I’ve always found driving to be a good way to relax and unwind. There’s something meditative about an open road in that it requires a certain amount of focus to keep us safe but at the same time, allows us to daydream. I also like listening to loud music, and what better time to do so than while cruising along with no one around to disturb. However, on one particular car journey, my mind was far from relaxed. I had no idea what was waiting for me at my destination, but I did know who was waiting – my father.
A few months earlier, with the birth of our second daughter imminent, I’d said to Tania, ‘I feel like a part of my soul is missing. I don’t know the person that half of me has come from. I just want to have the experience of sitting in the presence of my father.’
I’d tried to find my father once before, when I was in my early twenties, but when my search hit a dead end, I’d given up. Part of me had also known that the timing wasn’t right and that I wasn’t ready. But now, having done a significant amount of inner work and built a stable and loving family of my own, I felt I was both strong and well supported enough to navigate whatever I’d find. And, given that my father wouldn’t be a young man, I didn’t have forever to wait if I wanted answers to the origins of so much of my trauma.
Within a surprisingly short period of time, I’d found the address where my father was living. On the evening of my discovery, it had taken every inch of my self-restraint not to jump straight in my car and drive the couple of hours to his house.
As you can imagine, I had very mixed emotions. The little boy inside me still longed to be held by my father; the teenager in me wanted to murder him; and the young adult mostly wanted to understand why. But as I was then, more than anything, I just wanted to have the experience of sitting in his presence. Anything else would be a bonus.
Despite the intensity of my feelings, I’d done enough work in processing my hatred and rage that I no longer needed to throw it at him, and it was immensely important to me to act with grace and care, regardless of what he’d done in the past.
After speaking with a few people close to me, I decided the best next step was to ask two old friends of my parents to go to my father’s home on my behalf. Neither had been in touch with him in more than 30 years, but it seemed like a softer initial approach for both of us. They would ask if he was happy to meet me, although I suspected that if he said no, I’d have gone there myself anyway. One thing I didn’t feel he had the right to do was reject the little boy inside me again.
My father’s old friends had traveled to where he lived, and after many hours of waiting had met him late at night, when he returned from praying at the local church. He and I had subsequently spoken on the phone for a few minutes, and the first thing he’d asked me was, ‘Are you religious, son?’ I’d replied that I didn’t follow a formal religion, but my spiritual beliefs were very important to me. I was later to discover that he was training as a priest with the hope of working with the dying.
That day as I drove to my father’s home, I reflected on our short conversation. I’d no idea how I was going to feel when I met my father, but I’d made a pact with myself – whatever happened, I was going to be true to myself. I wasn’t going to shy away from difficult conversations, and if we were to have a relationship of some sort, I wanted it to be built on truth and honesty, however uncomfortable that might be.
Before I knew it, I was parked outside my father’s tiny bungalow on a council estate in the city of Canterbury, near the port of Dover in England. As I made the short walk to his front door, he came out of the house to meet me, and we hugged on the doorstep. At first, I was somewhat frozen, and the enormity of the moment didn’t fully hit me. But moments later, we were sitting inside and talking.
Of course, my father had his version of events, which mostly painted him as the victim. But, given what I knew from my mum and the facts of his actions and their divorce on the grounds of his mental cruelty, I wasn’t fully buying it. Clearly, he started to recognize this, and he began to change tack. Eventually, he looked at me with an expression of deep and intense regret in his eyes, and he said something that I hadn’t realized I’d waited my entire life to hear: ‘Son, it’s not your fault. I’m sorry. I fucked up.’
As I heard the words, I started crying. Beyond everything else, soul to soul, I knew that in that moment he was sorry, and that he was owning the impact his actions had had on me. It didn’t change the past, but it did soften its blows a little. After many hours of talking and spending time together, I made my way back to my own family and the loving home that Tania and I had built together.
Over the coming months, my father and I met up regularly and worked to build a relationship together. In some ways we were in a bubble of bliss and it was deeply nourishing. What was particularly moving for me was how much of myself I saw in aspects of my father. Although I recognized my kindness and loyalty as being from my mother, I clearly had my father’s love of stories and interest in life’s bigger questions.
However, after a while, as with all honeymoons, reality started to kick in. As much as I wanted to see the best in my father, I began to realize there was a lot more to him than met the eye. One evening, while we were having dinner in one of my favorite steak restaurants in London, I asked him in passing how his priesthood training was going. He told me he’d quit, and when I asked why, he said that they’d been too nosey, asking for background checks, and he didn’t like it.
It was obvious to me that he hadn’t wanted the Church to know that he’d been to prison for fraud, or that he’d gone bankrupt twice. But, to me, his refusal to disclose this was a clear sign that he was hiding from his past and quitting on something that he’d said he was passionate about. The problem was, as I said earlier, I’d made a commitment to myself that after all these years I was going to live in truth with my father. And so, I told him what I thought.
I remember my words as if I’ve just said them: ‘The thing is, Dad, this sounds like what you did to me and my sister all those years ago. You’re walking away from what you say you love because it’s getting difficult. Surely, if you have truly changed and learned from the past, you don’t want to repeat the mistakes?’
Dad looked a bit taken aback by this, but the focus of the conversation soon moved on, and I thought that was it. However, as we said goodbye at Oxford Circus Underground station, heading in opposite directions, his parting words were, ‘Thanks, son, for the steak, which was almost as raw as the conversation.’
When I say parting words, I mean it in the literal sense, because that was the last real conversation I ever had with my father. What had been a regular flurry of emails and phone calls stopped overnight. My father did once more what he’d done over three decades previously – he cut me off.
Initially, I made excuses for the lack of contact from my father, and it took me a few months to see the reality of what was happening. But then it landed, like an atomic bomb, and I experienced a rage and hurt that no words can describe. When I say I wanted to kill him, I don’t mean metaphorically – I literally wanted to kill him. For the first time in my life, I understood the force that can drive us to murder.
But, having done years of my own inner work, and as a therapist specializing in working with trauma, I knew it was now time to really put my tools to the test. Partly out of true defiance that I wasn’t going to give my father the power to traumatize me again, I got to work.
Firstly, I asked for help. I worked with my therapist at the time, and I talked openly and regularly with Tania, along with several of my closest friends. But I was also very careful and selective about who I talked to; in particular, I didn’t speak to those who I thought were likely to lay their own opinions on me. I needed HELP, not judgement or solutions.
In Part I of the book, we talked about the ECHOs of trauma, and how these are caused by our three core emotional needs of boundaries, safety, and love not being in place. And I worked hard to meet these needs. Firstly, I put some boundaries in place with family members whose opinions were unhelpful. Next, I committed to building safety in my nervous system using my meditation practice. Being in a loving and supportive relationship was also immensely helpful; indeed, I’d instinctively waited for this to be in place before I’d acted anyway.
It was then time to work through the RESET model. Firstly, I recognized what was happening. I could feel my nervous system ramping up, and my emotions shutting down and I realized this wasn’t helpful. Next, I examined what was going on, and I could see I was going into my default achiever and helper patterns of working harder and earning validation through giving to others, in a bid to change how I felt.
I also knew there was a lot that I needed to STOP. My meditation practice was helping me to feel grounded overall, but I was also running a lot of mental patterns in the category of, ‘Why has this happened to me?’ and ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ and so I also worked hard to catch these patterns and redirect my focus and energy.
Next, it was time to work with my emotions. I was already fairly aware of my emotional defenses of disconnection, avoidance and distraction, and rationalizing my feelings. This allowed me to get closer to what I was really feeling and to inquire into my deeper truth.
I was fortunate enough to still be part of an ongoing retreat group that met twice a year (the one I talked about in Chapter 1), and I was still working with my teacher Prakash regularly. I took part in a retreat a few months later, and there’s no need to guess what I worked on. I spent the week going right to the heart of my hurt, sadness, and longing, allowing myself to fully feel my rage and hatred. It certainly helped to feel validated by dear friends in the group who had known my story over many years and could truly witness me in my experience.
