It’s absolutely necessary to build healthy boundaries with people who’ve hurt and abused you in life, but boundaries are only one part of it. You can build walls to keep out everyone who’s ever hurt you, but you’ll still be dying alone inside your own castle if you’re not doing the work, your work, to get healed.
• • •
As Christians, we always frame Jesus’s teachings in philosophical and theological terms, but if you read those teachings a slightly different way, the message of forgiveness is really a superintuitive understanding of human psychology that was way ahead of its time. Among the many concepts I think Jesus understood better and sooner than anyone else was forgiveness. We all want forgiveness for our sins and our faults. But the only way to forgive yourself is to accept that you were programmed that way, that you didn’t have a choice in your parents or how you came up as a child and that’s not your fault. But guess what? In order to apply that logic to yourself, you now have to apply that logic to everyone else in the world. The only way to achieve forgiveness for our own sins is to learn how to forgive others for theirs—including our parents.
As has been said many times in many ways, refusing to forgive someone is like drinking poison and hoping that the other person will die. Forgiveness is not only, or even really, about the other person. Forgiveness is coming to the end of your ego and radically accepting that the pain caused by this person isn’t personal. It’s pain that they’re passing on because it was passed on to them. It’s generational trauma. It’s unhealed hearts and minds damaging other hearts and minds. This is why it’s so important to radically accept and radically love yourself and others, at every turn. Finding the way to a place of forgiveness is difficult for anyone. For me, nowhere has it been more difficult than in my relationship with my father.
As someone who grew up in the Christian faith, I’ve read my Bible a good bit, and I feel like so much of what Jesus was talking about were ideas that have been ratified and validated within modern psychology.
There’s a powerful scene in the movie Good Will Hunting, the emotional climax of the film, where Matt Damon’s Will Hunting character and Robin Williams’s therapist character both acknowledge the abuse they suffered from alcoholic fathers growing up. All through the film, Will has been putting up his tough-guy act, relying on a lifetime’s worth of defense mechanisms to avoid reckoning with his terrible childhood and all the bad, self-destructive choices he’s made in the years since, choices that have hurt the very people in his life who are trying to help him. Then, over the course of this one scene, his tough-guy act starts to fall apart as Robin Williams looks him in the eye and then hugs him and says to him, over and over again, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”
The reason we’re so afraid to confront the problems of our past is because we’re ashamed of them. We’re ashamed of what we feel. We’re ashamed of the bad choices we’ve made. We’re ashamed because we believe those bad choices were our fault—that those mistakes and those feelings of worthlessness are who we are. But they’re not. By and large, the trauma and the bad programming that led us to make those mistakes has less to do with us and almost entirely to do with the way that we were raised. We look at the truly damaged people in society, the people who commit awful crimes or hurt other people in unimaginable ways, and we say that they’re evil and there’s no good in them and our answer is always to punish them and shame them more, which simply has the opposite effect of stopping the madness. Instead of seeing the abused child in them, and helping that child to heal, we dehumanize them, severing from them any amount of empathy or grace, and in turn amplify their propensity to abuse even more.
I don’t believe that those people are evil. They may commit evil acts, but they are humans. They’re children of God. They’re damaged. They’re the ones who need to be hugged tight and told, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” But of course, it’s not that simple, which is one of the tricky things we as a society have yet to figure out. It’s said that if we admit that damaged people are not at fault for who they are then we’ve absolved them and the wrongs they’ve done are no longer their responsibility. But that’s not the case. Both can be true at the same time: it may not be your fault, but it’s still your responsibility. When it comes to the way we talk about these issues, we need to reach a point where we understand that explaining someone’s behavior isn’t the same as excusing it. If you have pain and bad programming and feelings of worthlessness inside you, that is not your fault. But when your pain has caused you to transgress and hurt other people, accepting and dealing with the consequences of your choices is still your responsibility. And that struggle, the difficulty of reconciling those two ideas, is to this day at the root of all of the issues I have with my father.
