Nobody gets away with anything — but you will lighten your burden, and you will free yourself to live at a different level.
I’m Olivia S. Benson. As you know, every week we have some discussion around my book, For the Love of My Father, which is available on Amazon. And it’s basically a book about healing daddy issues and significantly about forgiving your father for whatever his shortcomings, or however he injured you, let’s just say, in terms of your relationship with your dad. But this week, I want to tell another story.
Last week was basically a story about the fact that my dad, when I was getting divorced, I called my dad out of the clear blue sky. And I don’t want to tell the whole story again. But basically, he didn’t have a response. And so my take eventually, many years later, was, a person can’t give you what they don’t have. But I really encourage you to go see that video, because in fact one of the women who saw it told me that the story really touched her, and to really get to the point where you realize that maybe your dad really didn’t have it.
So this week, I have another story that I’m going to tell. And by the way, all of this is in anticipation of Father’s Day, because I want to tell you at the end how I handle Father’s Day, despite all the difficulties and all the experiences and negative experiences, in quotations, negative experiences that I had — but where I am today.
The present never came
But I want to tell you that apparently, many, many, many years ago, my dad, I guess it was his birthday. And I decided that I was going to call him for his birthday, again, out of the clear blue sky, because we weren’t in constant contact. Right. But anyway, apparently, I called him. And when I called him for his birthday, out of the clear blue sky, he must have said, oh, I realized it was your birthday. I called him to say happy birthday to him, but he immediately went to it was my birthday, and he hadn’t forgotten, and a series of things.
And then he said to me that he was going to send me a present. And I literally, apparently — and I’ll tell you why I keep saying apparently and sort of speaking in that tone — but apparently, I said to him, listen, you don’t have to send me a present. It’s fine. I don’t want to be disappointed. If you can’t do it, it’s okay.
And apparently, he responded and said, no, no, no, I’m going to send you a present for your birthday, even though I had called him, but I guess there was some sense of guilt. And even though I had called him to say happy birthday, and he promised he was going to get this present to me, he told me how he was going to get the present to me, and everything. So I want you to guess that the present never came.
But the reason I told the story the way that I did is because I had forgotten about that episode. And what happened was that a few months ago, I went through some papers, and I then found a letter that I wrote to my uncle, more than — it could easily be more than 20 years ago. And I write to my uncle, the one that I speak about in the book, and I say, this is what my dad did. I called him to say happy birthday. He began talking about my birthday. He promised, and I didn’t ask him to send me a present. He promised that he was going to send me a present. And when I said, please don’t disappoint me, don’t say something if you’re not gonna be able to do it — he promised that he wouldn’t disappoint me. And yet, the present never came.
Well, my uncle never responded to my letter. That was just something that happened, and it died right there, and I forgot about it completely.
I don’t know what you have to say about anything
But the next story that I’m going to tell you tells a lot about the level of anger. And I know that many of us have that kind of subconscious anger that kind of just lives in you. You don’t recognize it, it sort of explodes from time to time, but you really don’t recognize that it’s in you. And it has really serious effects. But nonetheless, I’ll put the three stories together: the one from last week, the story about the letter, and now this story, which actually happened before. Did it happen before? I think the story I’m about to tell you happened maybe before this one.
But in any event, so I was graduating from law school. And the only time that my father ever attended a graduation was when I was graduating from law school. And he actually made a trip, he traveled and came to the graduation and what have you. And following the graduation, we were going to have a party.
Now, I will say this. I don’t think I was very in touch with how I felt about a lot of things, because sometimes once life gets going, you just keep going. And you have to, because sometimes you don’t get a break. If you don’t know how, or you don’t know what you’re dealing with, you’re just really trying to survive. So I had been rolling along, rolling along, doing everything that I needed to do.
And my dad shows up, and shows up for the graduation. And then we’re planning a party. And there was some little detail, I can’t remember, it was something about a table or picking up a table or something like that. And there was some issue about it, and there was a discussion. And at this point, I can say, my poor dad had the nerve to offer a commentary. He’s here as a guest, and he’s staying in my house, in my home, and he decides that he’s going to offer his comment about what should be done.
And I don’t know, and I say in the book, out of some subconscious place and on to my tongue, what comes out is, I don’t know what you have to say about anything. You haven’t been here anyway. Like from nowhere.
And I want you to know that my dad was so stunned. He just held his head down and walked away. And we never, never spoke about that again. I didn’t say a word, and he didn’t say a word. But that was really the first time — I had been upset, sad, maybe depressed about different things at different times in my life, but that was the first time that I realized that there was some anger in me about my dad and his absence and what he had done or what he had not done.
