WE WEREN'T THE BRADYS: The Powder Keg of Rage, Religion and Disorder

WE WEREN'T THE BRADYS:

The Powder Keg of Rage, Religion and Disorder

For a moment in time, my family growing up had 3 boys and 3 girls just like the Brady Bunch. Baby number 6 was even born during the show's syndication heyday. So, when my parents brought that baby boy home from the hospital and said his name was Robert, we begged and pleaded with them to nickname him Bobby. How could they not when it seemed like such a perfect coincidence? Our Dad was even an architect like Mr. Brady! But my mom adamantly insisted we were never EVER to call him Bobby.
 
It was just as well, because other than those minor similarities, our family was really nothing like the Bradys. Our parents had only ever been married to each other. We were all full siblings; and three more siblings were soon born, bringing the total to nine. Plus my dad wasn't strictly an architect like Mr. Brady; rather he was a builder who designed only the houses that he intended to build. And unlike the even-tempered, kind, patient Mr. Brady, my Dad was a hot-tempered, (often irrational) man who seemed to hate his kids and wife as much as he loved them. And religion played a big role in our home, though more often than not, it played a negative role.

It's difficult to describe just how confusing and detrimental it is to live with someone like my father. He clearly suffered from a personality disorder, most likely Bipolar or Narcissistic. (The 2 disorders are quite similar in many respects; my dad’s brother was diagnosed as bipolar.) But add to that a religion as strict, detailed and all-encompassing as the LDS religion and you create a rather bizarre world.

 One analogy I came up with years ago to describe the confusing nature of my dad is this: Pretend someone comes to your door with a really nice treat they have spent hours making for you. They have put a lot of time into elaborately decorating and packaging it – “just for you.” But when they give it to you, they say, "Here you go you bleeping, bleepity bleep bleep. I spent hours making this bleeping treat for you. So you better bleeepity bleep bleeping enjoy it." Then they throw the treat at you and kick you in the shins. Then they go and tell everyone about the nice thing they've done for you and how you never appreciate anything they do. No matter how delicious the treat is... you would find it extremely hard to appreciate it. You'd kind of rather they hadn't bothered making you a treat and just wish they'd simply been kind to you instead.

Basically, the point is, my father is a whirlwind of very confusing, contradicting characteristics and behaviors.

• He likes to do "thoughtful" things for people, but he has difficulty interacting with people for more than a short period of time because they tend to either upset, frustrate or annoy him.
• While he's adamantly religious, more often than not, he's also violently angry at God.
• He is talented, but often hampered by insecurities and "perfectionism" so that many of his talents rarely come to fruition.
• He is a good story teller who loves to share stories and is easily moved to tears by a "touching" story but doesn't show the same compassion to people he's close to in the same circumstance as presented in the story.
• And while he is easily emotionally "touched" he is equally easily moved to violent, angry outbursts.

 His outrageously violent temper often moves him to yell out things that are so odd, ironic or irrational that they seem funny later on - much later on when you are far, far away from him, of course. My older kids have laughed themselves to tears over some of the things he's said. Mostly because they didn't have to grow up with him, but also because (unlike my 2 youngest kids) they've witnessed the spectacle of their grandpa's incongruous, irrational behavior on several occasions. To them, it's eccentric and amusing.

While my dad is not a physically imposing person, he has a temper that could scare Satan himself (and probably has).  He's all of about 5'9" with black hair, hazel eyes, olive skin and reasonably good-looking. But my son has said, "Somehow when Grandpa is angry it's way scarier than when anyone else is angry." I totally agree.  

On my 4th birthday, I got a present wrapped in Holly Hobbie fabric that looked very much like this.

I loved it even more than the present that was wrapped inside it. So I used it to swaddle my baby dolls in, and my Barbies would wear it wrapped around them like an over-sized sarong. Until the day my Dad, in an angry rage, repeatedly kicked the door of the bedroom I shared with my sister with his steel-toe boots. He left behind a huge gaping hole. (It was a large enough hole that we could squeeze through it). After that, my sister and I had to use this fabric to cover the hole in the door so we could still get dressed with privacy. For over a year, we used masking tape to hold the Holly Hobbie fabric in place before my dad ever got around to fixing it.

