father was abandoned as a child

LegacyUser

in his twenties, my dad discovered that his parents were not who he thought they were. it turned out that his father was a local man in the area who was married and already had children and his birth was a result of an 'affair'. he was raised by his mothers grandparents but always thought his mother was his sister. he comes from a very small village in the north of ireland and you can imagine how people would've of known this when he didnt. i think he carries a lot of resentment with him over this but tries to hide it with a bravado type personality. both of his natural parents are now dead, his mother just recently. i felt quite lost at the funeral as i did not know whether his natural family were present or not as my father never made any attempt to develop any sort of relationship with his half brothers and sisters who still recide in the village.
i'd like to know whether anyone else has experienced this in their family as i feel the resentment he carries is poisoning our relationship.
is it natural for people to develop relationships with their half brothers or is there any logic to it? ive tried to force the issue with him many times but it seems like he is unable to confront the issue.

Animord

Hi - I am sorry for you that is a very difficult situation and I wish you luck with it - I am afraid I haven't much constructive to say except that I have two half siblings - I have never met either of them and quite frankly, apart from a mild degree of curosity I have no great desire to. I presume some people do and some just don't.

For my part there is no great drama or emotion involved in it - I don't particuarly care that we share the same 'blood' - they have their lives and I have mine. They too presumably have no desire to contact us as it would be easy for them to find me.

I can't imagine the situation that your father is in - though I would guess that there is an enormous sense of betrayal at being lied to by your parents (whether they be birth parents or the semi-adoptive parents in your fathers case).

Why is his resentment poisoning your relationship with him? The trouble is, if he doesn't want to confront them or stay in contact you really can't force him to. It is hard, when you feel you know what is right for someone else, to stand back and watch them do what you consider to be the 'wrong' thing, but sometimes we just have to.

LegacyUser

i know ya, but i think he resents his half brothers and sisters because he feels like he was the one who was abandoned and not them. he puts a lot of pressure on us to succeed because he has something to prove. i once dropped out of college and he held a grudge againstme because he was expecting me to qualify. he didnt speak to me in over 4 years until i returned to college. he has the biggest <snip> chip on his shoulder and it only started to become obvious the time i dropped outta college. anything to do with where he comes from is kept in utter secrecy. any visits he makes back home are never mentioned. when his natural father died he never even told me or my siblings even though we were all grown at the time. the same happened when our grand uncle died and he buried him without telling us either. i think he has seriously betrayed our trust and let these grudges get the betterof him. it angers me beyond reason

Rosy Posy

dilema wrote: »

he resents his half brothers and sisters because he feels like he was the one who was abandoned and not them. he puts a lot of pressure on us to succeed because he has something to prove.

dilema wrote: »

he has the biggest <snip> chip on his shoulder

dilema wrote: »

anything to do with where he comes from is kept in utter secrecy.

dilema wrote: »

i think he has seriously betrayed our trust and let these grudges get the betterof him. it angers me beyond reason

Here you could be talking about my father- different situation- his mother died and his father remarried suspiciously quickly, farming him off to relatives while he got on with his new family - but similar results

What really got to me about it was that he felt that he had been denied a sense of family belonging and was so resentful about it that he inflicted the same thing on his own child

I got to the point where I accepted the situation was not going to change (he is a stubborn man, much like your father sounds) but then, just recently, since all the elder members of the family have died off and he himself is in poor health he made contact with the half brothers and sisters off his own bat. He seems to be more at peace with the situation but tbh the damage in our relationship has been done. The most I can hope for is to resolve my own issues so that I don't poison my own family relationships with them, which is what I would advise you to do, OP. I don't think that anything you say or do is going to tip the balance- its something he has to come to by himself, or not (imho).

Animord

You really can't blame him for resenting his brothers and sisters - I think it would be very hard not to in the same circumstances.

He is angry with you because you dropped out of your education? I think any parent would feel like that athough they might not deal with it by not talking to their child for four years.

Can you explain to him that although you understand how he feels, that these people are your relations too and you would like to know more about them or to be told if one of them dies?

I don't know how old your father is, but I think that people in Ireland today have a very hard time understanding Ireland of the 50s/60s and earlier - his parents and grandparents would have been shamed and disgraced - fair play to them for not putting him up for adoption - the pressure to do so was probably enormous. And that must have had a great affect on him.

I think you need to deal with your own anger first really. Because it sounds like there is no hope of proper communication if you are both angry and upset. Where is your mother in all this? Can she talk to him?

I think that you probably need to cut him some slack, understand that, whether rightly or wrongly, he is still very very angry and hurt about what happened to him. Is there anyone else who could talk to him (that you would trust) uncles, aunt, cousins on his mother's side?

Animord

Rosy Posy wrote: »

What really got to me about it was that he felt that he had been denied a sense of family belonging and was so resentful about it that he inflicted the same thing on his own child

This is the real tragedy of it - not learning from your own experience and then repeating it on the next generation.

Semele

You might just be expecting more emotional literacy than he's capable of. Certainly, thinking of my father or any of my uncles- they're traditional taciturn country men who were never encouraged to dwell on how they felt about anything, never mind be able to talk about it in any deep and meaningful way!

My family also has some very messed up dynamics but I've never once heard a conversation even acknowledge it- you cannot force someone to discuss something they can't perhaps even weigh up at an emotional level internally and it may actually cause more harm than good to encourage someone to confront painful memories/situations that they don't have the emotional capacity to process and deal with.

I could be entirely wrong in assuming that your father is the same "type" as the men I'm thinking of, but the fact that he stopped speaking to you for the reasons that you said encourages me to think this, as it seems totally in keeping with that type of character- one who can't express emotion fluently and so resorts to avoidance as a way of dealing with distress. Again imagining my dad in this situation, he probably wouldn't even (be able to??) question why he was so angry with me for dropping out of uni, never mind being able to recognise it was due to his own insecurities and then express this to me in a ratiional and reasonable way. He would probably get angry and then avoid me and thus the issue too.

Our generation is a lot more emotionally aware and open than previous ones in this country. It's just a learned behaviour and not necessarily his "fault", so to speak.

LegacyUser

Rosy Posy wrote: »

What really got to me about it was that he felt that he had been denied a sense of family belonging and was so resentful about it that he inflicted the same thing on his own child

thats exactly how i feel. we feel like we're being punished for something we were never responsible for. tbh i dont agree with ''cutting him some slack'' as im quite frankly sick of cutting him slack, im not his effing father you know. i think if anyone is in need of acceptance here it is him and not me as i do not deserve to be punished for something for which i am not responsible for. maybe he should finally grow up and stop behaving like a child before he puts one of us in an early grave

Big Bag of Chips

I'm afraid your father is what he is. Whether that is caused by the past or whether that is the type of man he would have been anyway, is anyone's guess.

You can't ever change him.Maybe, just maybe it is all caused by his background, but if he has never spoken to you about that, (which I'm guessing he hasn't) then all you are doing is projecting what you think, he must be thinking.

Forget about him and his problems for the moment. And deal with you and your problems with him.

You don't like things he does and has done.. so tackle him on those, or come up with your own coping strategy to deal with him.

Giving out about him and wishing he'd change is not going to change him. You can only change yourself and your reaction to him.