PART I: ORIGINS AND ERASURES

In the sterile halls of Memorial Hospital in Santa Rosa, California, my life began. I was a blank canvas soon to be colored by circumstances I couldn’t comprehend or control. What happened when I was just two years old would remain hidden from me for decades, yet would silently shape the architecture of my psyche and the trajectory of my relationships.

My mother, barely out of her teens herself, made a decision that would ripple across generations: she took me from my biological father, Bill White, changed my name without legal process, and disappeared with me. In today’s terminology, this would be classified as kidnapping. Back then, it was simply a desperate young mother’s attempt to rewrite our future.

My earliest memory, fragile and shimmering like light on water, takes place in a wooded clearing. A wooden airplane spins at the end of a string. My biological father is there, as is another woman whose identity is lost to time. This memory exists in a psychological vacuum, devoid of context or meaning, yet preserved with the peculiar vividness that only our earliest recollections retain.

What I couldn’t know then, what I wouldn’t discover until my mid-forties through an ancestry.com search initiated by my then-wife, was that this separation was merely the beginning of a parallel narrative occurring beyond my awareness. According to my biological father’s brother, Bill had spent years searching for me. The universe’s cruel irony: he eventually found me, watching silently from the bleachers during my high school football games, a spectator to his son’s life rather than a participant in it.

The psychological weight of this revelation decades later cannot be overstated. While I moved through childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood, my biological father carried the wound of my absence so deeply that after confirming I seemed to have “everything together,” he concluded I didn’t need him to “intervene” in my life. He returned to Arkansas and ended his life. This fact was deliberately omitted when, as a teenager, I attempted to find him and was told by his grandmother only that he had “passed away.”

This belated knowledge created what psychologists might call a “biographical disruption,” a fundamental questioning of the narrative I had constructed about my own existence. It introduced the haunting awareness that I had been simultaneously living my life while being searched for, found, and mourned without my knowledge. It raised questions about identity that still remain partially unanswered: What inherited psychological tendencies might explain some of my own struggles? What parallels exist between his life and mine? The suicide of my newly discovered cousin April after her difficult divorce only deepened these questions about familial patterns of responding to loss and rejection.

These questions hover in the liminal space between the father who raised me and the father I lost twice, once through separation and once through his death, leaving only a fragmented connection through my cousin Jessie in Kentucky, one of the few remaining links to that severed branch of my family tree.

PART II: NEW FATHER, NEW PATTERNS

When Dennis, my dad, entered my life around age two, he brought with him not just a hot rod El Camino that thrilled me with its speed, but a template for masculinity that would unconsciously shape my understanding of love and relationship for decades to come. Young himself, perhaps 21 or 22, Dad represented an exciting but volatile presence, teaching me my first lesson in psychological association: that love and fear could coexist, even depend upon each other.

Life on Lynnwood Avenue operating a pig farm revealed Dad’s dual nature in starker terms. His alcoholism fueled his inherently controlling tendencies, creating an atmospheric pressure of potential explosion that kept our family in a perpetual state of hypervigilance. We became emotional meteorologists, reading the subtle barometric shifts in his mood. The way his footsteps sounded on the porch, the manner in which he closed the car door, the cadence of his breathing. All signals that informed our behavior and emotional states.

This environmental conditioning created neural pathways that would remain active long into my adulthood: the equating of tension with normalcy, the subconscious expectation that emotional safety was inherently unstable, the understanding that another person’s psychological state should determine my own. These weren’t explicit lessons but atmospheric ones, absorbed through the emotional equivalent of osmosis.

As farm work dominated my childhood (feeding animals before daybreak, cleaning pens after school, maintaining land on weekends), Dad supervised with military-like precision, his approval conditional and criticism abundant. This dynamic instilled a work ethic that would serve me well professionally, but psychologically implanted the insidious belief that love had to be earned through productivity and compliance, that my inherent worth was negligible without demonstrable usefulness.

Among the formative experiences of this period was my brief participation in 4-H, where I raised a pig named Freddy from birth. The devastating discovery that Freddy was destined for slaughter, information casually delivered by other children rather than adults, provided an early lesson in the impermanence of attachment and the sudden severing of emotional bonds. This experience, while seemingly minor compared to other childhood challenges, reinforced a growing pattern of adaptation to loss and the suppression of emotional pain for practical purposes, psychological conditioning that would later manifest in my adult relationships.

