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father. I asked her to remember how she had felt when he cried.
At first it really scared me because I thought Daddy was dying and then who would be my daddy? Then I started feeling ashamed to see him that way. But mostly I felt this terrible guilt—that it was my fault because I had picked a fight with my brother or whatever. Like I’d really let him down. The worst of it was that I felt so helpless because I couldn’t make him happy. What’s amazing is, he’s been dead for four years, I’m forty-two years old, I’ve got two kids of my own, and I still feel guilty.
    Melanie was forced to be her father’s caretaker. Both her parents placed their adult responsibilities squarely on her young shoulders. At a time in her life when she needed a strong father to give her self-confidence, she found herself having to pamper an infantile father instead.
    Melanie’s first and most profound emotional relationship with a man was with her father. As a child she was overwhelmed by both her father’s neediness and the guilt she felt when she couldn’t satisfy his demands. She never stopped trying to make up for her inability to make him happy, even when he wasn’t around. She just found substitute needy, troubled men to take care of. Her choice of men was dictated by her need to assuage her guilt, and by choosing the father substitutes that she did, she perpetuated the emotional deprivation she had experienced as a child.
    I asked Melanie whether her mother had provided any of the love or attention that she never got from her father.
My mother tried, but she was sick a lot of the time. She was always running to doctors and had to stay in bed when her colitis acted up. They’d prescribe tranquilizers and she’d eat them like popcorn. I guess she got pretty hooked, I don’t know. She was always out of it. Our housekeeper really raised us. I mean my mother was there, but she wasn’t there. When I was about thirteen, I wrote that letter to Dear Abby. The damnedest thing was that my mother actually found it. You’d think she would’ve come to me and asked what I was so upset about, but I guess what I felt didn’t matter to her. It was almost like I didn’t exist.
    The Invisible Child
    Parents who focus their energies on their own physical and emotional survival send a very powerful message to their children: “Your feelings are not important. I’m the only one who counts.” Many of these children, deprived of adequate time, attention, and care, begin to feel invisible—as if they don’t even exist.
    In order for children to develop a sense of self-worth—a sense that they do more than occupy space, that they matter and are important—they need their parents to validate their needs and feelings. But Melanie’s father’s emotional needs were so overwhelming that he never noticed Melanie’s needs. She was there when he cried, but he did not reciprocate. Melanie knew that her mother had found her letter to Dear Abby, yet her mother never mentioned it to her. The message from both parents was loud and clear: she was a nonentity to them. Melanie learned to define herself in terms of their feelings instead of her own. If she made them feel good, she was good. If she made them feel bad, she was bad.
    As a result, Melanie had a great deal of difficulty in her adult life defining her own identity. Because her independent thoughts, feelings, and needs had never been encouraged, she truly had no idea who she was or what she should expect from a loving relationship.
    Unlike many adults with whom I have worked, Melanie wasalready in touch with some of her anger at her parents when she came to me. Later, we would focus and work through much of that anger and confront her deep feelings of emotional abandonment. She would learn to set limits on how much she would give of herself to others and to respect her own rights, needs, and feelings. She would learn to become visible again.
    The Vanishing Parent
    So far we’ve been talking