Couldn’t be me: How to break up with your dad

Welcome to “Couldn’t be me”, a weekly advice column where I solicit your personal dilemmas and help out as best as I can. Have something I can help you with? Find me @_Zeets.

In life, you sometimes find you’ve outgrown people you love, or that a relationship is no longer worth preserving. When that happens, there are few options other than to move on from the person in order to move forward with who you want to be.

The prompt for this week was, “When was a time you had to break up with a close friend or family member in order to grow or because you’ve outgrown them?” I was inspired by a certain NBA star who recently went as far as getting a shoddy cover-up tattoo to distance himself from his overbearing father and his foundering business venture.

Unintentionally, but fittingly, this week became an impromptu session on how to break up with your dad.

Zo: My dad and a friend who I met through him were in charge of my business, which we chose to keep independent because my dad believed we would be more successful on our own. He wanted us to become as big as the companies that I might have signed with at the start of my career. Now a few years after we chose to stay independent, I found out that the person I met through my dad was stealing money from me, and that our business is in shambles. I’ve cut everyone off, and I’m in the process of suing the friend. I love my dad, but his ideas have cost me a lot of money and has taken an emotional and psychological toll on me. I know I need to distance myself from him and everyone else, but I wonder if I’m being too harsh.

CBM: Part of growing up is taking charge of your own life, and setting the standards for engagement with the people around you. When you’re a child, your father can seem like a superhero, like someone who has all the answers and can achieve anything. But as you grow up and understand the world better, you come to realize that your father is not only human, but in some cases he may be deeply flawed. That’s not to say that you no longer admire or love him, but you can no longer think of him as capable of anything.

There’s no need to feel guilt for becoming independent. If you let him run your life, he will make you into who he wants you to be, and that’s often not what you want. Very likely, he will try to turn you into the person he feels like he missed out on becoming.

It’s your life, you might as well live it on your own terms. There’s also a chance that separating your father from your business will grant you both the space to love each other even more, without money or the health of your brand causing conflict. Now you can be father and son as you want to be, without the burden of also being business partners.

Manuel: My parents immigrated from Mexico shortly before I was born. Having lived my whole life in the U.S. and grown up around American kids, I often would (and continue to) clash with my parents over what my actions should or shouldn’t be. Their ideas can seem foreign and outdated to me; they were molded by a culture I feel I never fully belonged to and a religion I no longer feel very attached to.

I want to be close to them because I love them dearly and they sacrificed so much to give me the life I have now. But I often keep things from them to avoid upsetting our relationship or because I feel I have a right to make my own mistakes, which only mounts their frustration. I know I’m a meager 21 years old, but I feel the only way I can grow sometimes is to put some distance between me and the parents I cherish. How does someone toe the line between getting sage advice from their parents and distancing themselves in order to feel independent?

CBM: I sense this is a problem that many kids who were first- or second-generation immigrants deal with, and it’s an inevitable disconnect. You can’t be like your parents because you’re growing up in an entirely different environment than they did. But your parents, who sometimes have disdain for American culture (often warranted), are afraid that you will lose the connection to their culture and they can’t understand any of the experiences that are shaping you. The parents and the child exist in two different worlds, and while you want to be independent, it’s also important to know that your parents’ frustration is being driven by a fear of not knowing you.

There may never come a time when you or your parents fully understand each other, because your experiences just aren’t the same, but I also don’t think understanding is necessary. Toeing the line in this case is a matter of love and reflection. I dealt with the same disconnect with my parents, and it still exists to an extent, but what changed is that at some point, we accepted that I have a dual identity and worked from there. You are both the American and the Mexican.

Reflecting on that dual identity, and knowing that you exist as the manifestation of two cultures, is the starting point for embracing who you are. Your total self. And while it can be frustrating, the process doesn’t need to be a burden, or make you feel as if you’re betraying your parents. Having multiple identities allows you to experience and understand the world from a greater perspective. It’s a gift.

You may find that loving yourself lets you embrace your parents in all their strangeness to you. They may seem foreign and outdated, and you’re allowed to disagree with them on many things, but you also have to accept that just because you don’t understand their lives, that doesn’t grant you the right to sneer at them.

To close the distance between you and them, it’s important to embrace the parts of their culture that you’re comfortable with. You also have a claim to it, and your effort towards knowing its history, and how it shaped your parents, will ease some of their frustration. Rather than seeing the two parts of you as being in conflict, that you have to choose one or the other, they may come to see them as complementary.

That also doesn’t mean you have to tell them everything. My parents will never, ever, ever find out about some of the things that I’ve done.

Victor: How do you break up with a racist, sexist homophobe who happens to be your father without seeming like an ungrateful son? Even people who sympathize with me will say, “but it’s your parents!” (There’s a history of emotional, psychological abuse that I’m dealing with. I rarely speak to my parents despite living like 10 minutes away. I try to avoid them as much as possible.)

When I push back I get the “but it’s your dad” line, and it makes me feel ungrateful. On one hand, when I try to explain emotional/psychological abuse to a layperson, they take it as me not being “mentally tough” enough. And when you talk to friends of his you hear, “it’s the way he is,” or, “he provided for you growing up.”

CBM: The world still doesn’t take emotional and psychological abuse as seriously as it should, so I’m not surprised. Across all types of abuse, outsiders tend to be dismissive, and often blame victims for suffering in silence. For some twisted reason, there remains this attitude that an abused person should appease their abuser in order to preserve the relationship.

People are idealistic, to the point of allowing idealism to overpower reality. It seems that people in your life are pushing back on your complaints because of what they think a father/son relationship should be — namely, that it should withstand the differences that exist between the two of you. They aren’t paying attention to what you’re telling them, perhaps because they have good relationships with their fathers, or are holding on to fantasies of what they’d like their relationships to be. They don’t seem to want to understand that your life is different than theirs.

My answer to you is the same as what I practice in my own life. If someone is hurting you, and they don’t know they are, and you still want to keep them in your life, you have to make their actions clear to them along with the consequences if they don’t stop. If you have told someone that they are hurting you, and they continue to do so, you can and should sever that relationship. You do not need to suffer to preserve a connection. If you do, you may regret it and feel reduced by it.

Your father’s racism, sexism, and homophobia are an unholy trinity of bigotry. That’s high-level shit. If you’ve already tried to educate him and he remains as he is, and those attitudes are making it impossible for you to maintain a relationship with him, then the deterioration of that relationship is not your fault. Loving someone and being grateful for what they have done for you doesn’t mean you have to deal with their abuse or tolerate their hate. You can appreciate their role in your life, and also know that being close to them is not good for you.

You can love them and leave. That doesn’t make you an ungrateful son; it just means you’re not willing to destroy yourself for their comfort.