No One Told Me I Could Be A Dad Before I Ever Had Children

Tom's Story:

I never thought of myself as a spacey kind of guy...maybe more of a go-with-the-flow type.

Whatever happened was pretty much OK. I would take things as they came. But if anyone asked me what I had been doing, or where I had been just a few hours earlier, I really couldn't remember. I admit, it was a bit strange, but it didn't bother me too much, and if it bothered anyone else...well, that was their problem.

I also had a habit of answering "great, everything is great" whenever I was asked about how I was doing and how things were going. I felt generally positive about things and it seemed

like a good attitude towards life in general.

This started becoming a problem when I got into a new relationship. My girlfriend and I got

more serious and she didn't really buy the "everything's great" line, especially because clearly things weren't great all the time. At the same time, not being able to remember what happened earlier in the day became a more obvious problem. Not being able to remember caused problems in our relationship and she helped me realize something was going on.

In therapy together I began to discover my "inner child" and understand that my not remembering daily events was due to dissociating and disconnecting, a way I had learned as a child, to cope with the tension and out of control behavior between my parents. It made it easier to manage the fear and anxiety I experienced in childhood and became a way I coped with any situation that felt pressured.

As I began forming a relationship with my inner child, I started to appreciate how much he needed a dad who could give him what he hadn't gotten growing up. I slowly understood that feeling my down feelings was not the end of the world and I could manage them. The experience of connecting, well, really to myself, has been incredibly impactful on my relationship with my girlfriend. I am in the process of working on remembering daily events and have even stopped saying that "everything is great", unless it really is!