What was Your Dad Like?

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They say that dads play a huge role in a child's upbringing just as mothers do. Not sure if this is completely true or not but I've wondered if it does effect one in their perceptions of the opposite sex, self-esteem, and relationships whether male or female.

I grew up with a severely alcoholic dad and a deeply depressed mother. I looked up to my dad more than I did my mother even though she was gifted in many aspects just as he. I was envious as well as awed by my father's talents. However, I often found myself asking why did he drop out of college? Why did he decide not to major in something that he was "already" good at? And why was he in jobs that didn't pay over minimum? The times I've asked him this, his answere is usually "I don't know."

In contrast to most of his friends who had successful careers, I couldn't understand how he could be much smarter than most of them when it came to a problem or question. They were usually the ones needing his help. He would always go over their place to fix a computer or answere anything regarding the stock market, investing, politics, and even some history relating to that of famous people, religions, or old contraptions! I mean it was like he could multi-task whenever it came to learning something new or different.

I think what hurt me the most was his sudden tempers and mood swings. Many times he'd get angry over the pettiest things. Yet there would be times when he was in such a good mood that he'd laugh the problem off by saying "That's OK." I never knew what to expect from him, none of us did. One moment he was Mister Nice Guy the next he was like a raving lunatic or monster. Looking back, most of this was probably due to his drinking problems.

Our family was mostly comprised of girls. He only had one son by another woman before us. Whenever we cried or got upset for some reason, he'd either comfort us or lecture us on how crying was a weak excuse for girls to get attention or and then came the, "No wonder women haven't gotten very far in life, they're just too damn emotional!" So I kind of learned not to wear emotions on my sleeves or cry in public.

Since then, I always felt akward around people. I never felt femenine enough for a guy to actually like me. In some ways, I think I took more after my dad than my mom. I was very alcoholic and still am to a certain extent which means I'm in recovery and have to watch out when it comes to anything containing alcohol. I also used to easily get angry and throw childish fits like he did. Anger Management has helped a lot with this problem.

Another aspect that I have trouble in is relationships. Everytime I had a crush on a guy, I felt ashamed because I hated myself for not being pretty or "normal' and still do have trouble with this. I have always felt confused as to what my role is in a relationship. In just a couple of relationships, I felt like I had to try hard and pretend to be something I was not. Eventually I couldn't pretend anymore and the relationship flew out the door. I've always been afraid of letting anyone get to really know the true me. I'm also puzzled as to why I could never really relate to most women. I don't really see myself as a tom boy there's just something I can't quite grasp in terms of girls and their interests. I was never fond of malls, dollying up, flirting with guys, and the whole act some girls would put on that isn't easy to put into words. Again, most of it is probably due to my AS. Still I'm confused about what part I play even though it's the very thing I've learned to rebel against in terms of relationships and romantic aspects.

Anyway, my dad no longer drinks and has been 7 years sober. He was kind enough to let me live with him but he didn't put up with my drinking so I think it's this that's also kept me from drinking. I still think in the back of my mind he'll throw a fit over something I did even though I'm an adult now. I don't know why but I still get fearful of making a mistake or disaster.

So how do you think your dad effected you growing up? Do you think he had much of an influence on you in terms of self esteem and relationships?

BTW, you don't have to read this long boring story of mine if you're able to skim down here to the question above!! !

Last edited by MissConstrue on 10 Oct 2008, 7:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My dad had a huge effect on me growing up. He was the man who left me permantly disabled, who beat me constantly for things I never did, and was also a small animal murderer. All the while, he kept up the perfect public face, so no one quite knew why I said such 'terrible' things about him.

He left me kinda broken, its the best way to put it. I'm not very trusting, nor am I willing to be myself. As much as I crave being able to be alone, I cannot stand someone having a low opinion of me.

It sucks. I'm working on getting past the pile of crap he left me with daily, but it's not easy. I don't even fully understand what all he did, I've blocked most of my childhood memories. Maybe when I remember, I won't want to. But while I don't remember, I want to know.