Just as I was packing up to leave for Connecticut, my dad flew down to Austin with my sister Sarah and some other family friends to celebrate my thirty-seventh birthday and hold me together until I could get into treatment. Late one night he and I were in my living room, sitting on opposite ends of the couch, and I was doing my best to ease him into the conversation I’d tried to have with him on several occasions before. Once I found myself standing in the wreckage of my own failed marriage, I tried to talk to him about everything I was going through and all the ways he hadn’t been there for me and how much that had fucked me up. But trying to get him to open up was like pulling teeth. Even with his own son sitting there, crying as hard as I’ve ever cried about anything in my life, at the last gasp of my ego and self, in so much pain that I wanted to die, he still couldn’t do it. Instead, all I got from him was a begrudging, “Sorry. You wanna hear me say ‘Sorry’? Okay. I’m sorry!” He did not know how to do any more than that. He didn’t have the emotional capacity to go to those depths, nor the emotional vocabulary to say what needed to be said.
And that’s not his fault.
My dad was born in 1946 to Alton and Alice Pugh in St. Paul, Minnesota, the second of four kids. When he was young they left the Twin Cities and settled in Amo, Indiana, population around 450, a town so small it’s tough to spot on a map. Grandpa Alton was a World War II veteran. The dude was a beast, a man’s man, a hero who’d fought in the Pacific and come home with a Purple Heart and shrapnel in his leg. After the war Grandpa Alton helped start the volunteer fire department in Amo, and was so involved in the community that the town renamed the old firehouse/post office “The Alton Pugh Town Center.” Just before he passed away in 2001, for his service Grandpa Alton was awarded the title of Sagamore of the Wabash, which is the funny name of the highest honor bestowed by the State of Indiana, something they give to astronauts and politicians and famous actors.
When I was six years old my dad left me in the care of an abusive, emotionally unstable mother. It took me thirty years to understand that his leaving wasn’t his fault. I’m still waiting for him to accept that it is his responsibility.
All his accolades aside, what Grandpa Alton wanted in life was a son to play ball with. Instead he got my dad. Darrell Alton Pugh was not the superathletic, let’s-go-be-volunteer-firefighters kind of kid. He was more the sensitive, nerdy, artistic kind of guy, like me. Grandma Alice was very religious, loved church hymns, and taught piano to all of the kids in the area. She had all of her kids singing like the von Trapps all the time. That was more my dad’s speed.
My dad didn’t do great in school either. He wasn’t dumb; it just wasn’t for him. He’s a simple guy with simple desires, simple needs; he never wants for much, doesn’t own much. After a semester of college and a short stint at the phone company, he ended up enlisting in the Air Force right as the Vietnam War was getting into full swing. He spent most of the war stationed in Tokyo, and when it was finally his turn to get deployed to Vietnam, it turned out God had other plans. This other soldier he knew was running some kind of black-market operation smuggling cigarettes and booze and all manner of contraband in and out of Saigon. Having been sent back to Tokyo, he needed to get back to Vietnam to keep his operation going. He asked if he could take my dad’s place and my dad, like any sane person, said, “You betcha!”
So while Grandpa Alton spent WWII charging the beaches at Okinawa, my dad spent all of Vietnam hundreds of miles away from the jungle, playing in a rock cover band doing Beatles and Stones hits for evenings at the officers’ club. After a postwar stint in Germany, he ended up in Los Angeles for his job, and he was singing in the worship band at church when one day this thin hippie chick with long, wavy brown hair and a big smile walked up to him and said, out of the blue, “God told me I’m supposed to marry you.”
So he did.
To look at it in hindsight, if there were ever two people in the history of the world who should never have gotten married, it was my mom and my dad, with my mom and my stepdad coming in as a close second. But at the same time, it makes perfect sense that my parents did get married, because my dad, as Carl Jung would put it, was simply trying to heal the trauma bond he’d endured as a child. In my father’s case, that meant marrying a woman like his mom to try to heal his relationship with his mom.
