I used to see the same thing, that my father was suffering, and that someone should either help him or take him out of his misery. I felt bad that I had to see this suffering and yet be unable to assist. Also I was very angry, indeed rageful, because all of his efforts seemed directed to keeping me in a stunted immature state, from the age of 15 onward. He seemed to draw his energy from keeping me down. But this isn't object relations, which would mean something that happened when I was very young. It happened when I was an adolescent and subsequent to that.
It's a terrible state to be in, because as you have suggested it leads to an internal antagonism. Initially, whenever I became angry, I would reflexively condemn myself as worthless for being angry at what already had worth, whilst I, being not yet a socially sanctioned adult or having passed any rites of initiation, had not yet any worth in my own estimation. I wanted something to test myself against, followed by recognition of what I'd done.
I had to get myself to adulthood so that I would have the authority to do something authoritative, to fix the situation. That was hard. I needed my father's blessing or the blessing of a proxy to reach adulthood, and people, above all my father, resolutely refused to give this to me.
Actually, one of those things about patriarchal society is that if you mention "my father said X about me," everybody takes it for granted that this is an authoritatively true statement about you. After all, it was said by one's father. Consequently, people kept battering me and telling me to grow up -- which was ironic to say the least. Nobody wanted me to grow up, at least in terms of the new culture. I couldn't form an emotional bridge to it. And yet in other ways, I was overly mature.
I did eventually get there but it was a stuggle in a way it ought not to have been and that depleted the energy I could have used for other things.
But I do understand what you mean by the stage where "no" would have been destructive, as I have been there myself. That was when I lacked authority. And really, I had to do a lot of things to gain my own respect, so that I would have more authority, compared to that of my father and his voice in my head. So I got into what Bataille calls transgression and I got into it more and more, to try to loosen my boundaries and reduce the levels of rigidity.
When I began writing my memoir (also a form of transgression, since I was attempting to tell my side), I had that very conservative idea of climbing a slope and reaching a point where it all made sense and the situation was redemeed. It didn't really work out that way. People who read my work kept saying, "Your father said WHAT about you?" They were very much stuck at a patriarchal level and that is the way it has remained. But the thing is, I did transcend that notion of redemption eventually. It must be that I became more redeemed, so I had less use for the idea. Also I saw that it was futile to expect others to redeem you. Maybe in a homogenised society, where everybody could understand what was going on, due to sharing the same history, sense of responsibility and being able to conjecture. But otherwise, I had vastly overestimated the level of people's emotional and intellectual knowledge. I had been so intent on proving myself to be an adult to those who would deny me that status, that I had very much overshot the mark. And they still couldn't see it -- the patience, the strategy, the effort.
So I began to laugh. I split with the whole structure of the trauma and with the notion that effort has to be morally rewarded. The Christians themselves, who had encouraged me along that line of thought, had proven it untrue by their own reactions, in not recognising the need to move beyond a narrowk patriarchal view of things. Since they had demonstrated their own ability to confirm the beliefs they had, I was free from their ideology.
One does have to learn to say NO to various things at various points, but the timing really does matter. You have to build up the strength within yourself to be able to say it, otherwise you get crushed by your own exertion. You're dealing with forcefields.
Most people, it seems, can't say "no" to things in important ways. For instance, someone might say to me, "It seems you have made yourself free from bondage to conservative situations and beliefs, but I can do that too in due course." It doesn't work that way, because the mind does not function only on volition, but on the basis of emotional muscle tone. You can build that up within you and there are ways of doing that, for instance by becoming more attuned with and accepting of "disgusting" things. Anything that reduces authoritarian rigidity is useful.
But the road to freedom can take a couple of decades, and not at cruise speed either, but pushing along over some pretty rugged terrain.
Cf.
http://musteryou.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/seeking-rejuvenating-stints/
It's a terrible state to be in, because as you have suggested it leads to an internal antagonism. Initially, whenever I became angry, I would reflexively condemn myself as worthless for being angry at what already had worth, whilst I, being not yet a socially sanctioned adult or having passed any rites of initiation, had not yet any worth in my own estimation. I wanted something to test myself against, followed by recognition of what I'd done.
I had to get myself to adulthood so that I would have the authority to do something authoritative, to fix the situation. That was hard. I needed my father's blessing or the blessing of a proxy to reach adulthood, and people, above all my father, resolutely refused to give this to me.
Actually, one of those things about patriarchal society is that if you mention "my father said X about me," everybody takes it for granted that this is an authoritatively true statement about you. After all, it was said by one's father. Consequently, people kept battering me and telling me to grow up -- which was ironic to say the least. Nobody wanted me to grow up, at least in terms of the new culture. I couldn't form an emotional bridge to it. And yet in other ways, I was overly mature.
I did eventually get there but it was a stuggle in a way it ought not to have been and that depleted the energy I could have used for other things.
But I do understand what you mean by the stage where "no" would have been destructive, as I have been there myself. That was when I lacked authority. And really, I had to do a lot of things to gain my own respect, so that I would have more authority, compared to that of my father and his voice in my head. So I got into what Bataille calls transgression and I got into it more and more, to try to loosen my boundaries and reduce the levels of rigidity.
When I began writing my memoir (also a form of transgression, since I was attempting to tell my side), I had that very conservative idea of climbing a slope and reaching a point where it all made sense and the situation was redemeed. It didn't really work out that way. People who read my work kept saying, "Your father said WHAT about you?" They were very much stuck at a patriarchal level and that is the way it has remained. But the thing is, I did transcend that notion of redemption eventually. It must be that I became more redeemed, so I had less use for the idea. Also I saw that it was futile to expect others to redeem you. Maybe in a homogenised society, where everybody could understand what was going on, due to sharing the same history, sense of responsibility and being able to conjecture. But otherwise, I had vastly overestimated the level of people's emotional and intellectual knowledge. I had been so intent on proving myself to be an adult to those who would deny me that status, that I had very much overshot the mark. And they still couldn't see it -- the patience, the strategy, the effort.
So I began to laugh. I split with the whole structure of the trauma and with the notion that effort has to be morally rewarded. The Christians themselves, who had encouraged me along that line of thought, had proven it untrue by their own reactions, in not recognising the need to move beyond a narrowk patriarchal view of things. Since they had demonstrated their own ability to confirm the beliefs they had, I was free from their ideology.
One does have to learn to say NO to various things at various points, but the timing really does matter. You have to build up the strength within yourself to be able to say it, otherwise you get crushed by your own exertion. You're dealing with forcefields.
Most people, it seems, can't say "no" to things in important ways. For instance, someone might say to me, "It seems you have made yourself free from bondage to conservative situations and beliefs, but I can do that too in due course." It doesn't work that way, because the mind does not function only on volition, but on the basis of emotional muscle tone. You can build that up within you and there are ways of doing that, for instance by becoming more attuned with and accepting of "disgusting" things. Anything that reduces authoritarian rigidity is useful.
But the road to freedom can take a couple of decades, and not at cruise speed either, but pushing along over some pretty rugged terrain.
Cf.
http://musteryou.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/seeking-rejuvenating-stints/
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