Witnessing the Theater of Control

Dad’s psychological control manifested in moments of theatrical manipulation that, as a child, I couldn’t recognize as abnormal. One incident crystallized this pattern: alone with me in the house, Dad engaged in a heated phone conversation, culminating in his blowing up a paper bag, setting it down, and loudly popping it, simulating suicide to manipulate whoever was on the other end of the line. I watched this performance in stunned silence, absorbing not just the frightening act itself, but the implicit lesson that emotional terrorism was a valid tool for controlling others.

This wasn’t an isolated incident but part of a consistent behavioral pattern. Dad’s rage created regular domestic upheaval, with my mother and father’s arguments forming the ambient soundtrack of our home. For a developing mind, this normalized conflict as an inherent component of intimate relationships, creating a psychological expectation that would follow me into my own partnerships.

The impact extended beyond emotional terrain. Physical discipline, beatings with a belt or bare hands that left visible marks, taught me that bodily autonomy was conditional, that those who claimed to love you reserved the right to violate your physical boundaries when displeased. I vividly recall my brother once bearing belt buckle marks so severe he couldn’t attend school for days. A memory that illuminates not just the abuse itself but the secrecy surrounding it, the understanding that what happened in our family remained hidden from outside intervention.

Theological Counterpoint

During elementary school years, as we moved three or four times across Sonoma County, my Catholic education at Saint Rose school provided a curious counterpoint to home life. There, through first and second communions, I encountered a structured moral framework with clear delineations of right and wrong, sin and salvation. This theological structure stood in sharp contrast to the chaos of our household, where rules shifted with Dad’s moods and forgiveness was neither assured nor consistent.

This duality, rigid religious structure at school versus unpredictable emotional terrain at home, created a complex psychological landscape for moral development. It introduced questions about justice and mercy that would resurface throughout my life: If God forgave all sins upon genuine contrition, why did transgressions at home result in unpredictable, often disproportionate consequences? If love was patient and kind in theological terms, why did it manifest as control and volatility in practice?

PART III: GENERATIONAL ECHOES

Understanding Dad requires recognizing that he himself was a product of psychological damage. His mother died when he was young, leaving him with an alcoholic father, creating a pattern he would unknowingly recreate in his own parenting. His premature entry into military service by lying about his age represented both escape and a search for structure absent in his home life. His return to discover his stepmother had sold his car, a betrayal he compulsively recounted throughout my childhood, illuminated his own unresolved trauma around trust and loss.

His stepmother, who we called Nana, enacted her own form of psychological cruelty through the ritualized disappointment of Christmas. Each year, she would ask what gifts we wanted, only to give everything on our lists to her biological grandson while we received token offerings. This annual ceremony of exclusion taught me that family bonds could be hierarchical, that blood relation determined worth, and that even anticipated joy could be weaponized to reinforce one’s place in the emotional pecking order.

The psychological impact of witnessing Dad’s arrest outside my grandparents’ house, raging, searching for us, created another layer of complex conditioning: simultaneous fear of his volatility and confused relief at external intervention. This incident marked the public recognition of what was typically private dysfunction, briefly lifting the veil of family secrecy.

When my mother delivered her ultimatum (stop drinking or she would leave), Dad’s subsequent sobriety created a misleading narrative about transformation. The drinking stopped, but the controlling behavior intensified, teaching me perhaps the most significant psychological lesson about change: addressing symptoms (alcohol) without addressing root causes (trauma, control needs, anger issues) merely redirects dysfunction rather than healing it.

False Transformation and Entrenched Control Dynamics

When my mother threatened to leave unless Dad stopped drinking, his subsequent sobriety created an illusion of change that would confuse my understanding of transformation for decades. The drinking stopped, but the controlling behavior and rage remained, perhaps even intensified as he lost alcohol as a release valve. This became a crucial psychological lesson that would later inform my understanding of narcissism: addressing symptoms (alcohol) without addressing root causes (his need for control and unprocessed trauma) only changes the manifestation of dysfunction, not the dysfunction itself.

