But what happens when the truth not only sets you free but also breaks your heart. When telling your story saves you from self-destruction while destroying people you love – people who have carefully constructed a distorted self-image and spent their lives ensuring that those around reflect their looking glass.

My dad has never taken accountability for any of his hurtful behaviors towards me. To the contrary, when I have shared with him my experiences and the pain they have caused me, my father has responded as the wounded victim – as if the very act of sharing my experience made me the perpetrator.

This theme ran throughout my childhood: When I was 14, my dad flew into one of his frequent rages at my mom. There was an unspoken rule in the house that when my dad behaved like that, everyone was to stay perfectly still – ie, not call attention to the fact of what my father was doing. But by the age of 14, I had the courage to get up and walk out the door. Or shall I say, head toward the door.

My dad pivoted and directed the full force of his rage at me: “Do not walk out that door! You’re making me feel like my uncle, who used to scream at my aunt, and I would think he was an idiot and look at him in disgust and leave.”

Um, well, yeah, I remember thinking, you’re pretty much the spitting image of your uncle right now.

I also remember feeling confused. And frightened. My dad had powerful, intimidating, all-encompassing anger. I believe I did walk out the door, but my clear visual image is frozen in time, in that face-to-face confrontation, with my hand on the door, half-open, and my dad all up in my face, and me being like, Huh? Wha??!

The message was this: When I am being violent, you may not point out to me that I am being violent. Your telling me that I am violent is in itself an act of violence against me. Your telling me I hurt you is wounding me. Oh yeah, and let’s just erase that whole thing I did that instigated your saying anything to me, because it didn’t happen, and if it did, it was irrelevant, and did I mention that you’re mean and bad?

When I was 16, I began taking my dad to therapy, in the hope of working out our relationship, feeling safe with him, and being close with him. This endeavor went on for five years, until I realized my dad was utterly hopeless.

Not only did my dad complain about my expressing feelings about his behaviors and requsting that he change abusive patters (informing me that I should thank my lucky stars because, unlike him, some parents beat their kids up), but after therapy, my dad regularly pulled the car to the side of the road and raged at me for about an hour, explicitly forbidding me from plugging my ears to stave off the physical pain that his raging was causing me.

Because when I plugged my ears, it made him feel as if he were raging at me and causing pain in my ears.

When I was 18, I was suicidal. Not the run-of-the-mill, teen-with-suicidal-thoughts suicidal, but damn near close to pulling the plug. I traced a knife along my wrists. I drove at an accelerated speed toward a wall, swerving only at the last minute. I wanted to die with every fiber of my being. Except the part of me that wanted to want to live.

That part of me somehow gathered the strength and courage to tell my mom I was suicidal and needed help. She responded by sleeping in my room with me and putting a heavy chain lock on the door, so that she would hear me if I were to get up in the middle of the night and try to take my life.

I got an entirely different reaction from my dad.

I remember it was an afternoon, and we were in the dining room. My dad was sitting on the couch, his back to the window. I kneeled before him. He was reading the paper. “Daddy,” I said. He lowered the paper, looking over it at me. “I need help. I am suicidal. I need help so that I don’t kill myself.”

It took every ounce of courage, as well as the sum total of strength in that little part of me that wanted to want to live, to be able to ask my dad for help. My dad looked at me and asked rhetorically, “Oh, so now you want to make me feel like a bad father?” He raised the paper back up and continued reading.

Despite the many ways it had been “All Dad, All the Time,” I remember being stunned. Flat out stunned. I started shaking. I’d just told him I was afraid I would take my own life and die. We remained like that, him reading the paper, me kneeling and shaking, until I got up and left the room.

Forgiveness. My dad wants forgiveness. Without any acknowledgment of or apology for his actions or interest in how they affected me. He wants us to go to lunch. “Like father and daughter,” he says.

As a kid, I was acutely aware of how people could do all kinds of horrific shit, then be forgiven for it just because they got old – without taking any accountability or making any amends. I thought that was totally uncool.