To this day I don't remember what set him off in that instance - I've tried to fathom a justifiable reason to become angry enough at 4 and 5 year old little girls to behave that way, but I don't think one exists. But it wasn't the first (or the last) hole he kicked or punched in the walls or doors of our homes in an angry tirade.

That was just the norm at our house. When Dad was angry, he would scream and rage around - curse words flowing from his angry sneering lips, his brows lowered over angry, slitted eyes, and nostrils flared - as he would break and throw things to emphasize just how angry he was. It didn't matter if the "thing" that had made him angry was big or little the response was very much the same. It seemed his need to show his anger came more from a need to be angry at that particular moment than a response to the actual "thing" itself.

That is the crux of a personality disorder, it isn’t really the “thing” that has happened that determines the magnitude of the response. It’s how it affects the underlying disorder. With Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), an individual has unwarranted feelings of self-importance along with a sense of entitlement, exaggerated beliefs and behavior. A narcissist expects to be recognized as superior and special, whether there is superior accomplishment or not. And so they suffer from a strong need for admiration. However, these qualities are usually defenses against a deep feeling of inferiority and of being unloved. So when things happen that indicate the individual is not admired, or seen as special- and support the fears of being inferior or unloved, bad behavior results.

 
That is my Dad in a nutshell. So, if the “thing” that happened, seemed to him to show a lack of admiration for him, and enforce his fears of not being loved or being inferior, then the reaction was way over the top compared to the reality of the thing. So my dad could often handle a major crisis better than a little crisis. It really depended on how he interpreted it as relates to his feelings about his importance. I will give examples of these things later on.  

And then, to come back to how confusing this behavior truly is for people who live with the individual. This same man sometimes often on the very same day or even within hours after trading around screaming, swearing, cussing and breaking things, would sit down with his family to read the scriptures and pray. And he would be moved to tears over a spiritual story that he wanted to share with us, followed by bearing his testimony. Followed by a, "Shall we go get shakes at Dairy Queen?" Rarely did he ever show any acknowledgment of his angry behavior on any level. There were a few times when an angry episode that was directed at a particular person was followed by what he thought was an apology. But his version of an apology was more like, "I'm sorry...but you're really a terrible person so I had no choice but to react like that, to the horribleness that is you." So, not super apologetic.

Then a unique twist to a typical Narcissistic Personality Disorder in our home, was that this disorder mingled with his religious beliefs. There are two religious sentiments that are a part of the LDS faith that have had a rather unfortunate effect on my dad.
 

1) One is the story of Job.

2) The other is the principle that is often taught in the Mormon religion that for every rule/commandment there is a specific blessing irrevocably decreed to be tied to obeying that rule or commandment. (That is not exactly as the scripture is stated, but conveys the gist of how my dad and many others understand it).

The marriage of these 2 principles has created a lot of anger on my dad's part. The result is that he sincerely, adamantly believes that GOD AND SATAN ARE MESSING WITH HIS LIFE. So that, when anything goes wrong - from little things like an ice machine malfunctioning to big things - he is absolutely convinced God is testing him or Satan is trying to "thwart" him in his faithful efforts somehow. This extends to the second principle, so that when my dad doesn't receive blessings he is sure are "owed" him by his obedient behavior, he also attributes it to God testing him or Satan thwarting him. And if he feels it's God, it makes him furious with God for doing that to him or for withholding blessings he is "due." And by furious - I mean the same type of angry behavior he aimed at us. He would quite literally cuss God out or curse about him and throw an angry tirade. So, if he came home from work, hot and worn out from working hard to support his family, and God had decided to test him by denying him a cold drink from a working ice machine, then clearly God "deserved" to be cussed out in that instance. To him it makes perfect sense.

While he could be set off seemingly by just about anything, there were actually a few things that would predictably enrage him. (Though the level of his response to these triggers varied considerably, even for the same "infraction" from one time to the next. Again, this is because the anger comes from the disorder, not the actual infraction itself. It’s the “meaning” of the infraction – its impact on his perception of his self-worth in other people’s eyes.)

The following are examples of the things that would consistently set him off.  

