If you’re the dad and you’ve failed up until this point, you have the option.
So for those of you, women or men — and by the way, I wanna speak about the daddies, because if you’re a daddy and you’ve fallen beneath the standard that you would like to use, listen to what I’m saying and imagine your kids or your daughter saying 20 years from now or 30 years from now, my dad said he was coming and he never came. My dad never even asked me what I wanted. My dad never even brought me anything for Christmas. Or my dad brought me something that I couldn’t even relate to, meaning that he didn’t even know who I was for Christmas.
If you’re the dad, you have a chance
If you’re the dad and you’ve failed up until this point, you have the option, because I’m sitting here now as a whole person, but there was for many years a lot of trauma around all of that. So if you’re the dad, you have a chance. You can show up, you can talk to your daughter, even talk to your son, find out what is gonna make them happy. And it usually doesn’t take a lot, even though I know these days, kids, everybody wants a game that costs 300 or 400 or whatever the case might be. But beyond what you can buy for them, there’s also the showing up for them.
He said he was coming and he never came
And I’m the daughter, and my God, if my dad had shown up once of all the times he said he was gonna show up, boy, we would be having a different conversation. Because I would say, you know what? He said for years that he was coming and he only came once. But instead now I say, he said he was coming and he never came. And that was sad.
And it was sad for me as a child. And it’s sad for him, because he knows what he did. And he knows that he said he was coming and he never did. Nobody can take that away. You can pretend all you want, but he knows that he said he was coming, and every year he said he was coming and every year he didn’t show up. So ultimately we all know what we do. We can play around with it, we can do all kinds of different things, but we know.
Remember that you can heal those memories
So I’d like you to, if you start to fall into that scenario where you’re like kind of down for the holidays and it doesn’t hold good memories around your dad or your family or what have you, remember that you can heal those memories. And in the book, I also talk about ways of releasing negative experiences from your body. You can heal yourself and recast your life in a way that allows you to enjoy the holidays. You really should not allow your parents, your dad, your mom, or anybody to steal the joy that can come with the end of year holiday celebrations.
So I hope this is helpful for you. I didn’t want it to be like, oh, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Kwanzaa and Happy Hanukkah and any other holidays celebrated around the world, without taking a minute to speak to those of us who are less than happy around the holiday time.
Of course, this is one of my cups: “I’m willing to do the work to be whole.” I have several others, and also they’re available as wine mugs. And I’d really like you to take a look on my website, OliviaSBenson.com. We got a lot of products. The book, For the Love of My Father, available on Amazon. I am also on Facebook, author Olivia S. Benson. I’m on Instagram, Olivia S. Benson, and of course, YouTube.
So if you have some comments about this video and about your experiences, I’d be happy to have a conversation with you about your experiences, or maybe even share it, because I know there’s some people out there that have had some very difficult experiences. But in any event, again, I’m Olivia S. Benson, and I really, really hope that you can recast your childhood, your negative childhood experiences with your dad, with your mom, with your parents. You can heal from them and you can recast your feelings and create a new experience for yourself around the holidays.