And I think it was a big shock for him, because our interactions were never aggressive. Even though he had done many aggressive things, he had never experienced any aggression from me. Particularly as a child, I wasn’t even in a position. So now in this particular situation, all of a sudden, he gets this awful arrow: you don’t have any right to say anything about anything, because you haven’t been here at any time, anyway.
And I think it was a fair statement. I had never said it to him, and it was something that probably needed to be said. But all these years later, I now see something different, and I can deal with it differently.
He gave me everything that he could
So in the story that I told last week, which was me calling him to talk about the fact that I was getting divorced and really sort of hoping that he would have had something to offer — at that time, I just thought everything was kind of like, he didn’t have anything to offer. And it was disappointment. Today, my feeling about it was, is, and I said this last week, that he gave me everything that he could. And that in even sending me the $500, which is what he did, it was the only way that he knew how.
And I think that’s very significant, because as I’ve said in the book, and as I’ve said many times before, I think there’s even a segment titled People Can’t Give You What They Don’t Have. And I think if we as women who are having this experience understand that your dad very likely had a set of circumstances that made him who he was, and that might be less than the ideal father — and whatever that story is, I believe that I had to have compassion for his situation and for his upbringing and for his circumstances.
And by the way, something very important. There are many men, many people who have suffered many, many challenges, abuses, and a number of different things. And everybody who goes through something doesn’t live in that abuse, and many times they overcome their circumstances. So for example, somebody who maybe did not have a father, many times that person can turn out to be a better father because of their circumstances. So it’s not an automatic thing, and there’s really no excuse there. And by the way, there are always consequences for the choices we make, regardless of the reason that we make those choices.
So in a situation like my dad’s, this is very important, because in one of my favorite books by Louise Hay, which is mentioned in my book, You Can Heal Your Life, she spends a lot of time saying you got to get to understand who your parents are, because that will tell you about who they became in terms of being parents, and why many things happen. So with my entire process, I’ve been able to go back and sort of develop a high level of compassion for my dad, because I can imagine that he must have suffered a great deal. And that his suffering, which he was not able to perhaps process, to understand, or whatever his personality thing was, for whatever reason, he became who he became.
And I can now have compassion for him. Not that I didn’t suffer, not that my experiences were not difficult. Without a question, they were. But I was granted the grace of being able to heal, and being able to resolve, and have been provided with tools and support and all kinds of things that allow me to be a whole person today, and to be able to share my experiences, and hopefully help you with your experiences.
What level of guilt and anxiety he must have had
Now the other story, the one about the letter, that speaks to my level of — I mean, I call him to say happy birthday, and he immediately begins to talk about my birthday, and sending me a present. But the most interesting thing is that I say to him, no, no, no, don’t promise me, don’t tell me, don’t disappoint me, don’t make a promise you can’t keep. That is a weird interaction between a father and a daughter. So it spoke to me, and it speaks to me today, when I read the letter, which was in a box in my garage, and I read the letter, and I saw how, I would say, compromised I was in terms of just having that anxiety, and trying to get him not to say you’re going to do something that you’re not going to do.
And now I still have compassion, because I see that what happened is that he must have felt badly about me calling him for his birthday. And then he immediately sort of goes into this story about giving me a gift for my birthday, which I’m his daughter. And he makes up a whole story. And what level I had anxiety, because I didn’t want to be disappointed — but what level of guilt and anxiety he must have had to create this whole scenario that he really didn’t have to create.
I would have just been happy with, hey, happy birthday. I wasn’t calling for a present. I wasn’t calling to ask for anything, just happy birthday. And that would have been enough for me. And maybe he would have said, listen, happy birthday to you. But his own guilt and his own anxiety about the situation made it into another disappointment.
Anger, resentment, and bitterness will cause dis-ease in your body
And then, because it takes time to put the picture together over the years — and I’ve been fortunate, because I’ve been able to paste the picture together. Then ultimately, and this is an important one also, because anger, resentment, and bitterness are things that literally will cause dis-ease in your body.
And so with that story about the party, the law school graduation and the party, and that statement that I made and the way that I made it — I must have been very, very angry at some level, because it was a time of celebration. It was happy times. Everything was fine. There was no argument prior to that statement. And I don’t know what it was, but something touched that anger, which was already in me. And when it happened, I said what I said, which is, you haven’t been here. Why do you think you have a right to make any statement or participate in any way with any decision that needs to be made? That is a very angry statement.
