Journalled on Sunday, 27th of July 2025 | Santo Cristo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: 26 degrees, hot, sunny and perfect blue sky.
It is Sunday, and Yasmin is still with me. She will head back to her mother’s this afternoon, then come stay again later in the week.
Yesterday we had lunch at a small Mexican restaurant in Praça Mauá. Normally, we eat at a simple per-kilo place near my apartment in Santo Cristo. The food there is good, honestly excellent for the price, but a per-kilo restaurant is never cosy or welcoming.
It is hard to talk at ease in a place like that, especially on a weekend, when what you really want is a bit of quiet and room to breathe.
The Mexican restaurant gave us that room. We talked, daughter to father, in a way that felt unhurried, and I think Yasmin needed it. I think she needed to say some things that had been sitting heavy in her for a while, feelings and thoughts she had not had the space to unpack.
I think it was good for both of us.
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been carrying a deep, nagging sense of guilt about going no contact with Julie.
I know I needed to do it, but the guilt has been hard to sit with, at times overwhelming, and this morning it hit harder than usual. I think yesterday’s open conversation with Yasmin stirred something in me too.
I cannot fully explain it. All I know is that I woke up with such a heavy weight of guilt that I unblocked her number and sent a short message, apologising for doing it. I was not trying to open a door back to something, or to reconnect. I just needed time and space to gather my thoughts.
What I understand now, or think I understand, is that Julie, in moments of anger and frustration, does not know how to communicate without causing hurt. She does not stop to consider what the other person is feeling. It is almost as if her real goal in those moments is not to communicate at all, but to wound, to belittle, to put the other person down. Only then does the job feel finished to her.
I do not believe you have to hurt someone to feel complete, or right, or whole. You can say what you need to say, defend what you believe, without leaving a trail of damage behind you.
What I am describing, in the simplest terms, is assertiveness: standing up for your point of view and saying what you think or feel without setting out to judge, belittle, or hurt the person across from you.
This pulls a thread back to my childhood. Our father left when my brother and I were young, and separated from our mother. We stayed in contact with him for a while, until eventually he gave up on us completely.
After a lot of reflection, I can say honestly that my mother was, and still is, a narcissist, or at the very least deeply toxic. I had thought that going back to England, at her request, in her old age, might be different this time. It was not. If anything, it became clearer than I remembered.
Going back further, to when I was a child, I remember my mother beating us almost daily, with whatever she could get her hands on, and me more than my brother. The punishment was never really finished without at least two, three, sometimes four slaps across the face.
One memory stands out clearly. We were all packed into my grandfather’s car, ready to leave for a family holiday in Tenby, Wales, with my grandparents along. We were still outside our house in Wollaston, in the West Midlands.
I cannot remember what I said or did to set her off, but she hit me across the face, not once, several times. It was obvious even then that she was not going to stop until she felt she had hit me enough.
It was so clear, so plainly wrong, that my grandmother, her own mother, told her to stop and said out loud how disgusted she was by what she was watching: a mother who needed to punish her child by slapping his face over and over, who would not feel the punishment complete until she had delivered enough of them.
What I am trying to say, and maybe not saying it well, is that some level of discipline is normal. As parents we have to set boundaries, because children without limits grow into adults who cannot function.
I have never hit my daughters, or their mothers. But then and now are different times, and even by the standards of then, what my mother did went far past discipline.
Maybe slapping a child was seen as ordinary once. But what my mother did, pushing punishment to that exaggerated, repeated extreme, was not discipline. It was cruelty.
That kind of cruelty, that need to go further than necessary, says less about the child being punished and more about the person doing the punishing: their insecurity, their need to hurt someone else past the point of reason. I recognised a smaller version of that same pattern in Julie.
If I was not dancing to her tune, the knives would come out, the slurs, the belittling, sometimes loud, sometimes quiet and covert, but aggression all the same. Left unchecked, it grows like an untreated cancer, and it will take your self-esteem, your sanity, and your sense of worth with it.
What I am saying is that I saw pieces of my mother in Julie, and that is why I had to go no contact. Nobody talks enough about the part that comes after that decision: the guilt that floods in once the door is closed.
I believe people who behave this way need to hurt others to feel strong, so they never have to look inward. Looking inward would only remind them of their own emptiness, their own low self-esteem, maybe even self-loathing.
Still, the guilt and grief of going no contact became too much to carry, so I cleared my conscience, unblocked her, and apologised, not for her sake, but for mine. We have to keep looking inward, not outward at everyone else.
In bed by 10 p.m.
Thank you
Thank you for reading. Please explore my other posts and share your thoughts in the comments.
Richard
