you” to me directly in his life. On his death bed I said “I love you” to him - and the best that he could do was say, “Same here.” I have said for years - and said again at a CoDA meeting last night - that I think I have more shame because my father was there the whole time I was growing up. If he would have abandoned us physically and not been there - then I could have made up stories about him loving me. But he was there every day - and it never felt like he loved me. Thanks to the beautiful, courageously recovering woman I am in relationship with, I realized last fall that it was my father that I got sober for. It had never occurred to me to think that. And also, thanks to being in a relationship with someone who is in recovery, I got in touch with pain from when I was an infant about what felt like my father’s abandonment and betrayal. What felt like was his rejection because I wasn’t good enough - because I wasn’t lovable. I always have said that I never felt loved by my father, but what I realized last fall was that there was a time when I felt like he loved me - when I was a baby. His first son. Then my parents left the college town where my father was going on the GI bill - he always said he had to quit college because of me - and moved on to the farm I grew up on when I was about 6 month old. That was the start of my father working very hard to support a family that eventually included 6 kids. My next brother was born 15 months after me - and I was no longer the center of attention - but by then, I had already lost much of my father’s attention because he was working to support his growing family. I did get in touch with this infant wounding last fall, but I hadn’t really worked through it yet - which was causing me to react - out of that wordless pain and terror of an infant who feels rejected and betrayed by his father - to my partner. That happened yesterday - and again today. The part of me that is convinced that I am so unlovable that even someone who seems to love me completely will leave me - as it felt like I lost my father as a baby. When I reacted yesterday, and my partner was able to respond out of her recovery instead of out of her old wounded defensive behavioral reaction, I was not able to get through it - I just turned it back in on myself and judged myself for my reaction. Today when it happened and she again was able to respond out of recovery, I was able to bring the focus back to myself in a healthy way - and that led to my breakthrough. I have been saying to people for years that my mother taught me how to rationalize abusive behavior - both with her role modeling and with direct messages like: “Your father really loves you, he just doesn’t know how to show it.” And I did learn to rationalize from statements like that. What was different today, was that for the first time ever, I got it on a gut level that what she was saying was also the Truth (with a capital T.) My father did love me - and was incapable of showing it. My father did love me!!!!!! My father died in May 2005 - just a bit over 5 years ago. I didn’t grieve for my father then. I said that I had been grieving for not having a loving father for years - and that was the truth. But I did not ever really grieve for my father. Today I am grieving for my father. My father who did love me, but was incapable of showing me. Maybe it is not too late to be a different kind of father to my son. Owning that my father did love me is hopefully going to let me finally open up to receive the love from my partner that I haven’t been trusting because deep down inside I didn’t feel like I was lovable. 6/14/10 12:56 pm. I finished writing this and sent a copy to my partner Susan at 12:16 - 40 minutes ago. We got off the phone talking about it - and crying - only a few minutes ago. The miraculous, incredible gift that is a result of us both being in recovery, is that me getting on a gut level that my father really did love me, helped her for the first time to get on a gut level that her mother really did love her. Huge paradigm shift for both of us!!!!!!!!! I am going to be expanding on this processing in the coming days, and hopefully by Father’s Day I will have been able to process through it in more depth and breadth and post it on my site. Right now, I am sobbing and crying because this is a huge piece - for both of us. As long as at the core of my relationship with myself, was the belief / feeling that my father had rejected and betrayed me as an infant, there is no way that I could open up to receive love unconditionally from another person. There was no way that I could truly be more Loving to myself in how I treat myself, in how I live my life. As I say in the article above, I have made huge progress over the years - but this shame and terror of rejection was at the core of my relationship with myself. Opening my heart to Susan brought it to the surface for me. Now maybe I can really open up my heart to my self. My father really did love me!!!!! ~ Robert 6/14/10 1:13 pm

6/20/10 ~ I have not had a chance to do that process writing yet, so won’t be posting a Fathers Day article today. Happy Fathers Day to all the Dads who did the best they knew how. To all the sons and daughters, own your pain and anger and sadness over the ways your wounded fathers wounded you - but know also that they were powerless over their codependency. Forgive your self for something that wasn’t your fault - and that will open the space to be able to forgive them. Forgiveness is a process not an event. Codependency recovery is ninth step work - making amends to our selves for the ways that our wounding caused us to wound ourselves. And caused us to wound our sons and daughters. I have this week made a shift that is making it possible for me to forgive and Love myself more which helps me to forgive and own my Love for my father more. ~ RB

“Unfortunately, in sharing this information I am forced to use language that is polarized - that is black and white. When I say that you cannot Truly Love others unless you Love yourself - that does not mean that you have to completely Love yourself first before you can start to Love others. The way the process works is that every time we learn to Love and accept ourselves a little tiny bit more, we also gain the capacity to Love and accept others a little tiny bit more.” - Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls “Making amends is about taking action to change our behaviors - and the attitudes that caused our behaviors. That is true in terms of making amends to others and to making amends to ourselves - because as has been said, we hurt ourselves the most.” - The Miracle of The Twelve Step Process: 4 thru 9 “The Clean Up Steps.” “Codependence Recovery is ninth step work, making amends to ourselves and others by changing the attitudes and behaviors that have caused us to hurt ourselves and others. And we cannot make those amends without owning the feelings. We are powerless to substantially change the behavior patterns in our most intimate relationships without doing the grief work.” - Grave Emotional and Mental Disorders - AA language for Codependence As I mentioned when writing last Monday, this revelation of mine helped Susan to make a breakthrough also. She was already in the midst of multiple breakthroughs because of a Landmark Education seminar and Advanced course she has been / is involved in. Those breakthroughs have resulted in us making a major decision about the future of our relationship today. (More will be revealed.) - RB 11:12 am 6/20/10 June 17, 2012 ~ The decision I allude to in the last sentence was that we got engaged. We then did get married on January 14th 2011 - and this breakthrough was an important step to making that kind of commitment. Here is a short video on youtube from my February 2011 Intensive in which I am talking about the breakthrough I wrote about above: [My Father loved me but didn’t know how to show it

](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8ov-XoZpVg&feature=share&fb_source=message)

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Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney is copyright 1995. Material on Joy2MeU web site (except where otherwise noted) is copyright 1996 thru 2015 by Robert Burney PO Box 98 Fallbrook CA 92088.

God the Father, and my father was originally published online on May 31, 2005 on my Inner Child / Codependency Recovery topic page on the Suite101.com Directory.

Originally published at https://joy2meu.com/my_father.htm