Why do we hold people at bay? Why is it that no matter the type of relationship we have with an individual, they never know who we are? Even in intimate relationships we hide. Our struggle with who we are keeps us from allowing even those closest to us from knowing us fully. What we do not know of ourselves scares us so severely that we blindly create our fears.

I made a comment two weeks ago: what you focus on, you hit. Even if I aimed never to become the psychological and emotional danger to my children that my father was to me, or that his father was to my uncle, it is precisely my focus on their behavioral examples that will cause me to become the very thing I don't want to become. Why? Because by attempting to avoid it, I give it life; and by giving it life, I move it closer to my being as a secret – as an infection.

I am reminded of a time when my daughter was only about two. I, she, and her mother were at a restaurant on Westheimer, in Houston. She reached across her plate with her left hand to grab something and her elbow was perfectly aligned with her cup of water. Seconds seemed like an eternity of realization as it dawned on me what was about to happen, then – as I was just about to reach out to prevent it – it happened. In that moment, as she retracted her arm tipping over the cup, I jumped up and reached for her to get her out of the way of the tsunami. But again, seconds can seem like an eternity, and a moment can seem like a day. I realized in that moment the anger and rage with which my father would have reacted were that me. “Dammit, you fool, pay attention to what you're doing!” Then I realized that this very rage was absent in my response, and replaced with concern for her comfort. Where I was concerned about my daughter's comfort and learning, my father would have been angry about what I had done.

I spent the next day thinking and analyzing what had happened in that moment, both externally and internally. I wanted to understand why I felt that my response was correct, and why it was so automatic when considering how familial practices and pathologies are passed down from generation to generation. I had come to another realization.

For much of my early adult life, I had focused on not being my father. This only made me act out in similar grandiose, aggressive, authoritative, and other ways that are indicative of narcissism. Then I saw my life exhibiting a similar pattern to that of my dad's brother. Why? Because every day during my formative and adolescent years, they told me continuously, “you're just like your Uncle Doug,” who later committed suicide due to their abuse. This is weird, because I have very little memory of Doug or anything about his personality via personal experience. So how could my life be seeming to take a similar path?

Interestingly, it wasn't because I was just like Doug in my temperament or personality, but because I was supposed to become just like Doug. “Just like”, however defined, had nothing to do with my behavior pattern, it was about my place in the family.

As I traced my family tree, I was looking for hints to what would create a pathologically deceptive and divisive modus operandi in a family like mine. I searched into the historical claims my father would make about his own uncle, Bill, and – lo and behold – an odd and familiar behavioral pattern began to emerge.

Uncle Bill was referred to historically as “Bill Boxley, a very strange case indeed […] a gun-toting former CIA officer.” Well, this seemed almost derogatory, but at the same time correlative considering my father always called me strange. So that made me a bit curious. Portrayed by Michael Rooker in the Oliver Stone film JFK (1991), Bill was depicted as a man who nearly always had a drink in his hand, was a little on the off side in his behavior, and a little too ready to defend the U.S. Government against Jim Garrison – even to the point of hiring mafia enforcers to take him out.

He was known for his drunken loose lips, and was even aware of it, but two facts in a declassified CIA report dated 9 May, 1968 stand out to me the most:

1. In March of 1952, he suffered a nervous breakdown due to “family trouble and overindulgence in alcohol”; and

2. In July of 1953, he was to undergo a spinal tap to determine the necessity of brain surgery, and requested the presence of an agent from the CIA to mitigate his mouth should he say something he wasn't supposed to. According to the document, he is stated as telling his father (also present at the surgery), “Daddy, I have been such a failure.”

Interesting. Why would he say such a thing? Why would he consider himself a failure? What kind of family difficulties would lead to a nervous breakdown? Especially when my dad claims a long line of ministers – including Bill's dad, allegedly? Well, looking back further I found that Uncle Bill's grandparents were an interesting story, indeed. As it turns out, my second great grandfather grew up in a single-mother home.

There it is. A fatherless son. A male raised without stable emotional guidance. No moderation and a value structure subject to whims of a woman's emotion. Now, how does that familial structure play out? Get ready for a ride, as I answer that question over the next three posts.