My Father Is Ashamed of Me

I reminisce about the day my father told me he loved me, and I could smell the whiskey on his breath. I was around the age of eight, and he’d just climbed into my bedroom by breaking through the window. Our house was a prefab built just after the Second World War, so it wasn’t that secure and fairly easy for any of us to break into.

I recall my mother had talked about arranging a legal injunction to stop him from harassing her, as even though my father didn’t want my mother in his life, he wouldn’t let her go either. He had a jealous streak and toxic behaviour, which was bizarre because he was the one who had the other lovers.

My mother also spoke to me about wanting to stop complete contact with him for me, and I sobbed deeply and heavily. My tiny body shook, and I felt the sheer grief of my brokenness from the basement of my heart. My father, to me, was somehow the better parent. My mother was eccentric, religious, and ruled by an iron rod, a large wooden spoon, and a hard set of knuckles. She was the mad one to me.

Looking back at that moment now, as an adult and a mother myself, I can see why she wanted to initiate no contact. Being that my father wasn’t dependable, he was also immature and drank heavily. He would more than often turn up late when collecting my twin and me.

And many other times, he didn’t turn up at all. Like the day we waited after school in the cold snow and eventually gave up after an hour had passed. We had counted hundreds of cars driving past us; we always counted the passing cars, each time we waited for him to turn up. So, we headed back to the school, forlorn, having to find another way home to our neighbouring town. The expectation of being let down became part of our default setting.

When my father did pick us up from wherever the designated place was, he would check our teeth, necks, and heels of our shoes to make sure they were all clean. He was so ashamed of us, our poverty, and our existence, being that it was outside of wedlock and that our mother was a divorcee. His toxic shame leaked into our very essence and core. We were young and aware that his character was flawed and that he liked to drink, but when you are that young, you don’t have the maturity to understand fully about adults or how they become who they are. Or why they hurt you so badly?

My twin and I knew what to expect as soon as we climbed into the back of his car. His dialogue would be as automated as a recording. Without fail, it would begin with a quick hello, in his Italian accent, and straight onto, “I thought your mum was on the pill, I was meant to go back to Italy and be a doctor!” And then he would continue with, “Your mum, she’s mad!” He would talk on and on, usually about himself, in any way to ramp up his ego. We knew the drill, and yet his words would still feel like nails down a blackboard.

We would arrive at his aunts’, Toni and Lucia, who were drenched in the religiosity of southern Italian Catholicism. As we stepped into their old-fashioned kitchen, with the delicious smell of Italian coffee, sitting on the stove, the aunts both would retort, “How is your mum? Is she still mad?” Then they and my father proceeded to banter away for a couple of hours in their rough Neapolitan dialect. They didn’t even come up for any air, as they continued with an obscene amount of profanities.

My twin and I would step back outside the house, completely ignored, and search for ways to deal with the monotonous boredom. This scenario filled up most of the time spent with our father. Once he did push the boat out, completely surprising us.

It was the early 1990s when I fell in love with a local Italian boy. I was in my early twenties and still very much an empty shell from my short, dysfunctional life. His parents came from the same village in Italy as my father. They were all from the same Italian community in my hometown. My boyfriend’s father told him that if he continued to be with me, he would be digging his own grave.

The trouble is that in staunch Catholicism, my mother being divorced and having children from another marriage, and my parents not being married, branded me with a devil’s mark on my forehead. And that’s the way the story went all my young life. There was so much shame. Everything dripped with shame.

I was twelve when my father met his wife, an English rose with a rich father who was the CEO of a major oil company. You could see the £ signs of love in my father’s eyes. To give her dues, she has eloquently put up with an enormous legacy of toxicity from him. They have two grown-up children, the eldest being a doctor! You can imagine his pride or is it an inflated ego, when he tells all of the Italian community back in his homeland.

Should my twin and I be in the vicinity of my father’s restaurant when we were in our teens, my father would proceed to convert us into cousins or friends from Italy so that our identities and his old life were dug deep into the bleak vastness of where it originated from. And the essence was sadly bleak—that is what shame feels like. From then on, we were only ghosts of his past.

So many of us bear shame from family, and we do not fully comprehend how we can carry this shame in the form of shyness, lack of confidence, and feelings of worthlessness. Or simply being our self-conscious self. This is 'shame' being played out in many of its guises. It lives in addictions and a false sense of grandiosity. Shame filtered down from my father from the ideology of Catholicism, and from his father dying when my father was a small infant. The family were left with little to live on. Shame smashes through family dynamics and gives birth to more shame through the next generation.

Shame should and can also be healthy when it is used in the correct way, as John Bradshaw, who wrote Healing the Shame that Binds You, says that a healthy shame is important:

‘Shame is the emotion which gives us permission to be human. Shame tells us of our limits. Shame keeps us in our human boundaries, letting us know we can and will make mistakes, and that we need help.’

But when shame is toxic, it is the master disguise in so many of our behaviours. It is behind addiction, grandiosity, as well as worthlessness, and self-loathing. Another of Bradshaw’s quotes on toxic shame addresses this:

‘Toxic shame gives you a sense of worthlessness, a sense of failing and falling short as a human being. Toxic shame is a rupture of the self with the self.’

My twin and I were unknowingly raging on the inside, and my rage was hidden in my addiction to alcohol and drugs. We were seventeen and drunk when we rocked up at my father’s restaurant. We went there to warrant ourselves a place of importance in his life. I remember being mouthy to the waitress, and it was carnage. My father dragged my twin and me out as far down the road as possible. He was a strong man, his arms as strong as his legs. We had embarrassed him. Job done! I woke the following day feeling so ashamed. I wasn’t an angry person, but I was desperately hurt, unloved, and rejected.

I crashed through many more years feeding that wound until, having my own daughter, and fighting to survive, encouraged my own growth and healing. I have also experienced many epiphanies on my healing journey, over the past decade or so. I now see my inner child very clearly looking at me, asking to be acknowledged and accepted.

I haven’t seen my father for many years; however, I have been able to thank him spiritually for any good intentions, and understand he doesn't know how to love. I am facing the abandonment head-on and working through my pain in bite-sized pieces. I believe our shadow self hides itself until we are ready to open our arms and welcome that part of ourselves back home.

© Chantal Weiss 2025. All Rights Reserved