Now, you may think he was going to his father for wisdom or comfort. But you have to understand who he was running to. My grandfather, as I have said before, was a malignant psychopathic narcissist. He inflicted immense damage on everyone around him, including my father. But after every single fight—major or minor—my father would run to him, as if he were a toddler scraping his knee, seeking comfort. He wanted to be coddled. He wanted his abuser to validate his victimhood. It is a profound and twisted irony. He was running from the conflict of a healthy boundary—someone, perhaps I, was trying to set it—straight into the arms of the monster who created him. Why? Because the monster spoke his language.
The monster wouldn’t say, “Son, maybe you should listen to your son or someone else.” The monster would say, “How dare he speak to you like that? You are the victim here.” This dynamic reached a fever pitch one day when my father, in a desperate attempt to regain control, actually brought his father—my grandfather—into our home. He brought the big gun to silence me. It was an intimidation tactic. He wanted his father to witness the rebellion and put me back in my place. But by that point, I had seen too much truth to be afraid. I ended up having a fight with my grandfather as well. I stood my ground against the malignancy of the older generation, just as I had with the younger one. I refused to back down. In the midst of that chaos, my father turned to his father, pointed at me, and said something that still chills me to the bone: “See, this is what I tell you. When I tell you about the fights I have at home, this is it. You ask me why my mood is so down. This is why. This is exactly what I have to go through. This is what they put me through.”
In that moment, he was not a grown man; he was a tattletale. He was using my strength, my refusal to be abused, as evidence of his victimization. He was looking at his psychopathic father, begging for validation, saying, “Please agree with me that I am the good guy and they are the bad guys.” He needed that co-signature on his delusion to survive the collapse of his ego. And my grandfather, true to form, delivered the verdict. He looked at my father and said, “Your son is not going to be faithful to you. I’m telling you this once and for all. He’s not yours.” At the time, those words were meant to be a curse. They were intended to paint me as some sort of traitor, the black sheep, the disloyal son. But looking back, I realize he was absolutely right. He was predicting the future, but not in the way he thought. He was right because I was not going to be faithful to the dysfunction. Hell no. I would not be faithful to the generational trauma. I would not be faithful to the silence that allowed them to operate. I was going to be faithful to the truth. And in their world, telling the truth is the ultimate act of betrayal.
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