Dad’s narcissism manifested in total domination of our household. Every decision, from major life choices to the mundane details of daily routines, required his approval. Meals were served at precise times he dictated. Television programs were his choice exclusively. Even our physical positioning in spaces seemed to revolve around his comfort and preferences. This omnipresent control created a psychological environment where autonomy felt like rebellion and independence like betrayal.

His narcissism extended to an inability to see us as separate individuals with our own needs and identities. Our achievements were either appropriated as reflections of his parenting or dismissed if they didn’t align with his values. Our emotions were valid only when they matched his expectations. Sadness was weakness, fear was cowardice, and anger was disrespect, unless these emotions were his own, in which case they were fully justified and demanded the family’s complete accommodation.

As I entered adolescence, the conflicts with Dad escalated to heated arguments and physical altercations. One incident where he slapped me and I responded by punching a hole in the wall marked a pivotal psychological moment. I was simultaneously becoming like him in my response to emotional pain while also attempting to establish boundaries against his abuse. This contradictory response became a template that would follow me into adulthood, fighting against control while unconsciously recreating controlling dynamics.

Even today, decades later and well into his seventies, Dad maintains his iron grip on family dynamics. My mother, still with him after 53 years, continues to orient her life around his preferences and moods, a living testament to how deeply entrenched these patterns become. Family gatherings still follow his unspoken rules, conversations still navigate carefully around his sensitivities, and dissent is still met with consequences ranging from cold silence to explosive rage. Witnessing this unchanging dynamic into my adulthood reinforced a terrifying possibility: that personality patterns, once established, might be permanently fixed, a fear that would drive both my personal relationship choices and eventually my writing about psychological transformation.

PART IV: RELATIONSHIP REPETITION

The conditioning of my childhood manifested with remarkable precision in my adult relationships. I married three times, each partnership replicating familiar dynamics of control and volatility, not through conscious choice, but because these patterns registered as normal in my emotional blueprint.

My first wife, Jennifer, exhibited controlling and abusive behaviors that my upbringing had normalized. The psychological mechanism at work wasn’t masochism but familiarity, my brain recognizing in her behaviors the comfort of the known, however dysfunctional. When she cheated and our marriage dissolved, my desperate attempts to preserve the relationship “for family” reflected the lesson that maintaining family structure superseded personal wellbeing, a value demonstrated by my parents’ enduring despite dysfunction.

Between marriages, relationships followed predictable trajectories. I was drawn to what I misidentified as independence rather than recognizing it as control, a distinction my psychological conditioning hadn’t equipped me to discern.

Despite the personal turmoil, my professional life demonstrated a surprising resilience, a testament to the work ethic instilled during those demanding farm days of my youth. In my late teens and early twenties, Dad pushed me toward the emerging field of information technology. While his methods remained characteristically forceful, this guidance coincided with the early days of the internet, positioning me at the forefront of a technological revolution. I attended school for networking and software development, building technical skills that would later prove invaluable.

During my marriage to my second wife Denise, I channeled this technological aptitude into entrepreneurial ventures. I launched a startup website that tapped into the growing online marketplace, and in its first year, the business generated a million dollars in revenue. This professional success stood in stark contrast to my personal struggles, a common pattern for those who grow up in dysfunctional homes, often finding it easier to excel in structured external environments than to navigate the more complex terrain of intimate relationships.

Yet financial success couldn’t compensate for what was fundamentally missing in the marriage with Denise: genuine emotional connection beneath the familiar control dynamics. The pattern continued until I finally recognized that material achievement couldn’t fill the void created by the absence of authentic love.

Within six months of ending that marriage, I entered a relationship with Cassie, ignoring warning signals my subconscious found comfortingly familiar. As an IT manager for a small Northern California town, I believed my value in the relationship was purely utilitarian, bringing home a paycheck and maintaining domestic peace, a direct extension of the conditional worth system instilled in childhood.

Cassie’s gradual isolation of me from my family, at one point preventing contact for over a year, mirrored the emotional isolation of my childhood. Her justification that she “couldn’t stand” my family because they showed me genuine care revealed the threat that authentic love posed to the control dynamic. This insidious separation from support systems is a hallmark of narcissistic relationship patterns, yet I couldn’t recognize it because it replicated my normalized understanding of love as possession rather than freedom.