And if you read the book, which of course is For the Love of My Father, which is available at Amazon, I talk about what happens. We’re carrying bitterness, anger, resentment, unforgiveness, and any other guilt or whatever — any other emotion that we carry in our body weighs us down. And when you really genuinely realize that, you will do the work, because if you are weighed down, you can never reach your full potential. Everything that’s in you: if you are angry, you attract anger, because like attracts like. That is one of the laws of the universe, just like gravity. Like attracts like.
So if you’re angry, you’re going to attract anger. If you’re bitter, you’re going to attract bitterness. If you’re resentful, you’re going to attract experiences that match resentfulness. So eventually, when you really, really get this, you will say, I am willing to do whatever it takes to get rid of that. And that’s one of the reasons that I was willing to do whatever it took to heal myself from this particular issue.
Nobody gets away with anything
Now, the thing that I always remind people is that people think that if you have compassion — which I have a great deal of love and compassion for my dad, who’s passed away at this point, but I can still feel love and compassion as opposed to feeling anger towards him. Love and compassion and whatever other positive emotions I have towards him at this particular time. And forgiveness, right? People think that if you forgive, or you have compassion for someone, or you have empathy for them, that they have somehow gotten away with something. But guess what? Nobody gets away with anything. The universe doesn’t forget.
Nothing can be hidden. It is a cause and effect universe. What you put out, you get back, generally speaking. And so because I have compassion for my dad, that never intervened in the consequences for his behavior. What did happen is that I got better.
And if I can walk around, despite everything that happened, all the stories, the stories in the book — I mean, so far in these discussions I’ve only told you the story about me calling him about the divorce, the letter, which is not in the book, by the way, and also the story of when he came to visit for my law school graduation. There’s only three stories. And there were so many other things that happened, and so many other things in the story, and I was able to heal myself from the trauma of those stories, and learn to develop compassion for his situation.
And my connection, my spiritual connection to God, is the thing that strengthens me and gives me the ability to give. I have a friend of mine, and I always say, when I have compassion for someone’s circumstances, and when I have good to give, I always say, I have it to give, because I have the love of God. I’m connected to the love of God that is within me.
As we come to Father’s Day
And as we come to Father’s Day, in my interview with Michael Scott, he asked me, what do you have to say about this holiday? And how do you feel? Well, I felt very sad, and sometimes disappointed, when Father’s Day rolled around before, because I wanted to be able to be a daughter to my father. I would have bought him gifts, I would have done all the things that daughters do for their dad. So there was always a little bit of a hole. But now there’s no hole. And what I have to give to my dad on the other side is compassion.
And there’s a story in the book, towards the end, where I say, I love you, Daddy, and you’re never going to hear anything different from me. Despite everything that happened, I am now in a place where I have nothing to offer but love. And that’s been a process, but it’s a process that’s put me in a better place. And maybe that’s the reason for the entire story that I had.
Also, in Michael Scott’s interview, he asked me, what would I say to women for Father’s Day who are going through this particular issue? And this is what I would say. Nobody gets away with anything. If you forgive your dad, that doesn’t mean anything in terms of him getting away with something. And what will happen is that you will lighten your burden, and you will free yourself to live at a different level. And you will become a soul that is more in contact with the divine. Because in order to really forgive, you have to understand who you are as a divine being, understand why you had this particular experience, and then be ready to practice a series of spiritual principles.
So, as a woman, I hope — I’ve been for many, many years, for I would say at least half of my life, sad and depressed and down about daddy, and daddy this and daddy that. But then eventually, it all came together. I was able to look at each story and see what it was about. In the divorce story, you know what? My dad couldn’t say what I thought he should have said, but he gave me what he could get. That was $500.
In the second story that I talk about in the letter, he was so guilty that he tried to offer me something that he really couldn’t even get. But that gives me insight to what he was going through. And then of course, in the third, insight into me and the fact that, wow, there was anger. And after I said that, I went on like nothing happened. Many, many years later, I began to understand the level of anger that must have lived in me for a very long time. And I know it lives in a lot of people who have unresolved issues.
So this Father’s Day, consider forgiving your dad, developing compassion for him, understanding his story and what he must have gone through. This doesn’t liberate him from the consequences of his action. It liberates you from living with the weight of all of those experiences.
Again, the book is For the Love of My Father. It’s available on Amazon. I’m Olivia Benson. Thank you for stopping by. My Facebook page is Author Olivia S. Benson, and then Twitter and Instagram are Olivia S. Benson. And I also have my own webpage, which is OliviaSBenson.com.
And for the dads out there, I hope that you’re able to find reconciliation with your daughters this Father’s Day.