Even from the time I was a young child, and continuing throughout my life, I busted my chops in self-reflecting, speaking truth, behaving authentically, and doing the work of personal transformation, no matter how crazy difficult and scary the process was. How unjust it was that numerous people just careened through life without giving a fuck about anyone but themselves, then got blanket forgiveness without any consequence for their actions — just because they were old and could say with the wave of a hand, “Oh, I was young back then.” Or in my father’s case, just expect forgiveness, period.

I recently was talking with a friend of mine whose father died without ever acknowledging or apologizing for his sexual abuse of her. “When a parent is abusive,” she said, “then refuses to acknowledge the abuse, despite the fact that the child suffered from the scars for years past the abuse itself, the parent adds a layer of psychological torture.”

Word. Add to that the fact that the parent then makes the kid the bad guy and the forgiveness-hater and the Yom Kippur screw-upper, and, the insanity just continues.

My heart hurts. Literally. It’s been going on for a few weeks. The pain exacerbates whenever I have these circling thoughts about my dad. Just over a week ago, I learned about the broken heart syndrome, where a broken heart (which I have about the situation with my dad) causes a heart attack, mostly in women. I’m frightened that my dad’s toxicity may end up causing me a heart attack and killing me. Which might make my dad happy in his twisted way, because then we’d be joined in suffering, his ultimate form of bonding, and he would have claimed my life, which he strives to own.

My dad is literally making me sick.

Shortly after my contract ended with the organization that brought me to Los Angeles, my father started emailing me, fairly regularly, telling me how worried he was about me because he knew that I am self-employed and therefore unable to qualify for unemployment, and am I OK, and do I need help, and he wants to help me, and he’s not sleeping well because he’s worried about me, and I should let him know if I need help, yada yada yada.

Sounds loving and caring, right?

But that’s just the Sirens playing their pretty harps. Oh how do I explain the manipulative madness that is my dad? He makes more noise than contribution. He strives for worry points – in other words, if his face is all contorted from worry, and he’s not sleeping, and he’s all twisted in knots and miserable on your behalf, then he is actually helping you out. When in fact, during your time of need, he is making it all about him. So that you end up not only having to deal with your own crap, but also taking care of his emotional duress, purportedly generated on your behalf.

If heaven forbid you should fall for his antics and think that maybe, just maybe, this time it is genuine; and you ask for his help, he ensnares you in a trap of control and dominance and humiliation. So when those “I want to help” emails started coming, I ignored most of them, sending back the occasional vague and neutral reply that thanked him for his concern and let him know I would tell him if I needed his help.

But after two months of his persistence and my increasing desperation — as my bank account tanked, and my credit cards maxed out, during the launch of my company — I asked my dad for a loan, promising to pay it back as soon as one of the bank loans came through for my business. That’s when I got the email (seriously, how did I fall for it again?) that my dad doesn’t have that kind of money, but that he wanted to make sure I knew he was not abandoning me, so I should tell him everything that was going on in my life, so that he could help me figure out how to manage it.

Gee. Usually he dangles a couple hundred Benjamins in front of my face, in exchange for his offer to control me. I politely thanked him for his “consultation” offer and informed him that was not the kind of help I needed, but that I would let him know if that changed.

I continued to get emails about how my dad wanted to help me think about things. I also got the occasional $100+ check for the Jewish holidays. Confirmation that my dad had at least a little money to spare, but that it had to be on his terms and for his reasons, not when I actually indicated that I needed help. Oh yeah, and when one of his checks bounced, I got a whole lot of noise about whether the bank charged me, and if so how much, and no you know what never mind, he’ll send $50 to cover it. Eeking out the brownie points instead of just sending the damn check.