The Breaking Point

The beautiful home we built in Molalla, Oregon, after relocating from California became the stage for the culmination of these patterns. Cassie’s affair, painfully timed on my 50th birthday, April 5, 2019, forced a confrontation not just with her betrayal but with the patterns I had been unconsciously repeating for decades.

The discovery shattered me at a fundamental level. I had invested everything into this relationship. My love, identity, financial resources, and psychological well-being were all bound up in this family unit I had tried so desperately to nurture and protect. The betrayal triggered a darkness so profound that, for the first time in my life, I contemplated ending my existence. The psychological devastation wasn’t simply about infidelity; it represented the ultimate confirmation of my deepest, unspoken fear: that I was fundamentally unworthy of genuine love, that no matter how completely I gave myself to a relationship, it would never be enough.

These suicidal thoughts marked the absolute nadir of my psychological journey, the point where the weight of accumulated patterns and pain threatened to extinguish not just my happiness but my very being. In this profound darkness, however, lay the seed of transformation. The existential crisis forced a reckoning that mere unhappiness had allowed me to avoid: if I continued to live, something fundamental would have to change.

Her refusal to end the relationship and projection of blame onto me represented familiar gaslighting dynamics that, for the first time, I began to question rather than accept. My year-long attempt to salvage the marriage primarily for my son’s sake reflected my learned belief in sacrificing personal wellbeing for family preservation. When Cassie turned my son against me, convincing him I was to blame, it recreated the triangulation and emotional manipulation I had witnessed between my parents, but with a crucial difference: I now recognized it as a pattern rather than an inevitable reality.

PART V: PSYCHOLOGICAL AWAKENING

The true psychological turning point came through extensive therapy during my divorce. Where previous pain had only reinforced patterns, professional help provided the framework to recognize and name them. After discovering Cassie’s betrayal, I sought support from multiple mental health professionals, psychiatrists and psychologists, who helped me navigate the acute suicidal ideation that threatened to overwhelm me.

Among these professionals, one therapist, whom I’ll call Karen, became the catalyst for profound transformation. While other clinicians had focused primarily on symptom management, Karen recognized something deeper: my experiences, once properly processed and understood, could become not just manageable but meaningful. She saw potential where I saw only pain.

During one pivotal session after reading my essay comparing hiking to life’s journey, Karen made an observation that would fundamentally alter my self-perception: “Writing isn’t just something that helps you. It’s who you are. It’s your path to healing.” This insight struck me with the force of recognition, not as new information but as naming something I had always known but never fully acknowledged.

Karen had identified not just a therapeutic technique but my authentic essence that had been buried beneath layers of adaptation to others’ expectations. Writing wasn’t merely a hobby or even a profession I might pursue; it was the core expression of my true self, the self that had been overshadowed by the psychological patterns established in childhood.

My lifelong interest in writing, previously expressed through fiction about witches, found new purpose as I began exploring psychology and self-understanding. The transition from fictional narratives to psychological exploration represented more than a genre shift; it marked the beginning of integrating fragmented parts of my identity into a coherent whole. Each word I wrote became both exploration and reclamation, a way of giving voice to experiences that had previously existed only as wordless emotional imprints.

As I wrote about narcissism and toxic relationships, I wasn’t just documenting my experiences; I was actively reprocessing them through a new lens of understanding. The short book on narcissism I published represented not just a creative achievement but a psychological milestone, claiming authority over experiences that had previously claimed authority over me.

My deepening exploration of how childhood trauma shapes adult attractions, specifically, how being raised in a controlling environment led me to seek out controlling partners, wasn’t just academic understanding but profound self-recognition. This insight represented the critical shift from being unconsciously driven by my psychological conditioning to consciously examining and challenging it.

PART VI: WRITING A NEW NARRATIVE

Today, my writing has found resonance with others walking similar paths. Through social media, I share excerpts that help people recognize their own patterns, sometimes hearing that my words have “saved lives.” This impact, which I tend to downplay out of ingrained modesty, represents the transmutation of personal pain into collective healing, perhaps the most meaningful psychological achievement possible from difficult experiences.

My current writing projects, “Fuck It, I’m Out” and “Clean Break,” explore themes of psychological liberation and healing from toxic relationships. They document the painful recognition that sometimes blood ties must be evaluated through the same critical lens as any other relationship, that “family” is not an automatic exemption from the standards of healthy human interaction.