I didn’t grow up with Grandpa Alton and Grandma Alice; they were in Indiana and we were in California, and my mom was a difficult person to deal with, so we would rarely see them. But apparently, like Grandma Pat, Grandma Alice was quite the ballbuster. She’d had a hard life. She grew up on a farm in the Depression, no electricity, only an outhouse for a bathroom, that sort of thing. Her father was an alcoholic and he was gone a lot of the time, leaving her and her siblings and mother to take care of the entire farm. As I’ve come to learn from my dad’s siblings, all Grandma Alice wanted in life was to move to the big city, have a career, and do something adventurous. She never wanted to be married and never really wanted to have kids, but those were the days when that was what was expected of women. So she married a man she didn’t really wanna marry, and had four kids she didn’t really wanna have. She wound up fairly miserable and hardened because of it, and she took it out on everyone around her. She wasn’t physically abusive like Grandma Pat, as far as I know. But she was domineering and controlling. I believe that my dad, being the quiet, sensitive type, never stood a chance.
Instead of learning how to assert himself, my dad learned how to please and appease the larger personalities around him. So when this charming and charismatic California cyclone known as Susy Hoctor blew into his life one day at church and told him God said they were supposed to get married, he was powerless to resist. This is God’s will, he thought. It must be God’s will. He just went along with it.
The fact that they met at church, and that my mother presented their meeting as divine providence, was important. If someone walked up to you at a coffee shop and said, “God wants us to get married,” you’d look at them like they were a crazy person. But within the religious culture of the time—this hippie-dippie, woo-woo, superspiritual Christianity that had permeated Southern California and elsewhere—the same pick-up line made perfect sense, especially to someone like my father. My father is very much a follower of Christianity—an adherent in every sense of the word. Prior to the pandemic, he’d never miss church. In fact, he’d go multiple times a week. He’d still sing in the worship band and teach at Sunday school here and there. Now he will drive around with no radio on, or sit in his apartment with no TV on. You ask him what he’s doing, and he’ll say, “Just waitin’ on God. Just sittin’ here, waitin’ on the Lord.” It’s deeply ingrained in him to just be with God and wait around for what God has to say. So the fact that he met this beautiful, charming hippie girl in a hippie church played a lot into my dad’s thinking.
I think that’s one of the hardest parts of my relationship with my dad, our different approaches to faith. We share some elements in our beliefs, and I appreciate his faith, but I think he hides behind it. He’ll sometimes use it as a shield, as an excuse. When my mom and dad finally got divorced, he didn’t have it in him to fight her anymore. He was cooked. She’d chewed him up and spit him out so much that he didn’t have it in him to co-parent with her or even fight her for custody. Then came the moves—ours to Seattle and his to Charlotte—and that pulled us permanently apart. But my dad has always used his faith to gloss over that rupture. He told me many times growing up that he agonized over it and prayed over it, but that he always came to the same conclusion.
“Son,” he’d tell me, “I was so worried and I was praying and calling out to God, and the Lord said, ‘Darrell, don’t worry. They’re my kids. I’ve got ’em.’ And I knew you kids were going to be fine.”
For a long time, I used to think, “Wow, that’s amazing. How cool that God told you that. And look at us, here we are. God did take care of us. We’re alive. We’re okay.”
Except we weren’t okay. We weren’t okay by a longshot. Because what he did was leave us in the hands of someone who was emotionally and mentally unbalanced, and we suffered the consequences of that and are still suffering the consequences of that now. Our dad could have been a shield, the first line of defense, but he wasn’t.
My mom would always wield that fact as a weapon whenever she was angry at him. “Your dad didn’t fight for you,” she’d say. “Your dad didn’t want you.” As a kid I always defended him. “But you’re the one who moved us to Seattle,” I’d shoot back. “What was he supposed to do, keep following us around?” But now, as I’ve gotten older and watched my sisters and friends have kids of their own, I’ve realized, “Well, yeah. That is what the fuck you’re supposed to do. They’re your kids. They’re your responsibility.” But in his brokenness and unhealed trauma, my dad had genuinely allowed himself to believe that God had absolved him of that responsibility.
I know that my dad is a good man. I know that he means well. I know that he loves me and my sisters. Occasionally, especially in my teenage years, there were times when I needed help talking through something heavy. That’s when, to his credit, he was a good dad. I’d be going through some heavy shit that I could never talk to my mom about because she was so unstable and she might blow up. The pain would build up inside me to the point where my dad could hear it in my voice. He’d ask me what was wrong and I could confide in him about whatever it was, something that I had done wrong or something I’d screwed up that I hated myself for, maybe something between my mom and Gary and their chaos. No matter what it was, my dad never got angry. I could have said, “Dad, I killed someone,” and he would only say, “Son, I’m disappointed in you. I know you can do better than that, but I love you, and so does God.” On those rare occasions, a few times a year, he could be a real shoulder to cry on and a real voice of compassion and wisdom and encouragement and direction.