I sort of come from a similar backround, my dad was an alcoholic, and my mom had bouts of
depression. I have come to believe that he also had aspergers, he was painfully shy, but was
highly intelligent, his father would always belittle him, in front of others.In all of his childhood
pictures, he had the typical aspie look that me and one of my nephews have. My dad was
relatively successful, he was a jazz musician and played in several bands in the 1940's, and
was self taught on the trumpet and numerous other brass instruments, he also taught trumpet.
When my dad took over the family business in 1968, he started to drink, and have a lot of
mood swings, he was never violent with us, his bark was worse then his bite. I think alot of
how me and my 2 sisters are today are a results of our upbringing, both my sisters seem to
have my dad's bad temper and stubbornness, and I got the majority of his aspie traits, and
low self esteem, which is weird, because he was always so proud of me and my sisters.
My mom is a whole other story, I could write a book about the trials of her life, I don't think
I could of had any better parents.

Thank you for posting - I'm sure glad you are here ... and glad that I am
not alone! My experiences mirror yours almost exactly! I'm going to post more
a bit later but need to compose my thoughts...

Your dad sounds a lot like mine! When I was really young, he used to kill rabbits & skin them in front of me. Likewise with other animals...frog & things. He grew up on a farm during the depression. Still, it was traumatic for me to see him treat creatures that way. I still have vivid images burned into my memories of him killing animals. He has always had a fierce temper as well as some aspie traits. He's not an alcoholic, but does have an addiction to gambling. He's 81 now, still in relatively good health.

I am still dealing with all that I have been through too. He was pretty abusive....for instance, threatened to kill me in front of the neighbors when they accused me of stealing their candy (I hadn't, but no one believed me). He also preferred the dog over me & made it perfectly clear. So yeah, like you, I have a lot of issues with trusting people. I doubt I will really ever get past all the stuff I went through. There's so much more that happened during my years of living under his roof. His style of discipline was very heavy handed. My mother was no different. So yes, I can understand where you are coming from! I also feel like something broken, that will never be quite right! But it's difficult to find a shrink who can understand how much pain I endured.

[X] Abusive, physically.
[X] Abusive, verbally.
[X] Alcoholic.
[X] Bipolar.
[X] Covetous.
[X] Ignorant.
[X] Jealous.
[X] Paranoid.
[X] Prideful.
[X] Racist.
[X] Sexist.
[X] Wrathful.
[X] Xenophobic.

That about covers it. For details, read the previous posts in this thread. Our fathers seem to have been cut from the same cloth. My father has been dead for over four years. I miss my daddy, but I do not miss the man he became.

not a strong influence. a distant figure. i think he had AS. mum completely dominated him and the whole family, so he sort of became more ghostly or invisible in response. i think mum was schizoid/narcissistic or something like that.

pretty bad, but dad didn't do the damage really.

it was more like psychological/emotional abuse in my family, i used to think it would be easier or more understandable if you had bruises to show.

Second this fully.

...

Last edited by claire-333 on 12 Oct 2008, 3:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Wow, this is hard to type.

Well, we'll start with the absentee thing. He worked long hours running his own business. He spent 60 hours a week or more at his TV repair shop. He could talk passionately about his interests, which were music, electronics, and coin collecting. In hindsight, my father was definitely AS as well.

He wasn't a fall down drunk, but he drank 3 beers every night, and he had no patience for dealing with children when he came home. I was the last of his 5 children, so I think by time I came around, he didn't want to deal with me. In Dad's presence, talking while he was watching tv was not allowed.

Because he wasn't around, my Mom was a much more major influence on my life. I've got her sense of humor, I've got her sensibilities, and she's also very gender non-conformist.

He only hit me once, when I wandered away from home on my own at 3 am on a random sunday when I was 4. Once I was old enough to write, he believed in writing punishments that would leave my arm numb from writing for days at a time.

He was intimidating, and I'm still afraid of him, 6 years after he died.

My sister has a very different impression of him. She was a C & D student, so he rode her hard, made her take summer school when she got a C cause it wasn't good enough. I was a straight A student, and had no social life because I was burying my gender issues in extracurriculars and AP classes. It was almost as if I didn't exist.

There are three significantly traumatizing incidents that are forever etched in my mind.

When I was 12, I was depressed, and being bullied, and was just starting to have an inkling that something was wrong with my Gender. I was having a talk with my mom, I had been moping around, and she sat me down to find out what was up. In my usual fashion, I came right out and said it. "Mom, I think I need to be a girl." She called downstairs to bring my father up from his hidey hole in the basement, and she said it was just a phase, and asked my dad to confirm that all boys went through something like that. He vehemently, disgustedly said, "No, Absolutely Not!" and stormed out of the room. So I choked back my gender issues and did my best to find a coping mechanism and try my damndest to be a boy.

