There for Everything, Present for Nothing
- Yasmin Sorte, MSW
- Jun 5
- 8 min read
What going numb quietly costs you, and why feeling is worth the discomfort
Like most parents who do this work, he began with his own father. And the first thing he did was defend him. I have no complaints, he told me. He gave us everything. He never raised his voice. We never went without. He was at every game.
So I asked him about one of those games. Had he ever blown it, badly, the kind of mistake the whole bleachers see at once. He almost smiled. "Little league playoffs. I dropped a fly ball and we lost the series." And what did your dad say in the car afterward? He went quiet for a moment, longer than the question seemed to call for. "I don't remember. I just remember feeling alone."
I sat with that. Then I asked what he would do if it were his own daughter out there this weekend, striking out to end the game, him up in the stands.
He didn't even pause. "I coach her team. I'd be right there. I'd help her through it."
And in the car afterward? Would you pretend it never happened?
"No. God, no. I'd want to know how she was taking it."
Then he stopped, because he had heard himself. Somewhere over the last twenty years, with no one to show him how, he had learned to give his daughter the one thing his own father never managed to give him. He had not noticed he was doing it.
And there they were, side by side. The father he had become, and the father who had been at every game and yet seemingly a world away. He sat with the distance between them for a while.
Then, more quietly:
"I don't know my father," he said. "I never did."
This is what comes up, again and again, in the work we do with families. People come to us to sort out a marriage or a child in crisis, and somewhere along the way, they find themselves back with the parent who raised them. He was grieving a man who is still alive, still calling on Sundays, still asking after the grandchildren. Without meaning to, he had just put words to the one thing his father never found a way to give, and to what it had cost them both. His dad made it to every game and came home with none of them. No one ever found the way in.
We talk a lot about the damage these men leave behind. The children who stop asking. The wives who stop expecting. What we almost never talk about is the other half of it, everything the man himself never got to keep. Not the harm he caused. The life he missed.
Avoidance starts small, as the swerve. You feel the hard conversation coming and suddenly remember an email you need to send. The deeper kind is quieter. It is a whole family arranged around something the size of a couch in the middle of the room, having agreed, without ever saying so, to call it furniture. No one called a meeting. They learned the path around it. In a home built on a drink or a pill, that path becomes the entire floor plan, and Claudia Black named its three rules forty years ago: don't talk, don't trust, don't feel.¹
What he could not see was the price he had been paying the whole time. Everything we feel comes through one speaker inside us, with a single volume knob. When the hard things start coming through too loud, you turn it down. It feels like good sense, a way to brace for whatever might come next. But everything runs through that one speaker. Turn down the fear and the grief, and you turn down your daughter's wedding too, the news that should knock you flat, the ordinary good day. Thirty years of that and you do not come out calm. You come out muffled, every highlight of your life playing a world away. He was not holding back on purpose. He had turned himself down so far, so long ago, that the warmth could no longer reach him, not even his own child's.
In a home with active addiction, the knob gets forced all the way down. The drink does on command what nothing else in his life can, makes him feel nothing, every time, which is why getting sober is so much harder than setting the substance down. The feelings he spent years drowning come back at once, on time and furious, and staying in the room for that is the real work.
Numb the worst of life, and you mute the best of it. They run through the same speaker.
Children read the weather in a house long before they have words for it, and they adapt to it, usually one of two ways. Some grow up too fast, learning to manage the father who cannot manage himself, reading his face at the door and heading off the bad night before it starts. There is a name for it, parentification, and the research is sobering: anxiety, depression, and a lifelong reflex to dissolve into whatever everyone else needs, because their own needs were never the point.² Others go the opposite way and disappear, into homework and screens and any room where no one asks them to fix anything. Either way, they learn the rule of the house. Feeling is dangerous, so turn it down. They grow up safe and quietly muffled themselves until something finally makes them notice.
The instinct, once you see it, is to swing the other way and open up: tell the children everything, be vulnerable, let them in. That is half right. A father who pours his fear and grief onto a child has not healed anything. He has handed the child the weight and put a face on it. There is a name for the far end of that too, emotional incest.² What a child actually needs is smaller and harder than confession. A parent who can feel his own feelings and still stay present with the child's, without the two collapsing into one. That capacity is called reflective functioning, and it is the first thing avoidance takes.³ Shut all the way down, and you fail your child one way. Pour it all out, and you fail them the other.
