{Parental Concerns}[5th July 1987]

[Redbook4:8-9][19870705:1545k]{Parental Concerns}[5^th July 1987]

19870705.1745

[continued]

I should perhaps also say here that I have recently cut all contact with my parents, completely and finally*. To the end, they would not answer my letters about what had happened,** so that no dialogue, and therefore no change, was possible. In some ways, this was a relief: I did not expect that their side of the dialogue would observe the rules of dialogue and logical argument. But in the end they had no answer.

I do not think that anything less than {their} fraud on their own family could have persuaded me to cut myself off from them: it is not for no reason that Dante places those who betray or defraud their own kindred nearly at the bottom of Hell. But their fraud and deceit forced me to see aspects of their past behaviour to their children which I had previously refused to face up to.

I found that even their refusal to reply cast a great shadow over [CH]*** and my future development. I am not sure to what extent I was fully able to right myself before trying to give them the opportunity to right themselves and the wrong itself;**** but in any case, since I wrote to them ending contact, I have felt free for the first time ever from a force of destructive darkness.

If this sounds extra-ordinary in a married man of 36, I don't suppose I am unique: you have to remember the terrible power we give over ourselves to those whom we love, which is why we have to trust them with our love. Now that I am an orphan, in moral terms at least, I feel no resentment towards them (at present anyway): I am sufficiently detached from them to be able to analyse their destructive natures and behaviour without that grip of the stomach by resentment's invisible hand (just a fainter echo or memory, sometimes); and I do so, I hope, objectively.#

*[not finally in fact. <20160430>]

**{i.e. about the flat.}

***[New home.]

****[See e.g. [[Redbook3:101-102][19870404:1005k]{The Righting of Wrongs}[4th April 1987]]ff.]

#{cf.[[Redbook4:46][19870714:1052]{Past and Future}[14^th July 1987],]p.46.}

.1955

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