"Mindwarp influence"

I was recently going through some papers I have when I came across some childhood drawings that my brothers and I had made which my dad had saved. Of note is this one, an innocuous picture of a dog, annotated by my dad "Jus, Feb 90 (under mindwarp influence but it doesn't matter much)."

I have no idea what my dad saw in this image that led him to this conclusion that my brother was "under mindwarp influence," but this sort of thing happened to us constantly during this era. My dad claimed that we were all being "interfered" with by nefarious forces. For example, one of us would be talking to him and he would announce "you're being interfered with right now." (Another term he used was "being jammed.") I remember another picture my brother made which my dad claimed was a picture of "demons." Another time, he didn't like a picture I made in which I had tried to make cloud effects in the sky using pastels. He pointed to the clouds and asked pointedly and angrily "what are these?" Defensive, I said "clouds," but he was unconvinced.

Recently I've noticed in myself a deep well of hatred that has built in me over the years, something that I didn't want to acknowledge. Every time my dad would contact me, or there would be a particular childhood incident I would recall, my mind would reflexively formulate a thought like "Fuck you!" which barely grazed conscious awareness, but had a strong emotional contour. It was only when I began meditating that I even noticed this process was happening.

I think one explanation of this resentment was all of the incidents similar to the one illustrated above, in which my dad would first accuse us of engaging in some negative behavior which he had hallucinated, and then to top it off, rob us of any personal agency by claiming we were being manipulated by outside forces. In a nutshell the message was "you are bad, and also powerless."  This message was repeated over and over, and as kids, we had no way to fight back. Now that I'm an adult, I'm still stuck with the legacy of these events that happened 25 years ago, and as the trauma occurred at such an early stage of my development, my mind wants to fight back with a child's tools. It is a thorny problem to unravel. Writing entries for this blog is part of that process, and I think it helps serve that purpose, but the trauma seems so solid and entrenched, progress is slow. I guess I have a couple of options moving forward. Definitely staying with meditation is super helpful, and I know that I am making progress in dharma even if my path is erratic. This spring I attended a meditation retreat with Lama Karma of Tennessee, and had some very profound meditative experiences, much more so than previous retreats, and I was able to maintain a meditative state on and off for weeks beyond the retreat. As such, I feel like these are definite signs that I actually am making progress. During the retreat, it occurred to me, with the help of Lama Karma, that the chöd practice pioneered for westerners by Lama Tsultrim Allione may be a good practice for me to do. While I did read a little bit about this, I have yet to actually implement it with regularity. Writing now, I feel like this, together with regular sitting meditation, is a likely path forward.

My dad has never apologized for this in any meaningful way. One time when I recounted a particularly painful incident to him by email, he claimed it never happened, and while accepting some responsibility for subjecting us to a stressful childhood, he claimed he was "under a lot of pressure" and that we were too young to understand what was happening. I tend to believe that he doesn't remember what happened. He probably doesn't want to remember, and furthermore he was much deeper in psychosis back then, so it may be hard to access those memories. Still, his gut reaction is always to double down and try to justify his actions, while at the same time pushing blame off onto others. (For example, pushing some of it off on to me for being too young to understand.) He still sends my brother Chris articles about "psychotronic warfare" in an effort to bolster his claims that thoughts were being implanted in our minds by the CIA were not pure insanity.

I'm glad to have found the picture above because it provides clear documentary evidence of my brother's and my childhood experiences, so even if my dad claims they didn't happen, we know that they did. Not that there was any real doubt, as the three of us all share similar memories, but there is something very satisfying about an actual piece of paper. It might not satisfy my dad though, come to think of it. He once recounted to me how he would sometimes read a page, then turn back to it and the words had changed. To him this was evidence that the people harassing him were capable of magic! He often would complain of demons and so forth.

In actual fact, I don't want my dad to apologize. On the one hand, I've never seen him make a sincere apology for anything, but on the other there is such a deep resentment that I've built up over the years, it prefers to have him still there as a target. It doesn't want resolution. It wants revenge! The best way I've found forward is to simply ignore him and try not to interact with him. Every single time I've tried in the past few years has ended with me becoming furious at him, so simple avoidance seems best.