My reply to a 2014 email

Part 1 My reply to your email: After reading your email to me a few months ago, I felt exactly like I did when you and I first fell out with each other. The man that you describe in your email is not someone I recognize. If I saw myself in your description, I would readily amit it. Unfortunately, the person you describe is not recognizable to me.... in me. I cannot explain how such a thing can happen. It is extraordinary and...to my mind... extroardinarily unfortunate for both you and me. My love for you is overlasting and unegotiable. It is not something I can stop feeling. It just is and has been since the day you were born. In your email, you write about how misguided and hurtful my love has been for you over the years. It reminds me of the question: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" It saddens me profoundly to know that you have spent almost 30 years unable to feel loved by your father. While I accept that this is your reality, it is not mine. You may be accurately describing things when you write about feeling unloved by your father. But you don't get to decide how I really feel. You don't get to decide if my love is false love or real love. Just because you don't feel ittidoes not mean it is not real. All it means is that it has been falling on stone for 25 years instead of fertile ground. I must accept reality as it is. To do otherwise would be to be deluding myself. Likewise, you need to know that the person you descibe in your email is not how I see myself nor is it how I am inside. I was loved deeply by my father (your grandfather). So I know what it feels like to be loved by a Dad. And I have never given up on the hope that you would feel my love the way I felt loved by the late Ted "Austin" Nunan. Yes, there have been times in my life when I have not lived up to my own ideal of a perfect Dad or husband or boyfriend. I can count them on the fingers of one hand. In your email, you describe a violent and abusive man. That is not me. It is not who I am. How is it possible that you see me as one thing and I see myself in a totally different way. Am I the one who is deluded or in denial? Are you? In fact, I don't think either of us is. Let me explain what I think has happened to our family: My grandfather in Paris ON. struggled with alchool addiction and was unkind towards his wife (my grandmother). My father and his brother Peter never drank alchool as a result. As the child of an alcoholic, my Dad (your grandfather) displayed co-dependent traits. These traits were passed onto me, as his son. And I passed on some of those traits on to my eldest daughter, Elizabeth. It is not something a parent does consciously. It is unconscious. You once told me that, because of me, you struggled with developing a healthy attitude/relationship with money. As a child, I saw how my mom was always worried about running out of money. My Dad was generous and believed in abundance whereas my mom was always reluctant to spend money. She had developed a "scarcity" mindset. It all began when her father (Grandfather Bertrand) was treated by a quack doctor who accidentally caused Seraphin Bertrand to become incapacitated through accidental blood poisoning. As a result mom and her two sister had to work outside the home to earn money for the family. That is why your Grandmother Bertrand Nunan became worried about money. She passed that unhealthy relationship with money on to me and I apparently passed it onto you. Just as you inherited your relationship with money from me, I believe you unconsciously inherited your difficult relationship with me. The root cause was not what you think it was. I say this as someone who was an adult when you were born. As someone who observed how things were in your infant years and how our father-daughter relationship suddenly went off the rails and never got back on track. If you want to see things the way, I do - even if it's only a glimmer for an instant - you must "invert, always invert" (https://jamesclear.com/inversion). It is the only way you can step out of yourself and see things as they really are and not how you would like them to be. I speak from experience here since I had to "invert" in order to step into your world momentarily just long enough to see things as you do and not as I do. You see, I did not know how my late Grandfather Nunan's alcoholism was impacting me, my personality and my life decisions until my relationship with my youngest daughter went off the rails. It led me to spend years trying to better understand you and myself. The key question that you must ask yourself is this: "Was my father ever abusive or hurtful towards me BEFORE I turned six and began disliking him?" To answer this question truthfully, you must practice the inversion technique. It allowed me to glimpse at reality not as I see it but as my younger daughter saw it when she penned me an email sent from her personal inbox earlier this year. "Inversion can be particularly useful for challenging your own beliefs. It forces you to treat your decisions like a court of law. In court, the jury has to listen to both sides of the argument before making up their mind. Inversion helps you do something similar. What if the evidence disconfirmed what you believe? What if you tried to destroy the views that you cherish? Inversion prevents you from making up your mind after your first conclusion. It is a way to counteract the gravitational pull of confirmation bias. Inversion is an essential skill for leading a logical and rational life. It allows you to step outside your normal patterns of thought and see situations from a different angle. Whatever problem you are facing, always consider the opposite side of things." To my mind, that is the only hope you have of ever sensing your father's love which has been emanating or radiating from me since December 23, 1996. I cannot help it. A healthy attachment occurs when a parent loves their child unconditionally and when the child love the parent unconditionally. That did not happen in our family's case. I fully accept responsibility for the problem but not for the reasons that you outlined in your 2024 email to me. My root cause problem is the same problem as Ross Rosenberg (author of: The Human Magnet) has. I am not blaming anyone else. I take full responsibility for my problem. While it is not the problem you outline in your letter, the end result is the same. A tragic missed opportunity for you to feel loved and loving towards your father. -end of part 1 -