He does not avoid the conversation because he fails to understand himself. He knows exactly what is in the room. He avoids it because saying it out loud means feeling it, all at once, the entire weight the silence has been holding up for years. His body has filed that silence away as the thing that kept everyone standing. The nervous system does not run on what is true. It runs on what kept us alive the last time.
Avoidance feels like safety. That is the whole problem.
These patterns run downhill through families, though the research is just as clear that they do not run cleanly. Plenty of people break the line, and in the hardest families that break is more common than you would guess.⁴ Parents in our workshops will tell me, frightened, that they can already hear their own mother in their voice. That fear is a good sign. These patterns survive on not being seen. The father I have been describing is proof you can see it and set it down. He simply never noticed that he had.
His son found the door. His father never will, and many men and women of that generation never do, because they do not know it is there. Ask that older man, and he will tell you he was a good father, and he will mean every word. He gave them everything. He never raised his voice. He was at every game. The case his son made for him at the start is the same case the father would make for himself, and by that measure, he passed. No one ever told him there was another column on the page. He turned down his emotions so early, and so quietly, that he never knew he was missing anything. He will most likely die without ever suspecting there was another way to be in a room with the people he loved. That is the grief beneath the grief. We pour all our attention onto the harm these men cause. The life they never got to have, never even knew to want, we hardly mention.
He doesn't even know the door is there.
This man is not the warning in the story. He is the proof. For over twenty years, he taught himself to sit in the car after the bad game and ask the question, to walk his daughter through the strikeout instead of pretending it never happened. He built it out of nothing and barely noticed he had.
What he carried in, underneath all the defending, was sitting one chair back the whole time. His father is alive, behind the glass right now, present for grandchildren he cannot quite feel, the same way he was present for and out of reach to his own son. What he wanted, more than anything, was permission to try the latch one more time before it was too late, and a promise it would open. I cannot make him that promise. His father may not even see the door, let alone walk through it. You reach for him anyway. The reaching is the work, whether or not the other person can meet you there.
The price of getting back into the room is the one thing he has spent his life refusing to pay. Letting himself be seen before he knows how it will land. Saying the true thing and staying where he is while it is taken in, or while it isn't. To a man who turned himself down at nine years old, that can feel like stepping in front of a car. It is also the only thing that has ever brought him the closeness he wanted. You pay in exposure, and what comes back is another person in the room with you, reaching for you while you reach for them.
The families who are able to change are not the calm ones. They are the ones who finally said the thing and stayed while everyone in the room felt it, without grace, with some damage that lingers. What they got in return was each other. The good days at full volume. There for everything, and at last, truly there.
At YES Family Consulting, our family workshops and restructuring work are built for exactly this. We help people find the thing their whole life has been organized around without their say-so, and we help them turn back up, slowly, so the people they love can finally reach them.
If you have spent your life there for everything and present for none of it, reach out.
We would be honored to do this work alongside you.
Yasmin Sorte, MSW, is the founder of YES Family Consulting.
Sources
Claudia Black, It Will Never Happen to Me (1981). The rules "don't talk, don't trust, don't feel" describe how communication shuts down in families affected by addiction.
Hooper, L. M. (2007) and the broader literature on childhood parentification. Emotional parentification and role reversal are linked in adulthood to anxiety, depression, and compulsive caretaking. Its severe form, in which a child is positioned as a parent's emotional partner, is described as emotional incest.
Slade, A. (2005), "Parental reflective functioning: An introduction," Attachment & Human Development; Fonagy et al. Reflective functioning is the caregiver's capacity to hold their own and the child's mental states at once, a central pathway in the child's developing emotion regulation.
Verhage, M. L., et al. (2016), "Narrowing the transmission gap: A synthesis of three decades of research on intergenerational transmission of attachment," Psychological Bulletin, 142(4). Transmission across generations is confirmed but moderate (about r = .31 for secure attachment, r = .21 for insecure) and is sometimes absent in higher-risk families.