As my company developed collaborative relationships with multinational corporations; as I scheduled radio interviews on local radio and national television; and as various service providers stepped forth to contribute tens of thousands of dollars to my company launch, my dad was sending me emails encouraging me to go to the welfare office and get food stamps. In fact, once he was so excited about the urgency of this helpful idea that he sent an email on a Jewish holiday, despite being observant, and told my mother to call and suggest the idea to me as well.  

Meanwhile, my dad owns three homes in two countries, and around the time of our email exchange, he shelled out dough to remodel the condo.

I grew up with my dad saying he had no money. I’d ask for something I needed – like, you know, a hair dryer – and he would tell me he didn’t have the money. Which is why I spent years sitting perched in front of a heater vent for an hour at a shot, drying my hair. But then all kinds of money would suddenly be available for something else – ie, something my dad deemed worthy.

As my mom was on the verge of foreclosure and bankruptcy, my dad assured us he was scrimping and saving and living on fixed income and unable to do this and that. We thought this time it was for real. Then he lost close to $1 million in the bank crash. Who the hell knew he had that kind of dough? I couldn’t believe I fell for it again. So I have learned never to trust when my dad says he has no money. The man puts on a good show.

As I write this post, I’m realizing that I’m angry. I’m angry that I can’t talk to my dad about any of his behaviors, because he responds with refrains like, “I won’t be your whipping boy” and “I won’t be put on trial,” instead of considering his behaviors and their impact on those around him. It’s like a man punching you in the stomach but then getting all outraged when you tell him that he has just hurt you. My dad is the perpetual victim.

I hate the way things are so muddy. I think that’s what manipulative behavior does. It’s not clean abuse, but twisty abuse. The rhetoric is all about love, as it always was when my dad was abusing me as a child. It makes me constantly question myself, feel bad, wish things were different, offer the benefit of the doubt for my dad’s intentions, and try to find a way to stay connected without falling prey to the toxic crap. I think it would be much easier if my dad was just a cut-and-dry asshole.

And that messes me up. It deprives me of a certain level of trust and closeness that I would like to have with family, at least with my mom if not with anyone else. And then I feel guilty for not being close enough, for needing to put distance, for not trusting, for not feeling safe. I feel like I’m hurting the other person by taking care of myself.

It’s the never-ending spin cycle in the washing machine. Over and over and over again. The narrative never changes.

My mom has powerful psychic and healing energy. I like to imagine that we come from a line of witches, being that my maternal line is Irish and Danish on my grandmother’s side and Welsh on my grandfather’s side. I visualize Celtic dancers and medicine women prancing around a tree.

I have always been called “too sensitive,” which is code for being profoundly empathetic and connected to all living beings. I have come to understand that I have used food throughout my life as a buffer between myself and the harshness of the world, because without that food taking the edge off, things feel extremely raw.

My mom was obese throughout my childhood, and my grandmother and great grandmother were alcoholics. I wonder if they too needed something to take the edge off their sensitivity, though my mom says she doesn’t feel anything with or without the food. Maybe she’s developed some kind of mechanism of numbness that’s become a habit by now.

As a teenager, my mom was able to move physical objects with her mind – specifically, bowling balls. As the story goes, my mom sucked at bowling, but as a teen in the Midwest in the late 1940s and early 1950s, she had to do it. So she’d throw the ball down, and as it headed toward the gutter, she would take her hands and energetically move the ball toward the center – successfully striking out the pins.

At some point, she noticed this behavior was abnormal. Once she became aware of her extraordinary power, she became scared of and squelched it. With at least one exception: Decades later, when she could not find her keys at a hotel where she was staying, she sat in her room, got quiet in her mind, and asked where the keys were. An image of her keys came to her, behind the curtain in the lobby downstairs. She went downstairs, moved aside the curtain, and sure enough, there were her keys.

Anyhow, my mom says that she otherwise pushed down that energy until she went through her life-endangering accident in November 2008. After the accident, my mom was unconscious for the greater part of a week, during which I was by her side day and night – channeling healing energy, singing, praying, running her artwork across her fingers, acting as a positive affirmations soundtrack in her brain…until she came back to consciousness. I continued directing all my healing energy toward my mom and requesting the healing energy of her friends, my friends, professional healers, and prayer circles — both when I was by her side and when I was hundreds of miles away — as she progressed in her journey to complete recovery.

Six months after the accident, my mom was lucid and functional again. Now, one and a half years later, my mom is stronger than before the accident. Doctors say it’s a miracle that my mom is alive at all, much less fully recovered. My mom credits me with saving her life. I remind her that the effort was a partnership – me coaching her from the outside, her working it from the inside.

“You brought my power back up, and now I can’t push it down,” my mom has told me. She believes that her innate psychic energy was responsible for her ability to heal thoroughly. I have no doubt that is true.

Its reemergence has worked to my advantage, because as it turns out, my mom is one powerful distance energy healer. I’ll call her when something hurts, and I will know the minute she starts sending me healing energy; because whatever is hurting instantaneously will stop hurting. Take yesterday, when my back went out. I was literally hobbling around my apartment, hanging on to things so as to make it from one side of a room to another. Immediately after I asked my mom to send me energy, my back was pain-free.

But here’s the thing: My mom has been on such a mission to find out the exact impact of her every nuanced energy vibration, that her behavior has become demanding, invasive, and controlling. She wants to know exactly what I feel, when I feel it, and where I feel it. She wants to match up every shift I feel with precisely what she was doing at any given moment. She also has wanted to know exactly where I am at any given moment, so that she can visualize where she’s sending the energy.

I have told my mom a few times that this behavior crosses my boundaries. While she has modified some things – like not asking exactly where I am – she has persisted with others. For example, when I shared with her that I knew she was sending me healing energy because my back immediately stopped hurting, she then wanted to get into an involved conversation about when my back started hurting again, later in the day, and what she was doing at the time.

I told her this morning, yet again, that I did not want to have that conversation. She said, “Well I need to know what’s happening, so that I can be a good energy healer.” “So ask someone else,” I said. “But you’re the only person I do energy healing on,” she replied. “Well too bad,” I said. “I don’t want to do it this way.” It all felt very yucky and almost creepy. Then I was hit with the inevitable feelings of guilt that I was being mean to my mom or doing something wrong. Because lord help me if I set boundaries in this family.

Tonight, I mentioned in passing that my back felt normal today. “That’s because I sent energy,” my mom declared. Suddenly I felt violated. I hung up the phone. Then I called back and expressed my anger. “I don’t understand why it upsets you,” my mom said. “You don’t need to understand!” I barked. “You just need to respect it.” Fine!” my mom barked back, clearly pissed. “I won’t mention anything about energy ever again!” Because, of course, it has to be either-or.

I hung up extremely upset. Something so pure and healing had become so toxic. Which is typical for my family. As a child, the love I received was tangled up with leaky sexual energy, covert sexual abuse, control, manipulation, passive-aggressive behavior, and other incessant boundary violations. The terms of love were so screwed up that it was better to receive no love at all. Which was kind of like choosing starvation over a diet of straight processed junk food.

At any rate, so this thing tonight left me on the verge of crazy. I was shaking internally and physically. I felt energetically raped. It’s as if my mom had turned me into a science experiment or guinea pig, against my will, to serve her own purposes. Instead of just being a mom and sending loving healing energy to me, and at the most, thinking with me about how I wanted that energy delivered and discussed. Or rather, responding to how I wanted it delivered and discussed, because I’d already told her my wishes and boundaries several times.

Plus, I came to realize, my mom has developed a certain amount of arrogance and a bit of a Gd complex. While she undoubtedly has an extraordinary gift, so do I. And so do Gd, angels, loving Spirits, and whatever other healing energy forces that may be out there, bouncing around in the Universe, impacting people in positive ways. Who knows exactly what is making my body feel the way it does at any given moment. The important thing is that I ensure as much as possible that I live in and am surrounded by positivity, to maximize my healing capacity.

This morning, when I was trying to explain to my mom why it bugged me when she tried to rope me into answering the who-what-where-when-how-why questions, I said it was like the insanity-inducing 10 point pain scale that doctors keep trying to force on pain patients (and that my mom herself despises). In my experience, the very attempt to externally quantify or qualify either pain or healing effectively diminishes the power and potential of healing pain.

It’s like trying to ask a painter to deconstruct and analyze a painting while she is in the process of painting it. The question itself, not to mention the attempt to answer the question, may destroy the creative process, grace, inspiration, magic, and intuitive connection to the Universal Life Force that together create the painting, through the vessel of the painter.

The deconstruction and analysis introduce a completely different energy field. Now if the artist is herself inspired to share her process, if deconstruction and analysis comes through as part of the creation, that is another thing altogether. Similarly, if I am inspired to participate in a conversation with my mom about what I feel and when, then the energy is synergistic and part of the healing process. Anything imposed, however, is always directly in contradiction to healing.

I end up distracted from taking care of myself, because I’m busy taking care of them. Or I end up even more stressed out than I was initially, because on top of everything else, I actively have to push back against their smothering or controlling behavior.

My parents need me to need them. In the case of my father, he needs me to need exactly what he offers, the way he offers it, regardless of whether it’s even in the ball park of what might actually help me. Heaven forbid I politely decline his offer of assistance. Then I have to deal with all his anger and drama and misery, because he feels personally rejected.

Let’s not even get into whether he will ever once respond favorably to what I actually need from him.

In the case of my mother, if she is not able to give me what I need at the time I need it, heaven forbid I should hang up the phone and take care of my needs elsewhere. Suddenly she’s all red alert, as if I need to be put on suicide watch. It is off the hook. What ends up happening is that I not only have to deal with whatever I am dealing with, but I also have to take care of my mom’s freak-out.

For starters, the dynamic triggers an emotional reaction to years of her crazy behavior, when I was upset and needing space as a kid. I would run to my room and lock the door. My mom would come pounding after me. She would stand on the other side of the door, screaming and wailing and coming damn near close to banging down the door. She would alternate that behavior with writing and slipping 10-20 notes underneath, begging me to let her in. Of course, the more she went at it, the more I needed to hide.

In addition to triggering old stuff, my mom’s freak-out crosses my boundaries in present time. In the case where I’m upset at something my mom said or did, the last thing I want to do is have to assure her that everything is OK. But if I don’t call and do that, my mom’s freak-out will escalate. I will get multiple emails, text messages, and/or home phone messages.

The more my mom’s freak-out will escalate, the more my own stress will escalate, because I will be poignantly aware of her distress. I will get reminders every which way I turn. I acutely and physically will feel what she is going through. Rather than focusing on what I need to do to take care of myself, I will end up worrying about her worrying about me. It will take over my consciousness.

So when my mom crosses my boundaries, it’s less of an energy drain and violation to just do what she wants – ie, call her — and get it over with. It’s a setup.

My mom always has said that when I was six, she could have dropped me in the middle of Manhattan, and I was so smart and resourceful that I would have been fine on my own. Her behavior, however, regularly indicates that if she doesn’t run to my rescue, something horrific will happen. Talk about interfering with someone’s mojo. I actively have to protect myself from her inadvertently psyching me out or jinxing me.

Today I was experiencing some generalized existential angst. I called my mom, and when she answered, it was clear she had been sleeping. My mom sleeps on and off throughout the day and night, so there are no right and wrong times to contact her. For general conversations, I don’t mind speaking with her when she is sleepy, but in this particular instance, I needed her to be fully alert for the conversation.

So when she confirmed that she had been sleeping, I said that I would talk to her later. I promptly hung up, without waiting for her to respond, because I knew she was going to get into a protracted protest about wanting to “be there for me,” despite the fact that I had not even said why I had called. I didn’t want to subject myself to that behavior. Sure enough, I heard my mom pleading, “No, no, I can talk!” as I got off the phone.

