Post 41 Saturday, 12/28/24
Olympic diving champion, Greg Louganis, shared In his autobiography, Breaking the Surface. He compared John, his diving coach, with his authoritarian adoptive father. “John was a very soft-spoken family man. I was impressed with the way he went camping and hiking with his sons. I envied John's sons, because he was the kind of father I wanted. They spent a lot of time doing the things fathers and sons do together. My father always made me feel like I was putting him out, that I was a bother, that he’d rather be doing other things than spending time with me.” Louganis described a time his father was angry when he was afraid to practice a particular dive for his coach. He had felt unprepared to execute it safely. His father subsequently demanded that he practice the dive at their unheated home pool on an improper, unregulated springboard, and without his coach being present. In response to his reticence, Greg wrote that his father “took off his belt and told me not to talk back. There was only one way to do things--the logical way, his way. I can't remember if he hit me with the belt then or waited until I had my suit on, but he hit me across my backside and legs until it burned. That I can't forget. I didn't want to give my father the satisfaction of seeing me cry, so I held it in.” As an infant, Lougainis was deprived of ongoing care from his birth-mother. To that emotional and relational disengagement was added failure to bond with his adoptive father. His predominant attachment was to his mother. Persistent hungers for paternal love brought Louganis also to relate to other men erotically.
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