How to Break the Pull and Escape the Control of a Cruel Patriarch

Their love bombing also contains the leverage they need to imprison you

Walter Rhein

Apr 10, 2025

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Hello Friends,

Patriarchs like to present themselves as the rock that shields you from the torment of the world. In truth, they're the storm. They are the winds that batter you. They are the cold rain that soaks you to the bone.

They are the reason you have to crouch and cower. They are the cause of the burden that blinds you to the beauty of life.

They do all these things, and on top of that, they trick you into believing they are only trying to help.

Keep me going! You’re awesome!

My father had an addiction to authority and an allergy to accountability. I haven't spoken to him in decades. He's never met his grandchildren. That's his choice.

All he needed to do was recognize that, in the long course of his life, he's made mistakes.

I might as well have asked him to crawl across glass. Some people get to an age where it's too late. If they're forced to recognize the cruelty of their inherent pattern of behavior, their whole world comes crumbling down.

It's a hard thing to be confronted with the truth that the reality of your existence is not what you want it to be. We experience this jarring moment thousands of times in our lives.

We might fail a test.

We might get fired from a job.

We might lose a deeply meaningful relationship.

In all of those instances, we must make a choice. We can either embrace our new reality with open eyes and an acknowledgment of our need for improvement.

Or we can practice denial. We can practice grievance.

“That test was unfair. That job made a mistake. That person who left me has a deep, psychological problem.”

If you never blame yourself for the bad things that happen, you have to blame the innocent.

I expect my dad was pretty far along this path when I came into the world. I grew up in that pseudo reality. I learned the parameters of his ideology.

There were topics we could discuss, and others that were off limits. For decades, I lived within the confinement of those barriers.

He presented himself as the only source of funding in the world. If I wanted to work, it was through him. He and he alone established himself as the arbiter of value.

“You didn't work hard enough.”

I survived it well enough when I was little. But you can't fool a person forever. The chains begin to rust and break.

He loved it when I brought home mediocre grades. “Didn't do well enough here!” he'd say with glee. But if I brought home an A, he didn't say anything. That fell into the parameters of the things that didn't exist.

What could he say? That the A wasn't good enough?

What's better than an A?

Also, his denial couldn't erase the fact that other people had found value in me. I saw the scores as they posted them on the wall. There was my name among the very best. How was it then when I went home to the kingdom of the patriarch, my work was so terrible?

Why did he insist that I do well only to say nothing when presented with proof of my achievement?

In the negative spaces of what's left unsaid, you can find clues to indicate the existence of a grand deception.

His bedtime stories were filled with terror. They also weren't constrained to the night. He spoke them often. He reinforced his warnings every time he breathed.

The world is hard. The world is unfair. Life is unfair. Only I can protect you from it. All other people in the world are going to lie to you. Only I tell you the truth. All other people in the world are going to cheat you. Only I will treat you fairly.

“But didn't you say that life was unfair?”

“I did.”

“But if life is unfair, aren't you too part of life?”

That was an argument I knew better than to say. But the argument lingered in the negative spaces of his indoctrination. When people tell you not to trust anyone, you can't help but also begin to suspect the person giving you the lecture.

But he was good at this too, and he could divert suspicion through gifts. It was like offering a piece of chocolate cake after a meal of broccoli.

When you're 5 you don't turn down the cake.

The same is true when you're 10.

When you're 15, you resign yourself to chewing it because it's your only morsel of pleasure.

At 20, you might be tempted to spit it out, not even knowing why. You spit it out because rejecting his gift is the last thing you haven't tried.

I spat it out.

I grew up indoctrinated with a mechanism of fear that all pointed back to him. He was the answer. He was the way.

I was unhappy and suicidal.

He kept stringing me along based on the promise of a better day. But my days were slipping away. So were the people I cared about. So was my strength. So were my opportunities.

“All those things are lies and cons and cheats!”

Spitting out the cake, I got on a plane and went away. I'd been running marathons, but the marathon was never the goal. Some part of me knew I had to traverse a great distance. I needed to overcome pain in pursuit of a goal. I had to reject the concept that only a patriarch could carry me.

I had to make it on my own.

Once you shut the door on that steady torrent of lies, a surprising thing happens. You find that the world is filled with people who are kind.

Yes, there are others too. There are those that cheat you. But of the crooks I've encountered between now and the start, none have never treated me with the cruelty of the first patriarch.

When you taste a piece of comfort cake and recognize it's poison, you are free.