An excerpt from a YouTube interview (Connor Beaton) in which a speaker describes emotional injuries carried into marriage: growing up with a mother who has manic bipolar disorder, taking on a parental role in childhood, and an absent father. The speaker links these experiences to lasting beliefs about safety and trust in women.
What were some of those injuries that you carried in previously into the relationship with your wife? The first injury was being born to a mother that was struggling and still is struggling with manic bipolar disease. How that showed up was I felt like for a lot of my life I had to be her father. I had to morph and sacrifice my own childhood and adolescence to be a father to my mother. Was your dad in the picture or was he. He left when I was young. I mean, there's ambiguity there, but I think it's in the first couple months when I was born. And so I always had this deep wound or feeling or essence that something interstitially was off and that the world wasn't a safe place like all of us do. She unconsciously created what she was angry about in my childhood structure. And so that was probably the biggest piece that I brought into my marriage is that women aren't safe. Women can't be trusted.
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