Dara’s Family StructureNuclear Family • In general, Dara planted preconceived notions of her relatives long before I ever met any of them. She spoke with extreme negativity of those who were closest to her. She spoke approvingly of people she had seen seldom. • Father. Dara’s father, Walter, is a political conservative who has been on a life-long campaign to discredit anyone he feels is not of his political stripe, thus, his participation in the custody hearings. Dara herself has no respect for him yet often went to him for advice when dealing with her mother. I believe that Dara’s lack of trust in men starts with the lack of trust in her father. She goes to him to prove to herself that men are inferior. Dara would obsessively speak negatively about Walter, second to her mother, nearly on a daily basis, to the point where it caused a major rift between us. I was not immune to Dara’s negativity. Walter is an intelligent man who, each time that I observed, would verbally abuse Dara’s mother and anyone else he would target. Thus, I recount the story when we sat around the parents California dinner table upon our first meeting, for a reason that I have never been able to explain, Walter jocularly, but dead seriously, issued a threat to gun me down. • Mother. The obsessive hatred that Dara felt for her mother, Ann, surpassed nothing I had ever could imagine before in my life. From our first Mother’s Day together when Dara was inconsolably crying, she continually blamed her mother for everything bad that ever happened to her. I believe, it was Ann who steeled Dara against the possibility of forgiveness for everyone else in her life. Dara learned that it was convenient to focus all of her current anxieties on one person and physically shut them out of her life for a time. At the same time, Dara would obsess over the sacrifice this exiled person would be extracting from her. Dara’s mother is a domestic violence victim in a way that Dara will never be. Through her submissive cultural nature, Ann has put up with and accepted Walter’s verbal abuse as a way of life. Ann’s father was also, according to Dara, a violent man during his lifetime. • Sister. I had the opportunity to sit down and talk to Maya at length. She had an inventive mean streak she would employ against people whom she did not like and she shared Dara’s disdain for their mother. But, Maya was consistent and opportunistic about her revenge. Unlike her father, who would create opportunities to strike at his enemies, Maya would strike and let bygones be bygones. Unlike Dara, Maya never suffered abuse or considered herself a victim. She knew immediately when she didn’t like someone and would never give them a chance to abuse her. During one work related visit to their California home town, Maya and I talked for nearly an hour and a half in a hotel lobby as though we were long-lost friends. Extended Family • Grandmother. Thin and frail when I met her, I saw deep prejudice towards people of “inferior mental capacity” through the grandmother’s interactions with Dara and her comments to me. Both Dara and I were one of these lesser people, but she had pity for Dara. Dara recounted enough stories about her grandmother that I could tell all she had done for Dara was give a child pity and a sense that the world was against her, especially, her own mother. From a very early age, Margaret incubated a wedge of entitlement into Dara’s heart that would drive Dara to extract everything she could from others who she sought to blame for all her ills. Ugly pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place the day Dara found a 36 foot Nazi flag in Margaret’s possession. Dara blindly idolized her grandmother and would let no one; her mother’s sisters, psychologists, or me, hint that Margaret put such family pressure on Walter and direct pressure on Ann to drive Ann to drink heavily.
• Aunt Irene & Paternal Cousins.
• Aunt Mabel & Maternal Cousins.
Substitute Family Members • Sam & Elaine, the substitute Mother & Father. Good, wholesome people who live in upstate New York, Dara adopted these as her Dad and Mom when she had a boyfriend at SUNY New Paltz college. While I accepted the relationship as a condition of our relationship (under threat), the more I learned, the more I realized how uncomfortable I was with the issues that would crop up. Dara seemed to be using them for her own personal gain. And, I was the interloper who interfered with their son’s marriage to her. Endowed with much humility and common sense, these two always told me that it was Andy who lost Dara. Now, Sam and Elaine are being presented to Kirstin and Kalen as their third set of grandparents. • Guy, the substitute husband and Dad. While I consider how much I enabled Dara to be who she was during our marriage, it seems my enabling paled in comparison to Guy Yatsushiro. He is a successful doctor with a home in Kailua. He had quite the reputation among the nurses, for drinking and playing around, before he met Dara. Guy has sought to harass me on several exchanges, culminating in my filing a TRO against him. While we settled out of court, that very legal action, where I was seeking protection from him, is what gave Dara the legal means to have me thrown in jail. Others • DV Siblings. Dara has surrounded herself with people she calls, “survivors.” Dara sympathizes and empathizes with these people and believes that the rest of the world cannot understand them. The people appear to have certain emotional characteristics, particularly, that society and the world owe them a debt. When she meets one of these individuals, she becomes a fast friend. She brings them and their problems into her own personal life. She then has no emotional energy left over for those closest to her. Some of these people are:
o Dawn. Turned addict in 1999, Dawn lost her daughter, boyfriend and house from drug use and prostitution. This was her best friend. Dara became suicidal when Dawn became lost to the world.
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