ONE was if dinner was not ready at 5:30pm. My dad demanded this as his right as breadwinner and head of the family. My mom was to have dinner on the table at 5:30 every night, with dessert right after. This was about the time he came home every night from work. He would change and read as much of the newspaper as he could until 5:30 and then finish reading it after. Dinner was to be homemade, as was dessert. Packaged desserts were a particular no-no. Not that he didn't like packaged cookies, because he did. But he didn't consider them good enough to count as dessert. So, dinner usually was on the table at 5:30 with dessert baking or cooling while we ate. But when it wasn't...well, he let my mom have it with an angry barrage of insults, outrage, name-calling and complaints. Sometimes in a quiet sneering voice, other times in a loud yelling voice.

You never knew how long these types of tirades would go on. There were times when angry tirades against my mom would go on almost non-stop for days. He suffered from a sort of chronic semi-insomnia where he had a lot of difficulty sleeping or staying asleep at times. So lack of sleep was a state he was accustomed to. And when he was angry at my mom and suffering from insomnia, he would berate her all night long with names and speeches going on and on about her infractions, how incompetent she was, how unloving, how this, how that... all... night... long. So, getting dinner on the table by 5:30 was something my mom made a big effort to do.

TWO was if there was no cold Kool-Aid in the refrigerator when he looked for it. He almost always looked for it when he got home from work. It just made him furious beyond belief if the pitcher was empty or if the Kool-Aid was lukewarm. I don't know which of my siblings liked Kool-Aid enough to put us through this hell at times, but this was a big one. I think I didn't drink Kool-Aid just for this reason. I was traumatized by the many times he was enraged to find the pitcher empty or the Kool-Aid not cold. I made plenty of pitchers of Kool-Aid as part of the dinner chores, but I rarely if ever drank it. I still don't like it or buy it very often for my own kids. Call it PTSD from my dad's Kool-Aid rage. Ironically, we were never actually completely "out" of Kool-Aid. My mom made sure there were always plenty of packets of Kool-Aid mix in the cupboard and bags and bags of sugar in our pantry. (A year's supply actually – it’s an LDS principle to store a year’s supply of food). But apparently stirring the mix, sugar and water or letting the Kool-Aid get cold with ice was asking too much of my dad. Which makes sense if his disorder is NPD, because it isn’t about the Kool-Aid, it’s about not showing love, admiration and appreciation for him by having this already ready and waiting for him when he looked for it.

THREE- the ice machine. Heaven help us but we had the worst luck with ice machines. And it drove my dad, quite literally, insane. My brother tells the story of a time when he went to get ice from the fridge and my dad was standing there. No ice came out and my brother asked, "Is the ice machine not working?" My dad growled, "Don't blame me, blame that mother f**ker up there." (pointing up to the sky - at God).  This goes back to my dad's tendency to blame either God or Satan for things that go wrong in his life, as explained above. It's a fairly typical statement he makes and in line with things he says quite often. This makes sense if his disorder is NPD as well, because it’s about God not showing love or respect for him by not blessing him with the things he needs, wants and deserves in life.  

FOUR was if someone complained about the dinner my mom made. He would sometimes complain about what my mom made for dinner but if any of us did, it was a trigger for him. To him, it seemed synonymous to defending his wife's honor. Which is odd in itself, because he did not speak kindly to her or about her a lot of the time. He constantly criticized, nitpicked, complained and yelled at her for just about everything imaginable. So it was one of many odd contradictions to "defend" her by screaming, "If you don't like it, you can go eat at the Johnsons!" (our only close neighbors) or worse.  But it makes sense if his disorder is NPD as well, because NPD is about his perception of himself, and if part of what he thinks is admirable is being the kind of man who “defends his wife’s honor” and doing so feeds his Narcissism, then he will do so. Even if it means abusing his children; and even more so if the child doesn’t respond in a way that shows admiration for him and feed his feelings of superiority or self-worth.  

