After years of trying to be the good daughter, I’m finally feeling really angry about my father’s affair when I was just a toddler. The woman became my stepmother and I’ve always tried to be amenable and just move on.
Now I’ve realised I have suppressed this hatred for a woman who set out to break up my parents’ marriage. How do I have a relationship with my dad if I don’t want anything to do with his current wife?
Eleanor says: There’s this line that the half-life of love is forever. I think it can be true for certain kinds of anger, too: with enough time we can make peace with whatever happened to make us so angry, but the feeling itself smoulders to a glow that just keeps pulsing on and on.
Some people think this kind of lingering anger only hurts, and our goal should be to get rid of it. I disagree: I think the emotion of anger can be a way of insisting to ourselves that what happened matters – after everything else has moved on, after new trees have grown tall in the place where we were hurt, the fact of our continued anger can be a memorial to the moral truth of what happened.
But if we’re going to choose to live with anger instead of trying to extinguish it fully, we need to be sure we can control it. There is a world of difference between consistently and evenly judging that someone does not yet deserve our forgiveness and being randomly pulled backwards by the hair into painful memories from years ago.
You asked about how to maintain a relationship with your dad through this feeling. If you weren’t able to express it at the time, it may help to express your feelings now. Not necessarily to your stepmother (our hopes for catharsis don’t usually lie with the person we’re angry with), but to anyone who can hold a mirror back up to what you feel – a sibling, a partner, a therapist.
Affairs that cross-fade into new relationships can be difficult to find the vocabulary for: I can remember a school friend of mine saying: “It’s not like I want him to stay if he doesn’t love her, and it’s not like I would have been fine if he’d left instead of cheating.”
Eventually she found a thought you might like to hear echoed from someone in your life: “I’m just angry he thought his happiness was worth everyone else’s.”
If expressing your feelings about your stepmother doesn’t quite lance the boil, I think it’s worth asking if you’re angry with your father, too. Sometimes anger sticks around because there’s something else it hasn’t said, like a poltergeist keeping you up at night until you can figure out its unfinished business. Perhaps some of this anger is for him.
Although you describe this woman “setting out” to hurt your parents’ marriage, a divorce is a tricky thing to cause, unaided. It can be easy to blame just one half of a dynamic for the hurt caused by its whole.
Instead of freighting all your anger on her and maintaining contact with only him, it might be helpful, long-term, to grapple with the pain that they represent to you together. Try not to worry that this will mean causing a stir – if they’ve made it this far in the relationship without recrimination, there’s likely a small part of them that’s waiting for that shoe to drop.
Anger that keeps burning can do an important job for us in insisting that we matter – the trick is to make sure it casts light and not just heat.
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