Do you remember at the start of the movie “The Patriot”, Benjamin Martin is heard saying, “I have long feared that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bear.”? That sentiment struck me then and has stayed with me the past eighteen years.
Isn’t there poignant truth in that?

My daughter shared the movie “Warrior” with me a few years ago. It is one of my favorites. Indulge me as I recap it, because its theme is my topic. This movie isn’t about the trauma and abuses in the early childhood years, it’s about the aftermath of all the family members as they’re adults and have their own lives.

Tommy returns “home” as an adult to his aging father, Paddy Conlon. You piece together that the dad, Paddy, was an abusive alcoholic in Tommy’s childhood. You discover there were two brothers, Tommy and Brendan, and the pain that accompanies abuse and addiction. Tommy and his mother left his dad fourteen years prior to his return, where he later watched his mom die from a debilitating disease and in pain, poor and broken. Brendan had stayed with the dad because he was in love with his high school girlfriend, who he later married and had two children with.

When Tommy arrives back on the scene, you learn Paddy Conlon has been sober for about a thousand days now. Tommy is unimpressed, cynical. Tommy has no interest in reconciling with his dad, but he needs a trainer because he wants to fight MMA. Brendan has rejected his father as well from all of the damage he caused because of his addiction and abuse. Tommy is uninterested in reconnecting with his brother, and you can see the anger and pain as he interpreted Brendan’s refusal to abandon the father and run away with them as abandonment of Tommy and their mom.

You learn that Tommy was a national champion wrestler in his school days, trained by his dad. And over the course of the rest of the movie you learn Tommy was in the Marines. Brendan also fought MMA earlier in his life before he became a high school Physics teacher. He recently started doing small fights on the side because their home is about to go in foreclosure from unpaid medical bills from his young daughter’s heart condition at birth and they need money. Tommy has taken his mom’s last name, Riordan, and Brendan has kept his dad’s, Conlon. Both brothers are training in separate cities for the fight of the year, Sparta, unbeknownst to each other.

If you’ve known family dysfunction, abuse and/or addiction, you understand quickly the dynamics going on. Paddy is now an old man, keenly aware of his failures. He had searched for his wife and son a few years after they left, but was unable to get to them. He would find out his wife died well after the fact. He has two sons who hate him, one he hasn’t seen in fourteen years, the other who keeps him at arm’s length and whose home he is not welcome in. But he has found his peace as he is about three years sober, and finds strength in his newfound faith. His life is quiet now, in retirement, keeping up with his addiction meetings, and listening to novels on cassette.

You recognize the joy and hope when he sees his lost son for the first time after his departure. But you quickly ascertain Tommy hates him. Tommy’s anger drives him and isolates him. He’s unable to see his dad in any other way but through his lens of pain and anger.

And I recognize these attributes because I lived with them for too long. The utter anger you carry with you from the episodes of pain, humiliation, rejection, abuse, takes on a life of its own. It transforms you in ways you might identify, but not be readily able or willing to change. Ultimately, it is destructive. Maybe not all the time, but it’s always there, seething under the surface, and it boils over at both predictable and unpredictable times – damaging and destroying all that it comes into contact with.

As Tommy walked around his childhood home and looked at the pictures of his childhood life, I recall that conflicted feeling of reminders of carefully preserved memories that appear happy, but you can’t recall any happiness. You can still feel the turmoil, the anxiety of the moment that the picture usually doesn’t capture. Either you just went through a painful encounter or situation, or you’re on the brink of another, or you’re just living with the anxiety of the probability of the next one. Childhood pictures were so weird for me to look back at.

I cringed as I heard the hatred in his voice to his dad. As he shut his dad down time and again as his father reached out to him, tried to learn about him. You can see the father is changed, but as Tommy pointed out, it was “too little too late”. You almost hope Tommy will soften toward his dad. But if you’ve been there, you recognize his inability to. The pain has a life of its own. The rage only sleeps, it never disappears.

For his own reasons, Brendan has shut his father out of his life as well. You sense that he has built a good, honorable life for himself, but at the personal cost of his own family. His wife and he have built from the ground up, started afresh, are breaking the cycles he inherited. He clearly is conflicted when he finds out his brother has returned. He longs to see him, has carried an emptiness within him for those fourteen years. He is bewildered that Tommy doesn’t want to see him.

It’s so hard when you’re siblings in a dysfunctional home. We spent so much time and energy just fending for ourselves; we didn’t build anything between us, other than shared stilted memories. We didn’t know how. My method of survival and my sister’s were different. She had one way; I had another. We parted ways practically strangers, yet both fiercely protective of the other. Our adult lives carried the consequences of both our abilities and our inabilities to adapt and grow and heal. We eventually could not relate to one another and separated.

I found myself struggling between sympathy for the father, and empathy for the sons. See I carried that destructive anger everywhere I went. So when I got married and we had our own family, it may have slept, but it also woke up. There was damage from my own mouth and actions. I held a pretty stringent line of acceptable behavior that was hard for small children to toe. When things got too chaotic, the rage would erupt, and then there was the ordeal of trying to fix the damage the anger caused.

There are two brutally painful scenes that encapsulate the conflicts: when the brothers see each other for the first time on the beach. Brendan is longing for connection and to reestablish after all these years. Tommy has disavowed him. He had taken Brendan’s rejection to leave the home with him and his mom as personal rejection. Brendan tried to explain he was sixteen and in love, close to leaving the home anyway. Tommy didn’t care. He needed his big brother and his big brother abandoned him. Brendan is devastated because he never saw his mom again, never got to tell her good-bye. Tommy recalls with great pain watching her suffer and die, almost alone. Tommy’s only answer to Brendan’s plea for relationship is complete rejection.

Then there is the scene where Paddy is looking for Tommy who has disappeared. He finds him in the casino, and the harshest of words are spoken. Paddy is telling Tommy how proud he is of him. He tries connecting with him from a shared military background. Tommy coldly replies, “Spare me the compassionate father routine, Pop. The suit don’t fit.” Paddy replies that he’s really trying. Tommy coldly comes back with, “Now? Where were you when it mattered? I needed this guy back when I was a kid. I don’t need you now. It’s too late now, everything’s already happened. You and Brendan don’t seem to understand that.”

And THAT, that was so painful to watch. All the times I was afraid and alone. All the times I needed help, wisdom, guidance but it wasn’t there. All the doubts, trials and failures I pulled myself sometimes broken out of. They all came back in a flood. Problems with friends, problems with teachers, dances, game days, graduations – all devoid of involvement, help, direction, even comfort. Marriage, having a baby, parenting… I really could have used a parent in there.

But now… Now not so much. Everything’s already happened. I graduated, figured out some college, failed in a marriage, worked three jobs at a time, suffered from harassment and stalking, all by myself. Figured it out, I guess. Failed over and over again, in a marriage, parenting, life issues. I learned how to seek God for counsel, for direction, for wisdom, for comfort. I eventually got a handle on the anger, and then had to repair the damage I had done. But that Patriot quote, that one stuck with me. I have long since feared that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bear.

So I get the broken father as well. You’re not the person you used to be, but the damage has already been done. You want to restore and repair, somehow fix what got broken, restore what got lost.

It was so painful to watch and realize I was both people: the father and the son.

Tommy wasn’t finished though. He was angry. Two decades of pain and anger and rage came out as he said, “Let me explain something to you. The only thing I have in common with Brendan Conlon is that the pair of us, we have absolutely no use for you.”

This is more than the father can take. The fullness of his sins returning to visit him is in front of his face, and the cost is more than he can bear. He has probably had a lot of years to contemplate his actions, his choices, and the consequences. He has come to peace within himself, but his sons are broken people and he cannot help them, because their brokenness came at his actions. There was no mercy for him from either son, only pain and anger and hatred.

He relapses that night. Drinks for the first time in three years. Gets drunk and breaks down. His raw pain comes out in a tender scene of raging in the book he’s listening to on cassette, yelling, “Stop the ship!” Tommy comes upon the scene and holds Paddy as he breaks under the emotional pain, saying, “We’ll never make it back.” As Tommy holds him, you can hear him muttering, “Oh Tommy, I always loved you. You know that, don’t you Tommy? You and your brother, my two boys. I always loved you.” As Tommy holds him, saying, “shhhh.”

And the cost of our brokenness is so great. The cost of our sins is more than we can bear. They come in all shapes and sizes and packaging, but they still cost us more than we can bear. The curse of family dysfunction, of abuse, of addiction is debilitating. It renders broken children who grow into broken adults. Even when we try, when we want to get it right, we can’t.

This movie was strangely profound in its ability to capture the various aspects of family dysfunction. It captured the pain and anger it leaves the adult child with. It captured the brokenness and despair that follows into adulthood, even “successful” adulthood. The plight of the abuser parent is exposed as well. The conflict that remains after the abuse has taken its toll is almost impossible to describe even if you’ve lived it. But this movie captured it. While the addiction is never shown, its damage is ever present and evident all around.

You hate the dad and pity the dad at the same time. You know he’s being honest when he’s telling Tommy he’s always loved him, but you also know Tommy has never been able to feel that. You feel sorry for him yet you understand it is the consequence of his behaviors.
Brendan handled the dysfunction so differently. He built where Tommy fought. He put one foot in front of the other and rejected the dysfunction of his dad and his upbringing, but a wall was erected in his heart. Pain dwelt there in silence behind walls that hid it or discouraged approach. He fought (MMA) not out of anger but out of love. It was the way he could take care of his family, and that was all that mattered to him. And he wanted his brother. He needed his brother. He knew he had lost him, but now that he was back, he couldn’t bear to lose him again. Tommy’s words to him on the beach were like knives in his heart.

The unforeseeable happens. They have to fight each other for the Sparta championship. No one up to this point even knew they were brothers. Tommy was the clear favorite. Brendan didn’t want to fight him, but this is what he came for. His house was scheduled for foreclosure in days. Tommy fought Brendan with the full fury of his rage. You can sense all of his pain, his anger, his unrelenting rage. After being pummeled for three rounds, Brendan maneuvered Tommy in a position that he dislocated his shoulder. He hated to see his brother’s suffering. He wanted to call the fight. Tommy was alone. His dad had left after the painful confrontation.

Tommy responds in anger, almost chiding him to come out and fight him. You really sense all the ugliness of unhealed pain in Tommy. You see the blindness to right thinking and correct perspective. You almost hate him for how cold and ugly he is, but you know it’s pain he has allowed to manifest as anger – as the only way he could survive.

Brendan begs him not to fight anymore, to tap out. Tommy stubbornly refuses. Their dad walks into the crowd at the next to last round, when Tommy can’t swing his arm, with Brendan yelling, “You don’t have to do this Tommy!” He begs him to stop. Tommy is so blinded by his rage, he can’t stop. You can see the pain on Brendan’s face as he watches his brother suffer. He pins him to the mat and you can feel his heart breaking as he is trying so hard to reach his brother. Tommy is suffering, and Brendan is in his ear, pinned to the mat, saying, “I’m sorry, Tommy. I’m sorry. It’s okay, it’s okay. I love you. I love you, Tommy.” At that, Tommy taps out. It’s the most beautiful scene of the whole movie. Brendan doesn’t care about the win, the money, the title, the hailing of the victor. He pulls his brother to standing, and with his arms around him, helps him out of the ring, with no thought of the belt or victory he has walked away from.

It is only fitting that the setting this movie is shot in is the bloody sport of MMA fighting. For abuse, addiction, neglect and abandonment are bloody acts. They incapacitate the human soul. They alter the face and harden the heart just like MMA hardens the body and disfigures the face.

There is no chart to accurately depict the cost of abuse, for every one suffers differently. There’s no scale for the amount of damage one has borne. It affects every personality in ways unique to that personality, and yet strangely similar in category.

I watch Warrior and it reminds me of similarities in my own childhood and then adulthood. I feel for every single person involved, including the father. Sometimes we project exactly what we received, and we don’t know how to change that. I grieve for the parents that have destroyed their children and damaged their families. I grieve for the adult children, victims of the dysfunction, who are trying to manage successful adult lives with glaring obstacles and hindrances. I honestly don’t know how people overcome without additional damage and dysfunction without God’s intervention. He is what enabled my healing and recovery.

I am on the other side, mostly. I have been healed, and I have sought healing for the damage I have done. My husband and children have been amazing, loving me through the various stages leading to my health and wholeness. They have suffered themselves in the process, but we have learned how to get our healing from God. If you’re a product of abuse, dysfunction, addiction, there’s hope. There’s healing. I know because I’ve experienced it.