Being that just a couple of days earlier, we had our umpteenth, yet this time seemingly effective, conversation about how my mom needs to stop getting all OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) on me, I had hoped that maybe on this occasion, my mom would just let things be. But she called me back right away on my cell (I didn’t answer), and when I got home, there was a message waiting on my home phone: “I know that you don’t want me to call, but you called me from your cell, and given the circumstances, I think this call is justified and not an instance of being paranoid.”

Circumstances? What circumstances? That I called from my cell? That she could hear in my voice that I was upset? Ergo, send the cavalry?

The ridiculous thing about all this is that my mom’s worry is completely ineffective at responding to anything if it were in fact happening. The other night, for example, I called my mom because my heart was in pain (literally), and I was feeling frightened. I had already gone to the doctor, who had informed me that the only thing that could be done was a stress test – which essentially would check out my heart during exercise. Since my heart has been hurting around the clock – ie, when I’m not exercising — that seems kind of pointless to me.

Anyhow, so I was sharing with my mom that I think my heart pain has been caused by the skyrocketed stress I’ve been feeling with regards to some recent drama my dad pulled on me. My mom’s response made me feel worse, so I told her I wanted to go. She said OK, and I hung up the phone. When I woke up the next day, there were three messages on my voicemail, a text on my cell phone, and one or more emails, all from my mom. I deleted them all without reading or listening, and just straightaway texted my mom that I was ok.

As it turned out, my mom hadn’t gotten back to sleep that night, because she was all worried about me. But here’s the thing: If the situation was in fact dire enough to be that concerned, why not do something about it – like call the police or an ambulance? Aside from which, being that I calmly said, “I’m going to go now,” how was that in any way an indication that something horrific had happened or was going to happen? Why must I stay on the phone as long as my mom wants, or leave a conversation the way she wants, for her not to go into crisis mode? It’s disconnected from the reality of what is actually going on for me.

In writing this, I realize that the reason I don’t just let my mom suffer from an extended anxiety attack (ie, give her some “tough love” and refuse to call back) is not just because of compassion but because of concern that she might work herself into such a tizzy that she’ll end up with a heart attack or not pay attention to what she’s doing and, as a result, injure herself. I recognize that my response to my mom in a way parallels her response to me. Perhaps it’s just bad training that I got from her.

Or perhaps, being that my mom has severe ADD and an anxiety disorder, and being that at these times, it is clear that she is very actively going nutso with distress (ie, I’m not just imagining the possibility), it’s a highly realistic scenario. I certainly don’t want to take that chance and let her worry herself into the grave. So I feel trapped.

Decades of hurtful and antagonistic behavior on her part has left me wanting nothing to do with her and resentful that people keep calling her my sister and informing me of her latest shenanigans. These reports inevitably trigger me and leave me in some state of misery or other for hours, days, or weeks at a time.

So I did work with my 12-step sponsor on the issue of resentments. And wanting to be in charge of the show, which leads to butting heads with the universe.

I am pissed that my sister has behaved in ways that have had a ripple effect on my life – in other words, that do not allow me to quietly go my way. I am resentful of the way that people compare her and me according to superficial markers (like having a PhD or physically birthing a child) and go on to make all kinds of judgments based on these markers — drawing conclusions without knowing shit about her, me, or the back story.

I am pissed that we remain connected through a web of biological circumstance and cultural norms. And most of all, I am pissed that I cannot be part of her life. Because despite everything, I love her and miss her and would throw down my armor in a heartbeat. And I hate being reminded of it.

There is only so much narcissism, jealousy, victim mentality, and abuse that one can take before throwing in the towel. At some point, I had to accept that my sister’s behavior is toxic to my well-being, and I had to close the door. When people sledgehammer it open, they fuck with my sanity and serenity.

Why do people insist on treating biological relations as sacrosanct, despite circumstance? Wake up and pay attention to the staggering levels of family violence and to the extreme betrayal and dysfunction running rampant in family webs. Give people the choice to separate from those who are unhealthy for us, and let us live in peace with that decision. Respect it.

Why insist that we stay connected to people who are poison? Are we not far greater beings than our biological stamps?

Multiple lanes suddenly become one. A lane heading to a destination suddenly becomes an exit-only lane — off the freeway or onto another freeway. Cars criss-cross lanes at breakneck speeds. A tunnel emerges, so all this chaos goes on with no room for a margin of error. Then on top of it all, one lane is suddenly marked not by white paint lines, but by halogen lights that are blinding.

Despite my 900 mile power road trip this summer, which appeared to have successfully catapulted me past my fear of driving, I start sweating to the point that my hands are slipping on the steering wheel. My heart races. I am having a panic attack. At 65 miles an hour. And I know I am having a panic attack at 65 miles an hour, in a narrow tunnel, with cars criss-crossing at breakneck speed and lanes disappearing right and left. Which makes me panic even more. And that, of course, makes me panic.

There are no exits. The freeway curves right and left. Still no exits. Five minutes drag on, tunnels and walls come and go. I am terrified I am going to faint and end up dead. I hang on for dear life. I periodically wipe one hand, then another, on my pants. Finally there is an exit to the right. It is narrow and curves abruptly and sharply and has blinding halogen lights all over the place, shining into my eyes.

I make it off the freeway. I pull over to the side of the road. My whole body is shaking. I don’t know how I’m going to make it to the event or back home. I feel stuck and scared.

I call my friend who lives in the area. “It’s just five more minutes on the freeway,” she says. I cannot under any circumstances get back on the freeway. I rest for a bit, then find surface streets to take me to where I’m going. Twenty minutes later, I find the street of the event, but not the building. I circle around three times. I stop at a pub and ask for directions. Nobody knows how to get me to the damn place. It seems there is exactly one long building on the street where I’m supposed to be, and it’s not the right building.

Finally I reach the guy at the event where I’m heading. He tells me it’s almost over. It has been two hours since I left home. I say, “Well, I’m here, so I might as well go.” He tells me how to get there. I drive and drive. Streets and freeways run parallel, then intersect. I never know if I will get stuck on an on-ramp going lord knows where. I am nervous and utterly confused.

Finally I give up and stop at a Starbuck’s downtown. It’s connected to a Barnes & Noble. I pick up a book and read it, first a section toward the beginning, then the entire ending. One hour later, caffeinated and feeling back in my body, albeit still nervous, I get back in the car. I take a different freeway home.

I call my mother a couple of times en route. She reveals that the freeways to and from this town are the most hideous she ever has encountered. She has driven 40 miles out of her way to avoid them. She encourages me that I will make it home safely and that I can pull over at any time.

This alternate freeway is not as crazy, but it is still a freeway. My nerves are totally jangled. I pass a section with a wall on the right. A big rig truck passes me on my left. It is loud and over-stimulating. There are just a couple of inches between the truck and me and between the wall and me. I again begin sweating and shaking and feeling as if I am going to faint.

I get off shortly after reaching a place where I can take surface streets all the way back home. I try jumping on the freeway at a place that usually feels very safe to me, but my system is too jacked up. I get back on the surface streets and am grateful to Gd when I make it home alive.

This morning, I wake up and head straight to my computer. Ten or fifteen minutes into checking emails, I hear screeches, slams, and crashes. At least three cars have just plowed into each other. A man yells, “Holy shit!” I call 911. I am angry. They are always driving at breakneck speeds in my neighborhood. I hear a car crash about every other month. I am always frightened when walking across an intersection here or pulling into my alleyway.

An hour later I am cleaning out my car. A woman walks down the alleyway and strikes up a conversation about the chaos that has been going on for the past hour. The woman reveals that the collision required multiple ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars. I tweet about it, asking how many more car crashes it will take before people slow the fuck down.

It is evening. I call my mother and have a joyful conversation with her, sharing some things I feel proud about from the day. About 20 minutes into the conversation, I tell her I feel like skipping and dancing in the street, but I feel uncomfortable doing that in this neighborhood, as opposed to when I lived in Berkeley. “I feel like I won’t be met with a loving response,” I say. “You’ll be met with a car,” she replies.

Excuse me?

I am furious. I feel sick. Exasperated. I confront my mother. She says, as she always does when she says something inappropriate and/or hurtful, “It was a joke.” (Whether or not it actually was. It is her escape card.) Tell me how joking about a car hitting me, especially knowing that a car crash turned my life upside down and knowing how terrified of driving I was last night, is funny.

“It wasn’t personal,” she defends herself. “It was just general. It’s not safe out there.” I repeat: How is it funny. How is it something to enter into a previously light-hearted and happy conversation.

Sometimes my mother is my biggest ally. Sometimes she is my worst enemy. Talk about it not being safe out there.

My dad is in my brain constantly. I have, in fact, been tormented by the dilemma of my dad, to the point that I have been left severely and frighteningly depressed. As in, hide-anything-that-can-be-an-instrument-of-death depressed.

That’s because my dream is to have a loving, nurturing, healthy, close relationship with my dad. But because of the choices he has made, that has not been possible for me.

I took my dad to therapy for five years, during high school and college. And over the course of the past decade, I sent him numerous letters pouring out my heart, desperately seeking healing and wholeness between us.

The thing is, my dad is unwilling to acknowledge or make amends for his abusive behavior. When I have shared with him my pain, he has responded with statements like, “I will not be your whipping boy” or “I will not be put on trial.” Never has he responded with care and interest or with an attitude of self-reflection and mutual discovery. Never has he, heaven forbid, thanked me for seeking closeness and authenticity with him or for sharing with him honestly, instead of running from him and cutting him out.

And so, ironically, I have had to cut him out, which has broken both my heart and his. To be in my dad’s life, I have to pretend things that happened didn’t happen. I have to defer to his delusions. I have to rotate my life around his needs. I have to conform to his point of view. I have to betray myself.

I cannot live a lie. I will not live a lie.

When I was in my teen years, my dad told me that when I was eleven years old, I said, “We are living a lie.” He said it like it was a bad thing. But it made me proud.

It has taken me a decade to put pen to paper and write about my dad in a public forum. That’s because as long as my dad is unwilling to acknowledge the reality of our lives, and as long as he builds his life around a whole host of illusions and denial, my writing about my life threatens to shatter his world.

I do not want to shatter his world. I want my dad to be happy. Really, genuinely, smile-in-the-sunshine, skip-to-my-lou happy. With an ice cream cone in his hand and a dorky smile on his face. Which is why I have deferred to his public reality, at my expense, all these years.

Violence itself is not physical, though the delivery system very well may be. Violence is an energy – invasive, penetrating, abrupt, creepy, unrelenting. It is the filth you cannot wash off with a shower.

In this society, we are conditioned to be so obtuse that we only recognize violence when it already is in the extreme, super-advanced stage – like someone being killed. But a whole lot of violence leads up to murder. It just may not be apparent in the visual or audial realms of our perception.  

So when I say I grew up in a violent home, do not assume it was physical (although it was that too). And do not assume that if it was not physical, it was inconsequential. Given the lack of recognition of and response to non-physical violence, in fact, energetic violence is almost worse, given the added layer of psychological torture, or mind-fuck:

You are taught to believe that you are crazy. That you are evil. That you cannot trust yourself. What is happening is not actually happening. And yet it is, while they are telling you it isn’t, and while you are telling yourself it isn’t. Soul destruction.

When you cannot trust or, therefore, defend yourself, you are especially susceptible to anyone’s and everyone’s violence.