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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!

It was difficult for me to find a good way to word my question. I know there is no objective answer, but I want to explore it and get some feedback. From as early as I can remember until age 9, I was frequently and viciously beaten by my dad, and also by my mom. I was mostly beaten by my dad at the request of my mom, who requested these beatings for my questioning her authority or disobeying her orders. My memory of my entire childhood is very fuzzy because I was forced to be on the constant lookout for anything I might say or do which would get me beaten, and also because I was severely neglected. As early as age 6 my parents would leave me home alone for a day, and when my mom (labeled schizophrenic) moved across the country to a group home at age 9, I lost the only of the two parents which paid any attention to me whatsoever. My dad stayed on his computer or in his room and ignored me and my younger siblings and I only have two clear memories of him which don't involve him beating me. One major problem I still face because of all the abuse is that my nervous system still constantly prepares me for being physically attacked. In other words, it's extremely difficult for me to relax and take a deep breath. I have been in a state of non-stop stress ever since I can remember, because almost any interaction with other people has the potential to trigger an emotional flashback to childhood. It has improved since going no contact with my father and my extended family (it has been just over 4 months at this point), but there are still days when the whole day I am stuck in a state of physical and emotional pain, combined with an inability to feel physical or emotional pleasure. When I put my preferences over the other person's - especially if it's someone I don't know well or trust my fear response is activated. I am equally as prone to be triggered by positive events as I am with negative ones. Someone being very nice to me often triggers my fear that I'm being tricked somehow into letting my guard down so I can be hurt even more. This is especially true with women, which makes sense given the fact that my mom was capable of being very nice to me when she wasn't threatening me, brainwashing me, or keeping me from developing my own identity. I struggle with flashbacks at my customer service job. I was never able to develop my own identity with my mom around because she treated me as an object which she could showcase to her friends. Because I was smart, because she was so good at teaching me language skills (homeschool), and because she was a narcissist, I was something for her to show off to her friends in the church and the only way for me to gain her affection was to play the smart, obedient little boy to gain her status with her "friends". I was never able to develop my own identity around my father because he simply didn't interact with us in the home. In high school I started to use my constant anxiety and verbal skills to make people laugh and started to become very popular for this. I had 2 of my 4 closest friends move away and for various other reasons, I was unable to continue to use this strategy, which was a type of personality structure in reaction to my trauma. My personality changed to something akin to a paranoid schizoid, which I couldn't truly shake until I moved out of my dad's house and to a different city. This drastic change in my personality happened sometime between the end of 10th grade and the beginning of 11th grade. I never consciously decided to make either of these changes to my personality - they happened unconsciously, and because of my lack of social support, not a single person reached out to see to try to understand why I went from loud, popular guy to eating lunch in the bathrooms guy who couldn't make eye contact over the course of a few months. I believe the only reason I survived this period of my life without killing myself or becoming a monstrous sadist was because I was able to suppress (in the short-term) my impulses, feelings, and do whatever the people I was hanging out with me wanted to do. I am unable and/or unwilling to go back to either of those personality types. My ability to exist and express myself unconsciously was taken away from me, because I was filled with rage and hate yet smart enough to realize the social consequences of me acting out my rage on others (other than my siblings which I unfortunately was abusive to when I was a child). For me to "be real" in front of other people would have gotten me ostracized by anyone other than someone else who had their humanity stolen from them. It feels like I can't be real now (except in therapy and with my one good friend), because the real me is full of rage, sadness, and fear. I have been in therapy for 5 years now and have made tons of progress, but it's very disheartening how much I struggle each and every day. To me this is the most sinister part of child abuse combined with severe neglect. You are filling the child with rage and hateful, murderous impulses - which gives them one of two options: Either act out the impulses and face the consequences from others and society as a whole (probably prison), or constantly suppress those impulses which is to create one's own prison and erase one's identity. It's extremely difficult to be outgoing without being either a people-pleaser or letting my rage surface. I work at a gas station and I have been leaning towards the people-pleaser side because at least I get some positive reactions from people, but I can no longer keep that up and it makes me miserable to act this way. I know how to be nice, and I can tell which people deserve to be treated nicely, but I hate doing it because when they are nice to me it triggers me that this person is trying to lull me into a false sense of security and will send someone to torture me (the way my mom did). When they are mean to me it triggers me and my brain sends the signals to my body and mind to prepare for torture. Also, when I am nice when I don't want to be, it feels like a continuation of my survival strategy in my childhood environment. It takes so much work for me to get through each and every day having to constantly suppress the emotional roller-coaster that my brain and body go through even during what other people consider mundane social interactions. My brain is constantly going a mile a minute and telling my body to go a mile a minute, but I realize that these are impulses which don't need to be acted on, and if are acted on only serve to tighten the chains of my past around my neck. I feel trapped. Maybe my weariness with people-pleasing means I am finally strong enough to live without the positive opinions of people who I don't really care about, but the fact that lots and lots of people now know who I am and the way I usually act (practically everyone in my relatively small town comes into my gas station) makes being the real me even more difficult. I've stopped hanging out with two people I was spending a lot of time with and have hung out with for several years with because I recognized I was constantly engaged in people-pleasing with them. I think I'm already taking good steps to solve my problems but I could use some advice from anyone else who has struggled with similar issues. Sometimes it feels like I'm fighting an unwinnable battle and it feels like I've been fighting for a lifetime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA3qQ-aqs7o