This mother’s day landed differently than the others. As I scrolled through social media, I expected to find photos and videos of happy mothers celebrating with their children. Instead, I found dozens of heartbreaking testimonials from sad people who had become estranged from their families, usually due to the malicious actions of their former husbands.

These stories stopped me in my tracks because I realized they were exactly what I’ve been through. We have an epidemic of narcissistic abuse that lurks beneath the camouflage of the traditional family.

Over and over, the story played out the same. The narcissistic husband, furious that his ex-wife would claim her basic humanity, goes on to dedicate himself to destroying all her current and future relationships.

Abuse is not limited to gender, and I have close friends who are women who have also been ostracized by their mothers. My own experience lies with the father, so that will be the focus of this article. I want only to recognize that every situation is unique, and all our collective trauma deserves to be healed.

We live in a society that constantly makes apologies for cruel, conservative, patriarchal men. The mass of our population will twist themselves into knots to defend these men, even as they regard hardworking, compassionate women with nothing but shame and scorn.

No matter how much cruelty the children receive from the father, they’re told they must always love him.

No matter how much kindness they receive from the mother, they’re told it is never enough.

Thanks for your support: 30% off 💙 40% off 💙 50% off 💙 60% off

After separation these men, emboldened by unearned privilege, extend their aggression to the point of breaking the bond between mother and child.

Above all else, cruel conservative patriarchy wants us divided and hostile. They know that if we ever banded together, we’d topple them from their unearned throne and demand a society that works for us.

I maintain a relationship with my mother, but it’s been hard to watch my father’s efforts to besmirch her character. Frankly, I’ve been helpless to do anything about it other than to offer her my support.

Never in the 26 years that I’ve been estranged from my father has he ever spent one once of effort on accountability, or engaged in any action that would result in our mutual benefit.

He believes he’s already perfect, and the rest of the world has to conform to him.

Even in my adolescence, I recognized that my father did not make any efforts to nurture my development. Sure, he liked to take credit for my successes, but he never provided any assistance in navigating my failures.

It wasn’t until I caught him providing me with deliberately false information that I recognized he perceived me as a threat. He did his best to hide what he was doing, but when I found the evidence it was irrefutable and cataclysmic.

I’ve never been able to see him the same since.

I realized that here was a man who so feared I might emerge into strength, that he was committed to keeping me weak. He wanted me to suffer to serve his own insecurities and frail ego.

Nobody has any obligation to suffer in order to protect the feelings of a cowardly, conservative man who is too lazy to engage in self-improvement.

This is the fundamental patriarchal mindset. They’re too entitled to even try to rise through merit, so their objective is to hold everyone around them down. They see oppression as the “safer” path, because there’s no guarantee that if they submitted to a fair contest they’d emerge victorious.

Only through cheating can they grasp the illusion of security that gives them comfort.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Once you see through the facade, you become a threat to them. They don’t spend energy on self-improvement, so they are industrious about attacking you. All their power becomes dedicated to sabotage and betrayal.

Even if you escape them, they add unnecessary hardships to an already challenging world.

They’ll spend hours whispering to everyone in your circle. Eventually you’ll have to leave or be betrayed. They’re highly charismatic and manipulative. They turn people against you, and make them believe it was their own idea.

They’re able to wield this power, because the United States of America doesn’t recognize children as people, and that helps conservatives create a trauma bond through a combination of abuse and love bombing.

I remember my father slamming the brakes on the car and blooding my nose on the dashboard. I was taught that my love for him was dependent on the pain I could endure. He ridiculed my weakness when I cried and threatened to revoke his love for me.

When I approached, I never knew if I’d encounter the happy father or the furious one. Sometimes he’d hit me and I’d grow dizzy. But then he’d turn around and behave with kindness. He’d laugh and tell me to “remember the good times.” Maybe he thought they’d be more impactful if he seasoned them with frequent bouts of cruelty.

My mother never hit me. I received some stability there.

Yet, there’s been an ongoing effort to portray her as the cruel one. I’m not one to reject the evidence of my own senses. Even if my conscious mind had tried, my body remembered the source of pain. Nevertheless, these tactics form a major part of our cultural fabric. I’ve met many people who have endured trauma from them in one way or another.

When the campaign against her didn’t take, I became lumped in as an accessory to the problem.

Over mother’s day weekend, I discovered that this family dynamic is closer to the norm than the exception. We’ve long known that the parent that cares less about the child gains a certain approximation of power as a consequence of that cruelty.

Throughout the entire history of this country, and perhaps the world, women have been expected to absorb cruel and unnecessary blows as a consequence of their unconditional love for their children. We live in a world where men do not face consequences for drugging their wives and violating them.

This must change.

Is there anything more detestable than a man who would leverage the purity of a mother’s love for the sake of his own selfish and anti-human impulses?

I can’t think of anything worse, except perhaps for the fact that we’ve allowed the creation of an entire nation which ignores these crimes and allows them to become normalized.

Perhaps the worst part is the sense of impotence that comes from knowing we currently lack the tools to do anything about abusive fathers. They have all the power, and rather than offer us any reprieve, our only reward is the absence of punishment.

They threaten to inflict pain if we don’t comply.

Our compliance is never good enough.

For now, the only thing you can do is retreat from the toxic situation in order to save the people you love the most. It’s hard to accept they’ve been manipulated into hating you, but there’s no sense fighting an established reality. I left the country entirely for almost a decade to escape the building, intolerable pressure that threatened my life.

The trauma bond between merciless, conservative patriarchs and their children is impervious to reason. They heat it with abuse, then they quench it with love bombing, again and again until the separate sense of identity is merged into a self-destructive collective.

These poor kids are deceived into assuming that love isn’t possible. They think life is a trial that must be endured. They believe it can’t be any other way. They emerge with a devastating loyalty to their conservative patriarch, and never recognize that bond deprives them of ever attaining anything good or decent in their life.

As the years go by, they come to regard the very people who attempt to save them as the source of all their agony.

Meanwhile, the conservative patriarch laughs and smiles and offers one of his rare moments of strategic and destructive comfort.

“Yes, it was always her. All your problems are because of her. It was her.”

The psyche of the United States of America needs a massive reset. It’s time to reject the fundamental lie and sabotage of patriarchal authority. We need to emerge into an era where women and mothers are respected and revered rather than sabotaged and tormented.

It is not our obligation in this life to exploit people and squeeze everything we can of them for our personal satisfaction.

Our duty is to help each other. We should all aspire to understand the meaning of unconditional love. We should find our commitment to lifting each other up rather than holding them down.

Even now, so many people are inclined to apologize for cruelty and make a mockery of kindness. Our challenge is cultural. We have to change the norms. It’s a big hill to climb, but unconditional love gives us the power to move mountains.

I'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe