Talk:Phillip Strenger/@comment-24.138.10.206-20180910040330/@comment-70.68.221.255-20180910052622

He held on to his family desperately because he thought they were the only thing keeping him sane, making himself blind to the ways he hurt them because if he lost them he lost everything. His ultimate failing is that he wanted easy solutions to impossible problems. Alcohol to forget the horror of war, expiation for the sins he committed both on the battlefield and in his marriage, control of his wife expecting their relationship to heal up on its own - not simply for ego as you pointed out - as long as they stayed together physically even though they deliberately hurt each other and resented how much they both changed from when they first met unable to reconcile those changes, indulgences for his daughter to tell himself he was a good father so he never had to face how terrifying he was to her even if he never struck her directly, and desperately hoping for a second child to magically patch up all of it thinking he was calmed in temperament by his children rather than using them as a safe harbor from his own inner turmoil mistaking that feeling for an improvement in his behaviour. He was a desperate, selfish, and pathetic man, but in the end I agree he's genuinely remorseful and wanted things to be better without knowing how to make them better.

However I think trying to reconcile as a family is doomed to failure. Pinning his hopes and the salvation of his mental state on his family turned it poisonous in the first place. They may survive as individuals with a mutual connection, maybe even rekindle some affection, but as a family they were long done.

Coming from a broken home myself I know better than most that for a wreck like that there's no right answers and no real happy ending, only trying to live with what's already done and trying not to deepen the wounds. To my mind he'll only have peace if he stops holding on so tight. None of them are what they were or what they hoped the other would be. He's a tragic - and for many painfully familiar - character. Stuck in a reciprocated circle of abuse. Not blameless, not solely responsible, not entirely deserving of his woes but digging himself deeper in his desperation to find a light at the end. He is as you said: a human being. We hurt ourselves and each other all too easily.