It exploded a few months later after some stupid incident at school, I threw a chair across the cafeteria, left school, walked home and swallowed a bottle of Aspirin at the tender age of 13. My Dad's response when my Sister called him? He came threw me in the back of his truck, and locked me in the basement of his shop for 6 hours. A dirty, dingy, dark hole in the ground..... alone and suicidal for 6 hours because he couldn't talk to me. So, my coping mechanism was to bury myself in school. I went to an all boys school by choice, first because I was tormented in public school, second because if I was going to an all boys school, and playing sports, then there was no question about my gender. I was trying to do all the things that boys do.

I graduated high school, went to college out of state, discovered the internet (This was 94) and finally accepted that my gender wasn't normal. I still had a big huge block in place about being transgendered, but I tried to be a gay man. When I came home for Summer break..... My Mom asked me flat out if I was gay.... so I admitted what I thought was the truth at that time. The next morning, my Dad came the closest he's ever come to physical violence. He shoved me in a corner and raised his fist to slap me as I was cowering underneath him and screamed that he wouldn't have a pervert living under his roof.

So, I shacked up with a man 16 years older then me so I had a place to live and dropped out of college. The relationship never really recovered from that day. We got to the point we could be in the same room, but the tension was always there.

The day my dad died, I wasn't speaking to him, so when I got a call from the house number on my cell, I didn't answer and continues soaking in my bath and reading my book, figuring I'd listen to the voicemail later. I fell asleep in the bathtub, the second phone call woke me up. By the time I got to the hospital he was unable to speak, and could barely keep his eyes open. My mom told me a couple of days later, the one thing he kept repeating over and over again was "Tell my son Daniel I love him." This still messes with me, 6 years later.... I oscillate between being pissed that he thought I didn't know..... and understanding because he knew he f****d up raising me.

The icing on this entire cake.... My Mom told me a week after Dad died that after his first wife, when he was living in Idaho, he spent a year in a gay relationship. Realizing exactly how much of a hypocrite he had been to me hardened my hatred of him in ways I can't explain and don't even understand myself.

I sometimes have to wonder if my gender dysphoria doesn't come directly from the seething anger I still have at my father. But I know that's not the case, because I knew my gender was wrong before any of these incidents. I just buried the issues for 20 years because of what he did to me.

20 years of my life spent imitating a man because my father intimidated me and couldn't accept me for who I was, when he had gone through the same questions himself. 20 years of passive aggressive self destruction because I had no desire to live as a man, getting by on the exact minimum required, doing what was expected of me and not having a goal.


The proverbial floodgate moment came when I decided to quit smoking in january of 2007. My friend had just quit, and recommended Chantix. So, I tried it..... 2 weeks in I spiralled into a suicidal depression and didn't leave my room for a week straight. My work slipped, and I finally told my boss where I was, and he got me in to see a counselor. He got me talking, and that got me to admit the basic underlying problem that was slowly killing me.

In a way, I'm glad I took the Chantix, even though it came to a close call with killing myself, I finally, for once in my life, am doing something because it's what I want to do. I have a goal that is my own, and it's made me truly happy for the first time since I was an innocent little kid.

My father stole 20 years of my life, and left me with a never ending hatred of hypocrites because of his own insecurities and his inability to deal with them.

I also hate that I'm entirely too much like him, it drives me nuts.

I'm a very slow typer, so I'll keep this short.


My parents had been seperated for a couple years, and one day my dad left for a pack of cigarettes when I was 7 and never came back, no explanation no nothing. I didn't know if he died or what to think.

At that same time, my mom met another guy and he moved in. He was very physically and mentally abusive, especially when mom was at work. When me and my sister told mom about the abuse, he denied it, or explained otherwise. Every day I feared for my life, and there was no one to help, so I endured the abuse for years. All this drove me to trust no one.

Around age 14, my real dad contacted me, by phone. He had been living in Florida all this time, and he blamed my mom for him leaving. By that time I had developed some severe abandonment issues, along with the trust issues. Add undiagnosed AS to the mix, abnd you have one f**ked up kid.

Finally I turned 18, and the abusive step-father backed off some, but the damage was already done. I was a non-trusting, anti-social, undiagnosed Aspie, with abandonment issues and panic disorder. Also, I was already self-medicating. I was a full blown alcoholic and experimenting with hard drugs. My life was crap for the next 10 years.


