Find MORE through LESS

Facing „what is“ is always the right place to start…



I thought I already have a profound understanding of my past, my family history, my challanges. I might as well have – at least in my own head. I really did believe, I know enough to have a „sealed“ concept of why I became the person I am today: what affected me, what hurt me, what hindered my self-acceptance and what made me choose the ways of adaptations I did to manage my life’s challanges with. I also thought, that knowing about all these in my head was enough to truly see, accept and integrate them.

I believed so up until a recent conversation – again in therapy – that cracked me open and completely changed my perception of how true healing looks like. Diving into the surpressed anger around my fathers recent life-events – burdening me, my brother and every close family member with further reckless financial debts, with the reckless „not-caring“ about serious physical health conditions that led to dangering the self and other people, the consequences of the compulsive hoarding and littering -, I was given the gift to experience something nobody ever offered me in the past twenty years of soul-searching, inner-work, therapy. I was given a mundane, down-to-earth diagnoses about my fathers mental state, which, in the very moment shifted something powerful inside me. I literally felt my stomach easing up, my breath becoming deeped, my jaw becoming softer, and I flet a certain relieving calmness inside my whole body.

„Have nobody ever told you before, that your father must have been living with serious mental health conditions for decades, and he must have needed help to find his way to a more stable and sustainable way of living.? That nobody becomes a self-destructing, careless messy, who repeatedly destroys his own living enviroments with compulsive littering, lack of hygine, lack of self-care without underlying and untreated mental problems? That his constant, reckless drive to start new projects and never finishing them, deniying social contacts, becoming isolated and solitary, unable to manage any kind of human relationship, burdening their own children with financial and regulatory distress and (unwillingly) endangering their fellow humans are NOT the „healthy“ way of living an adult life.? Your father must have been suffering from severe menthal illnesses for decades now – left untreated, reaching a point where he really cannot take care of himself anymore. Your father must have been living with these illnesses before you were born. It was his heritage, his bourden, his challenge to work with, and he couldn’t. Your father has been ill for a long time. Do you think that any shame, guilt, self-reproach on your side could ever make it go away? Do you hear me saying: he was and is ill and it is not your doing that he is this way? He would have needed help. But you could not help him.„

I might have known this. But at the same time, I didn’t.

It has an incomparable power to actually HEAR such words: from people who know better, who were or are in the power of responsibility (like your parents are when you still are a child), from educated professionals, experienced diagnosticians, doctors, therapists. The words, the knowing, the understanding, they all do sit differently, if you get them mirrored back and actually hear them being spoken out.

This very moment of hearing them stopped a decade-long process inside me. Because even the 1% uncertainty of our unvalidated inner-knowing allows us the spiral around for years: maybe I could do something about it.? Maybe it’s (also) my fault, my doing that someone is struggling. Maybe I can try a little bit harder, dig deeper, strech myself a little more. Or maybe he is just a careless-bad person, who really doesn’t mind ruining so much in his and in our life? Even if you „know“ that cannot be the case, there is something in our minds that only allows us that knowing through reflection and „neutral validation“.

I have lived with crippling guilt after my parents divorce:

• first, because my own mother asked and used me to cover up her beginning new relationship from my father, making me lie to my him regarding her whereabouts for almost a year.
• then, because I watched my father loose almost everything in his life (job, family, marriage, money, status) and I was sure it is mainly because of me, because I lied to him and helped my mother get her way.

I lived with the paralyzing feeling for over 20 years, that I am responsible for every missfortune my father had in his life: every bad decision, loss of social contacts, money, every trouble or debt he got himself into: I was sure it is on me. Over time, through a lot of inner work, precious friends and conversations, I started to realize – maybe it wasn’t all me. It was not all my fault. I started to allow myself the questioning, the doubt, but even that felt like a betrayal, a letdown: because my father WAS struggling. He was not getting any better – if, then only worse over time. There was no concept available and allowed to my mind: whose fault it is then, if not mine.? There was no loving source inside me that could allow me to understand: it surely is not the fault of a young child, if their grown-up parents can’t take over the responsibility of their own faith, even if facing devastating life events. And – if after years and decades – those grown-ups still cannot take over the steering wheel of their own destiny: maybe there IS no one to blame guilty for what happened, but to accept, that illnesses do rob humans to assume responsibilities.

It is not to say, that no one should care and try to improve, repair, and do their very best to become the best versions of themselves. But it is to say, that if an illness is standing in the way of that process, help is needed. To be able to help, it is inevitable and life-changing to start with acknowleding what is: to speak the words, to face the facts, to name the feelings, evaluate to damage, the ressouces, the capacities. NOTHING can start before we face the truth bravely.

My father is ill. And has been for a very long time. I will turn 35 soon, and now is the first moment in my life, that anybody ever spoke the words that clearly. Only through hearing them from someone else (and not only guessing in my mind), I could stop for a second and release my breath. I could let go of the tension. I could hold the truth. I could see the reality. It hurts. Because it is sad, it is tragical and quite late to realize in the wake of his death: what hurts the most is exactly the realization: how many years, how much energy lost, how much loving & connection with oneself and one another went lost in the blindfold decades of not seeing reality for what it is. For not dealing with the truth. For not investing the energy into the right kind of help & healing, instead of self-hatred, blame, shame and guilt.

Words do matter. Diagnoses do matter. Knowing what is, without downplaying or compensating it, matters. Working with reality does matter, and is actually the only way that will ever bring relief, healing and a chance to create something better in our lives.

I can’t go back and rewrite our history. I can’t go back and help my father the way he could have really needed help: offering him a kind companion, a mirror to see himself and giving him a chance to work on it, for himself. He could or couldn’t have lived with the chances, he could have made a difference, and I could have taken a better care of myself instead of loosing myself in needless guilt. I did not. And that is just how it is, that is not to be condemned, judged, but it is to be seen and accepted. I now have a chance to do something with the knowing, and I do know, that I will.

Because I am ill, too. And I will speak about it, live it, hold space for it, work with it – I do not want to have an unseen illness dictate the course of my life without me trying to be the captain of my own experience. I deserve this. My people deserve this. My son, my ancher in the dark: YOU deserve better. And I try my very best, to be better for you. You saved me, you keep saving me day after day, and I will forever be grateful for your presence, forcing me to seek for the truth. So that we both can live.