What happens when some things are unforgivable?

Spoilers! I will be assuming the reader has already seen the latest episode as I discuss the psychological issues that came up.

How is it possible to manage grief when you love and hate a parent?

Stunned, helpless, frozen in disbelief, and backing into denial: “Is this real or some kind of manipulative fake?”

The characters of HBO’s “Succession” are going through these reactions just as the audience is. In a brilliant stroke by the show’s writers, the children of Logan Roy learn of his health crisis by phone, while Logan is on his private jet over the Atlantic (and skipping his eldest son's wedding).

Until this jolting turn, the plot had a slow momentum, pulling the viewer in and focusing on the mundane work of negotiating relationships around both a big merger and their brother Connor’s wedding. Suddenly, with one call, the expectations of both the characters and the audience are blown apart on the end of a phone. The writers' choice to have the siblings and audience learn of Logan’s health crisis by phone heightens the helplessness, shock, and disbelief. Had the writers chosen to show the events on the plane directly, the emotional intensity of the shock would have been lost.

But what happens next brilliantly and efficiently captures the emotional chaos one can feel around the death of a parent both loved and hated. This episode shows us how our emotions yank us back and forth amid our desperate need for guidance.

But it also shows the power of talking to someone who isn’t there—which is one of the principles of chairwork and self-talk therapy.

Kendall, Shiv, and Roman, in a room on the yacht for Connor’s wedding, receive a call from Tom informing them that their father had a cardiac event, the flight staff are performing chest compressions, and if he puts the phone to Logan’s ear, their father may be able to hear what the children say to him. He's implying these may be their final words to their father. What do you say?

The phone becomes a powerful symbol of death, like a hand-held mobile gravestone.

The siblings each go through a moment of being totally overwhelmed by emotion, lurching from mundane words of comfort to saying “I love you,” to regressing into a brief child state of feeling. As the audience, we feel their helplessness and the desperation of their words, while we all still feel the weight of Logan’s history of emotional manipulation.

Most powerfully, when Kendall Roy takes the phone, he says both “I love you” and “I don’t forgive you.” Kendall’s two statements capture what is called ambivalent loss, a term that describes the experience of both loving and hating the deceased.

Ambivalent Grief

Everyone has loveable qualities as well as problematic ones. So ambivalence usually plays a role in the grieving process, and our tendency is to just focus on the positive qualities of the deceased. We feel that’s the decent thing to do. But obstacles can happen in the grief process when the dead have negative qualities that cannot be ignored.

When dealing with serious ambivalent loss, we can feel a strong pressure to “pick a side” and try to simplify the person’s role in our life. So if we choose to see the person as all bad, we deny the elements of love we have for them, which then get stuck unexpressed. Or if we choose the all-good view, we are haunted by feelings of hate. Whenever we “pick a side,” we are condemning ourselves to be haunted by repressed feelings. This commonly leads to a situation of feeling stuck with unresolved grief.

In the case of the Roy family, Logan operates as the malignant narcissist authoritarian who uses his children’s love for him as a tool for manipulation. Each adult child will have to accept that they were entitled to a loving father, but grew up with a manipulative one. And in Roman's case, it's clear Logan was physically abusive as well.

Trauma and emotional abuse complicate the question of grief even further, which is outside the scope of this post. For now, I'll address the question of managing ambivalent loss.

Using Self-Talk to Manage Grief With Three Steps

Of course, I’m not suggesting that the Roy children would do chairwork immediately after getting the news, but once the dust settles and they are trying to make sense of how they feel, and what they want to do with their new future. In TV time—the next episode, maybe. But if I were talking to one of these characters, here’s what might help them get a sense of control.

Self-talk, using elements of chairwork, can help the person in grief fully express both sides of the self. (You can learn more about my self-talk approach here.) Once you allow yourself to put into words all that you feel, you are giving yourself the chance to take ownership of the story of your grief and the meaning of the loss for you as an individual. Once you take ownership of your grief story, you open the way to drawing personal meaning and significance from the loss.

The self-talk method in this case is straightforward and works with three steps:

1. If you could completely identify with the part of you who hates the deceased, what would you say?

2. If you could completely identify with the part of you who loves the deceased, what would you say? Allow yourself to really let go and say everything while in each mindset. You may want to journal the results.

3. Next, write about how to hold two truths in mind at once. The deceased may have done things that are unforgivable, and you loved him as your father.

You will never know whether the deceased is sorry for, or even understands, the damage they did. But you can start to find closure by accepting the reality of your contradictory feelings, that bad things happened, and that you are in charge of how this story is part of you.

photo credits: Shutterstock: Zsschreiner; Shutterstock: ouh_desire