These works externally offer guidance to others while internally continuing my own integration process. Each insight I articulate for readers simultaneously deepens my own understanding. The act of writing itself becomes a form of ongoing therapy, a continued excavation of patterns so deeply embedded they require constant examination to prevent unconscious recurrence.

Most significantly, I’ve begun to break the generational pattern in my personal life. My current relationship differs fundamentally from previous ones. My partner is loving, caring, and empathetic, qualities I once would have found unsettling in their unfamiliarity or lacking the adrenaline-inducing drama I had come to associate with closeness. This transformation hasn’t been easy or linear. I sometimes still find myself instinctively bracing for control that isn’t coming, interpreting neutral comments as veiled criticisms, or struggling to trust genuine affection.

The neural pathways carved by childhood experience don’t disappear entirely, but they can be recognized as artifacts of adaptation rather than fundamental truths about relationship. This ongoing rewiring of expectations and responses demonstrates that unconscious attraction to controlling personalities is a pattern that can be recognized and changed, not an immutable destiny handed down through psychological DNA.

PART VII: RECONCILIATION WITHOUT DENIAL

What makes this journey of psychological integration most profound is the complex relationship I maintain with my family today. Despite the damage inflicted during childhood, I’ve come to a place where I can genuinely say I love both my mother and Dad deeply. This isn’t Stockholm syndrome or denial of past harm, but rather a mature understanding that human beings are complex, that hurt people hurt people, and that it’s possible to love someone while acknowledging the harm they’ve caused.

My mother’s decision to take me from my biological father, a choice that had cascading consequences across generations, came from her own desperate attempt to create safety, however misguided some aspects of that choice may appear in retrospect. Dad’s controlling behavior emerged from his own experiences of abandonment and instability. Understanding these contexts doesn’t excuse the harm caused, but it allows me to see them as full human beings worthy of compassion despite their failures.

Similarly, my relationships with my siblings, my brother who is five years younger and my sister who is eight years younger, have evolved beyond the shared trauma of our upbringing. Though we each experienced our childhood differently and followed separate paths into adulthood, the shared understanding of growing up in our particular family system creates a bond that transcends typical sibling relationships. Today, I love them both deeply, recognizing that we were all doing our best to navigate the psychological environment we inherited.

These family relationships exist in a space of beautiful contradiction, holding both the acknowledgment of past wounds and the choice to love in the present. This capacity to hold seemingly opposing truths simultaneously represents perhaps the most significant psychological achievement of my journey, allowing me to write authentically about psychological damage while still choosing connection over resentment.

CONCLUSION: AUTHORING A LIFE

Looking back on the journey from that confused two-year-old to the writer I am today, I see how my early psychological imprinting created both my greatest challenges and, ultimately, my greatest contribution. The darkness I experienced became the ink with which I now write stories of healing and hope for others walking similar paths.

My evolution from a child who normalized control and abuse to an adult who can recognize and articulate these patterns represents more than personal growth. It offers a template for how pain, once processed and understood, can become purpose. My writing doesn’t just tell my story; it illuminates the psychological pathways from trauma to healing, from unconscious repetition to conscious choice, from being defined by one’s past to authoring one’s future.

Writing has become not just what I do but who I am, my most authentic form of self-expression and the vessel through which my experiences gain meaning. When Karen identified writing as my essence rather than merely a helpful activity, she named the transformative truth that would reshape my identity: I am, at my core, a writer. This realization didn’t create something new but rather uncovered what had always been present beneath the accumulated layers of adaptation to others’ expectations and needs.

The act of writing itself, of finding precise language for previously wordless experiences, has become both my personal therapy and my contribution to others. When readers tell me my words have “saved their lives,” they’re recognizing what I’ve come to understand: that articulating psychological patterns breaks their power, that naming the invisible makes it navigable, that stories can become bridges from isolation to connection.

In this way, becoming an author of books has been inseparable from becoming the author of my own life, learning to write new patterns where old ones once seemed inevitable, and helping others find the words for their own unwritten possibilities. The psychological inheritance of patterns need not be destiny. It can become, instead, the first draft of a story we ultimately rewrite for ourselves.