[Elysium]

Sometimes I just don't understand why I feel the way I feel.

I have wanted to post this since mid-day...and I have been thinking where the most appropriate forum to post it would be...and I am not sure where it should go...so I'm putting it here.

Today I had training at work all day. It was good stuff. We had a good discussion/lecture with a P-Doc on Psychopharmacology, we discussed Leadership and we discussed how to talk about Sui with the mentally ill. I learned some good things today.

What is bothering me though is that while having our discussion with the P-Doc, someone brought up the topic of our forensic patients and legal vs. clinical insanity. This topic interests me, and it attracts me greatly as I grew up with a father who was quite anti-social. He has actually been called a malignant narcissist and sociopathic by previous therapists.

Anyway...I asked the P-Doc a personal question. I asked if it was common for sociopathic/psyhopathic people to go from being pure evil to being a more serene, reclusive, at peace kind of person. His answer...He said that a lot of times they "burn out". He said that they outlive their disorder and although still dangerous when provoked, they tend to just wither into reclusiveness and fizzle out.

After hearing this, I was just gone. My father has fizzled out. He lives in a tin shed/building in some small town in Arizona. It leaks and has no heat and the floor is cement slab. He shares this place with his cars, his dogs, and a bunch of electronic crap. He runs his own company selling amplifiers for MRI machines and is one of only four people in the US market that can do this, but right now he is like a non-violent uni-bomber. He says he does his laundry for free at the laundromat next door because he fixes their washers and dryers so they don't have to call someone from out of town. He gets free food in town because he fixes stuff for the restaurant owners so they let him eat. He says he wants to be my friend and get to know me. He says he doesn't want to fight with me anymore and that he just wants me to be friends with him.

Well....I feel abandoned. It's crazy!! I've spent my whole life surviving him. He's abused me in every way possible. We live thousands of miles apart and I still fear him. He has been a threat to me my whole life and that is what I have learned to live with. It is the ONLY way I know how to live...to be afraid of him yet to crave the danger of getting to close.

What right does he have to "burn out" on me? My whole life...he's been reliable in the way I couldn't trust him...in the way I had to fear him...in the way I had to protect myself from him, and now what....he's gets to burn out...like he's in freekin retirement now!!?

So I just realized today...I'm free. I don't need to be afraid of him anymore. He's not coming to get me anymore. I survived and I got away and I beat him at his game. Or did I? I still am stuck here with all this pain and horrible memories that are hiding behind the invisibility cloak waiting to suffocate me when I remember them. And he is spent. He is done.

I feel like he isn't keeping up his end of the bargain to keep torturing me. He isn't doing his job...the job we both agreed on decades ago was going to be either his or my demise. I feel betrayed by him now more than ever. I feel abandoned by him all over again...in the worst way.

WTF gives him the right to be able to be serene and live the rest of his life out in a reclusive numbness while I can't get past the hell I lived through at his hands?

Maybe it is not fair, but then life is basically unfair. Although your father has turned your world upside down, he cannot prevent you from choosing to do the work to become serene too.