My father genuinely cares about people too. He’s always been a devout servant in trying to do good in the world. He has always been there for other people’s kids, teaching Sunday school and helping out with church picnics and BBQs. Everyone in all the churches he’s attended in his life will tell you nothing but the most wonderful things about him. And I’m glad for that. I’m glad that God has been able to use him in other people’s lives, but at the same time I think all of that has also been a refuge and an escape for him. It’s important to serve your community, obviously, but it’s also a less messy way of being a good person. Helping to teach kids who you don’t have to take home at the end of the day is noble, but it’s far less complicated than taking care of your own.
My dad lived in Charlotte for twenty-five years, and in all that time we never got to visit him there. He never said, “I’d love for you kids to come out here for once.” So we never did. It was always just two weeks in the summer on the West Coast, which continued even as I became an adult. All through the years I was doing Less Than Perfect and Chuck, my dad would come out and stay with me. When he did, he’d visit me on set every day. He’d walk around and everybody knew him and he’d get high fives and he was everybody’s pal. He got to be “Mr. Levi”—even though his name is actually “Mr. Pugh”—and I got to have my dad. For a long time, I felt like, “Hey, this is great! I’ve got my pop!” Except I didn’t, really. There was never any acknowledgment of the past, of the pain we shared, and certainly no attempt to fix any of it. It was all very surface-y, like two weeks of swappin’ howdies, except in person. Emotionally speaking, he might as well have been back on the other side of the country.
When my dad finally retired at seventy, Shekinah and I were living in LA and Sarah was up in Ventura, so we reached out to him. “C’mon, Pop,” we said. “Come on out and retire in LA.” So he did. He moved out and got a place in North Hollywood right near me and Shekinah. He even started going back to the same church where he met my mom. Having him around full-time, I made an effort to connect with him on some kind of deeper level, but quickly I found that it wasn’t going to happen. I tried getting him to open up about his childhood and relationship with his parents. That didn’t work. “It was fine,” he’d say. “We got on fine.” Which I know from talking to his siblings was simply not true, as they painted a much different picture.
I feel like my dad, in many ways, is still a teenage boy. His parents never taught him to have the confidence or maturity we all need to handle big emotional challenges in life, so the trials of marriage and fatherhood, followed by the trials of co-parenting in a divorce, were simply too much for him. I know my father loves me. But it’s not his love that’s in question. It’s his ability to recognize how much collateral damage was done because of the decisions that he and my mom made, particularly when it came to us kids. That has never been resolved. My dad’s inability to handle that without completely shutting down, that’s where the breakdown comes. Whenever the subject comes up, whatever script starts running through his mind, he closes down so fast.
And I understand why. I do. Deep down, he’s probably terrified. I don’t think his psyche can handle it. My dad has felt so much shame in his life. All of the traumas that he endured rendered him incapable of truly standing up and fighting for his own children. But he’s afraid to go back and reckon with that because he’s afraid it will only bring on more shame. Because that’s how we wrongly deal with so many things in our society. When people admit wrongdoing, when they admit they have fallen short, they’re rarely forgiven. Too often they’re shamed and humiliated. I didn’t want to shame and humiliate my dad. Just the opposite. I wanted the healing that lay on the other side of acknowledgment.
As I’ve gotten to know my dad, it’s become very evident to me that his relationships with his parents stunted his growth in significant ways. I can look at his decision to leave and, in spite of my pain, I do understand it. I think it was his survival instinct. I think he felt like he was going to be destroyed by my mother. He didn’t have the emotional tools or weapons to fight back against her, so he retreated. I understand that, and I can even forgive that, but I’ve had a hard time relating to him without an acknowledgment of the pain that his choice caused.
I don’t like to speak in ultimatums if I can help it, but after my dad and I failed to have any kind of breakthrough in Austin, as I was leaving for Connecticut, I came close to giving him one. “I’m gonna go do this therapy,” I said, “but if we’re going to fix our relationship, if we’re going to even have a relationship, then we have got to go to therapy together.”
He deflected as usual. “Ah, son. I’m seventy-two years old. I’m fine, I’m fine. I don’t need all that.”
But I needed it, which was something he still wasn’t acknowledging. Once I arrived in Connecticut, my relationship with my dad was one of the subjects I was wrestling with the most. What I found, somewhat to my own surprise, was that despite all of my mom’s abusive behavior it was easier for me to forgive and find closure with her than with my dad. Part of that was simply that he’s still alive and she’s passed away; since there’s no longer any way for her to accept responsibility, there’s no point in getting angry about it. It simply is what it is.
With my dad, I didn’t know what to do about the fact that he wasn’t stepping up and being the father that I needed or wanted him to be. I was willing to absolve him and tell him I know that it wasn’t his fault, but I still wanted him to acknowledge that it was his responsibility and that it had a huge effect on me and my sisters, which he still wouldn’t do. And I didn’t know how to have a relationship with him if he wasn’t willing to do that.
I remember sitting in my psychiatrist’s office one day telling him precisely that. “I don’t know if I can ever have a relationship with my dad,” I said. “Not until he’s willing to go to therapy and reckon with all of this.”
“Okay,” the psychiatrist said. “But what if he never does?”
“Well, then . . . I don’t know,” I said.
“So let me understand. You’re saying you’re going to give your dad this ultimatum that he can’t be in your life unless he goes to therapy with you, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the whole point. If he wants to have a relationship with me, then he has to go and do this. That’s what I need.”
“Then your own happiness is still being held hostage by your father, by his being willing or unwilling to go and do this work that you think he needs to go do. If you’re waiting for your father to go and do this, then your happiness is going to hinge on something that may or may not ever happen, and so you’re potentially never going to be happy—and you might end up losing your father in the bargain.”
I think we need to have a big rethink on what’s really important in life. In this world. For all of our futures. And in the meantime, give yourself and others a break.
Up to that moment, I was so upset that losing my father was a consequence I was willing to accept; I was not above cutting people out of my life who I felt were not healthy for me, at least temporarily. But my therapist forced me to wrap my head around the other side of that: what it means to be unable to forgive someone.
Jesus’s concept of forgiveness was radical in its time, and I don’t think we fully grapple with that fact even to this day. We’ve glossed over it in such weird ways. We treat forgiveness like it’s a traffic fine. The person says, “I’m sorry,” and you say, “I forgive you,” and that’s that. But forgiveness is much deeper and more three-dimensional. Forgiveness is genuinely being done with something. Forgiveness is finding resolution and closure. Ultimately, forgiveness is radical acceptance. It is radical love. It’s understanding whatever someone did to you was because of their brokenness, not because of you and not because they are a “bad person.” They had bad programming, and that led them to cheat on you, hit you, yell at you, whatever. “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.” It’s not a random platitude plucked from the Bible. It’s a profound insight into the ways in which generational trauma shapes who we are and how we treat other people, even in ways we do not understand. If Jesus could say that about the Romans who crucified him, who are we to deny that forgiveness to the trespasses others commit against us?
To this day my relationship with my dad isn’t what I want it to be. He still maintains in his own heart that he didn’t do anything wrong, that God is good and God had a plan, and look how it all turned out with my sisters married with nice families and my being this successful actor and it’s all okay. Even if I wanted to get a better father out of him now, I don’t think I could. Our relationship has always been pretty surface-level, and it remains that way. It’s sad and it sucks and it hurts, but that’s life. I know I can’t change my dad and I can’t fault him either, because I know what he’s gone through in his life. I don’t feel animosity toward him either. And I haven’t made any ultimatums of “You either go and do this therapy or you’re not in my life anymore.” I see that scared little boy in him, afraid to confront the past, so I’ve learned not to press it.
I came away from Connecticut with a renewed vision for my relationship with my father. I would radically love him for exactly who he is. If our relationship never got deeper, or stronger, that would be okay—and it is okay. Even if my relationship with my dad isn’t what I wished it would be, I’ve grown to accept that it is the best relationship that it can be. My dad understands that I love him, and I understand that he loves me.