So, I would say yes, my father had a significant impact on my life. I have since forgiven him and my step-father, but not completely. Some things you just can't forgive and forget. I am finally starting to recover from my past, and probably will be for the rest of my life. They say "what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger", and I'm a firm believer. I'm just glad it is all over and behind me now.

This is hard flutter, I feel shame for speaking against my dad. But here goes....

my dad was an idiot, other times he was a scary and drunken bully. He always had an overblown sense self entitlement.

He was a dirty and disgusting old man.

He abused and put down my mother. Other times he was sexually inappropriate. I used to fear him, I hated listening to him picking on my mother after she had spent the whole day looking after 7 children and running the shop..... while he had spent the day in the pub.

Others times he would seem weak and defenseless and sad.

He made christmas time miserable, every christmas eve he would get into the hard stuff and become more nasty than usual. This would happen every year - without fail.

He was a pig.

I hated that he told us that he was going to leave us ..... but the bastard came back after a couple hours. He didn't have anywhere else to go.

Weird as it is, I still love him, and maintain a level of respect, love, concern and contact.... but sadly I will feel relieved he dies.... bI will also feel vey sad for what never should have been.

The good:
-He is the only other "nerd" in my family, being a science fiction screenwriter - made it much easier to connect with him than to other family members.
-He encouraged my artistic and intellectual pursuits.
-He helped me with a lot of the more involved school projects - like props for plays, scripts for group skit projects, covers for book presentations, that sort of stuff.
-He can be very generous.
-He was the one who stepped in and made the doctors spill the beans about what the surgeries my mom wanted me to go through would actually entail - and subsequently got me out of having to go through them.
-He kept my secret when I started flushing my medications.
-He took on my psychiatrist at several points for trying to falsely diagnose me and overmedicate me.
-He has a similar demented sense of humor to my own, and does really good voice impersonations.
-He taught me how to argue and analyze things well.
-He taught me how to strategize in order to most effectively bring difficult and abusive people down, and was at some points the only person encouraging me to fight back against people who were hurting me.
-He at least tries to be interested in the music, movies, books and shows I was into when no one else would even hear me out about them.

The bad:
-He is an alcoholic.
-He cheated on my mom numerous times, the straw that broke the camel's back being when he took up with her best friend.
-He seems to give precedence to his "new family," even though both his girlfriend and her son are annoying twits, both emotionally and in making decisions (like taking them to Vietnam and France but not helping me or my brother with college expenses).
-When he's angry, one doesn't see it coming, and then there's little hope. It can last 4 hours. If you're silent, it's being insulting. If you talk back, you lack respect. If you cry, you're being weak and manipulative.
-He always does this in a moving car or a room where he's blocking the door.
-He has an excellent memory - that often works in ways I don't want it to, and conveniently fails him when it would be most useful to me.
-He thought my food issues were just me being "spoiled" - even when eating something would make me throw up, at which point he'd be even more angry at me.
-Despite later helping me in some respects, he did side with Mom at various points in issues of forcing medication and surgery on me, and in punishing me for defending myself in school.
-He assumes that everyone thinks through everything they do, and failure to be perfect all the time is either out of deliberate laziness, manipulation, stubbornness, being spoiled and/or being selfish. This led to me constantly monitoring my thoughts, intentions and memories in an attempt at beating him at his own game - which only internalized all this and made it happen in my head all the time.
-He's accused me of purposely getting sick before.
-He apparently had stuff going on behind my back about the stuff with the psychiatrist - he was actually getting drugs for recreational purposes, and a lot of his fights with her over my medication were actually related to his own tumultuous connection to her.

My Dad has aspergers.

It wasn't relaly a healthy relationship because for some reason I resented him. It's only recently I have started trying to mend things.

My dad is a good person.

while my mom is a horrible listener most of the time, I can't really go to my dad to talk about things because he'll ignore me or tell me to "go talk to your mother."

Talking to him doesn't work too well either because he's hard of hearing-- blame the machine shops since he can't hear a damn thing, and won't notice that you're actually saying something if you're not looking at him when talking. For most part, he's an alright guy though.

it is annoying when they are hard of hearing.

my dad is a good guy for the most part.
i tend to watch horse races with him and sports sometimes. He makes bets with 3 friends in a syndicate setup. every week one of them places $20 on any horses they choose and any monies made are divided between them.
I am interested in history and so is he so i think i inherited the history interest for him.
i also inherited the self critical bit from him i think.


l am lucky to have him.