As part of the work, I also made sure to transform my inner critic and its attempts to hold a running commentary on my experience. It didn’t stop my inner critic completely, but it was left with little power to affect the way I felt day-to-day. It was like a broken record playing quietly in the background, which was a nuisance, but little more.
So, what was the impact of all this? Well, it was a tough few months, and doing the work took committed effort, but on the other side of it I felt clear. I felt softer and somewhat heavy-hearted toward my father, but my hatred and rage were gone. I also felt that the little boy had grown up, and he was no longer looking to the outside to have his needs met, which was a gift in itself.
Ultimately, I felt a sense of gratitude. My primary wish had been to sit in the presence of my father, and I’d experienced that. In addition, I’d had the blessing of meeting my two much younger half-brothers, one of whom I’ve since become very close to. In some ways I realized that for him, growing up with our father in his life had been at least as damaging as my not doing so.
Put simply, it hurt, but I didn’t feel that I’d been traumatized. One of the most painful things I could imagine had happened – my father had abandoned me for a second time and triggered my deepest wound. And I was able to respond in a way that meant I wasn’t traumatized.
I did see my father twice more in the subsequent years, but I kept a deliberate and firm boundary. Each time, more than anything, it was to reconfirm that there was nothing I needed to say, and that I was at peace with things, which I was.
And then, almost exactly seven years after my first meeting with my father, I received news from one of my half-brothers that he’d died of a heart attack. He’d been alone when it happened, and he hadn’t been found for several days. He’d also died penniless, and my parting gift to him was paying for the flowers at his funeral.
Due to COVID-19 restrictions in the UK at the time, funerals were limited to 30 people, but there were fewer than 20 people at my father’s. I was grateful to have a sense of closure, and I still felt some sadness for the little boy in me; but I also felt complete in my healing. As my half-brothers spoke elegantly and lovingly of their time with our father, I found myself reflecting.
Of course, it would be unfair to compare my father’s choices with my own. I hadn’t lived his life, and I knew it was likely he’d had his own inner difficulties, along with some possibly undiagnosed mental health issues. And yet, I couldn’t help but think about the meanings we make in life, the choices they influence, and how different my father’s and mine had been.
Throughout my life, I’d made so many unconscious meanings from my father’s abandonment. I’d decided that I was unlovable, that I had to take responsibility for others’ feelings, and that people are not to be trusted, to name just a few.
As we saw in Chapter 6, where we talked about the outcomes of our trauma, all these meanings came with a price, and with a set of life choices as a consequence. As I’ve said many times now, it isn’t the events of our trauma that cause us the most suffering, but what happens in our nervous system and life choices in response.
Sitting there at my father’s funeral, with Tania gently squeezing my hand, I thought deeply about what I ultimately wanted my relationship with my father to mean. The answers that came to me were clear and simple: I’d lean into life when it felt difficult; I’d stand for what I believed in; and I’d love my wife and children with a ferocity and open-heartedness that nothing could destroy.
And so, as we come to the close of our journey together, I want to ask you that same final question: What do you choose to make your trauma mean? If you don’t give your trauma a meaning consciously, you’ll certainly do so unconsciously, and the price you’ll pay for that meaning is likely to be significant.
Ultimately, you can choose to believe that your trauma happened to you and that you’re a victim. And on some level, that may well be true. But you can also choose to believe that there have been gifts and treasures you’ve taken from the journey that give it a different meaning.
Choosing a positive meaning for your trauma certainly doesn’t mean that any perpetrators should escape appropriate justice, or that you can’t have firm and powerful boundaries with them going forward. But, as one of my teachers once said to me, ‘Hatred is like swallowing poison and hoping the other person dies.’
Now, to fully embody the meaning you give to your trauma, you of course need to do your healing work. If I’ve tried to impart one thing in this book it’s that you can’t bypass or ignore your emotional truth. If you have anger and hatred, let yourself feel them and digest them.
And, when all is said and done, we’re left with a choice: What does it all mean? I pray that you’ll choose a meaning that empowers you to live more fully, and to bring more of your gifts and potential into the world. With the global challenges we face, the world needs that from all of us now more than ever.