Probably the very worst experience with this infraction, for me personally, was when I was 17. KFC had just come out with chicken nuggets and I had seen ads for them all day. I was sitting on the bar stool while my mom was stirring dinner on the stove. I was a huge fan of McNuggets but KFC's looked even better. I was telling her about how good the nuggets looked and how much I wanted to try them. My mom was irritably responding that she had already started dinner and that it was what we were going to eat. Undeterred, I said we could put the food she was making in the fridge for tomorrow and have KFC nuggets that night instead. My mom said, no. And I kept going on and on (as kids sometimes do). My dad was already home reading the paper in the other room. And so suddenly, he stormed down the hall toward me yelling and screaming about how my mom cooks good food for our family, and so on, calling me names and cursing me out. He pushed and shoved and kicked me down the hall as I retreated toward my room. I had developed an unfortunate habit of trying to stand up to my dad at this point in my life. So I just made things worse as I yelled back while he hit me repeatedly on the back and shoved me down the hall. When we got all the way into my room, next to my bed, he attempted to pick me up and throw me onto my bed, which ultimately resulted in me being shoved into the wall behind my bed knocking my head on the corner of the window sill. When he left the room, I was hurt, angry and frankly fed up. There had been so, so many horrible encounters with my dad lately. Just days earlier during an angry tirade while I was curling my hair in the bathroom, he got inches from my face and sneered with that angry Irish face of his, "I've always thought you were ugly." So as I sat on my bed, hurt and worn-out physically and emotionally; I decided I just couldn't take it anymore. I was so tired of living in a home completely lacking in love or affection and so filled with anger and rage. I opened my window and escaped, running two miles along a dark canal to a friend's house. She looked at the red marks all over my back, arms and head, and said she would hide me and that her parents would help her. But when my parents discovered I had gone, they made a sweeping search for me. When they discovered where I was, they parked their vehicle at an angle behind the cars in my friend's driveway and made threats if her parents didn't make me come out. They held off them off for awhile by saying they would bring me home later. My dad told them he called the police station and asked if it was ok if parents "smacked" their kids when they were being intolerable brats and claimed they said that was fine. He called my grandparents and some of my aunts and uncles and told them I ran away because I wanted KFC nuggets and didn't get them. So one of my aunts actually brought me KFC nuggets at my friend's house while my parents were still parked there. I looked at them and said, "I don't care about nuggets. How could you think I would care that much about nuggets?" She said she knew but that she wanted to buy them for me anyway. To this day, some of my relatives actually think I ran away because I wanted nuggets. So, complaining about dinner at my house was not a good idea.

FIVE actually ties right into the story above, it's people fighting, talking loud or otherwise making noise when he is trying to rest or nap. Regrettably, the design of our house was terrible for this problem. My dad built all the houses we lived in and we moved into the house they still live in now, when I was eight years old. The master suite is quite large with a few separate areas inside it, but it joins the house with two of its walls and one of them has a large cut-out at the very top that is open to the rest of the house - where plants or other decorative items can be placed. And then the design of the rest of the house is very open with the only actual doors being on the bedrooms and bathroom. Which means sound made in any room - the living room, family room, music room, kitchen, and dining room - carried down through the house and right into the master suite cut-out* and pissed my father off if he was trying to sleep. But he also often rested outside his bedroom anyway, on the couch or in his chair, after work or on weekend afternoons. If you can picture an open home built this way without doors or closed off areas, with nine kids living in it in Arizona, where it is often too hot to go outside to play, you can imagine that noise carrying was a problem. So pissing Dad off while he was napping or sleeping was a big problem. Our Atari met an early, angry fate due to this problem. We were fighting over turns on the Atari in the family room one afternoon while my dad was napping in the living room, when he stormed down the hall toward us and stomped it to smithereens and then picked the whole mess up and threw it against the wall. Unsuspecting friends or guests of teenagers in our home were sometimes introduced to the terrifying sight of my dad appearing suddenly out of the dark hallway wearing his bathrobe angrily yelling if they stayed late talking and laughing too loud at our kitchen table. The first time one of my best friends from high school met my dad was under similar circumstances. We had been out with some friends when their car broke down and we walked a couple of miles home. (It was before cell phones and in a neighborhood so no phone booths). So we were a little behind her curfew - by about 15 to 25 minutes or so. But, apparently my friend's dad had called looking for her, which woke my dad up. Which meant, as we quietly tried to unlock the back door to my dark house, the door swung open, my bath-robed dad reached out and grabbed my shirt forcefully yanking me into the house as he screamed, "I'm sick and tired of your bitch friend's father waking me up in the middle of the night..." Even though it was the first time it had ever happened and my dad had never met her before. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to say, "Dad this is Shauna, Shauna this is my Dad," or not, so I elected not to.

