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Hello FDR community! I would like to know your thoughts about the ethics and emotional necessity of caring for ones parents in old age and through sickness. I've always felt it was a persons duty to care for their parents. I've also felt that being with our parents through that terrifying experience gives us essential knowledge and perspective about life and death. I know that the ethics around this topic are relative and so I'll share a bit about my current relationship to this common human experience in order to create more opportunity for the responses to this topic to help me understand the root of my interest in this subject. My parents neglected and abused me to the extant that I have endured a great deal of trauma. They are now having health issues from living a life of overconsumption of toxic substances. They both deny their illness. My Father has been telling me that some of his organs are injured for the past 2 years. The first thing was hepatitis C, he contracted before I was born. He has a history of heroine abuse so he may have contracted while living in London in his early 20's. He denies that possibility but does not deny using heroine. Though he was aware of the virus before I was born he took medication to get rid of the virus at the age of 55 because he thought it was making him fatigued. He decided to take a newer experimental drug so that he wouldn't have to pay as much for the prescription. One of the drugs caused his haemoglobin to drop and he went to the doctor reporting pain in his left arm and his chest. He was sent to hospital and after some weeks found that the results of the testing he had done showed that he has clogged arteries. He also discovered that 30% of his liver is not functioning while being tested for eligibility to take the experimental drug. He denies any of this has to do with a lifetime of chronic drinking and smoking. He did quit smoking 10 years ago and drinks less now. .. When he discovered he had clogged arteries he was in denial and attributed the results to his physical reaction to the severe drop in haemoglobin. It was suggested that he go for surgery but refused. I spoke to him yesterday and he has decided that he will in fact go for the surgery for a number of reasons including 'everyday when I go to the gym, after about 8 minutes on the treadmill I start to feel a pain in my left arm' and that the doctor has classified him as high risk. ... He takes pride in the fact that he is still going to the gym. .. He has asked me to go back to my hometown (the bad part of hell) to take care of him. There is no where else I could be but there while he goes through this. I have a relatively strong loyalty to my parents. I tell myself to be grateful that I have the chance to see him again. But this isn't going to be triggering emotions associated with mortality alone. There is also the feeling that I've been neglected and traumatized by this person and now I must go and watch him suffer the consequences of indulging in the things that were more important to him than my well being(smoking, drinking, an unjustified and irrational moral authority, etc). I must watch him suffer while feeling the panic and pain associated with watching a loved one suffer. And there is also the pain of the cause being self inflicted And the pain of the absolute terrorized destruction of my potential to have a peaceful life as a result of his masochism And the fear of the only person in the world I think is closest to loving me unconditionally being gone- The fear of being alone. Then- there is the fear of interacting with him, putting up with the non reality, untruth, disassociation, and sometimes still, though I am almost 30, agression and possibly physical violence. There is the fear that I will become so upset in this situation that I'll break. I've just come into relative emotional and material stability after almost 3 years of chronic depression, possibly longer. I'm living in a city far away and have made arrangements to take prerequisite courses in order to prepare for furthering my education should it happen I don't find a suitable father figure to have a family with. I'll have to leave everything here (which isn't that great but is heaven compared to my hometown) in order to care for my father. This should not make me feel this kind of discomfort. I feel like I should be entirely grateful to be able to take care of him. There is a part of me that is spared injury because I feel more secure taking care of my dad than leaving him without anyone around who has an intrinsic value in his well being. It would drive me insane if I couldn't be there for some reason. But I'm more terrified of the kind of insanity that being in an abusive environment while enduring great loss could cause me to retreat into. Since our discussion yesterday I've been in a completely disassociated state and I've been experiencing psychosomatic physical pain in a number of ways that are incredibly distracting. I suppose my question is, If family is the most important thing and that is why I must care for my father(aside from love) And his lack of care for me has created a threat to my ability to further our family by having the emotional, psychological, and material stability required to have my own children And caring for him may further that threat by breaking down the self worth I've been diligently building based on truth and reason Then is it not the best thing for our family for me to protect myself from further injury? I'm concerned that my feeling of obligation comes from a place of cowardice rather than Reason. Some advice I've received is 'don't let the past get in the way' 'you'll regret it if you don't go' 'you owe it to him' And I'm not sure why I'm having such a hard time accepting those claims. I understand them but the reality is that the result of my going to my hometown and being close to my family is always conflict. Conflicts where when I ask myself if I have or ever would treat my parents the way they treat me I am shocked at the disparity between the level of respect we have for each other. I understand that therapy will help, I've been moving in that direction but at this point I'll be going to to take care of my father without a doubt in my mind so I'll likely wait until I arrive to find one. I'm hoping that seeing a therapist will allow me to have the time I desire with my dad and help me to avoid any conflict. I find it almost impossible to believe that taking care of a loved one could be the wrong thing to do. Looking forward to your thoughts and I hope this thread is of some use to all of you!

Alice Miller explains in For Your Own Good how children who were mistreated and humiliated by their 'caretakers' and who couldn't rebel against those they depended on, as a survival strategy ended up pushing out of their awareness both this abuse and their need for self-affirmation, and now as adults if they don't become aware of all this and heal themselves then the usual way in which their long suppressed needs get satisfied is when they in turn abuse others with less power, often their own children. Here's the PDF http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/alicemiller.pdfIn the Articles on alice-miller.com (if I remember correctly), she says this explains why the Israeli state, many of whose members suffered grave abuse from Nazis, has been heaping similar abuse on the captive and helpless Palestinians.It seems to me that this mechanism can account for much of the violence going on today, whether in families or schools or cities and countries and in wars.If this is accurate enough, then my question is how do we fix this? As far as I can tell, and please let me know if you see errors or omissions:1) by understanding how we were each of us affected by the abuse we received (I think Alice Miller is correct when she says that the vast majority of people are affected by this), including getting clear who harmed us in and what ways. To do this she says we need someone to help us see exactly where we were in fact mistreated, because the strong habit we have developed of not bringing our attention to this makes it difficult for us to see it by ourselves (this person’s role is to support us, never to lead us)2) then by staying with this realization until we integrate this missing side of our history and and as a result reclaim our lost ability to feel the full range of emotions we would have had if we had been allowed to develop harmoniously. This seems to be a gradual process where the first 80% takes months if not years (my supposition). 3) and then looking at how we may have in turn hurt others when we had the power to do so, and checking whether the reason we harmed them is that we had been harmed ourselves and we were largely unconsciously playing out the effects of that harm, and then extending these ideas to those who harmed us and seeing how they perhaps had also been victims, and whether it’s possible that most of the abuse in the world can be explained this way.