LOUISE FOWLER SPEAKS UP

“If some man were to say to your daughter: ‘Here’s the deal, sweetie. For several months or so, I’m going to pretend to be everything you ever wanted. I’ll shower you with attention, affection and all manner of stuff to make you feel special. Then, once I know you’re depending on me as your significant other, and have made a commitment, I’m going to quit pretending and be who I really am. I’m going to start treating you really badly. I’ll say insensitive things, I’ll lie, I’ll cheat, I’ll be really cruel, possibly humiliate you in public. Hey, I might even beat you. Your job will be to figure out what happened and do everything in your power to restore the relationship to what it was, until you either die, try to kill yourself, or collapse and get sent to the hospital, which will be pretty funny because there’s no chance whatsoever I’ll ever pretend to be that ‘nice guy’ again—and by the way, it WAS a pretense. So what do you say, sweetie? Do we have a deal? Several years of hell in exchange for a few months of fantasy. If your daughter whipped out the pen to ink the deal, you’d smack her and say, ‘What are you, NUTS? This guy’s a lunatic!!!’ Right? But that IS the deal. That is the contract. If that contract wouldn’t be nearly good enough for your daughter, why would it be good enough for you?”  anonymous 

Know one wouldn’t want this on anyone let alone your child, right.  Now, what if you are the child and you are trapped, this is your father, another narcissist. You know this is not right and something is seriously wrong with this kind of behavior. But you are small, you have no frame of reference and no one to talk to. Now you add to the mix a brother who has molested you too and is incapable of compassion. And a mother who has just checked out.

You are beholden to a man who has no concept of truth. Loves to play with your head, that really gave him pleasure. Loved to embarrass me, another good game for him. But despite the fact that I was essentially a passive pleaser of a child I had something in me, I don’t know what to call it. Some called it belligerence. That came from the people who were in “cover-up mode”. I call it “a sense of right and wrong”. I would speak up sometimes albeit I was scared to death. Did it get me anywhere, NO of course not.