essay about abusive father

Life with my abusive father

Aug 6, 2019 | survivor-stories

My father thought that it was necessary for children to fear their parents in order to behave. He thought that kids were born bad. He was physically abused as a child by his own father, and then fought in Vietnam, so my father told himself that as long as he didn’t beat us with his fists, that he was doing a good job as a father, and that every other cruelty was a necessary child-rearing tool. My mother never interfered with his cruelty. He belittled and humiliated her every chance he got. He needed to feel smarter and bigger than everyone else. My mother was silent. She did nothing but work all day and night. You could eat off of our floors. She cooked 4 course meals from scratch and the kids were pressured to eat at all times. She never spent any time with her kids except to oversee our own house work.

My father was always angry and always ready to explode at any time. His life was hard, and he thought it was crucial for me and my 4 siblings to understand this from the age of 2 years old on. Just his voice, or the sound of his car pulling up to the house, was enough to make my stomach flip, my body to flush with heat and sweat, my face to tingle, my mind to fill with panic and dread. Every single day. I would go completely still, feeling that if I became wallpaper, he wouldn’t see me. The worst thing imaginable was being noticed, because no good ever came of it.

He created these elaborate, perverse punishments to humiliate us. It was important for everyone to stand and watch the punishments so that the victim would be as humiliated as possible and the rest of us would be more afraid of him. He was unpredictable in order to intentionally destroy our sense of security. A few of his many punishments: making my 3 year old younger sister sit outside naked in the front yard in front of passing cars getting as mosquito bitten as possible to punish her for preferring to be naked while inside the house; screaming at the top of his lungs while threatening our physically and mentally disabled cousin that he would nail his back to the kitchen chair if he did not sit up straight and forcing us to witness all of it when we were in elementary school (he did this many times over the course of several years until we begged our aunt not to let him come over anymore when my father was home); beating our dog in front of us; threatening to kill us, accusing us of trying to make his wife (our mother) want to leave him; calling us “assholes” and “useless”; ripping up our completed homework if he felt our handwriting was too messy (because he himself only had a 5th grade education and couldn’t grasp the math problems on our middle school homework); forcing us to stand silently and watch him work at his desk for no reason; long, threatening tirades where we would have to stand up straight for an hour as he accused us of leaving a broom on the floor of the garage; choking me when I was 13 because he thought my hand-me-down skirt was too short; glaring, hovering, and threatening bodily harm in such a menacing way when we were 2 – 14 years of age that we would throw up and pee our pants; prohibiting us from having school friends; slut shaming us the minute we hit puberty even though none of us has so much as held hands with a boy; listening to our phone conversations when we were 14-19 years old; lying about everything and gas lighting; physically reaching over and kneading our faces with his hands when he decided we looked “too serious” or “angry”.

People outside of our immediate family noticed sometimes. At the age of 9, one of my aunts took us aside when he wasn’t there and asked us “Are you afraid of your father?” We all just tried to brush it off and said we didn’t really care what he did, but at that age I was 100% certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that my father was more than capable of murdering any one of his kids if we went far enough (if we ever got pregnant, yelled back, ran away from home, told our teachers how cruel he was, or outright disobeyed him). Nothing ever came of any pseudo-interventions. It was the 80s and any would-be good samaritans were afraid to question male authority figures, apparently.

We were completely terrified of him. 25 years later, we avoid him at all costs.

He didn’t raise “winners” or “achievers” or strong people as he would have wanted. He raised adults with an array of serious mental, emotional, and health problems: eating disorders, chronic panic and anxiety disorders requiring medication, problems with relationships, substance abuse, people-pleasing problems, over-perfectionism, self-harming behaviors, underachievement, and general struggle and poor health. His offspring turned out to be generally good parents to our own kids, thank God. We now understand what not to do, for the most part.

Parents, do not use shame and fear as child rearing tools. No good will ever come of it. You will raise the opposite kid you were aiming to raise. Trust me. Treat your kids with pure kindness and forgiveness, and I promise they will learn by example.

— Nicolette, Child Abuse Survivor

Children living through abuse, violence and other traumatic events unnecessarily suffer the ill effects for the rest of their lives. These life-altering events are called Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

As the Nation’s Voice for Children, we offer a community of care, support, and free resources for parents and caregivers to prevent other’s from suffering like Nicole. 

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Daddy Issues: Psychology, Causes, Signs, Treatment

Hispanolistic / Getty Images

Why Do Some People Have Daddy Issues?

• Causes of Daddy Issues
• How to Spot Daddy Issues
• Healthy Father-Child Bonds
• Treatment Recommendations

During childhood, some people have distant relationships with their fathers or no relationship at all. Others might be so close that the relationship becomes unhealthy. Both situations can contribute to developing what people call 'daddy issues.' While people use this term often, 'daddy issues' are not an official mental health diagnosis.

This article discusses the psychology behind daddy issues, the signs you or someone you know has them, and why healthy relationships with father-like figures are important. You'll also learn whether or not daddy issues can be treated.

Children who had a troubled relationship with their father while growing up may have difficulty attaching to others as adults. When fathers are neglectful or abusive, this can cause their children to develop an insecure attachment style.

How Do Therapists Feel About the Term 'Daddy Issues?'?

Some therapists may not like the phrase "daddy issues" because a child shouldn’t be blamed for their parent’s problem. Others say it’s understood that all of us are affected by how we were parented.

Unhealthy parent-child relationships may instill mistrust and uncertainty, leading to daddy issues later in life.

Bianca L. Rodriguez, EdM, LMFT

It’s normal to have attachment issues based on your relationship with your father, mother, or primary caregivers. Your early attachment figures create what I call your 'intimacy template'—the foundation of how you relate to others as an adult.

What Causes Someone to Develop Daddy Issues?

The following are a few factors that can potentially play a role in the development of daddy issues.

Unhealthy Close Bonds

While it's wonderful to be close to a father figure, in some cases, this bond can cross the line from being healthy and supportive to being unhealthy and damaging.

If someone has a close bond with their father, this might suggest that their father favored them or took especially good care of them, perhaps even spoiled them. It might also be that they resembled their father more than their siblings and were rewarded for it.

One explanation for developing an unhealthy close bond with one's father figure is if, while growing up, the father was attracted to or treated the child more like a date or romantic partner. This could lead to the child being subjected to mental , emotional , and sexual abuse .

Having a close relationship with your father doesn't necessarily lead to daddy issues. This term refers more so to exceptionally close relationships that are unhealthy or potentially harmful to one's mental health.

An Absentee Father

Instead of having an overly involved father, sometimes people with daddy issues grew up with a father who was never around. The father might have worked a lot, left the family, or couldn’t be counted on due to a drug or alcohol problem.

Dads who are physically distant may also be emotionally distant . An emotionally unavailable father also leaves substantial wounds.

To fill that void, someone might constantly need attention and validation from older men to fill the father role. They might seek this older male's approval, advice, or company to compensate for the lack of physical and emotional closeness they craved as a child.

Sexual Abuse

Young children are vulnerable and trust parents to set appropriate boundaries. Sadly, adults sometimes cross those lines. A parent, stepparent, or another father figure may take advantage of vulnerable children, potentially causing the child to have daddy issues later in life.

Sexual abuse creates complicated feelings in children. They want to love their father figure for taking them out, playing games with them, and caring for them. But they are also in pain because of the abuse.

Children who are abused often blame themselves for what took place. Childhood trauma, neglect, and sexual abuse can cause them to feel shame. It also increases their risk of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

If you are a victim of child abuse or know someone who might be, call or text the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453 to speak with a professional crisis counselor.

For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database .

Signs of Daddy Issues

How do you know whether you or someone you know may have what is commonly referred to as daddy issues? Below are a few signs to look for.

Only Dating Older Men

A person with daddy issues might only be attracted to older males or father-type replacements. If someone had an unhealthy connection to their father or their father was away for various reasons, older men may be more appealing to date or marry.

Being in a relationship with an older person may make them feel as if they have someone who will protect them. They may yearn for the missing love they never received, whether consciously or subconsciously. Or they might seek an older male who is wealthy or flashy, confident, or seemingly in control.

Someone with daddy issues might use dating apps to zero in on only older men who are financially stable and can take care of them.

If they were the "apple of their father's eye," the person with daddy issues may even want to duplicate that relationship and find a partner who worships and adores them. A healthy relationship involves a genuine understanding of and respect for one another as equals—not one partner putting the other on a pedestal.

The danger of a relationship with a vast age difference may lie in a skewed power dynamic. Dating a much older, more successful father figure might force someone into a more passive or victimized position.

Being Jealous or Territorial

If individuals weren’t raised in a consistent, loving environment by their early caregivers, they might struggle to have meaningful relationships as adults. One sign of an attachment issue is being overly anxious or jealous .

Someone with daddy issues may constantly be worried that the person they’re dating is seeing someone else. Or they might imagine that someone is flirting with their partner.

Constantly Needing Reassurance

Rooted in a fear of being abandoned , those with daddy issues sometimes have an insatiable need to receive love. This fear might take the form of requiring constant affection, constant attention , or constant approval.

While the person is genuinely anxious for a deep connection and attachment, they often go about getting it in unhealthy ways. They might repeatedly ask their partner if they are angry at them, for example, or always question whether they made the right decision. Over time, this can take a toll on the relationship.

Abandonment Fears

Another sign of someone with daddy issues is wanting to be in a relationship at any cost. They might jump from one relationship to another because they're afraid to be alone.

However, people who fear being abandoned may inadvertently drive their partners away if they constantly need reassurance or if they consistently question their partner's love for them.

Repeating Toxic Patterns

People with daddy issues might be so accustomed to a dysfunctional relationship that they duplicate it over time.

So, it's possible that someone with daddy issues can consistently seek out toxic relationships because it's familiar to them.

Why Healthy Relationship With Father Figures Are Important

The importance of fathers being involved in their families is evident. For instance, some studies have found fewer behavioral problems in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who spent a higher quantity of time with their fathers.

Conversely, increased time and involvement with a father in at-risk families don’t contribute to a healthy dynamic. Instead, it can increase adverse behavior problems, especially if the father is physically abusive.

Scientific evidence shows that a physically abusive father can traumatize adolescents and lead to anxiety , depression , and social withdrawal . The adolescent may also mimic their father’s aggressive and violent behavior after spending more time together.

Quality Time Is Essential

Spending lots of time with a father isn’t always ideal. Instead, having more quality time with a healthy father figure may be more critical.

Can 'Daddy Issues' Be Treated?

In short, yes. For instance, there are ways to cope with an insecure attachment style by reconciling childhood experiences related to daddy issues and finding new ways to deal with insecurities. A good therapist can help guide those struggling with this.

While you can’t change your past, you can change how you view your childhood and yourself.

Work to Resolve Attachment Issues

To resolve attachment issues and improve emotional regulation skills , those with daddy issues are encouraged to seek out the assistance of a qualified therapist. Counseling can help those wounded by their relationships with their father find new ways to have a healthy and loving partner relationship in the future.

In her practice, Bianca Rodriguez works to identify a client's attachment style and assess how it impacts their current relationships. If their attachment style impedes their ability to have healthy relationships, she helps them make changes to those behaviors. "This often includes rebalancing core beliefs about their worth, ability to trust others and feel in control of their actions," Rodriguez says.

Behere AP, Basnet P, Campbell P.  Effects of family structure on mental health of children: A preliminary study .  Indian J Psychol Med . 2017;39(4):457-463. doi:10.4103/0253-7176.211767

Kim SH, Baek M, Park S. Association of parent-child experiences with insecure attachment in adulthood: A systematic review and meta-analysis . J Fam Theory Rev . 2021;13(1):58-76. doi:10.1111/jftr.12402

Ullman SE, Peter-Hagene Lc, Relyea M. Coping, emotion regulation, and self-blame as mediators of sexual abuse and psychological symptoms in adult sexual assault . J Child Sex Abuse . 2014;23(1):74-93. doi:10.1080/10538712.2014.864747

Rodriguez LM, DiBello AM, Øverup CS, Neighbors C. The price of distrust: Trust, anxious attachment, jealousy, and partner abuse . Partner Abuse . 2015;6(3):298-319. doi:10.1891/1946-6560.6.3.298

Climie EA, Mitchell K. Parent-child relationship and behavior problems in children with ADHD . Int J Development Disabil . 2017;63(1):27-35. doi:10.1080/20473869.2015.1112498

Yoon S, Bellamy JL, Kim W, Yoon D. Father involvement and behavior problems among preadolescents at risk of maltreatment .  J Child Fam Stud . 2018;27(2):494-504. doi:10.1007/s10826-017-0890-6

By Barbara Field Barbara is a writer and speaker who is passionate about mental health, overall wellness, and women's issues.

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

How I Learned to Forgive My Father

When you grow up in a home with an alcoholic, you learn very quickly how to stay invisible.

I spent my younger years desperately avoiding my father. Fortunately, he worked a 9-5 job and he usually managed to make it to work. That meant safe stretches of the day when we didn’t see each other. But weeknights and weekends were anyone’s guess. As soon as my father reached for his first whisky highball, he morphed from a grumpy, depressed man into a volatile, abusive stranger.

My father was not a hitter—much. But when he was drinking, he was a slow-brewing mess of volatility, the muscles in his jaw tightening, his eyes narrowing, his voice getting louder and full of expletives. I would go to my room and hide. Sometimes this worked, but more often he would find me and frighten me with his threats, delivered with smelly breath and slurred speech.

Part of me realized something was wrong with him—but, as a child, I wasn’t sure what it was. I would see him sitting alone in the evenings playing solitaire for hours on end, nursing his highball and smoking cigarette after cigarette. While the rest of us went to church on Sunday mornings, my dad would stay behind, sleeping off a hangover. He would yell at the TV while watching football, and punish us severely if we shirked our chores. Though he had friends who would occasionally hang out with him and joke—especially if they too were drinkers—my mother was the social one who drew people to her. My dad scared them away.

When I became a teenager—and my sisters both went off to college—I faced the full brunt of his disease and depression alone. I was getting straight A’s in school—but I was chastised for being lazy. I had lots of friends—but they were rude or trouble, according to my dad. When I got a scholarship to go abroad the summer of my junior year, my dad assured me it would be a waste of time. Nothing I did was good enough.

Living with an alcoholic can make you feel on edge, as if you are living with a grenade that might go off at any moment. It can cause you to retreat, to avoid calling attention—even positive attention—to yourself. I felt deeply ashamed of my father. I also felt ashamed of myself, as if I were responsible for his abuse. I later learned this was a very normal response to living with someone who is an alcoholic. At the time, it tore at my self-confidence.

Eight Essentials for Forgiveness

Forgiveness is a long and often challenging process. These steps may help along the way.

You’d think that I would have learned to tune him out, and, to some extent, I tried. I looked for parental figures in other places—teachers, friends’ parents, my pastor at church. However, it’s nearly impossible not to look to your parents to reflect back who you are in the world. If they tell you there’s something wrong with you, you assume there is. I would often respond to his criticisms by working harder, desperately trying to please him or, maybe more truthfully, make him eat his words. This was a losing battle. No matter how well I did, he aimed his spotlight on all of my flaws.

Growing up, I found it very difficult to trust other people’s friendship or love for me. Later, when I started working, I’d cower in the face of criticism, worried that I’d been found out. I know that many people get that “impostor syndrome” when they stretch themselves at work and worry about their qualifications. But my experience of inadequacy infused everything I did. It made me scared to commit to anything, to make sure I had an escape planned, in case someone tried to humiliate me.

It wasn’t until I reached adulthood that I finally started to disentangle myself from my dad. I went to a counselor after having a mild nervous breakdown at college and I learned something about alcoholism. It helped me to understand my father’s disease and how it had affected him and, by extension, me. I was someone who felt I needed to be a people-pleaser, who feared making mistakes, who had trouble committing to people and plans. I felt uncomfortable standing out in any way, because I’d learned it wasn’t ever safe to be seen. But I also learned that I wasn’t alone in being this way. Many children of alcoholic parents adopt the same coping strategies.

Seeing a therapist helped me to take things into my own hands. I started to set limits with my father. If I came home for the holidays, I would stay for only a couple of days, then find a friend’s place—or even a nearby hotel—to stay. If he wanted to drive the family somewhere for a dinner out, I would drive myself, not wanting to be in the car with him post-drinking. If he got mad, I walked away. I might have cut off all communication, but I wanted to see my gentle, loving mother, and she was still living with him…despite my attempts to convince her to leave.

Greater Good Chronicles

Eventually, my father’s depression overwhelmed him, and his drinking escalated. After 42 years of marriage, he angrily divorced my mother, blaming her for his problems, spitefully cutting her from his will. It was an outcome that I’d always wanted. Even so, it took me by surprise. I’d always thought it would be my mother who would leave, not my dad. Still, their divorce allowed me to spend more time with my mother and avoid seeing my father. In fact, I saw very little of him after that. Until something shifted.

I had moved from Santa Barbara to Berkeley in 1990, eventually meeting my husband and settling down. It was probably when we had our first child that I began to have a little empathy for my father. I realized how hard it could be to find yourself reducing your own dreams and ambitions in order to raise your kids. This happened to me, and it caused some inner and outer conflicts in my life. Facing my own need to adapt to these changes made me a little more open to thinking about my dad’s story and how much he’d had to give up to raise us.

I knew that when my dad was a young man, he’d wanted to teach high school, but he ended up working in the insurance industry—a boring job, for him—to make a better living. I also knew my parents had had a difficult time conceiving children because of blood incompatibility and that their first child died shortly after birth. My dad had to care for my depressed mother and persevere through that tragedy in order to have my sisters and me. I also knew that he didn’t get along well with his own parents and that my grandmother was often harsh with him when we’d visit. These disappointments must have been hard to manage for someone like my dad, I realized, and that gave me insight into his struggles.

Still, I didn’t reach out to him much. I think I felt more sympathy than empathy for him at that point—he was a sorry person, but not someone I really cared for. Then, late one night, he called me out of the blue.

He was crying, which shocked me. I could tell he’d been drinking, and I wasn’t sure it was wise to talk. Still, I listened as he confessed that he’d figured out my mother wasn’t to blame for his depression, and he wished he could take back his request for a divorce. Instead of encouraging him on this fruitless path, I suggested he find a therapist. I was utterly surprised when he did.

The therapist helped my father understand his depression and encouraged him to stop drinking. This was not something he truly wanted to do. He especially didn’t want to go to AA meetings, where people talked about God—something he didn’t believe in. He went anyway and found some support to help him stop drinking. And, maybe more importantly, he began to learn about some of the costs of his alcoholism on his relationships with other people.

Some months after he’d told me he’d begun counseling, he called me at work to tell me that his therapist had given him a homework assignment involving me. I was sitting at a desk full of papers, preparing for an evening talk and not really in the mood to participate. But he pushed on, telling me that this therapist had assigned him to call up each of his daughters and ask us if we’d thought he loved us when we were children.

“So, did you think I loved you as a child?” he asked, as if reading from a standardized questionnaire. I had no idea my sisters had received similar calls.

“No, Dad, I didn’t,” I said. “Maybe I knew it on some intellectual plane, but I didn’t feel it.” That stopped the conversation cold. There were no follow-up questions, and he quickly made an excuse to get off the phone. But, surprisingly, I think this was the beginning of our true reconciliation. He needed to hear that truth, and I’d needed to say it.

He began to ask me to meet him for lunch occasionally. I obliged. He liked to meet me near my office at the Harbor Restaurant in San Rafael—a small, casual café on the water and, according to my dad, a “great place.” We would talk about our lives, my dad slowly learning how to ask questions and listen to my answers, rather than cutting me off with a snarky remark. He showed interest, keeping track of the stories I told of my kids, occasionally delivering a small present to me that I could give to them. He was trying—albeit one step forward, one step back—to be nice. To be loving.

This is when he started to tell me more stories about his life, too. He told me that when he was a child, he’d never felt love from either of his parents. He did poorly in school, probably because it was hard for him to sit still and concentrate, for which he was often punished. One time, when he was very young, he got hold of some matches and accidentally started a fire at his house. For that, his mother beat him severely.

As a teen, he wanted to go to work and probably would have dropped out of high school except for the encouragement of a teacher who helped him apply himself and get good grades. This allowed him to be offered a spot in officer’s training school after enlisting in the navy during World War II. Luckily, he saw little action before the end of the war, and his stint in the navy allowed him to go to Stanford and earn his M.A. in History. It was around that time that he met and married my mother, who came from his hometown. My grandmother tried to talk my mother out of marrying her son—a rebuke that stung.

Though this background explained a lot, the stories concerning moral stands my father took as a young man most changed my view of him. When he was a senior in high school, he protested loudly as the student-body president of his school—a Japanese-American boy—was carted away with his family to a detention center. Watching this grave injustice deeply affected him, and he went out of his way to make friends with our Japanese-American neighbors during my childhood in Richmond, sampling the octopus they served him for dinner and helping them organize cultural parties.

One time, when he was an officer on a boat at the end of the war and was told to sail his ship up the coast during a storm, he questioned his superior officer’s order and tried to delay moving the boat until it was safe to do so. This earned him a disciplinary rebuke. Another time, as a high school teacher in Taft, California, during the 50s, he’d given his students a lesson in race relations by assigning them to go downtown and report on the mistreatment of African Americans in the community. This civics lesson cost him his job, but he felt justified in opening up his students’ eyes.

These stories gave me insights into my father that I was never able to see through his disease. He’d had a hard life without the love of his parents, but he’d tried to do the right thing. He was disheartened by injustice, but he’d tried to make a difference. He wasn’t a perfect dad growing up, but he tried to make sure we were cared for, in his imperfect way. He had trouble expressing his love, but he’d had no good role models to follow.

When my mother died some years later, my father offered to help me sort through her things, taking them to Goodwill for me and carefully sending me the receipts. He volunteered to store my mother’s piano, which, though he didn’t want it, I couldn’t bear to give away. He attended the memorial and listened with moist eyes to my tribute to her. Months later, when I still felt the grief hot in my heart, he held me while I cried. I think it must have happened for him then—when he saw my pain at losing my mother—that he decided he would try to make his own death less painful for me. He bought a plan from the Neptune Society, which would ensure that someone would come for his body and cremate him when his time came. He wrote up explicit instructions, taking the decision out of my hands. He made sure all of his papers were in order and went over his will with me several times.

I remember he asked me once if it would be OK if he had someone else bury him, someone besides his three daughters. He didn’t want people crying over his grave after he was gone. But I’d told him no. I needed that time to help me let go, to give my kids a chance to say goodbye, to process my grief. I cried as I told him this and saw rare tears in his eyes. So, he cut the funeral and the memorial, but gave me that time by his graveside. His gift to me.

Replacing Anger with Compassion

Loosen the grip of anger by changing the way we think about the person who hurt us.

It wasn’t easy to forgive the man who had so bruised my self-esteem—indeed, my entire sense of self. But, as I came to have more empathy for him, I began to naturally feel forgiveness . Being truthful about my pain and standing up for myself probably helped, too. And it was important to hear his stories and appreciate him for who he was, rather than simply focusing on all that was wrong with him. Though none of this erased his past abuse, it at least gave me some perspective. It allowed me to see that, late in his life, my father had tried to show me he cared. 

When my father eventually died, my sisters and I cleaned out his house. I found a note he must have written a few days before he died. It was a list of things to do, written on the back of an envelope in his nearly illegible scrawl. I knew the day he wrote it, because it was by his bed with the date at the top, as if he needed to write the date down to remember it. The list included reminders to take his pills, to call his doctor, and other mundane activities. At the bottom of his list were the words: “Call Jill. Tell her not to worry.”

About the Author

Jill Suttie

Jill Suttie, Psy.D. , is Greater Good ’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good .

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Four Abusive fathering

• Published: May 2011
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This chapter discusses the author's own exploratory, qualitative UK research with twenty domestically violent fathers. Overall the study aimed to look at fathers' own perspectives on their violence, its impact on their relationships with children, and their parenting practices. One object of this research was therefore to provide an insight into violent fathers' own views of their parenting and the meanings they give to it when still living with families or in the context of post-separation child contact, in order to highlight the need for policymakers and professionals to pay greater attention to these areas when making decisions about children's safety and wellbeing. A second aim was to look at the impact of perpetrator programmes for domestically violent men on the fathers' understanding of the effects of their violence, since all the fathers who agreed to participate in the research were drawn from such programmes.

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Dear Therapist: I Don’t Talk to My Dad Anymore, but I’m Afraid to Tell My Family Why

Would it make things better or worse to tell them how he abused me, more than 10 years later?

Dear Therapist,

My parents divorced when I was very young, and afterward my father began sexually abusing me, which went on for years. I never told anyone in my family, and once I moved away from home I cut all contact with my father. I’m in my late 20s now, and my life is significantly better without him in it.

The problem is that my not talking to my father has started to raise questions. Recently my mother brought up the fact that I haven’t spoken to him in years and said something to the effect of “What could he possibly have done?” On the one hand, I’ve been through enough counseling to feel that I don’t owe anyone an explanation for not wanting a toxic person in my life, and bringing it up now, 10-plus years after the fact, wouldn’t change what happened. I’m also not emotionally prepared for the level of uproar it would cause if I started talking about it (my family are fabulous gossips).

On the other hand, I wonder if I should come forward. Many members of my mother’s family still have a friendly (if not especially close) relationship with my father, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t hurt me a little. My father has a new wife and new kids, and there’s certainly a vindictive part of me that wants to damage that under the guise of “They deserve to know.” I don’t have any reason to think my mother’s family wouldn’t believe me. And I know for a fact that there was at least one conversation between my mother, my father, and his mother about some concerns they had when I was in my early teens.

Should I let sleeping dogs lie, or is this secret something I need to share?

Dear Anonymous,

I’m so sorry that this happened to you, and I’m glad to hear that you’ve been able to talk about the abuse with a trusted therapist. I also sympathize with your current dilemma: Not telling anyone about a parent’s sexual abuse often makes the person feel even more alone in an already isolating experience, and tends to perpetuate the shame and confusion from the abuse even long after it has ended. At the same time, it can be difficult to decide whom to tell and why, because of some of the consequences you’ve anticipated in your letter. But whatever one chooses, because victims have such a lack of control during abuse, it’s important that they control the telling. In other words, this decision is about your comfort, a consideration that wasn’t given to you as a child. So let’s look at what would be helpful for you at this point in your life.

First, you’re right that you don’t owe anyone an explanation, but I don’t think that your choice is binary: say nothing or disclose everything. If you don’t offer any information to your family members about why you don’t speak to your father, they’ll probably fill in the blanks, often with inaccurate assumptions—that you’re angry about the divorce or that your father left and started another family; that you’re ungrateful; that you’re acting like a teenager in your 20s and will grow out of this in a few years. Whatever it is, you’re likely to be mischaracterized and misunderstood, blamed for something that isn’t your fault.

One option, if you’re not comfortable telling your family members about the abuse, is to give an explanation, revealing as much or as little as you’d like. You might say something like, “I know you want to know why I don’t talk to Dad. Please know that I’ve thought long and hard about this decision, but for reasons that are personal and that I’d rather not talk about—and that Dad is fully aware of—this is what I have to do. I hope you’ll respect my decision and trust that, even though I’d rather not share the details, it wasn’t a decision I made lightly.”

Remember that whatever you choose to say now doesn’t prevent you from sharing more information later. I say this because it’s clear from your letter that there’s also a part of you that wants your family members to know what happened. Yes, you want them to know what the man they remain friendly with did to you, and you want his new family to know as well, because it wouldn’t be fair for him to get away with his actions while you have been suffering their consequences. But I think you also want to come out of hiding and finally be seen after feeling so harrowingly unseen for all these years. It takes a lot of emotional energy to keep a painful secret, and when it comes to sexual abuse, the secret, like a toxic bond between the abuser and the abused, can keep you feeling imprisoned by the perpetrator’s power. In that way, the secret still controls you. But if the secret’s out, that bond is finally broken.

Of course, often in families—and it sounds like this might be the case in yours, given the conversation you mention—the secret isn’t a secret at all. Instead, a family culture exists in which keeping the secret protects not just the abuser, but the entire family system. Bringing the abuse to light threatens the status quo, and even if the family is split up, as yours is, keeping the secret could still preserve that equilibrium.

For instance, your mother or grandmother may not have wanted to believe any abuse was occurring, because as long as they told themselves that everything was fine, they wouldn’t have to report your father, which might have led to his conviction, a lack of child support, enormous embarrassment or shame in the community, or other consequences the family didn’t want to face. But in order to rationalize keeping the secret—in essence, sacrificing the victim—they pretend that the secret doesn’t exist.

I mention this because if you do tell your mother, it will help to first get clear about what you want her to know and why—and to be prepared if she’s unable or unwilling to give it you. For instance, do you have questions that you want answered, such as what your mother knew or suspected? Would you like her to express remorse in some way for not having done anything to protect you when she had concerns about what was going on? If she denies the conversation you mention, how do you want to respond? Would you like her to now stand by you and support you as you tell other family members (if that’s what you decide to do)? Do you wish that once you have this conversation, she and the rest of your family will also cut ties with your father and inform his new family of his abuse? How will you feel if they don’t?

These questions are important for you to answer because sometimes people hope that by telling the people who should have protected them, these people will take their heads out of the sand and provide some form of healing. Sometimes that happens, but in case it doesn’t, it helps to go into the conversation with a different orientation: that the telling is being done just for you—for the psychic relief in letting the secret out, and of not colluding in the family’s fiction but instead shedding the helplessness and taking action, of which this telling might just be a first step.

If you come around to that orientation, the question of whether and whom you should tell should seem easier to sort out. Maybe you’ll inform your family about the abuse, either gradually or all at once. Maybe you’ll consult an attorney and see what your options are (after all, there’s a chance that any children in his house are suffering as you did). Maybe a weight will be lifted by telling a trusted friend or romantic partner about your experience—somebody who doesn’t have stakes attached to believing you—and getting the supportive response you deserve. At this point in your life, you get to decide what you want to do with your experience, and as you continue to heal, that’s going to be far more important than how anyone in your family reacts to it.

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

About the Author

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Dear Therapist: My Relatives Don’t Believe My Parents Were Abusive

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Cheating on My Parents

My own abusive mother and father were being replaced, and they knew it..

I did plenty of things I knew I shouldn’t have done in that red-brick colonial in suburban Georgia: smeared grime from the unfinished half of the basement on the walls of the finished half; spilled ruby red sweet-and-sour sauce on the pearly carpet. During a sleepover, a friend even knocked a hole in the sheetrock as we rode sleeping bags down the basement stairs like sleds. It could’ve been any of those things or none of them that precipitated the beating I received from my father one night near Christmas, when I was 8 years old.

I woke up still aching from the lashes, which had left bruised stripes on my back and thighs and forearms in the pattern of the braided belt my father wore. My mind was addled, ringing, half-delirious. At school, I couldn’t sit comfortably, couldn’t concentrate or settle down. Eventually, with a little coaxing, I told a teaching assistant what had happened. From there I was sent to the guidance counselor, to whom I repeated the story.

That night, I told my mother about my disclosure. She frantically demanded that I take it all back. “Go see the counselor again tomorrow,” she said. “Tell her that you lied because you were mad at your dad.” Otherwise, she said, things would be much worse.

For as long as I could remember, my father had been physically abusive and my mother nervous and cowed by him, an unreliable guardian. He constantly threatened to leave her, something she was terrified of. He bullied her incessantly in front of my brother and me, once making her repeat the phrase “I’m a dumbass” ten times because she had mistaken the hours of a Chinese restaurant, leaving him without food on the table when he got home from work. For me, there had been beatings and threats, nighttime lockouts and odd cruelties — one afternoon my father stepped on my bare feet with his tennis shoes on; another time he strangled me after a brief, stumbling chase up the stairs.

Still, I was desperately afraid of what would happen if I finally transgressed too much — whatever that might mean, and whatever it would entail. The consequences were always nebulous. Maybe my father would leave us, and we would be poor. Maybe they would send me away somewhere, disown me. Maybe they would just stop loving me — you have to understand that this was the only kind of love I had ever known, and that it was the only sort of love I thought existed, with the rest being myth or fiction — and things would get even worse, as my father often warned they could.

So the next day, I went to the guidance counselor’s office and told her that I had lied. When an agent from Child Protective Services arrived later that day, I met with her in a small room in the school’s administrative office and reiterated that I hadn’t told the truth. I was just mad at my dad, I said, just a liar. She still made a home visit, where my mother chatted merrily with her about her interior decorating, inviting her to view the tasteful Christmas wreaths and garlands she had adorned the banisters with that year. Whether the agent really believed me or my mother, I never heard anything further from her.

And that was the beginning of my shitty adult life. The abuse didn’t stop, but my sense that I could do anything about it — which had kindled , I think , a small ember of comfort — had been abruptly extinguished. Resignation became the organizing principle of my entire existence.

Between the bouts of violence, my father complained often and dramatically that I didn’t love him, that I was surly and withdrawn, that I never gave hugs. Everything I did was wrong: the way I dressed, my friends (and sometimes lack thereof), the fact that I was squat, plain, and unlovely. The fact that I had told the guidance counselor about the abuse was adduced frequently as evidence of my meanness and disloyalty. My mother felt sorry for me, and sometimes furtively sent my brother to my room with painkillers to pass along after my father had beaten me. But that was the extent of her pity.

All throughout my childhood, there was a deep disjointedness inside me, something permanently bruised and always faintly aching, but it had been there so long I understood it as a native part of me. I was just melancholy, I thought, when I did think about it. Usually, I was just getting by. I assumed that was all there was.

I don’t believe that every present torment is caused by something in the past. My father likely has some kind of personality disorder or a cluster of them, and would almost certainly be a difficult person no matter his upbringing. But it always seemed to me that his childhood had limited his resources for dealing with everyday life: He had grown up in an appallingly unstable, abusive home, the subject of a custody battle between his parents — a mentally ill woman and her alcoholic husband — and his grandparents. His grandparents eventually lost, but it was too late for him to integrate fully into his family. That primal loss seemed to color his entire worldview. In small disappointments, he saw total abjection; in minor setbacks, an unending abyss; in interpersonal conflicts, complete and irrevocable abandonment. In the end, he just didn’t have much love to give.

“I hated being a parent,” he said to me, once. “It was hard. It was like being a ship captain and having to — get everybody to shore, on lifeboats.”

“I don’t love you,” he told me on another occasion, when I was maybe 13, “I don’t want you.” I wailed in animal pain that has never really abated.

In my teenage years, I began to wonder if the echoing darkness his parents had instilled in him had been passed on to me. I suspected it had been. I hated the features we shared — the black, round eyes, the snub nose, the diminutive chin. Maybe I had always felt strange and lonely because I was like him: fundamentally unlikable. Maybe I found it hard to trust because I myself was devious, unworthy of trust. Maybe I would never feel any other way.

When I was old enough, I tried to get away. I left the state for college; I even left the country for a time. Trips home for breaks were often miserable and tumultuous. Even as I graduated with honors and scholarships and found a little high-profile work, my father remained identically disposed toward me. Everything I did was still wrong, my husband wasn’t good enough, and my work was an embarrassment. Eventually, all of the physical violence tapered off, and only the occasional bitter, hours-long tirades remained, whenever I happened to see my parents.

And that, I accepted. The relationship wasn’t great, I reasoned, but they were the only parents I had. It wasn’t all bad, anyway; sometimes things were fine, and we were relatively happy — there were peaceful nights, and occasionally, laughter. At least my children would have grandparents, I decided; at least I would have some place to go if things really fell apart. I knew they would welcome that — that they almost hoped I would fail — based on the fact that my older brother had never left home, and that they seemed to like it that way, presiding over him as a permanent child. There were worse things, I thought.

I eventually settled with my husband far from them, in a city on the east coast. They followed me.

They began conspiring to move nearby when I got pregnant, without really consulting me. The full-court press was driven by my mother, who was determined to be a part of my child’s life, as though she needed another chance to get it right. Accordingly, she mustered courage to defy my father she had never been able to summon when I needed it.

The two of them had a hellacious fight over moving north, which erupted in a hotel in my city after a day spent unsuccessfully house hunting. I learned of its particulars only through occasional text messages from my mother and phone calls from my brother. My father had banished my mother from their bedroom as soon as they returned home, I understood, and she was sleeping in the guest room, with my brother guarding her.

One night during this marathon struggle, my mother called me in tears to tell me that certain things were going to come out during the divorce that she wanted me to hear from her first. My father would say she was a whore, she warned. He would say she had group sex with strange men, so she wouldn’t get anything in the split. She told me none of it was true, that it was dirty talk she invented for him, but that while he enjoyed it in the moment, he had become paranoid that much of it was true over time. I told her to leave him, to get away as soon as possible, and for a few weeks I thought she might listen.

In the end, I think my father realized he had little chance of survival without my mother — at least, no chance of persisting in the lifestyle to which he’s accustomed. The fact that she has always seen to the cooking and cleaning and the furnishing of his odd little comforts — like a boozy slushy he’s enjoyed in the same cup, with the same spoon, nightly since I can remember — likely convinced him that he couldn’t lose her. They reached a compromise: abandoning the search for a home in my city, instead relocating to the distant exurbs.

They bought a house an hour and a half from my apartment, and agreed that my mother entering menopause had caused a temporary madness which resulted in the cataclysmic fight. It was the kind of myth-making that allowed a shared life to continue, like the recasting of the Civil War as a grand tragedy rather than a triumph of good over evil. It was similarly discomfiting to closely consider.

We drifted out to their house on weekends, for holidays. I still found it nearly impossible to tell them no, and usually came when called. It was often hard to endure, with my father berating me or my mother for infractions imagined or real, and always quietly sulking that my husband ignored him. He had wanted my husband to defer to him as a kind of paterfamilias, shaking his hand and addressing him, maybe, as mister. But my husband mostly refused to speak to him.

My husband never asked me why I still had anything to do with my family. But I knew he wondered, and I know that you must wonder. So do I.

It had something to do with hope, or a perversion of it. I maintained a thin, wilting desire for things to change, long after I knew they wouldn’t. There was also a sick sense of sunk costs: I had already put so much into loving these people, desperately loving them, that I didn’t want to give up so late. I knew that if I managed to finally disengage from my father, I would lose my mother, too. He would make her choose him or me, and she would choose him. She always had.

And then there was fear. What if I disengaged from them, and he retaliated somehow, against me or my mother? What if they abandoned me much more decisively than I could abandon them — refusing to help me if something catastrophic happened?

That terror heightened with the birth of my daughter, whose arrival struck me with a kind of vulnerability I had never known before, as though I were wearing my heart on the outside. I knew I needed help, or that I would, eventually — some advice in the night, or emergency daycare during a sudden sick day. Didn’t it take a village?

And they wanted — urgently, frantically, madly — to see her.

Letting them have contact with her was an agonizing decision. If they hurt her, I thought, I would detonate every explosive I had always left dormant: I would call the police, I would retain a lawyer, I would write this story under my own name. I would tell every one of his asshole corporate golfing buddies: This son of a bitch beats up little girls. I would run a garden hose into the gas tank of that precious dove-gray Volvo; I would soak their drapes in kerosene and set their house on fire.

But I had reasons to believe they wouldn’t. That abusive parents often target a particular child to the exclusion of siblings and grandchildren is a well-known, if little understood, phenomenon. My father had occasionally beaten my brother growing up — once standing over him and lashing him with a belt each time he made a mistake reciting multiplication tables — but never with the zeal and malice he reserved for me. Why? One study from the 1970s found little support for the idea that abused children are different in significant ways from their non-abused siblings. “These children are, however,” the study’s authors wrote, “ viewed more negatively by their parents than their non-abused siblings.” Why would that be the case? The authors answered that, too: “They are more likely to remind their parents in negative ways of themselves or others …”

The two-way mirror of child abuse: They look at you and see themselves, you look at yourself and see them. They destroy themselves in you, and you destroy yourself in despair or retaliation. Maybe the one thing we always had in common was hating his features in my face.

By my late 20s, I was a writer of modest means and relevance. I was thrilled if a speaking gig rolled in, and especially so when I didn’t have to pick up my own travel or lodging. When a suburban church in New England reached out to me about giving a talk in the fall of 2017 and mentioned that a parishioner would be willing to put me up for the night, I was eager. It was better than shelling out for a hotel, and cutting my honorarium in half. Any small windfall helped with the rent.

So I boarded the train with my suitcase and my baggage, both of which I felt were discreet and unobtrusive. I didn’t give much thought to Jen, the parishioner I would be staying with. She had emailed me after I had agreed to stay in her home. “I’m here to offer you as much or as little hospitality as you’d like,” she wrote. “We’d be delighted to have you stay with us, we really would. We are also happy to feed you, drive you, etc. Want you to feel welcome but not crowded, of course.” Extreme politesse, I thought. They have that in New England; it doesn’t mean they like you.

This permanent suspicion of being secretly hated was learned; so was its behavioral consequence in my nonstop, unsolicited apologies.

My train arrived after dark, on a cool evening. Jen and her husband pulled up outside the station in a dark SUV, and helped me put my luggage in the back. We chatted idly on the ride home, about shows we liked and social media. We ate in their kitchen, a vibrant, airy nook in their beautiful house, with its hardwood floors and walls full of framed artwork, some by professionals, some by their children. A rainbow-striped runner raced up the stairs all the way to a cozy attic room with a bed, a television, and a vase of fresh flowers on the nightstand, placed there for me.

For me. I marveled at the three stems of blue hydrangeas that night after dinner, chatting with my husband online. This place is great, I said. They have the life I want to live. 

On the train ride home, I dreamed of their house, their lives. Jen was blonde and blue-eyed and beautiful; her teenage daughter was, too, and she kept an iguana in a terrarium in her room, which she showed me, his raspberry-dotted mouth and searching eyes. Jen’s son was 12, funny and confident, easily the most agreeable person of that age I had ever met. And Alan, Jen’s husband, was magnetic, with a wry sense of humor and a deep, resonant voice. The night I slept in their attic, Alan texted me to let me know he was leaving a soda outside my door. He didn’t want to scare me, he said, lurking around up there.

Jen and Alan’s kids loved them, and Jen and Alan loved their kids: kissed them, hugged them, stroked their hair. Jen’s son and daughter seemed to lean into her occasionally for touch, seeking that safe harbor, gentle reassurance. They played video games and ate SpaghettiOs, too, rode their bicycles with their friends, went to choir practice and played sports. And I thought — If I had what you had, I would never do anything else but lean into her, just basking in all that love. 

Pain is didactic; it imparts knowledge. Abused children learn that the people who ought to love them unconditionally do not, and from that they deduce that they themselves are unlovable. But the fact of being unlovable never abrogates the need for love. Some abused kids look for it everywhere, some give up looking for it altogether, and some do both at once, desperately seeking love while convinced they can’t receive it. I had always been in that latter category, seeing shades of loving fathers and mothers everywhere I looked — in teachers, professors, managers, and mentors — but never trusting that their kindness was anything more than transactional or perfunctory. I told myself the same was true of Jen and Alan.

But a few days later, Alan sent me a message.

“My daughter whom you met,” he said, “announced to me that you’re who she wants to be. That’s never happened before. So, good work.”

I was astonished. My own parents didn’t want me to be their daughter; the idea that anyone could want to be me, or countenance their child wanting such, was absurd. I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything.

Alan waited a week before trying again.

He sent me a link to a video of my talk. “Did you like it!?” I asked, wondering why he was still speaking to me.

“It was like looking into the face of God and hearing the words, ‘you are my most perfect creation.’”

How strange, I thought, and resolved not to reply.

A few days later, Alan sent me another note, about a playwright I liked. I sent him an article about the playwright, puzzled by this effort at conversation. “Thx for sending this,” Alan said. Surely something was up. Who likes receiving unsolicited links?

The next day, Alan wrote to me about interesting goings-on at work. I haltingly replied. That night, feeling like I should disclose this odd correspondence, I told my husband.

“Why would this guy keep messaging me?” I asked. “Must be some kind of sex thing, surely.”

“Maybe,” my husband said neutrally. “Maybe he just wants to talk to you.”

There was nothing to do but see where it went. I liked chatting with Alan. He was in his mid-40s, with a good career and a curious, searching mind. He was witty and weird and self-effacing; he liked pulpy movies from the 1980s as well as high-minded nonfiction. We considered Martha Nussbaum and Mary Karr, mulled over Inside Llewyn Davis, mused about the news, and shared congruent politics.

And he complimented me — excessively, I thought, and often.

Once, I worried aloud I might be becoming a mommy blogger. “Good God!” Alan wrote instantly. “You’re not a mommy-blogger! I know those people. You’re 1,000 times smarter, more caring, and more aware.”

On and on like that. I felt ashamed of myself, thinking I was allowing myself to be taken in. One of these days, I thought, he’s going to ask for a picture of my tits. 

But he never did. Instead, he and Jen sent a picture book for my daughter. And the next time Alan was in our city for work, we got together — him, me, and my husband. He started chatting with my husband, too, and over the next couple of months it became clear to me that he wasn’t keeping his conversations with me a secret from either my husband or his wife. My fear of an ulterior motive began to dissipate.

Around Thanksgiving, Alan wrote: “You know, you can be less-than-perfect in interacting with me. My opinion of you is locked in. If you care.”

I cared very much.

So much so that I began to feel I was hiding something from Alan. In mid-December, I told him about my father and the abuse. I wanted so badly to have a real friend in him. But that meant knowing why I was the way I was: all the anxiety, timidity, loneliness, shame. I worried he would respond with skepticism, or, worse, polite sympathy.

Instead, my telling him seemed only to confirm something he had suspected all along.

“Okay,” he replied, “now we’re cooking.”

A message over 1,000 words long followed. “In 1999, I was going to kill myself by a combination of drugs that I had compiled and hanging,” Alan said. “I was living in Los Angeles and suffering from crippling anxiety, depression, and OCD. I was excusing myself from work to go weep uncontrollably in the bathroom. I couldn’t sleep for doing push-ups for hours (I had sweet upper-body development, at least) and was adding an hour to my commute to park and re-park my car to get it positioned correctly between the lines in the garage. I had been clinically depressed most of the time since 1984 … Accordingly, various types of madness are intimately familiar, i.e., anxiety.”

It was raw and sad and it made me smile. We talked more about our childhoods, each of which were fraught with various species of abuse, and about our strained relationships with our parents, and our fervent hopes for our children. When he was in our city, we spent time together, and when he wasn’t, we plotted to see each other again soon.

The following summer, Alan, Jen, and their kids rode the train down to attend my daughter’s birthday party — a silly excuse for a get-together, but it had already been too long. The next month, my husband and I rode the train up to attend a concert with Alan and his kids. The night before the show, we all sat around a fire pit in their backyard while their two dogs lazed on the porch and fireflies twinkled in the grass. Skewers were plucked from the gravel and marshmallows produced from a kitchen cabinet; Jen showed me how to toast them just so. I had never done that before.

A group chat formed over text: Alan, Jen, me, my husband. We sent videos and pictures of our daily lives, vented about work, joked about the news. Soon, we were in contact every day. Jen became my go-to for questions about my daughter; I sent her countless snapshots of weird rashes and swollen glands. Alan and my husband held long conversations about their shared career paths. And all of us conspired to see each other again as soon as possible.

That fall, I had an important business meeting in New York City. Alan rode up with me, strolled around the town while I conducted my interview, and then met up with me afterward. My husband, Jen, and their daughter arrived later in the evening, and we all convened for dinner. That was where Thanksgiving came up.

“We would love to have you,” Jen said. She had never looked so beautiful to me as she did then, with her wide-framed glasses and her sharply tailored, evergreen leather jacket.

“We’ll be there,” I promised.

Walking back to their car, a drunk guy bumped into us. Squinting, he sized me, Jen, and her daughter up; he then launched into a serenade about how Alan ought to value us, his gorgeous wife, his lovely daughters. I held Jen’s daughter’s hand, and when the guy wandered off, we laughed.

I could have burst into a million stars.

Thanksgiving with Alan and Jen was perfect. It was also when I realized that I was cheating on my parents.

My options had heretofore been abused or alone . Now, my little girl lounged on Alan and Jen’s beanbag chair, shared toast with their dog, gnawed on one of the chocolate turkeys Jen had tucked beside each place setting. We celebrated my husband’s birthday, and went hunting for a Christmas tree, which we situated in the corner of Alan and Jen’s living room. I sat by the fire as Jen and her daughter strung lights up on its glistening branches. I had the distinct feeling, akin to the recognition of infidelity, that we weren’t just friends anymore. We were family.

I couldn’t think of another way to look at it. Someone else might’ve looked at the relationship as nothing more than a blossoming friendship between adults — and it was that, too. But while I felt guilty for unilaterally saddling them with the weight of kinship, I couldn’t help myself. When I was with them, I knew unconditional love. I found myself relaxing into the certainty of their kindness, their mercy, their comfort. Their advice was sound, and genuine; unlike my own parents, they didn’t seem to harbor ulterior motives. When we were together, it felt like home.

When we returned after the holiday, my father called me. That was rare; he ordinarily only called in the case of familial deaths. He was furious.

“Who’s sleeping with who?” he asked, “You sleeping with him, or is your husband fucking his wife?”

Nobody was sleeping with anybody, I explained. I just thought it would be fun to spend Thanksgiving together.

“Your mother has been walking around all weekend crying,” he bellowed. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

I wanted one good holiday, I admitted. It wasn’t as though our relationship was the best.

“If I’m so evil, such a monster, how come you let your kid around me?”

It was a good question.

Because I don’t think you have a problem with her like you do me, I said, dizzy with my own candor. And because I want to forgive you.

He said he didn’t need, didn’t want my forgiveness; he told me never to call or visit again. And where formerly there would have been this keening, wailing neediness in me — don’t say that, daddy, please, don’t send me away, don’t let me go — I now felt only faint disappointment.

Okay, I said. If that’s what you want.

By the time our daughter was heading to preschool, we knew we needed a home of our own, if only to start building equity instead of paying rent. But it was impossible for us to make a down payment: We had spent our early marriage paying off student debt. My own parents likely would have offered assistance, but only with strings attached, so I didn’t bother consulting them. When I vented about all this to Alan, he made a subtle but clear offer to help with the financing. I was taken aback: What about his real kids, I asked. He said he already had enough put away for their college expenses, and that this wouldn’t be a problem. Would Jen be alright with it, I pressed. She endorsed the idea, with enthusiasm.

We bought our first place, and celebrated it. Alan and Jen loved it; my parents hated it. It was too small, they said, and dingy. I ignored them.

In February, we went on vacation with Alan, Jen, and their kids, each of whom brought friends along. Each morning, we all convened at the hotel’s breakfast buffet, brought our plates of crêpes and eggs and salmon and toast and fruit and yogurt to the table, talked about our plans for the day. I was pregnant again, so while the kids went skiing, Jen and I went to the spa, sat with Alan and my husband in the lodge’s cafe, or trekked through the snow to a neighboring town to shop and sightsee.

My father called me one night of the trip, to suggest Alan and Jen wanted something from me, something nefarious, and that I ought to be cautious about them. I told him, somewhat flippantly, that I’d be on the lookout for any suspicious activity. There was a pause, and then he asked: “Why can’t you go on vacation with us? Why can’t you just do things with your mom and I?” There was a plaintive tone there I hadn’t heard before. I felt a fleeting pang of sympathy for them; they were being replaced, and they knew it.

I told him I just didn’t think we would have a good time together. We never had, I pointed out. All of the vacations of my childhood had been marked by meltdowns and panicked departures, usually a few days earlier than planned. They got to spend time with my daughter, I said. Wasn’t that enough?

Maybe that was what gave him the idea. From then on, my parents began waging a subtler war against my husband and I, using our daughter as a weapon and a battlefield.

Most grandparents are indulgent, but my parents became excessively so. They refused my daughter nothing, even when it meant endangering her. When she complained about sitting in her carseat, my father would direct my mother, who was usually fumbling to secure the buckles and calm the toddler, to undo the fastenings and let her sit unsecured in the car. My father fed her doughnut holes and ice cream, cupcakes and soda to the exclusion of any real food; our daughter would come home from weekends at their house bloated and sick. When my daughter fussed about potty training, my father made my mother put her back in diapers, setting her progress back weeks at a time. She was embarrassed by the accidents she had at preschool after spending time with them.

I begged them to stop, which my father seemed to relish. Let go of your anger, he would say, and let us love your daughter. He had no idea how to love; this wasn’t love, just another vector for abuse. When we refused to let them pick our daughter up, my mother would become distraught and unstable, texting me that she was crying, that she felt like she was having a stroke, that she feared she might die without seeing her.

On and on this went. I enlisted the help of a nutritionist to try to explain to them why they needed to feed our daughter sensibly; they refused to speak to her. I sent a cookbook of healthy recipes for toddlers, which my mother returned to me unopened. Eventually, we began making up excuses — birthday parties, illnesses, preexisting plans — that they couldn’t take our daughter to their house, which created an uneasy tension.

I talked to Alan and Jen about them constantly, seeking advice, or maybe just comfort. Alan had similar problems with his parents, similar battles. He was always gentle and reserved in his analysis, but his advice was always the same: Stay cool, don’t engage in the mudslinging, treat them like children, prepare to walk away for good. You’re never going to get what you want from them.

Alan and Jen came to town last summer, when my second daughter was due. They sat with me and my husband in the delivery room, waited anxiously in the hallway as the anesthesiologist slipped the thin tube flush with fentanyl into the recesses of my spine. They held my newborn as soon as she was dried and dressed, and ferried drinks and snacks to my bedside. I watched Jen cradling her in the afternoon half-light, with her blonde hair glowing like a halo, her face beatific. I asked them to be my daughter’s godparents, and they agreed.

Meanwhile, my parents were belligerent and reproachful. They refused to come to town to help with the baby, instead demanding that we stay at their house with the newborn for several weeks. That this would mean driving hours to take the baby to her check-ups and depriving my husband of his wife and children as soon as his paltry paternity leave ended meant nothing to them; they were deeply resentful that we were denying them this opportunity to spend time with the new baby. “When are you going to let her come out here without you,” they asked of the newborn, “so she can get used to us?” Never, I thought.

Jen rode the train down to help us with the baby, instead. She bounced her on her hip for countless hours, rocked her, swaddled her, carried her in a sling the first time we went out in what felt like months. While the baby napped, Jen did our dishes, laundry, and grocery shopping. I texted my mom, telling her explicitly for the first time that someone else was doing what she ought to be doing. Why couldn’t she come help me, I asked? She ignored me.

We started to demur more often when they asked to whisk our older daughter away for overnight visits, which angered them. They wanted a relationship with her and not me — around 20 weekends a year, they specified — that was more akin to a joint-custody agreement than a congenial family relationship. Clarity came to me in waves. I soon recognized what I had perhaps always known — that I would never be allowed to be happy so long as they were an overwhelming presence in my life. We had to get away. So I began to look for a new job, in hopes of moving closer to Alan and Jen.

Jen took me outfit-shopping for a particularly big interview last fall, and lent me a blazer of hers. She hugged me as I headed up the Penn Station escalator to 34th.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too.”

I got the job. In the spring, we’re going to move.

My parents can see all this happening; they know what I’m preparing to do, and they hate it. The final gift of good parents is an adult child’s preparation to live without them. My parents had never intended to bestow that — they enjoyed controlling me, crippling me, reigning over my adult life as though I were still a captive child. It took Alan and Jen acting as surrogate parents to help me complete my adolescence, a painful and unnaturally prolonged thing, stretched over a pitiless rack. I am ready, now, to walk away.

The last time I saw my father, it was late in the fall. He brought up Alan and Jen, suggesting with leering suspicion the unseemliness of it all.

“He wants something from you,” my father told me, referring to Alan. “I don’t know what it is, but it’ll be clear over time. Nobody does anything for free.”

“Maybe they just like me,” I said, “maybe they love me.”

“Sure,” my father said, dismissive, as though someone loving me were an absurd idea.

Since my childhood, I had disappeared into my mind when my father spoke to me. He always said the same things, anyway. I watched his face — my own weary, dark eyes, the same round nose, recessed chin — and felt my own thoughts crest over the sound of his words.

I realized then that everything I’ve always feared about walking away has already happened: I have already been beaten, I have already been abandoned, they had already stopped loving me. All of it had happened long ago, and I had been scraping by on the doomed hope that it might all change one day. But I knew it wouldn’t. I had nothing to lose by leaving them for good.

A shadow passed over my thoughts. Would I have chosen Alan and Jen if my own family had loved me? Or would I have allowed them to drift by in the stream of my life, pleasant acquaintances, nothing more? In that world, I thought, I would be someone else. What has happened to me has made me what I am. Maybe I was disfigured, emotionally and spiritually, by the abuse. But the void in my soul was also an open gate through which Alan and Jen entered my life, and changed it forever, for the better.

My father was still talking. “I mean, how fucking bizarre would it be if I started spending a bunch of time with some other guy’s kids? How fucking bizarre ? Me, over 60, hanging around another man’s kids. That’s what I wanna ask this guy, man-to-man.”

That would be strange, I said, laying my napkin on the tabletop. But I’m not a little girl anymore.

• first person

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Kafka’s Remarkable Letter to His Abusive and Narcissistic Father

By maria popova.

Prompted in large part by the dissolution of his engagement to Felice Bauer , in which Hermann’s active disapproval of the relationship was a toxic force and which resulted in the estrangement of father and son, 36-year-old Kafka set out to hold his father accountable for the emotional abuse, disorienting double standards, and constant disapprobation that branded his childhood — a measured yet fierce outburst of anguish and disappointment thirty years in the buildup.

His litany of indictments is doubly harrowing in light of what psychologists have found in the decades since — that our early limbic contact with our parents profoundly shapes our character , laying down the wiring for emotional habits and patterns of connecting that greatly influence what we bring to all subsequent relationships in life, either expanding or contracting our capacity for “positivity resonance” depending on how nurturing or toxic those formative relationships were. For those of us with similar experiences, be it inflicted by a patriarch or a matriarch, Kafka’s letter to his father is at once excruciating in its deep resonance and strangely comforting in its validation of shared reality.

Kafka writes:

Dearest Father, You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.

Kafka paints the backdrop of his father’s emotional tyranny and lays out what he hopes the letter would accomplish for both of them:

To you the matter always seemed very simple, at least in so far as you talked about it in front of me, and indiscriminately in front of many other people. It looked to you more or less as follows: you have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed everything for your children, above all for me, consequently I have lived high and handsome, have been completely at liberty to learn whatever I wanted, and have had no cause for material worries, which means worries of any kind at all. You have not expected any gratitude for this, knowing what “children’s gratitude” is like, but have expected at least some sort of obligingness, some sign of sympathy. Instead I have always hidden from you, in my room, among my books, with crazy friends, or with extravagant ideas… If you sum up your judgment of me, the result you get is that, although you don’t charge me with anything downright improper or wicked (with the exception perhaps of my latest marriage plan), you do charge me with coldness, estrangement, and ingratitude. And, what is more, you charge me with it in such a way as to make it seem my fault, as though I might have been able, with something like a touch on the steering wheel, to make everything quite different, while you aren’t in the slightest to blame, unless it be for having been too good to me. This, your usual way of representing it, I regard as accurate only in so far as I too believe you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement. But I am equally entirely blameless. If I could get you to acknowledge this, then what would be possible is — not, I think, a new life, we are both much too old for that — but still, a kind of peace; no cessation, but still, a diminution of your unceasing reproaches.

But this is where the similarity ends. Kafka sees in his father everything he himself is not — a man of “health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, knowledge of human nature, a certain way of doing things on a grand scale, of course also with all the defects and weaknesses that go with these advantages and into which your temperament and sometimes your hot temper drive you.” The anguish resulting from this disparity of temperaments coupled with a disparity of power between parent and child is familiar to all who have lived through a similar childhood — the constantly enforced, with varying degrees of force, sense that the parent’s version of reality is always right simply by virtue of authority and the child’s always wrong by virtue of submission, and thus the child comes to internalize the chronic guilt of wrongness.

With such a child’s classic cycle of accusation and apologism in making sense of a parent’s hurtful behavior, Kafka considers his father’s shortcomings with equal parts pain and compassion:

We were so different and in our difference so dangerous to each other that if anyone had tried to calculate in advance how I, the slowly developing child, and you, the full-grown man, would stand to each other, he could have assumed that you would simply trample me underfoot so that nothing was left of me. Well, that did not happen. Nothing alive can be calculated. But perhaps something worse happened. And in saying this I would all the time beg of you not to forget that I never, and not even for a single moment, believe any guilt to be on your side. The effect you had on me was the effect you could not help having. But you should stop considering it some particular malice on my part that I succumbed to that effect. I was a timid child. For all that, I am sure I was also obstinate, as children are. I am sure that Mother spoilt me too, but I cannot believe I was particularly difficult to manage; I cannot believe that a kindly word, a quiet taking by the hand, a friendly look, could not have got me to do anything that was wanted of me. Now you are, after all, at bottom a kindly and softhearted person (what follows will not be in contradiction to this, I am speaking only of the impression you made on the child), but not every child has the endurance and fearlessness to go on searching until it comes to the kindliness that lies beneath the surface. You can only treat a child in the way you yourself are constituted, with vigor, noise, and hot temper, and in this case this seemed to you, into the bargain, extremely suitable, because you wanted to bring me up to be a strong brave boy.

Kafka recounts one particularly traumatic incident when one night as a young boy, he kept crying for water — “not, I am certain, because I was thirsty, but probably partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself,” he explains with that learned reality-questioning apologism he carried into adulthood — until his father grew so angry that he yanked little Franz out of bed, carried him out onto the balcony, and left him there in nothing but his nightshirt, shutting the door. He writes:

I was quite obedient afterwards at that period, but it did me inner harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were two things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other. Even years afterwards I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the [balcony], and that meant I was a mere nothing for him.

In a poignant lament that calls to mind the contrasting childhood of Henri Matisse , who was bathed in parental support, Kafka bemoans his father’s attitude toward his academic and creative endeavors:

What I would have needed was a little encouragement, a little friendliness, a little keeping open of my road, instead of which you blocked it for me, though of course with the good intention of making me go another road. But I was not fit for that… At that time, and at that time in every way, I would have needed encouragement.

In reflecting on his father’s particularly oppressive “intellectual domination,” Kafka speaks to the particular burden of children whose parents have risen from poverty to success by their own efforts. (In factuality, Hermann grew up in a middle-class family but liked to mythologize the hardships of his youth after he became a successful businessman.) With piercing insight into the self-righteousness syndrome that befalls many such self-made people who come to believe their own myth of omnipotence, Kafka writes:

You had worked your way so far up by your own energies alone, and as a result you had unbounded confidence in your opinion. That was not yet so dazzling for me as a child as later for the boy growing up. From your armchair you ruled the world. Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, meshugge , not normal. Your self-confidence indeed was so great that you had no need to be consistent at all and yet never ceased to be in the right. It did sometimes happen that you had no opinion whatsoever about a matter and as a result all opinions that were at all possible with respect to the matter were necessarily wrong, without exception. You were capable, for instance, of running down the Czechs, and then the Germans, and then the Jews, and what is more, not only selectively but in every respect, and finally nobody was left except yourself. For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have whose rights are based on their person and not on reason.

Once again, Kafka returns to how his father’s warped and solipsistic view of reality made his own bleed with uncertainty and self-doubt:

All these thoughts, seemingly independent of you, were from the beginning burdened with your belittling judgments; it was almost impossible to endure this and still work out a thought with any measure of completeness and permanence.

One especially frequent form of belittlement was Hermann’s habit of dismissing anything that excited and inspired young Franz, invariably crushing the boy’s interest in pursuing anything — a particularly poisonous serpent to have in one’s nest of idea-incubation. He writes:

It was only necessary to be happy about something or other, to be filled with the thought of it, to come home and speak of it, and the answer was an ironical sigh, a shaking of the head, a tapping on the table with a finger… Of course, you couldn’t be expected to be enthusiastic about every childish triviality, when you were in a state of fret and worry. But that was not the point. Rather, by virtue of your antagonistic nature, you could not help but always and inevitably cause the child such disappointments; and further, this antagonism, accumulating material, was constantly intensified; eventually the pattern expressed itself even if, for once, you were of the same opinion as I; finally, these disappointments of the child were not the ordinary disappointments of life but, since they involved you, the all-important personage, they struck to the very core. Courage, resolution, confidence, delight in this and that, could not last when you were against it or even if your opposition was merely to be assumed; and it was to be assumed in almost everything I did.

Writing only five years after Freud introduced the concept of narcissism and half a century before Narcissistic Personality Disorder came to be classified in psychiatry’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , Kafka offers a perfect and prescient diagnosis of his father:

What was always incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgments. It was as though you had no notion of your power. I too, I am sure, often hurt you with what I said, but then I always knew, and it pained me, but I could not control myself, could not keep the words back, I was sorry even while I was saying them. But you struck out with your words without much ado, you weren’t sorry for anyone, either during or afterwards, one was utterly defenseless against you.

Anyone who has shared life with a narcissist recognizes, of course, the chronic dispensation of such double standards and its many manifestations across all areas where rules are applied. In describing how Hermann disciplined his children at the dinner table, Kafka illustrates this narcissistic tendency with the perfect allegorical anecdote:

The main thing was that the bread should be cut straight. But it didn’t matter that you did it with a knife dripping with gravy. Care had to be taken that no scraps fell on the floor. In the end it was under your chair that there were most scraps.

The most heartbreaking effect of these disorienting double standards is that the child grows utterly confused about right and wrong, for they seem to trade places constantly depending on who the doer is, and comes to internalize the notion that he or she is always at fault. Instead of holding up a mirror to validate the child’s experience of reality, such a parent instead traps the child in a fun-house maze of mirrors that never reflect an accurate or static image. Those who have lived through this know how easily it metastasizes into a deep-seated belief that one’s interpretation of reality, especially when reality is ambiguous or uncertain, is always the wrong one, the faulty one, the one fully invalidated by the mere existence of another’s interpretation.

As a consequence of this immersion in uncertainty and self-doubt, Kafka grew increasingly preoccupied with his body and health — a tangible aspect of reality:

Since there was nothing at all I was certain of, since I needed to be provided at every instant with a new confirmation of my existence, since nothing was in my very own, undoubted, sole possession, determined unequivocally only by me — in sober truth a disinherited son — naturally I became unsure even of the thing nearest to me, my own body.

This paved the way for “every sort of hypochondria” and developed a wide range of anxieties about “digestion, hair falling out, a spinal curvature, and so on,” which swelled into tormenting fixations until he finally succumbed to real illness — the tuberculosis that would eventually take his life.

Kafka captures this draining dance with disappointment and uncertainty in another heartbreaking exhortation:

Please, Father, understand me correctly: in themselves these would have been utterly insignificant details, they only became depressing for me because you, so tremendously the authoritative man, did not keep the commandments you imposed on me. Hence the world was for me divided into three parts: one in which I, the slave, lived under laws that had been invented only for me and which I could, I did not know why, never completely comply with; then a second world, which was infinitely remote from mine, in which you lived, concerned with government, with the issuing of orders and with the annoyance about their not being obeyed; and finally a third world where everybody else lived happily and free from orders and from having to obey. I was continually in disgrace; either I obeyed your orders, and that was a disgrace, for they applied, after all, only to me; or I was defiant, and that was a disgrace too, for how could I presume to defy you; or I could not obey because I did not, for instance, have your strength, your appetite, your skill, although you expected it of me as a matter of course; this was the greatest disgrace of all.

Kafka turns to how his father’s explosive temperament crushed the young man’s hope of being understood — which is what everybody needs — by annihilating the possibility of calm, civil conversation in the household:

[Your] frightful, hoarse undertone of anger and utter condemnation … only makes me tremble less today than in my childhood because the child’s exclusive sense of guilt has been partly replaced by insight into our helplessness, yours and mine. The impossibility of getting on calmly together had one more result, actually a very natural one: I lost the capacity to talk. I dare say I would not have become a very eloquent person in any case, but I would, after all, have acquired the usual fluency of human language. But at a very early stage you forbade me to speak. Your threat, “Not a word of contradiction!” and the raised hand that accompanied it have been with me ever since. What I got from you — and you are, whenever it is a matter of your own affairs, an excellent talker — was a hesitant, stammering mode of speech, and even that was still too much for you, and finally I kept silent, at first perhaps out of defiance, and then because I could neither think nor speak in your presence. And because you were the person who really brought me up, this has had its repercussions throughout my life. […] Your extremely effective rhetorical methods in bringing me up, which never failed to work with me, were: abuse, threats, irony, spiteful laughter, and — oddly enough — self-pity.

This blend of abusive aplomb and martyrdom seems common in the narcissistic tyrant — familiar, at least, to those who have suffered one — but Kafka adds even more dimension by pointing out that his father’s most scarring abuse was inflicted less by direct blows than by toxic osmosis, that soul-squashing effect of being in the presence of an angry and spiritually draining despot:

I cannot recall your ever having abused me directly and in downright abusive terms. Nor was that necessary; you had so many other methods, and besides, in talk at home and particularly at business the words of abuse went flying around me in such swarms, as they were flung at other people’s heads, that as a little boy I was sometimes almost stunned and had no reason not to apply them to myself too, for the people you were abusing were certainly no worse than I was and you were certainly not more displeased with them than with me. And here again was your enigmatic innocence and inviolability; you cursed and swore without the slightest scruple; yet you condemned cursing and swearing in other people and would not have it.

His father’s continuous threats, Kafka argues, were in a way more painful than the actual harm they promised but rarely delivered. “One’s feelings became dulled by these continued threats,” he laments, but more than that, they conditioned the twisted sense that his father’s choice not to administer the promised punishment was some great act of generosity:

One had, so it seemed to the child, remained alive through your mercy and bore one’s life henceforth as an undeserved gift from you. […] It is also true that you hardly ever really gave me a whipping. But the shouting, the way your face got red, the hasty undoing of the braces and laying them ready over the back of the chair, all that was almost worse for me. It is as if someone is going to be hanged. If he really is hanged, then he is dead and it is all over. But if he has to go through all the preliminaries to being hanged and he learns of his reprieve only when the noose is dangling before his face, he may suffer from it all his life. Besides, from the many occasions on which I had, according to your clearly expressed opinion, deserved a whipping but was let off at the last moment by your grace, I again accumulated only a huge sense of guilt. On every side I was to blame, I was in your debt.

Indeed, this touches on the most devastating and deadening effect of growing up in such an emotional environment — the way in which we come to mistake the crumbs of mercy for a feast of love. Kafka recounts those rare glimpses of basic parental care and affection, to which every abuser’s child learns to cling as the most precious affirmation of existence:

Fortunately, there were exceptions to all this, mostly when you suffered in silence, and affection and kindliness by their own strength overcame all obstacles, and moved me immediately. Rare as this was, it was wonderful. For instance, in earlier years, in hot summers, when you were tired after lunch, I saw you having a nap at the office, your elbow on the desk; or you joined us in the country, in the summer holidays, on Sundays, worn out from work; or the time Mother was gravely ill and you stood holding on to the bookcase, shaking with sobs; or when, during my last illness, you came tiptoeing to Ottla’s room to see me, stopping in the doorway, craning your neck to see me, and out of consideration only waved to me with your hand. At such times one would lie back and weep for happiness, and one weeps again now, writing it down.

He then turns to another of the crushing complexities of such households — the role of the passive parent as the abuser’s accomplice and thus a perpetrator of parallel emotional betrayal by failing to validate the child’s confusion and to affirm the anguish inflicted by the abuser. Kafka writes:

It is true that Mother was illimitably good to me, but for me all that was in relation to you, that is to say, in no good relation. Mother unconsciously played the part of a beater during a hunt. Even if your method of upbringing might in some unlikely case have set me on my own feet by means of producing defiance, dislike, or even hate in me, Mother canceled that out again by kindness, by talking sensibly (in the maze and chaos of my childhood she was the very prototype of good sense and reasonableness), by pleading for me; and I was again driven back into your orbit, which I might perhaps otherwise have broken out of, to your advantage and to my own. […] If I was to escape from you, I had to escape from the family as well, even from Mother. True, one could always get protection from her, but only in relation to you. She loved you too much and was too devoted and loyal to you to have been for long an independent spiritual force in the child’s struggle.

Long before psychologists demonstrated how our early attachment patterns wire the way we connect later in life, Kafka laments the detrimental effect of his father’s emotional abuse on his subsequent relationships:

Relations with people outside the family … suffered possibly still more under your influence. You are entirely mistaken if you believe I do everything for other people out of affection and loyalty, and for you and the family nothing, out of coldness and betrayal. I repeat for the tenth time: even in other circumstances I should probably have become a shy and nervous person, but it is a long dark road from there to where I have really come.

But for Kafka, the most disheartening manifestation of his father’s chronic disapproval was that directed at his writing:

[In my writing] I had, in fact, got some distance away from you by my own efforts, even if it was slightly reminiscent of the worm that, when a foot treads on its tail end, breaks loose with its front part and drags itself aside. To a certain extent I was in safety; there was a chance to breathe freely. The aversion you naturally and immediately took to my writing was, for once, welcome to me. My vanity, my ambition did suffer under your soon proverbial way of hailing the arrival of my books: “Put it on my bedside table!” (usually you were playing cards when a book came)… My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long-drawn-out leave-taking from you, yet, although it was enforced by you, it did take its course in the direction determined by me.

He later adds:

In my writing, and in everything connected with it, I have made some attempts at independence, attempts at escape, with the very smallest of success; they will scarcely lead any farther; much confirms this for me. Nevertheless it is my duty or, rather, the essence of my life, to watch over them, to let no danger that I can avert, indeed no possibility of such a danger, approach them.

Early on, his father’s attitude toward his intellectual and creative interests planted the seed of Impostor Syndrome. Likening his young self to a bank clerk who has committed fraud yet continues working in constant terror of being found out, Kafka recounts one particularly tormenting fantasy he had in high school:

Often in my mind’s eye I saw the terrible assembly of the teachers … as they would meet, when I had passed the first class, and then in the second class, when I had passed that, and then in the third, and so on, meeting in order to examine this unique, outrageous case, to discover how I, the most incapable and, in any case, the most ignorant of all, had succeeded in creeping up so far as this class, which now, when everybody’s attention had at last been focused on me, would of course instantly spew me out, to the jubilation of all the righteous liberated from this nightmare. To live with such fantasies is not easy for a child.

But the most beautiful line in the entire letter is delivered almost as an aside, as Kafka contemplates the things his father has condemned as failures — including his broken engagement — and issues an elegant admonition against the perils of dogmatic perfectionism:

It is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little.

Kafka ends the letter with a lyrical and heartbreaking reflection on its ultimate purpose — to offer a little door for repairing the relationship despite their vast differences:

Things cannot in reality fit together the way the evidence does in my letter; life is more than a Chinese puzzle. But with the correction made by this rejoinder — a correction I neither can nor will elaborate in detail — in my opinion something has been achieved which so closely approximates the truth that it might reassure us both a little and make our living and our dying easier.

Although the Kaiser/Wilkins vintage translation of the letter is enduringly excellent, only in this final paragraph do I find the more recent translation by Howard Colyer superior in elegance and enchantment:

In life things don’t fit together as neatly as do the proofs in my letter — life is more than a game of patience. But after allowing for this answer, which I can’t and don’t want to elaborate on now, I still believe my letter contains some truth, it takes us closer to the truth, and therefore it may allow us to live and die with a gentler and lighter spirit.

And yet for all the autobiographical tragedy captured in Kafka’s litany of abuses and disappointments, most tragic of all is the fate of the letter. According to Kafka’s friend and official biographer Max Brod, the anguished author didn’t mail the letter but gave it to his mother, Julie, to pass along to Hermann. But she never did — instead, she returned it to her son. After all, the most devastating pathology of such relationships is the child’s compulsive effort — be it by vain hope or by concrete action — to eradicate the abusive parent’s demons and make the paltry angels endure, only to be disappointed over and over again every time the demons re-rear their undying heads. Perhaps Julie sensed this and tried, in the best way she knew, to spare her son the ultimate disappointment of seeing this most grandiose of hopes familiarly vanquished.

Lighten the psychoemotional load of Letter to His Father — which is an overwhelming yet absolutely remarkable read in its totality — with Mark Twain on what his mother taught him about compassion and Rachel Carson on parenting and why it’s more important to feel than to know .

— Published March 5, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/05/franz-kafka-letter-father/ —

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“It’s not an easy journey, to get to a place where you forgive people. But it is such a powerful place, because it sets you free.” ~Tyler Perry

I still remember the day when I told my mother that I no longer wanted to be at home. I’d had enough of so much pain and sorrow, and the constant yelling. Soon after, I watched my mother cry bitterly as she made the decision to get a divorce .

I was ten years old at the time.

My father had always been a very strict man, who used to believe that his ways were the right ways.

He considered himself “successful” because he had his own house, his own car, a high salary, and a family. He was indeed a success at his office, but his employees didn’t seem to respect him.

They described my father as a man who liked to give orders and to keep things under control—and also a man who liked to tell hurtful, humiliating jokes at others’ expense.

I don’t remember my father having any friends, nor seeing him invite anyone to our home for Christmas.

Father was always working hard, two daily shifts for five years. He later told me he did that to give us a good future, but he was never present.

I don’t recall him playing with me that much, nor taking us on vacation. And he used to beat me with a belt if I didn’t get good grades at school. He used to drill into my head that I needed to “be better than everyone else.” He wanted me to be as competitive as him, as successful as him. He wanted me to become him.

But that wasn’t the whole reason why my parents divorced. My father cheated on my mother with five different women, thinking my mother wasn’t good enough for him anymore. Later in life I understood that it was he who felt not good enough.

One day he got very drunk and began calling me names like “little cockroach,” because he knew I would never be as good as him. That’s when I lost it.

At ten years old, I jumped toward my father and blindly hit him, with my tiny fists, in every part of his body that I could reach. My mother came running from the kitchen and had to separate us because my father, a mountain of a man, was easily giving me the beating of my life.

That was the last straw for her.

That night my mother kicked him out of the house, and I didn’t see him again for a few years.

After that day, we were shocked, but felt a small piece of relief. Eventually, we found peace.

The divorce helped my mother mature and become stronger and wiser. She was always there for me and my kid sister, playing the role of both loving mother and father. My raising made me think that, if I ever had children, I would never let them live the hell I lived.

Time heals all wounds, or so they say. Eventually, I found the strength to see my father again, at a very sad family event.

He was all by himself. None of his former mistresses were in sight. We spoke few words; I gave him my condolences and left. It had been weird to see my father again after so much time.

One day he fell sick with kidney failure and thought he was about to die. I went to visit him at the hospital, and it was shocking to see my once strong father reduced to a thin ghost of a man wrapped in a hospital gown.

There was no one around to help him but an aunt. No friends, no other women, no one. He was all alone.

I spent days and night taking care of him at the hospital. We would joke around and remember the few good things we shared during my childhood. I soon realized my father was just another kid that had been hit and humiliated during his childhood.

His parents had raised him the same way he’d raised me; therefore, he grew up with those values carved in his heart.

That’s when I realized it made no sense to continue hating him for the horrible childhood he gave me. Life was already giving him a tough lesson. Loneliness can be worse than death itself.

My father eventually recovered and left the hospital. I still speak to him and pay him a visit from time to time to see how he’s doing. He’s still the prideful man I knew as a kid, and he still expects me to become better than him. But now, his words don’t hurt me.

Because of my experiences with my father, I have learned these valuable lessons.

1. Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting.

Some people say “Forgive and forget.” I would say instead “Forgive, don’t forget, but don’t let the memory of what happened control you.”

I learned this the hard way, sadly. Some days I would get very angry , and other days I would feel hopeless and unloved. This eventually pushed away the few people that really cared for me.

I couldn’t change the past, and I didn’t like the insecure, angry woman that I had become. I had to release that pain and anger.

One thing that helped me was to write down all the things I wanted to say to my father. I would read the letter as many times as I needed, then burn it. Watching the fire consume the letter that contained all my frustrations helped me ease the burden in my heart.

Some days, when I felt the ugly feeling again, I would put my hand over my heart, say a prayer, and repeat the same mantra to myself over and over again:

“I am here, I will help you. We are in this together. I will protect you.”

These words were powerful to me. After repeating that mantra to myself, I would feel my anger melt away.

We have to release our anger—in private, to avoid hurting the people that love us—in order to make space for love and peace. We learn from the pain, and though there’s no way we can easily push it under a rug, we don’t have to be controlled by the feelings that flood us when we remember what happened.

Don’t let the memory of the past inflict pain in your present life.

2. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you have to include that person back into your life.

Forgiving someone doesn’t always mean welcoming that person back into your life like nothing happened.

There are people who can’t be in our lives without hurting us. These kinds of people need to be loved from a distance. It may be your father, your brother, your former best friend, or your ex. Life is too short to make it harder and more painful by allowing people who constantly hurt us back into our circle of peacefulness.

3. Forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning someone’s actions.

Some people might view what happened to my father as karma, but it’s hard for me to see it that way. When I learned about his troubled childhood, I realized that’s where his behavior came from. I finally understood why he did what he did. Still, that didn’t make it excusable. What he did was wrong and not acceptable. No matter how bad your past was, you can’t go around inflicting pain on others, thinking it’s okay.

I know a lot of people who had sad, painful childhoods  who turned out to be wonderful parents. Pain can give us huge lessons and make us better people.

4. Forgive to set yourself free.

This was the most important lesson in my life. I was the target of bullying at school because, at that time, children who came from broken homes were seen as troubled kids. I hated my father every time someone made jokes about my divorced parents.

Later in life I blamed my father for all my failed relationships. I hopelessly looked for approval from the men I dated, only to be dumped like a hot frying pan.

I was destroying myself with hatred and pain. All this turmoil made me lonely and miserable.

Eventually, I learned that I was the only person responsible of my life, and that blaming my father was a cowardly thing to do. If I wanted to have a happy life, I had to let go of the pain. It wasn’t easy—it took years of self-discovery and soul searching to achieve this—but when I did, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

Trying to find something to inspire me, I came across one quote that struck a chord with me:

“Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

I was poisoning my life, my few friendships, and myself. I’d missed a lot of the big things in life because I’d spent so much time hating my father and my problems. I learned not to repeat his mistakes, and to pay attention to my own behavior. The past can be painful but it doesn’t have to define us. We make our own present; we are our own person.

We can’t erase the past, but we can choose to let go of the pain in order to live a happier, more fulfilling life.

The road isn’t easy; in fact, there were days when I felt I was taking one step forward and two steps back, and some days I would just curl up and cry. But I kept moving forward because I desperately wanted to get out of that place of isolation. I focused on myself, spent time with family, eventually found good friends, and then finally felt lighter and at peace.

In the end, I learned that forgiveness is not about the other person; it is about ourselves.

About Cerise M. Chapman

Cerise is an avid reader, a huge cat lover, and a writing enthusiast. She likes to write articles and stories that reflect her everyday life to inspire and help others. She enjoys listening to music and is always accompanied by her cat Sebastian. You can read more of her stories in www.morningcoffeenotes.wordpress.com .

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When terrible, abusive parents come crawling back, what do their grown children owe them?

What do we owe our tormentors? It’s a question that haunts those who had childhoods marked by years of neglect and deprivation, or of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse at the hands of one or both parents. Despite this terrible beginning, many people make it out successfully and go on to build satisfying lives. Now their mother or father is old, maybe ailing, possibly broke. With a sense of guilt and dread, these adults are grappling with whether and how to care for those who didn’t care for them.

Rochelle, 37, wrote to me in my role as Slate ’s Dear Prudence because of the pressure she was getting from friends to reach out to her mother. Rochelle is a banquet waitress in the Midwest. She has a boyfriend but lives alone and has no children. She and her younger brother grew up with an angry, alcoholic mother who was on welfare but cleaned houses off the books to supplement the check. Rochelle’s parents were never married and split when she was young. Her mother always told her not to have children. “We were the reason her life turned out as it did,” Rochelle says. She told Rochelle she was so stupid that she’d need to find a rich husband to support her. She said she couldn’t wait for Rochelle to turn 18 and get out of her house. Rochelle’s younger brother had difficulties from the start—she looks back and thinks he might have been autistic. Her mother used to take a belt to him and call him the devil and say she wished he’d never been born.

Rochelle started waitressing when she was 15. By 18, she was indeed out of the house and into an abusive relationship with an older man. She broke up with him, got her own apartment, a decent boyfriend, and started working to put herself through college. Then her brother was killed at age 18, shot in the heart during a silly fight over a girl. Rochelle stepped up and took care of all the funeral arrangements. Her father came and, when he left, hugged her goodbye. “That was the first time he ever hugged me,” she recalls. Her mother called later that night, drunk, and said that, by hugging her, Rochelle’s father was trying to molest Rochelle. Rochelle wrote her mother a letter saying she had a drinking problem and needed help. In response she got a letter saying that she was a horrible daughter and she would get what she deserved and that her brother was defective and needed to die.

That was Rochelle’s breaking point—after that, she didn’t see her mother for the next 13 years. Even though Rochelle was barely scraping by, she would sometimes send her mother money for rent, knowing she probably used it for booze. Occasionally, a friend would check on her mother and give her a report. Then last year a tornado struck the town where Rochelle’s mother lived, and Rochelle went to make sure she was all right. That began a sort of rapprochement. Rochelle started taking her mother out to lunch every other Sunday. She did it not because she felt she owed her mother anything: “Absolutely not.” Instead it was for her own sense of self. “To me being a good person means helping people when you can.”

The visits took a toll. Rochelle describes a physical response that sounds a lot like post-traumatic stress disorder . “All the stuff I tried to let go of seeps in. One little thing—the scent of her cigarettes, a mannerism, a word—floods back all these memories.” Rochelle started chewing gum on the drive to see her mother, she says, “because I’m clenching my jaw, white-knuckling the steering wheel.”

Rochelle found that being a good person to her mother was so draining that it left her sleepless and snapping at the people she did love. Her mother’s verbal abuse resumed and her demands started escalating—she wanted more attention, more money. Rochelle got a therapist, and with her help, has again cut ties with her mother. Rochelle says, “I can’t sacrifice my life and sanity in order to try to save her.”

In an essay in the New York Times , psychiatrist Richard Friedman writes that the relationship of adults to their abusive parents “gets little, if any, attention in standard textbooks or in the psychiatric literature.” But Rochelle is not alone. I have been hearing from people in her position for years, adult children weighing whether to reconnect with parents who nearly ruined their lives. Sometimes it’s a letter writer such as “ Comfortably Numb ” who has cut off contact with a parent but is now being pressured by family members, and even a spouse, to reconcile and forgive. Sometimes a correspondent, like “ Her Son ,” has hung on to a thread of a relationship, but is now fearful of being further yoked emotionally or financially to a declining parent.

One hallmark of growing up in a frightening home is for the children to think they are the only ones in such circumstances. Even when they reach adulthood and come to understand that many others have had dire childhoods, they might not reveal the details of their abuse to anyone. “The profound isolation that’s imposed on people is a very painful and destructive thing,” says Dr. Vincent Felitti, co-principal investigator of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study . According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , about 3.3 million cases of abuse or neglect were reported to child protective service agencies in 2010. This vastly undercounts the actual number of horrific and painful childhoods, as most never make it into any official record. The CDC notes that some studies estimate that 20 percent of children will be the victims of such maltreatment. That means a lot of people are wrestling with this legacy.

Loved ones and friends—sometimes even therapists—who urge reconnecting with a parent often speak as if forgiveness will be a psychic aloe vera, a balm that will heal the wounds of the past. They warn of the guilt that will dog the victim if the perpetrator dies estranged. What these people fail to take into account is the potential psychological cost of reconnecting, of dredging up painful memories and reviving destructive patterns.

Eleanor Payson, a marital and family therapist in Michigan and the author of The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists , sees some clients who feel it would be immoral to abandon a now-feeble parent, no matter how destructive that person was. Payson says she advises them to find ways to be caring while protecting themselves from further abuse. “One of my missions is helping people not be tyrannized by false guilt or ignore their own pain and needs,” she says. Setting limits is crucial: “You may need to keep yourself in a shark cage with no opportunity to let that person take a bite out of you.” It’s also OK for the conversation to be anodyne. “You can say something respectful, something good-faith-oriented. ‘I wish you well’; ‘I continue to work on my own forgiveness.’ ”

There is no formula for defining one’s obligations to the parents who didn’t fulfill their own. The stories of famous people with abusive parents reveal the wide range of possible responses. Abraham Lincoln couldn’t stand his brutish father , Thomas, who hated Abraham’s books and sent him out as a kind of indentured servant. As an adult, Lincoln did occasionally bail out his father financially. But during his father’s final illness, Lincoln ignored letters telling him the end was near. Finally, he wrote not to his father, but his stepbrother to explain his absence : “Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.” Lincoln didn’t attend his father’s funeral.

Warren Buffett remained distantly dutiful to his mother, who had subjected her children to endless, rabid verbal attacks . On the occasions he visited her at the end of her life, he was a “wreck” of anxiety, sitting silently while his female companions made conversation. He was 66 when she died at 92. His tears at her death were not because he was sad or because he missed her, he said in his biography, The Snowball . “It was because of the waste.”

Bruce Springsteen’s frustrated, depressive father took out much of his rage on his son. In a New Yorker profile, David Remnick writes that long after Springsteen’s family had left his unhappy childhood home, he would obsessively drive by the old house. A therapist said to him, “Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right.” Springsteen finally came to accept he couldn’t. When he became successful he did give his parents the money to buy their dream house. But Springsteen says of this seeming reconciliation, “Of course, all the deeper things go unsaid, that it all could have been a little different.”

We all accept that there is an enduring bond between parent and child. One of the Ten Commandments is to “honor your father and your mother,” though this must have been a difficult admonition for the children of, for example, Abraham, Rebecca, and Jacob. Yet the loyalty of children to even the worst of parents makes perfect biological sense. From an evolutionary perspective, parents, even poor ones, are a child’s best chance for food, shelter, and survival.

Regina Sullivan is a research professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the NYU Langone School of Medicine who studies emotional attachment in rats. In experiments with rats raised by mothers who neglect or physically hurt their pups, Sullivan has teased out that, when in the presence of the caregiver, the infant brain’s fear and avoidance circuits are suppressed. Attachment “programs the brain,” she says. “The ability of an adult who can say to you, I had a horrible childhood, I don’t like my parents , but then do things to continue to get the parents’ approval, is an example of the strength of human attachment in early life.”

As Springsteen’s experience shows, one doesn’t just leave such childhoods behind, like outgrowing a fear of the dark. Study after study has found that just as an emotionally warm, intellectually stimulating childhood is typically a springboard for a happy, healthy life, an abusive one can cause a litany of problems.

Abuse victims are more likely to suffer from depression, substance abuse, broken relationships, chronic diseases, and even obesity . Many of the high-functioning people I hear from who are wrestling with their debt to their parents have struggled with some of these issues. Rochelle says, “I was a very angry kid, I got into fights in grade school. I’ve worked on it a lot, on not being the spiteful angry person all the time.” She also says she has dealt with food issues her whole life. Her mother brought home groceries once a month and she and her brother would devour the food before unpacking it. “We were starving,” she says. “If I have an addiction, it’s eating.”

Those who refuse to make peace with a failing parent may also find themselves judged harshly. In his memoir Closing Time , Joe Queenan writes of the loathing he and his sisters felt for their alcoholic, physically and psychologically abusive father. When they were grown, Queenan writes: “We talked about him as if he were already dead; such wishful thinking was rooted in the hope that he would kick the bucket before reaching the age when he might expect one of us to take him in,” although they agreed none would. When the father finally died, he wrote, “Clemency was not included in my limited roster of emotions.” In a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal , Alexander Theroux writes , “It is a shameful confession to make in any book.”

In his New York Times essay, Richard Friedman acknowledges that some parent-child relationships are so toxic that they must be severed. But he adds, “Of course, relationships are rarely all good or bad; even the most abusive parents can sometimes be loving, which is why severing a bond should be a tough, and rare decision.” But substitute “husband” for “parents,” and surely Friedman would not advise a woman in such a relationship to carry on because her battering spouse had a few redeeming qualities.

I know from my own inbox that many people are looking for someone, anyone, to tell them they should not feel guilty for declining to care for their abuser. I’m happy to do it. In private correspondence with these letter writers, I sometimes point out that, judging by their accounts, there doesn’t seem to be any acknowledgement of guilt on the part of the parent for neglecting to meet their most basic responsibilities.

A woman I’ll call Beatrice wrote to me as she wrestled with how to respond to a series of emails, calls, and letters from her long-estranged parents. Beatrice, 42, has a doctorate, is a professor of mathematics at a Midwestern university, and lives with her supportive boyfriend. She thinks of herself simultaneously as a “self-made person” and a “damaged” one. She decided long ago not to have children. “I have never felt confident I could trust another person to be the other parent. I’m not sure I could be a competent parent because of what I’ve been through.”

Of her childhood she says, “I don’t remember any happy days at all.” Her father had violent rages; he once knocked her down a flight of stairs. If she couldn’t finish dinner, she would have to sit at the table all night, then get beaten by him if she didn’t clean her plate. Her mother never intervened. Her parents divorced when she was young and her father refused to pay child support. A few years later, her mother became the fifth wife of Beatrice’s new stepfather and life got much worse.

He was unemployed and always around. Beatrice was a young teen and when she got home from school he would go into her bedroom, put his fingers up her vagina, and say he was giving her a massage. He made her touch his genitals. He let his friends come over and “have fun” with her, as long as they didn’t take her virginity. When she was 17, she finally stood up to him and he kicked her out of the house. He told her mother she had taken off of her own accord. By that time she was working 40 hours a week at a crafts store in addition to going to school, and a co-worker let her move into her basement. She contacted her mother and asked her to meet her for lunch. Beatrice explained everything that had been going on with her stepfather. “She told me she didn’t believe a word and didn’t want to hear any more,” Beatrice says. “That was the last time I saw her.” That was 25 years ago.

Beatrice says that during her childhood she would sometimes feel sorry for herself. Her friends would complain about their parents, or about having bad days, and she would think they had no idea what a bad day was. But she says of being on her own at 17, “The day my stepdad kicked me out, my life got better. I could come home and no one was trying to do anything bad to me. I didn’t have to hide. I didn’t worry about getting hit. That meant everything.”

Last year, separately and out of the blue, Beatrice’s mother and father each got in touch. Her biological father sent a small gift and a card with an update: He was in debt, out of work, and was supporting Beatrice’s troubled sister. A few months later, there was a message on her answering machine. “This is your mother,” the voice said. She wanted Beatrice to know her stepfather had only a few days to live. She told Beatrice she was willing to forgive her. “That made me laugh,” Beatrice says. Her mother started sending emails and Beatrice sent her a reply saying she was busy and couldn’t deal with any of this. She hasn’t heard back from her mother since. But she fears that both her parents will contact her again and explicitly ask for help.

“I’m worried about that happening. I’m worried she’ll call and say, ‘I have cancer.’ I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Beatrice says. “If she knows I’m a professor, I’m sure everyone thinks I make a huge salary and I’m going to save them. My salary is enough for me to do what I want.”

Dr. Ronald Rohner, an emeritus professor of family studies and anthropology at the University of Connecticut, has devoted much of his career to studying parental rejection and its effects. He says there’s little research on adult role reversal—that is, what happens when the parent is vulnerable and wants support from the child. But he says the studies that do exist demonstrate that “it really truly is as you sow, so shall you reap. Those parents who raised children less than lovingly are putting their own dependent old age at risk for being well and lovingly cared for themselves.”

In a 2008 essay in the journal In Character , history professor Wilfred McClay writes that as a society we have twisted the meaning of forgiveness into a therapeutic act for the victim: “[F]orgiveness is in danger of being debased into a kind of cheap grace, a waiving of standards of justice without which such transactions have no meaning.” Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School writes that, “There is a watered-down but widespread form of ‘forgiveness’ best tagged preemptory or exculpatory forgiveness. That is, without any indication of regret or remorse from perpetrators of even the most heinous crimes, we are enjoined by many not to harden our hearts but rather to ‘forgive.’ ”

I agree with these more bracing views about what forgiveness should entail. Choosing not to forgive does not doom someone to being mired in the past forever. Accepting what happened and moving on is a good general principle. But it can be comforting for those being browbeaten to absolve their parents to recognize that forgiveness works best as a mutual endeavor. After all, many adult children of abusers have never heard a word of regret from their parent or parents. People who have the capacity to ruthlessly maltreat their children tend toward self-justification, not shame.

Even apologies can have their limits, as illustrated by a Dear Prudence letter from a mother who called herself “Sadder but Wiser.” She verbally humiliated her son when he was a boy, realized the damage she had done, changed her ways, and apologized. But her son, who recently became a father, has only a coolly cordial relationship with her, and she complained that she wanted more warmth and caring. I suggested that she should be glad that he did see her, stop whining for more, and tell her son she admires that he is giving his little boy the childhood he deserves and that he didn’t get.

It’s wonderful when there can be true reconciliation and healing, when all parties can feel the past has been somehow redeemed. But I don’t think Rochelle, Beatrice, and others like them should be hammered with lectures about the benefits of—here comes that dread word—closure. Sometimes the best thing to do is just close the door.

Heartbreaking Letters From Teens Describe Abusive Fathers

As South Africa observes Child Protection Week, HuffPost got to take a look at some essays written between 2013 and 2016 by teenagers about their abusive fathers.

The essays were submitted to the "Fathers in Africa" writing competition on the topic "What does your father mean to you?" Although many wrote essays about their love for their dads, others told a sad, dark tale.

The Child Protection Week campaign was launched in 1997, to raise awareness and mobilise communities to care and protect children from abuse, neglect, exploitation as well as other forms of violence and ill-treatment. #ChildProtection2018 pic.twitter.com/NiIBNq4vnE — South African Government (@GovernmentZA) May 28, 2018

One participant wrote that her father meant nothing to her, because he was "violent" and "abusive".

"My father is not the kind of dad that I am proud to have in my life. My father means nothing, but is abusive and aggressive to his children," she said. "He has abused me physically and emotionally, saying bad things about me in front of my friends — even now. He has never changed, and I will never forgive him for that."

She said her father provided for the family, but was not a true role model to his children.

"He provides for our family, is a caregiver and protector, but not a man that I can say is my role model. When I make mistakes, he is not willing to talk to me to show my mistakes or give advice. All he can do is insult me," she explained.

This young girl felt like she did not belong.

"He treats me like I am somebody else — not his daughter. My father doesn't have love for me. I wish my father was loving — not violent. A man who beats his wife is nothing!" she wrote.

It feels like he prepared how he would do the scattering of my heart.

Another teenager from Western Cape wrote about how unbearable living with his father was.

"I always wish he doesn't come home from work. He always makes me feel sad and angry. My father doesn't normally live with me, but now he is living with us until his house is finished. It feels like they are taking too long," he wrote in the essay.

He added: "Whenever I make a mistake, he would shout at me. When my father wasn't living with us, our relationship wasn't this bad, although it wasn't good either. I wish he could see that I love him, no matter what happens."

I always thought I was inadequate, useless and trash.

A schoolgirl from Soshanguve wrote about how she needed a dad, not just a father.

"Every time I talk to him, his response is a grenade blowing my emotions out of proportion. It feels like he prepared how he would do the scattering of my heart. It makes me wonder if he really knows how I feel," the teenager wrote.

"I always imagine me talking to him, just that one decent conversation. A father-daughter talk. How he would advise ... well, that is just my imagination."

A teenager from Settlers in Limpopo described her stepfather as a "grim [reaper] coming to prey on my soul". Her biological father passed away, but he was not a part of her life either, so when her mother remarried, she hoped that life would get better — but this was not the case.

I then thought of suicide, but couldn't, because I knew what tomorrow holds is brighter.

"It was a nightmare I couldn't wake up from. I was not allowed to cry or be me, but fake. The worst mistake I ever did was to call [my stepfather] dad. I was told how useless and idiotic I am. I was only nine years old, and that still haunts me," she wrote.

"I always thought I was inadequate, useless and trash."

Like many abused children, she even contemplated ending it all.

"I then thought of suicide, but couldn't, because I knew what tomorrow holds is brighter. Music was my life, dance was my fix, and the lyrics my story."

More In News

Her Story: My Father Was Abusive

I awoke to the sound of shattered glass and an angry scream. Quickly, I jumped out of bed and blindly ran towards the light pouring out from the cracks of the door. “Stop!” I screamed. I was now standing witness to a scene, a nightmare I had dreamt of too often. There stood my father, holding his hand in a threatening grip around my mother’s arm as her face cringed in pain.

“Let her go! You’re hurting her!” I screamed.

“I’m just showing your mother something. Go back to bed,” he said sternly. Did he think I was an idiot? Did he think I was some ignorant child? I could see shards of broken glass in the other room, and I quickly inspected my mother from head to toe.

I ran towards him and began to pry his fastened fingers from her arm. I was not a child anymore; I was almost eighteen, and I would not let him lay another finger on my mother. My father batted me away with ease and flung her to the side. I ran over to meet her, feeling somewhat helpless. Once I made sure my mother was okay, I ran over to the washroom to fetch the broom. You can only imagine my surprise when I found myself gazing at a scared and helpless little girl who stared accusingly back at me in me in the mirror. I closed my eyes and woke up in my own bed, then quickly ran over to the mirror. Staring back was a matured girl with a tear-stained face and red puffy eyes—this was me.

As a child, I grew up in a household where fear and betrayal ran deep. My father, the man whose lap I lay on as a babe, promised me the world but instead taught me the true meaning of temptation and hate. For years I watched as he abused my mother both physically and mentally and, though I love him, I soon discovered that my trust in him was gradually slipping away. He frequently made my mother a promise of change and repentance, insisting that all he needed was a second chance. The first time, my mother stayed, even though they had never been married—not because she loved him or because she had no family, but because she thought she was doing what was best for me. A day would barely pass before the sound of forceful strikes and gut-wrenching cries echoed throughout the house once more.

The days began to drift together; it was a constant cycle. In the morning, my mother would drop me off at the bus stop while my father continued to sleep in his room. I dreaded returning home at the end of the day because I knew all too well what the evening would hold. When I returned home the door would be unlocked, so I would climb up the stairs and head towards the kitchen. “Hello, sweetie how was your day?” he’d call from the living room chair. “Come here and give me a hug and a kiss. Tell me about your day.” Oh I’ll tell you, I wished I could say. Today during my math lesson I thought about how you beat the crap out of my mother last night. I will never understand why he would expect me to come running into his arms after everything I’d seen him do. I was young, not blind or deaf. I dreaded the days he called me to his side; even now I continue to despise his ignorance.

Some days. when it was just my father and me in the house, I would become so overwhelmed with fear, anxiety, and loneliness that I would suddenly burst into tears. Most times, he would get upset because he just couldn’t get it through his head why I could possibly be crying. As I tried to explain to him the pain that he had put my mother through, he would not heed my words. To him, I was just a crying seven-year-old girl; the only thing I could convey to him was that I wanted my mother. Exasperated, he’d throw the phone towards me, “Fine, call your mother. You only love her anyway, she’s the only one you need, and you never say you love me.” After that, he, a grown man, would start a crying fit of his own in front of me. They were fake, of course, amateur sobs only meant to try to break the heart of a little girl. So I’d sit at the top of the stairs just waiting for the moment my mother would walk through the door. [pagebreak] Gradually, the distance began to increase between my father and me; it was something I embraced. During Friday nights, my mother would pack a small suitcase of clothes, and together we would spend the weekend at her sister’s house located in the neighbouring city. The first time we did this, my father protested in the only way he knew how. He would grab every piece of clothing my mother had already packed and toss it down the stairs. He would scream and tell her how insensitive she was to take me away from him. When my aunt finally intervened, and he knew the battle was lost, he’d wrap me in his arms and tell me how sorry he was that my mother was taking me away from him. He did this ignoring my not so subtle protest for him to let me go and leave me be. A feeling of utter joy would course through my body as we left his house, but dread would always make its way back when it was time to return. I would cry in my aunt’s arms on those Sunday evenings, and in turn, she would whisper words of encouragement in my ear. I sometimes wondered what my father did during the weekends when my mother and I were away, and one day I found out.

One weekend, my mother had forgotten something at my father’s house, so we returned the Saturday morning. She unlocked the door with her keys, but the chain was drawn across on the other side, limiting our access. My father came to the door five minutes later dressed in his boxers and a t-shirt that looked like he had just thrown them on. It took another few minutes for him to let us in and when we entered the two of them argued in a rushed manner. I tried to capture the essence of the conversation, and it didn’t take me long to catch up. My father had the door to his room locked shut and as I approached, he blocked my path. I asked him who was in there, and he responded that it was nobody. If the door was locked someone must be on the other side, I responded, and he replied that it was his friend Bob, a man that I knew, and he said they were playing cards. I will always remember this day because it was during this moment that I was able to gather my strength and finally say it to his face. “I don’t trust you.” My voice quivered. He looked at me in disbelief and asked me in a threatening voice what I had just said, so I repeated it again in a stronger voice. It’s days like these that you never forget: this was the day I finally stood up to my father, and probably the day my half brother was conceived.

This day could have very well been what finally triggered my mother to walk out the door, or as I would have recommended, run. Their separation was easier in the sense that there were no documents to sign. Because the two of them had never been married, and the only thing keeping them in contact was me, my father liked using this to his advantage by telling all of his friends that by her leaving she was only hurting me. Before I entered fourth grade, my mother and I left my father to begin a new life in my aunt’s home. It seemed as though that tiny distance would not stop my father from harassing the two of us. He had an annoying habit of stopping by my new school, house, and day care, just to show us that he could. I hated the way he treated me, as if I was his little baby forcefully taken away from him by my mother. If you have ever experienced a situation such as mine then I am sure you have heard it before. “Look at what you’ve done to my daughter.” He’d yell to her. “You’ve brainwashed her!” This lasted throughout the last four years of my elementary school career.

When I was in middle school, on the last day of class, my mother dropped a bombshell: she had agreed to move back in with my father. I did not speak to her for the entire summer before freshman year. I was utterly convinced that she had gone completely crazy. I warned her on many occasions that she was returning to a psychopath, the man whom had harmed her on so many occasions right in front of my eyes. It seemed that what I said did not matter because she refused to listen. She would instead say that he was a lonely man with no family and that I should learn to trust because some people do change. The decision had already been made—we were rejoining my father. On the night before my first day of high school, I cried all night. In four years time, between leaving my father and finishing middle school I had somehow ended up back in a home owned by the man who stole my youth.

The peace in that tiny suburban house did not last a week. My father stayed out late on many occasions, treated my mother as if she were his maid, and treated me as if I were his trophy daughter. He acted as if he had always been there to celebrate my achievements, saying how much he had done and sacrificed to get me there. [pagebreak] A year had not passed before my mother and I left my father once again, and I did not shed a single tear. I did not even look back as he stood looking lost and confused on the front porch. I expected him to try to remain a constant figure in my life, but I knew that in my heart, he never would. To me, he would always be the father that could not love right. From then on, I assumed that I would be attending the school back in my area since we were moving into our old house. But my mother had other plans.

She did not want the dispute between her and my father to ruin the progress I had made at the school I had begun to attend. In the five months that I had been there, I had received a position in the Senior Jazz Band, choir and French Club. I was an A+ student with a bright future at the school, and my mother knew it. So for the next four years I would spend my early mornings and late afternoons commuting to and from the two cities. Some afternoons after school my father would recommend I come by his house to pick up something to eat, and I would often use these times to recover items my mother and I may have forgotten when we occupied the house with him.

Four years passed sooner than I thought. I succeeded in my academics, though did not really leave much time for evening pizza nights with the buds, or steamy make-out sessions with the guy next door. My social life was put at a standstill for most of my high school career, but the friends that I spoke to, the ones that really understood my situation always stood with me. Was it worth it? Definitely. I do admit that there were a few rough patches that I had to climb through, but I never did it alone because my mother was always by my side. I am currently a first-year university student in the Honours English program at my college, and I couldn’t be happier with my choice. What ever happened to my father? He’s still there, calling everyday; there are many messages on my phone that go unanswered. My wish for myself is to carry on with my life. What I learned from my relationship with my father is that trust is something I will never be able to do with my full heart. I will never be able to have a true relationship with him because he is the same man I knew from my childhood. It’s sad how things in life don’t always change, but this is something that I have learnt to expect and accept.

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My story: Growing up with an alcoholic parent

By Jody Lamb

Growing up with an alcoholic parent

I was one of billions of kids who grew up with an alcoholic parent.

My mother and father were extraordinarily kind-hearted, compassionate people. But my mother, who had a traumatic childhood, was an alcoholic before I was born. I love my mother deeply. She is a wonderful person. Every day, I wish I could do something to take away the hundreds of pounds of sadness she carries every day. But the effects of her alcoholism affected my sister and me terribly.

I was born in 1982 and grew up in Dearborn, Michigan. The first 10 years or so of my life, I don’t remember my father being home very much. He worked in the evenings, mostly, and this left me with my mom as the primary parent.

My mother drank at night and into the early morning hours several times a week.

Around that same age, I remember apple juice being my favorite drink. One day, I asked my mom why her apple juice always had foam on top of it. It took a few years after that to make the connection between my mom’s dramatic mood changes and her consuming the foamy apple juice. After a while, she drank directly from beer cans. She hid these cans and bottles all over the house.

By 8 or 9 years old, I regularly went looking through the closets and cabinets and poured out the beer and returned the empty cans and bottles to their spots. I also often organized the cabinets and closets because it made me feel there was kind of order to the house, even though my mom’s behavior made everything unpredictable, chaotic and messy.

I went to a small Catholic school about a 15-minute drive away from our house. We lived too far from the busing system limits so my mom had to drive me every morning. Sometimes – quite often, actually – she wouldn’t get out of bed. I got up myself, made my own breakfast, got ready and prayed she’d get out of bed. Sometimes, I’d have to plead and beg her to get out of bed for 20 minutes. By the time I made it to school, I’d be crying. I’d make it to the school as the last bell rang or minutes too late. I felt ashamed about my tardiness and hated the attention on me as I entered the classroom after my classmates were already seated. I’d be stressed, exhausted and nauseous before the day even began. The teachers at the school had zero clue. In fact, I was probably the last student they’d suspect to be dealing with an alcoholic parent at home. I was always super well behaved and got good grades. In the fifth grade, my teacher said, “Jody, you are so lucky to have a perfect mother.”

My mother was a good mother…when she wasn’t drinking.

I knew my mother’s behavior due to drinking wasn’t good. I knew her health was at risk and I knew the way she screamed at me and my dad and stumbled around wasn’t good. But like most kids of alcoholics, I was used to it and as a mini adult, I was really good at hiding any evidence of trouble at home. I saw my cousins often but besides that, we lived a very isolated life. When family and people at school saw us, everything seemed fine. My mother and father’s family knew she drank but I don’t think they really had any idea that it kept me up at night, that I was neglected in so many ways, that I went to school without enough sleep and that I was constantly – and I mean constantly – worried. I worried her cigarettes would burn the house down because she dropped burning cigarettes on the couch, the car, everywhere and she left stuff cooking on the stove and passed out and didn’t even wake up to the smoke detectors going off. Worse, I was perpetually confused by my mother’s behavior. One minute she was showering me with compliments, the next minute she was screaming, swearing and throwing things at me. I felt I couldn’t do anything right and that I was never good enough. Now, I knew my mother loved me but on some level, I felt I caused her drinking.

In every way, it was the family secret. To some degree, I don’t think my dad even knew in those early years, how much my mother’s drinking affected me but we had conversations about it. He called it a Jekyll and Hyde situation. If you met my mother, you’d only see an extremely sweet and kind person. This is the person she truly is. However, when she drinks, she becomes an entirely different person – completely unrecognizable. She transforms into a loud, angry, aggressive, violent, abusive and destructive person. My mother would scream at the top of her lungs about ridiculous things or things that had nothing to do with me or my dad. She’d throw things across the room. She’d hit my father. She’d take off for hours or a day. I’d fear she was dead. She’d drive drunk. I’d fear that she’d kill someone. And most memorable, she’d say the cruelest, hurtful things. As a young person, it was impossible to separate those mean words from the kind words she spoke when sober. The hurtful words were far more impactful. She doesn’t mean what she says when she’s drunk, my dad would explain. But that didn’t matter. The words echoed in my mind and scarred me.

Usually, my mom woke up the next day, all sweet acting, as if nothing happened. Sometimes it was easier to pretend the drunken behavior didn’t happen. Other times, I was so hurt and angry such as when she’d disappear for hours, I couldn’t even speak to her. Many times, she didn’t even remember what happened and definitely didn’t remember the things she said. Average days were nightmares. I also have horrible memories of ruined holidays and family weddings. I have zero good birthday memories.

But I was really, really good at covering up the messes – figuratively and literally. I tried to be a perfect kid. On some level, I think I thought my mom drank because of me and maybe if I could just be better, she wouldn’t have any reason to drink. Or, that if she really loved me, that would be enough to make her stop drinking. Through tears, I begged and pleaded that she stop drinking. She probably promised that she’d never drink again about 1,000 times throughout my childhood. I also wrote lengthy, heartfelt letters and slipped them under her bedroom door. She’d throw them away without a response.

I was sure that I could “fix” her if only I tried a little harder.

But she didn’t get better. She got worse. My late father, wonderful man he was, was totally trapped by codependency and paralyzed with fear that Mom would die if they divorced or some other action was taken. In fact, he told this to my sister and me on several occasions. He just always acted like it would get better on its own. He didn’t see clearly that my mother’s alcoholism was destroying all of our lives and that allowing life to go on the way it was actually enabling my mother’s alcoholism to go on and worsen. My dear father was a talented athlete and coach who had a positive impact on thousands of lives throughout his life. But he was made ill by alcoholism in our house. He simply tried to be the best dad and husband he knew how to be. But not a day goes by that I don’t wish he would have gone to Al-Anon meetings, gotten educated about what the hell was going on with his wife and taken action that would have pushed Mom to hit rock bottom and perhaps then, at the prospect of losing her life, finally get help. Maybe my father would be alive today if he had.

It was a lonely childhood. I always wanted brothers and sisters. My mom had a few miscarriages. Every time she lost a baby, I cried.  I wanted a sibling to experience life with; I may have hoped another child would give Mom purpose and happiness in the way I could not.

I was 14 when my sister, Brooke, was born.

Though I was a bit old to care about having a sibling at that point, I felt blessed to have her in my life. Complications during delivery almost killed Mom and Brooke.

I was the first person to hold Brooke, which I always think completely foreshadowed my role in her life.

Uh, hold the comments on 14-year-old me’s style…

My sister’s arrival did not snap Mom out of her drinking problem, though she drank less in my sister’s toddler years than she had before the pregnancy. Still, I could never have friends over to visit at the house. I have horrible memories from high school when friends dropped by unannounced and my mother’s drunken, aggressive and abusive behavior humiliated me. Another dominant memory is when I invited my first serious boyfriend over to the house and begged my mom not to drink and she promised that she wouldn’t. Of course, she got drunk and the evening ended with me humiliated and fighting back tears and a very uncomfortable boyfriend who departed early.

In those teen years, I was completely obsessed with my mom’s drinking.

Every day, I searched the house for her hidden bottles and cans and poured them out – which of course, only completely perpetuated the problem because she just then went out to the store and bought replacement supplies. I could determine, with spot-on accuracy, how many beers she’d consumed just by looking at her face or hearing her speak one or words. I could also predict if she planned on drinking that night or not. If she had supplies, she’d act happy, even giddy, that day. I’d get instantly sick to my stomach. If she couldn’t drink for some reason, she’d be terribly irritable – snapping at me over trivial matters, even becoming as evil tongued as she did while drunk.

During those teen years, I grew closer with my father. He was super supportive and encouraging about my cross-country and track running and involvement in school extracurricular activities. I began to understand him better. In the process, I began to resent my mother for what I perceived as a conscious decision not to get better. I believed she didn’t care enough about her family to get help. I was angry at her but I went off to college with a pit in my stomach. I worried about the well-being of my sister, though my dad assured me things would be OK and insisted that I would regret not focusing on myself for once.

After years of being the perfect, rule-following kid, I went a bit wild and did the common party thing in college. I liked the way alcohol erased my insecurities. By my second year, I recognized my relationship with alcohol was mirroring that of my mom and alcohol. I started feeling like I needed to drink in order to go to social events where I didn’t know many people. I felt I wasn’t drinking socially anymore; I was totally emotionally dependent on alcohol for a sense of confidence. I felt I was standing atop a very slippery slope. After that year, I stopped drinking heavily and focused my efforts on my education and building a foundation for a career.

That’s when I discovered that things were not good for my sister. My dad was working at night a lot again. My sister was being neglected by our mother and endangered. Mom would lock herself in her room for two days, leaving Brooke to care for herself. I spent my senior year of college basically commuting back and forth from class and work to home. My sister needed me. That year, I even sometimes brought Brooke to stay for the weekend at my college apartment. When a Big 10 college apartment is safer for a seven-year-old girl than her home, the home is an extreme problem. My father’s family urged my father to take action to get me and my sister out of the situation. He recognized the worsening problems but he was so trapped by a mix of denial, codependency and laidback, everything-will-work-out personality that prevented him from believing he had the ability to make things better. He really believed that Mom was a hopeless cause and that if he left her, she’d die.

At 26, I was exhausted and depressed – like I didn’t want to go on anymore yet I felt I had to. There were so many people depending on me. That’s when I finally got educated about alcoholism and addiction and its impact on kids and families. I better understood my mother and her disease. I let go of a lot of expectations. I learned about the effects of growing up as a child of an alcoholic. I discovered that many things I felt – extreme anxiety, low self-confidence, problems trusting people, lack of satisfaction with anything – were directly tied to the destruction my mom’s alcoholism caused. I began taking better care of myself. I went to Al-Anon meetings . I met other adult children of alcoholics. I began reading and writing more often, as I’d done as a child. This prompted me to write a middle-grade novel for tweens that was published in 2012.

Because I was focused on taking better care of me, this helped the whole family.

Then in 2014, Dad died from a heart attack.

My first thought was: My dad is gone. My second thought: Oh my God, now I am 100% responsible for Mom.

My sister was 17 and ending her junior year of high school.

So I did what most first-born children of alcoholics would do: I assumed my dad’s role. I moved out of my place and back into my parents’ home. I promptly forgot everything I’d learned about co-dependency and self-care.

My mother, overwhelmed with intense grief, plummeted. Every day, for months, I feared I’d come home and find her lifeless body. Once again, I became obsessed with her drinking. She binged for days on end. Again, I was determined to “fix” her. At one point, I convinced her to see a psychologist and I sure it the turning point – the road to recovery. It wasn’t.

After three months of sleepless nights, my sister said she couldn’t bear to stay there and watch Mom slowly kill herself so we moved out. I sobbed the day we moved. It felt like I was abandoning a sick child.

But then as the weeks passed, I get healthier. My sister got healthier. Our minds cleared as time passed being away from the chaos and the abuse. I detached, slowly.

My departure from the environment and my father’s death forced Mom to be more of an adult than she ever had in her life. While her alcoholism is still destructive, my sister and I are much better today.

Update – July 2022: 

• Mom is doing better than I ever could have imagined!
• Brooke is a happy, healthy person and we’re very close.
• Life is great for me! I’m engaged to an extraordinary guy who makes me laugh and laughs at all my jokes.

I believe sharing these personal stories is tremendously powerful. If you are an ACoA (adult child of an alcoholic) or grew up in a dysfunctional/abusive situation, I hope you’re well on your healing journey, too. Glad you’re here.

Take good care of yourself.

Reader Interactions

December 15, 2020 at 4:17 pm

I love you so much.

April 15, 2021 at 8:34 pm

As a heavy drinker (1.5 bottle a day on average, down from 3 bottles five years ago) here some piece of advise from “the other side”, mostly for alcoholics.

1. It is not necessarily hopeless. First thing, the alcoholic must recognize he has a problem. I did, everyone knows me as an alcoholic, but I hope to stop for good.

2. Don’t lie to your wife or kids. I never did. I drink in the main room in my home so everyone knows when I drink, and how much. No hidden bottles either. It used to be every day, now it is every other day on average. Yet recently my wife told me to drink “secretly”, with no one seeing me drinking. I am complying most of the time, and it is not increasing my consumption. I still want to stop.

3. My wife regrets the time I was drinking every day because it was more predictable for her. Now I can go four days with no drink, but it makes her sad because she sees more the good side of me being sober and has more home. But the moment I resume, her hopes vanishes. Before she did not have any hope. Nevertheless I know 10 bottles a week is better than 20, and I can not go back to the worse times.

4. Find a few restaurants where you use to drink, and go there and don’t drink. That way, when you are ready to stop for good, you can go to these places without having a trigger. Otherwise, you can’t go anymore to any restaurant once sober for good, which could make you angry when recovered. Prepare yourself little by little for the day you will stop for good. It’s about changing bad habits, one at a time.

5. I thought some days I needed a bottle to be OK to get rid of the shakes. I discovered it was not wine but food I needed. Sure wine would cure the shakes, but so did eating food. Try and see if this trick works for you.

Good luck! Relapses are expected and not a failure as long as you see the light at the end of the tunnel. Think about seeing your grandchildren when they will be born. Stop drinking to make that happen before it is too late.

April 19, 2021 at 9:07 pm

Thank you for sharing your perspective. Best wishes to you and your family. It sounds like you are determined to create a system to stop for good and are on your way to making that happen. Wishing you hope and great success.

May 2, 2021 at 4:56 am

Thank you for this. I’m 32 and had my son when I was 15. I grew up in a dysfunctional home where my mum was addicted to crack and alcohol. She is no longer in the crack but she is still drinking everyday (unless she hasn’t got any money). I can relate to so much of what you said, especially knowing how many drinks she’s had even over the phone. I really appreciate you sharing your testimony. Yesterday I had to block my mums calls again as she became abusive because I wouldn’t go and see her with my son. I can hardly stand to be around her when she’s drunk. But she’s blaming me for the fact she doesn’t see me or her grandchild. It feels so terrible and brings me back to being a child again.

May 6, 2021 at 3:20 pm

Thank you for publishing your journey, my own father has issues with alcoholism and a lot of what you have written is very recognisable to me. It’s nice to know I was not alone with my feelings.

We can’t fix everybody only try and look after ourselves.

May 6, 2021 at 3:52 pm

Telling your story is courageous! I am so proud of you . I, too am an adult child, although much older than you. Growing up with “alcoholism” leaves many scars, but with the help of people like yourself , ACOA groups, Alanon and written information about the effects of Alcoholism , many lives can be changed and even saved. Many blessings to you and your sister. Nathalie

July 5, 2021 at 9:25 am

I read all of your story and it resonated with me. I grew up with an alcoholic mother too. It was a terribly sad upbringing and it still affects me to this day (I am 42). My mum and dad split up when i was 14 and mum found a new boyfriend who was was an alcoholic also and used to beat her up. So many ruined birthdays and chirstmas’s throughout all of my childhood. Eventually she moved to Spain and tried to murder her boyfriend in a drunken arguement. I had to fly out there and go to a Spanish prison, negotiate the Spanish law system, get a lawyer etc. She got two years in the end. Eventually she died at aged 63. What a waste. My father was pretty useless as well and is very cold emotionally. Luckily i found a wonderful woman whom I have been married to for 16 years and have a wonderful son so I am out of that life now but it has left deep scars. My sister has become a cocaine addict as well and I dont contact her anymore as she lies and steals. The only advice I can give anyone is to get away from it as soon as you can. You cannot help an alcoholic and they will drag you down with them. I speak from experience.

November 7, 2021 at 11:55 am

Jody, thank you for sharing your story, something just like this is happening now, and I’d love to get your advice if willing. My Sister-in-law, displays many of the traits here – always has a full glass of wine at night, rarely leaves the house, wakes up at noon, regularly not getting the kids to appointments. My niece and nephew are 9yo (boy) and 10yo (girl), and live a very isolated life and don’t have many friends. My niece’s 10 year birthday was only family and no friends from school. My brother works all the time, but his life outside work is his children… so he does make up for a lot of misses of my sister-in-law (but demands on him are higher than i’ve ever seen in someone)

I’ve tried to help, for about a year going over there every night to help with kids, but I also noticed her drinking got worse… like i was there helping, so she could take less responsibilities and drink more… and for that year I was thinking – just keep blinders on, Robert, keep a good relationship with her so you can keep coming over… I kept telling myself these are the crucial development years for them and you’ve got to be like water and work with the constraints we have.

My sister in law is honestly one of the most fun people to be around – she’s so funny, and off the cuff with responses, and engaging in conversation. Which makes it easier for her to mask these things to our family or at any social events she goes to. She rarely goes to a day function. It’s always night functions, and she’ll spend the whole day relaxing stress free waking up at noon, getting her hair done, getting to looking immaculate, and then when she shows up at the social event, it even makes me questions whether i’m right in my assumptions of her – she looks beautiful, healthy, she’s engaging with everyone, she’s laughing, she’s not too dunk, she’s self depreciating, focusing on the children in those little ways, etc. But after a while, you start to see the routine.

And overtime i’ve built resentment towards her, and it’s not healthy and that’s my own issue I have to work through… But i have made a decision to address the issue with my brother (although i haven’t yet and i’m getting as educated as much as I can).

I know their is most definitely an element of codependency with my brother and sister-in-law… and his worry for her, but also likely his worry for doing anything that might rock the boat and make things even more unpredictable than they are currently.

So, my question to you is… if you’d had an uncle like me, when you were growing up, who saw and understood what was happening – what would your older wiser self encourage/plead him to do? Because eventually this will be the situation my niece and nephew will be in… 30 years from now…asking me, “if you knew, Robert, why didn’t you xyz?”

Should I be hammering my brother to go to A-A events and get more information? What sort of urgency should I be acting with? they are 9 and 10 years old. Are there other people in the family I should be including in my knowledge of all this? What if my brother says it will work itself out or it’s just the way she is and I’ve found ways around it (brushes it off like your father)? Should it be my responsibility to escalate, etc? For starters, I want the best shot of getting my brother’s buy in. Also, if you have someone in your network that you think I should reach out to… please advise, I’m happy to pay someone a consultation fee, etc. I’ll continue to get more information and seek out resources, but any thoughts you might share would be greatly appreciated.

November 7, 2021 at 12:01 pm

Jody, I noticed the books you recommended in one of your comments. I’m going to start with one of those. Thanks and please let me know if you do have some other specific thoughts on my previous comment.

February 8, 2022 at 3:14 am

Omg I thought I was reading my own life story. Everything you wrote I have gone threw . I have ywo younger siblings that I took care of because are mom was always drunk..I was 14 when my dad died . My sister was 10 and my grother was 7yr old. When he passed it made it worst on all of us.so every word you care saying I have lived it.

September 17, 2022 at 7:17 am

You’re story is my story except I was the youngest in the family so I was mostly neglected and forgotten. My mother was the alcoholic and dad the enabler just like in your family. Fighting was constant. As soon as I could get out of that house I did and right into a marriage with an addicted man. It took me 12 years to realize I had a problem as an enabler. Today I have a new husband and a different life but the scars of all those years past still are with me. I have tons of anxiety issues. I see a therapist. I am trying to find out who I am after a lifetime of being a shell of a person. Thank you for your story. It helped me realize my story could be anyones story.

September 20, 2022 at 12:38 pm

Best wishes to you on your journey, Nicole. Some people never attempt to find healing; you’re well on your way!

August 21, 2023 at 2:49 pm

Thank you for sharing your deeply personal and powerful journey of growing up with an alcoholic parent. Your story reflects resilience, strength, and the transformative power of healing. Your courage in sharing this can provide solace and encouragement to others who have faced similar challenges.

November 20, 2023 at 9:14 am

Thank you for sharing your story. I relate to almost everything you wrote although the roles were reversed. The alcoholic dad and the co-dependent mother. I am 63 and still reeling in the pain of it all. I have gone through one failed marriage and my second marriage is on the verge of breaking apart. I am learning now of the impact of being an adult child of an alcoholic. It’s never too late, right? I am in search of the hope, joy and peace that can be achieved by facing these childhood nightmares. I am so thankful that the Lord led me to your website. I am thankful to have found this community. Peace to you all.

November 26, 2023 at 1:04 pm

It is definitely always the right time to heal, no matter your age. Best wishes to you on your healing journey!

December 5, 2023 at 2:52 am

Thank you. I feel inspired.

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The effect of father's absence, parental adverse events, and neighborhood disadvantage on children's aggression and delinquency: A multi-analytic approach

a School of Public Health, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA;

A. Elizabeth Glassgow

b College of Medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

We applied multiple statistical approaches to address the co-varying nature of neighborhood, household context, and children’s behavioral problems. The focal relationship under investigation was the effect of father presence on child’s aggression. We take advantage of hybrid models to examine within-group fixed effects of time varying variables, while paying attention to household stable characteristics.

Findings demonstrate that the level of child aggression was influenced more by household and neighborhood level stable characteristics. Living in disadvantaged neighborhood had direct and indirect effects on child aggression, controlling for other variables. Fixed effects model showed no significant relationship between having a father in the household and aggression. However, hybrid models with between and within group differences in father absence indicated that the between individual difference was significantly associated with child aggression.

The findings suggest that contextual forces that precede the relationship between father absence and child aggression might determine who may be likely to live in households with characteristics that affect both father absence and aggression. When there are systematic selection biases, statistical methods suited for determining causal inference, such as fixed effects models, cannot fully tease out larger contextual and systemic forces that sort individuals into certain types of households and neighborhoods.

Introduction

Neighborhood context and inequality.

The role of space in inequality and stratification has been studied since the early 1920s. For example, Chicago School human ecology understood that the neighborhood is the basis for elementary associations in the organization of city life ( Park, Burgess, & McKenzie, 1925 ). They saw that local communities arise as a result of competition for land use and affordable housing. A neighborhood is a collection of people and institutions sharing a spatial area influenced by ecological, cultural, and political forces. Thus, characteristics of neighborhoods are not simply aggregates of individual characteristics. Influenced by Park and Burgess, Shaw and McKay (1942/1969) also documented how delinquency/crime rates are spatially distributed in urban areas and area level characteristics including economic status, racial composition, and residential mobility affect the level of social disorganization. Wilson (1987) argues that disadvantage is concentrated in class/racially segregated neighborhoods, and many social, economic, and health outcomes are also clustered in such areas. Poverty, social exclusion, housing discrimination, crime, and concentrated incarceration in these neighborhoods, in turn, further limit life chances of individuals who are already disadvantaged ( Brody et al., 2001 ; Browning, Calder, Krivo, Kwan, & Peterson, 2006 ; Grodsky & Pager, 2001 ; Moore, 2003 ; Pougnet, Serbin, Stack, Ledingham, & Schwartzman, 2012 ; Ross & Mirowsky, 2001 ; Sampson, Sharkey, & Raudenbush, 2008 ).

Neighborhood social context, interactions, and organizational mechanisms may mediate macro level structures that produce inequality to local and individual level uneven outcomes ( Lutfey & Freese, 2005 ; Reynolds, Ou, & Topitzes, 2004 ; Stockdale et al., 2007 ). The question of inequality, that is, who gets what and why, is closely linked to and mediated by who lives where, how decisions concerning where investments/divestments are made, and why. Examining inequality across neighborhood areas is to understand structural determinants and spatial processes that produce and reinforce racial and class inequality at the local level. Understanding the political economy of space thus can expand the scope of sociology of inequality and stratification. In particular, children who grow up in disadvantaged neighborhoods tend to show poorer academic achievements and more behavioral problems compared with those who live in affluent neighborhoods ( Goebert et al., 2004 ; Gorman-Smith, Tolan, & Henry, 2000 ; Jeynes, 2007 ; Woolley & Grogan-Kaylor, 2006 ). Scholars have argued that the gap between children living in poverty and those living in wealthier areas begins before their schooling and continues to widen ( Duncan, