Can You Go Back Without Going Under?

I have not seen my father in five years. I miss him, which surprises me. But I know how a visit goes. I stay in my old room. By the second day he is commenting on my weight, my job, my husband’s salary. By the fourth I am fourteen again and crying in the bathroom.

So I do not go at all. My aunt says, “He is getting old, just adjust.” I cannot adjust. I also cannot stop thinking about him.

Shreya, you have described two options. A week in your old room, or nothing. I would like to suggest that there are more than two.

It is fear more than anger

People who have been cut off usually put it down to the other person’s anger or selfishness. When the sociologist Karl Pillemer interviewed those who had done the cutting off, he found something else underneath, and it surprised him. It was anxiety. People stayed away because they dreaded being pulled back into the criticism, the demands and the old role. That was true even of those who opened the interview by saying the rift did not bother them.

He connects this to the family-systems theory of the psychiatrist Murray Bowen. One of its ideas is that people do not cut off because they have stopped caring. They cut off because the relationship is too intense to bear, and distance is the only release they can find.

So missing your father and avoiding him are not a contradiction. They are the same fact seen from two sides.

Make the terms concrete

“I just want him to respect me” is a reasonable wish and a useless condition. Pillemer shows why. A daughter asks her mother to respect her husband. To the daughter that means no remarks about him at all. The mother thinks her frankness is a form of respect. Each believes she is keeping the agreement.

The people in Fault Lines who went back successfully set terms that could be observed. Which subjects are closed. How long a visit lasts. Where everyone sleeps.

One man had cut off his critical father twice. When he went back the second time, he made a single rule. He would visit, and he would never again stay under the same roof. His parents disliked it. It worked, because it gave him a door. He also learnt to ask one question calmly when his father started on how he raised his children. Could his father leave that alone, or should they go? To his surprise, his father backed down.

The same holds for whoever is asking to be let back in. Pillemer’s advice to them is to say exactly what they will do differently.

Expect the fence to be tested

Habits that took thirty years to form will not vanish because you announced a rule. Pillemer describes the usual course as terms set, terms broken, terms set again. The same man compared his father to his own bad back. It was never going to be cured. It could be managed with regular care.

I find that a useful way to hold it. A broken rule is not proof that you were foolish to try. It is the back acting up.

Get help building it

On this the reconcilers were direct, and Pillemer passes it on as an instruction: see a counsellor. Most went alone, and often for a short time. Anne McKnight, who directs the Bowen Center, told him the aim is to help a person become what she called a more solid self, less easily set off by the family.

One finding surprised me. Some people learnt in counselling that they could live without the relationship. That was what made it safe to go back.

Where both people will attend, it can move quickly. A mother and daughter in the book cleared eighteen years in a few sessions. They said things in that office that neither could have said at a kitchen table.

Pillemer ends with Robert Frost’s poem about two neighbours repairing a wall. Before building one, the poet says, he would want to know what he was keeping in and what he was keeping out. It is a good question to ask about a father.

Boundaries are for difficult relationships. They do not make a dangerous one safe. If you were abused, or you are afraid of this person, please speak to a counsellor before making any contact.