What the Hell is Water?
This is the original piece I wrote which was edited down for the Guardian and appeared as “Oliver’s mum was a narcissist…” on 22 June 2026.
My father took me to the Wexford Festival Opera when I was ten - one of the few times I saw him as a child. He hired a taxi driver to mind me for the duration. I spent three days with a stranger while my father ate oysters and socialised. When he dropped me back to my mother, I thanked him. We inherit more than eye colour and bone structure from our parents. We inherit rules, silences, habits, beliefs. We inherit the shape of our parents' presence or absence, the flavour of their neglect, and the confusion of thinking this is love.
Every week in my therapy practice, I meet people living out their inheritance, their family dysfunction: reenacting childhoods, becoming the parents they despised, clinging to survival strategies that are slowly killing them. "I think I have a problem," they tell me, "but I can't see it."
David Foster Wallace summarised the problem well,
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
A fish doesn't know it's wet. A child doesn't know her childhood is unhealthy.
While physical abuse leaves marks, covert dysfunction is absorbed as normal and most of us don’t question what feels normal. It can remain unrecognised until someone else, a spouse, a friend, or a therapist, points it out. Sometimes loss, like a divorce, is required for us to finally accept something fundamental, something we assumed was normal, needs reconsideration.
Four generations of fathers in my family were abandoned by their fathers. The inheritance of abandonment. I vowed to break the cycle but my relationship ended, and depression came - or was it the other way around? - and instead of reaching for help, I disappeared into it. I left my children for four months. I went to Greece, the place I associate most with my father, and drowned in ouzo and almost, intentionally, in the sea itself. All to escape pain and reality. My children were four and seven. They became the fifth generation. I came back. I tell myself that matters. But it doesn’t erase the wounds of leaving. I went to therapy, then became a therapist, trying to understand what happened. Whether that was genuine healing or elaborate rationalization, I’m still not sure. Probably both.
Oliver’s father had spent the last fifteen years of his life sleeping on a pull-out sofa in his study. He even had a stationery cupboard converted into a wardrobe; and used Post-it notes to communicate with his wife - it was a spectacular commitment to avoidance. He wasn’t the only family member to avoid Oliver’s narcissistic mother, a woman with strong but warped opinions. “Darling, you can’t date her, she works in a shop.” Oliver imitated his mother's plummy Margaret Thatcher accent. “People like us don’t associate with people in service.” While the absurdity of that statement might be obvious - it wasn’t for young Oliver. What Oliver heard was that his family was special, what he didn't hear was the silent second part: "...and therefore alone, and therefore unable to seek help because needing help means you're not special." This is what I mean about water. You can be drowning and not realise it.
Despite rejecting his mother and idealising his absent father, Oliver had taken on features of both. He was highly avoidant in relationships and chased sexual conquests with the same desperate energy his mother pursued social status. Raised, I’m not sure that’s the right word, by a mother with a disordered personality, it was inevitable he would absorb narcissistic traits. When a family member urged him to try therapy, Oliver cut contact. When his long-term partner finally left - “You’re exactly like her, you know that?” - Oliver spiraled into depression. He’d idealized her, but pushed her away, disappeared for days, and betrayed her trust repeatedly. That’s when he found his way to therapy.
He was enraged at his partner, “I’m nothing like my mother! Who does she think she is!” There’s the mother I thought. I challenged that statement; Oliver couldn't see he had partly absorbed what he hated. I asked him - quietly, carefully - why he thought different people kept making the same connection. He defended and justified himself and looked angry but eventually we sat in silence for a long time. Through the silence my question lingered. “But I…”, he started and couldn’t finish. His face went slack and the air went out of him. Oliver glimpsed himself, finally, and it nearly broke him.
Over the coming months, Oliver would arrive late, cancel sessions, or sit in hostile silence. When I pointed out he was doing exactly what his father did - fleeing instead of facing things - he didn't come back for six weeks. Last month, Oliver arrived on time - unusual for him. “I almost cancelled,” he admitted. “I could feel myself getting ready to…” He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. The fact that he'd shown up, that he'd named the pattern before following it - that wasn’t nothing and it might be everything.
The dysfunctional things that happened are easier for people to see. What’s harder to grasp are the things that didn’t happen - emotional safety, stability, nurturing. I asked Kate how she survived twenty-five years in a marriage where she felt completely alone. The answer was in her childhood bedroom. She had spent her early years alone in her bedroom silently eating toast she had made herself. At age six she was making and packing her own school lunches. By seven she was taking her younger sister to school on public transport. She learnt early to never ask for help. For Kate, neglect was normal. Kate swam in loneliness.
What I've learned (and by "learned" I mean "am still figuring out”): while seeing the water is hard, getting out is harder. Kate, now a nurse - perhaps inevitably - took a long time to open up. She understood intellectually the connection between her lonely childhood and lonely marriage, but admitted feeling deeply uncomfortable being vulnerable, “I hate talking about myself; I know it’s good for me but I really hate it.” I tried to slow the pacing within our sessions, but even that felt like too much. In our last session, Kate sat with her arms wrapped around a cushion, looking at the carpet. We'd been talking about what it might mean to leave her marriage. What it would require of her. To believe she deserved something.
"I'll think about it," she said. We scheduled another appointment, but I felt the particular unease I feel when I sense a client isn’t coming back. Maybe it was the way she wouldn't quite meet my eyes, or a slight pitch change. I hoped she would, but I understand why some don’t. Some see the water but choose to stay submerged, the alternative - opening yourself up when you've spent a lifetime closed - means feeling everything, all at once. For some people, that doesn’t seem survivable.
I am Oliver fifteen years on. I too had my necessary moment of brokenness, my own reckoning with inherited patterns. I came back to my children, yes, but the four months are still there; they remember and I remember. They joke about it now, but every time they do something inside of me - the child who swore he’d be different? - collapses. I sink. Clearly absence is still in me, four generations deep. Have I done enough to repair the wounds and stop that inheritance? I don’t know. I don’t know how, and by who, that gets judged. Maybe it’s a job for my grandchildren - and Oliver’s.
What haunts me is not so much the patients sitting in my office; it's those who never arrive. How many people are losing decades - entire lives - in water they can't see? And even when they do see the water, sometimes, like Kate, that isn't enough. Not every adult escapes their childhood, some do, slowly, painfully, one breath at a time, but for many, the water is just too deep.
Oliver comes to me on Thursdays. The work of learning a new way of being - one without his mother's narcissism or his father's avoidance - is ongoing. Sometimes I see his mother’s snarl superimposed on his face, then his father’s silence dominates, and then there’s this other thing: Oliver showing up, catching himself. I don't know who will win. Learning what a healthy relationship feels like takes time, but now, at least, Oliver knows what water is.
Kate stayed in the water. I got out—though I’m not sure that’s even right. Am I out and wet? Or just swimming differently, aware of what I’m in? Oliver is trying to surface. I don’t know which takes more courage: the staying or the struggling. Maybe they’re the same courage, just differently expressed. Maybe we’re all just doing the best we can with the inheritance we got.
I think about Kate every time I eat toast.
