Sense of Then

I recently learned about the fundamental attribution error, which is the tendency to explain someone’s behavior by deciding what kind of person they are, while overlooking what may have been happening around them.

When I read this, I had a serious aha moment. I am a person whose foundational personality includes a combination of pattern recognition, sensory regulation, precision, deep focus, a lag between what my body knows and what I understand, a need for fairness and accuracy, a discomfort with incoherent systems, and an intensity that is significantly familiar to me, but is often mistaken for brashness or being labeled as “too much”. I also anthropomorphize objects — stuffed animals, cars, the house I grew up in, my pottery, and what it wants to do versus what I think it should be.

I bring up these personality traits because after my dad died and I didn’t understand what happened, I created a story in my head that he was on a business trip. I wholeheartedly believed this story. I was 11; he helped me orient myself in the world, ensured I knew I was loved, and kept me safe. Why would a god take him when he was so important at home? I didn’t have a lot of people around me to help me understand. The adults would grieve behind closed doors and then reappear and resume normal activities as if nothing happened. I remember my elementary school counselor as having a bad memory because he kept asking me the same questions every time. I suspect he was trying to see what I understood and was trying to help me with my grief, but I remember saying often those next three years, “wait until my dad comes back, he’ll fix this.” I knew he had died, but I didn’t know what “died” meant — or that it was forever.

By the time my mother started dating her now-husband, I was not only convinced my dad would come back — I was keeping a list of things to talk to him about when he did — but I was confused why my mother referred to this new person as her “friend”. Her “friend” had a key to our house, would appear randomly, and acted like he belonged there. He told us how to behave in our own house and enforced rules he brought with him but were not explained. I fought back; I would say, “You can’t do that in my dad’s house,” or “He can’t stay the night; this is my dad’s house.” My mother would be so frustrated with me; she’d yell at me that he’s dead, he isn’t coming back, and I would say that I knew he was dead — because that’s what everyone said — but wait until he comes back; he’ll fix this.

From the adult perspective, I can see how parenting me would be confusing — it’s confusing to me to feel the old feelings, the familiarity of my words and what was happening in my head, and see them on the screen from the perspective of a mother with four adult kids. I know hindsight is 20:20, but I struggle with the severity of the alarms I was sounding and the sheer lack of response from the people who were responsible for me. Instead of helping me understand what happened and that it was forever, I was labeled difficult and was treated in accordance with the Tough Love framework. My reach for my mother was treated as manipulation. My confusion and disorientation were treated as acting out or disobeying. My search for stability and familiarity was treated as defiance against this “new family” I was supposed to be grateful for and automatically know how to behave within it.

It’s been 35 years since the remarriage that destabilized my entire world. It taught me that my dad really was not coming back, and I had so many things I had been saving to tell him and so many other things I was waiting for him to help me understand. I realized a few weeks ago that I don’t know where I fit into this family that was forced upon me, where I was punished for being myself and demanded to conform to receive acts of love or recognition. When I wore what I called ‘my robot suit’, I was almost good enough, but not consistently, and would still be publicly humiliated and shamed when my behavior deviated from arbitrary expectations that I still couldn’t align into a pattern after many decades. I raised four children in this environment, and it impacted how I parented. I’m working through forgiving myself for behaving in ways I did because of the pressure to lose myself to become acceptable to people who never wanted to know who I was in the first place. Had anyone in my teenage years understood the context of my behavior, perhaps the fundamental attribution error would not have significantly impacted who I had to be to survive in that environment.