(*Incidentally sound could also be carried out of their bedroom. Which is why we were privy to my dad's habit of berating my mom late into the night, or all night long when he was angry at her - as referred to in trigger number one).

SIX was cars breaking down, which always seemed to happen on the way to our annual summer vacation to California. The towns of Indio and Blythe are familiar names to me solely because almost every year it seemed like we ended up spending a couple of hours in one of those towns getting a part for our Suburban. It didn't matter if it was a new Suburban or one we'd had awhile - something always seemed to go wrong with it somewhere along the way. Which is indisputably frustrating and a terrible thing to happen in the middle of the desert with nine small kids in the car. No argument there. But it was the way he dealt with it that made it a problem. He would curse and scream at God, Satan, my mom and us. His wrath and frustration was aimed at anything and everyone around. This was because, to him, vacations weren’t really an attempt to go spend time with people he really loved being around. Rather it was because he believed spending time together as a family was a commandment from God, and that attempts to obey that commandment should be met with blessings.

 In reality, he was rarely, if ever, genuinely happy and relaxed when we were all together. (Frankly, I can’t even picture that happening.) He seemed, much of the time, to literally hate me with such an intense hate that I avoided being around him whenever I could. We all did. There were times when his anger, rage and hate were so focused on me that it felt like he was literally trying to hate me out of existence. There is a special kind of damage that comes from someone who seems to wish he could hate you out of existence. And even more damaging, that at the same time he is forcefully demanding that you spend time "doing something fun" together. Not the two of you but the whole lot of you - and not because he enjoys that together time. But because of a fervent, almost maniacal, belief that spending time together is a sort of good that will put him in good with God. And being in good with God will get him things he wants from God. Blessings that will make his life easier.

And so, for things to happen to prevent that, like cars breaking down – well, that was just so wrong in his eyes for God to test him when he was trying to be obedient. Or unfair that Satan was allowed to thwart him under those circumstances. I can’t count how many times he said that Satan hated family vacations and would try to stop them or make them go wrong. He really believed that. It couldn’t have been that trying to drive a large vehicle packed with 11 people and countless belongings across the desert in the heat of July is hard on a vehicle. Nope must be God or Satan – so cuss them out instead of planning for that problem or handling it with some rational patience.

That is just a tiny snapshot of the major triggers I remember. But, as I said in the beginning, my dad is a whirlwind of very confusing, contradicting characteristics and behaviors. That’s how the disorder works, and what makes it so confusing and detrimental. Because if a person is all bad, then it makes sense, they are an evil character that you avoid. But he has a lot of good qualities and characteristics. In fact, there came a point in my childhood when I realized that not everybody knew my dad's intense scary, angry side. To say that it was surreal to imagine people who only saw my dad laughing, happy and friendly - is a gross understatement. I actually remember lying on the floor trying to "cut-out" the images of my dad angry, yelling, cursing, etc. to see what was left, to see what those people saw. But I couldn't. They were too inextricably intertwined. And, as my father got older, he seemed less able to "filter" that type of behavior out of public interactions. He would burst out with angry or bitter statements or comments at church or in other social situations. But never to the level he did at home.

I have often wondered if my father would have been a happier person without religion. For so many people, religion does so much good. It gives them peace, happiness, meaning and direction. But for my father, well it just made him so angry so much of the time. He was so angry that he couldn't make God do what he wanted by doing what he was sure God wanted him to do. And he was just so sure that God was supposed to reciprocate in that way. It made him bitter and angry. It made him feel unloved and unappreciated on a level that my mom couldn't fix or even address. Nobody could. But maybe he would have been bitter and angry anyway, at something or someone else in the same way. There’s no way to know that. But for me, for our home, the mingling of rage, disorder and religion was a powder keg.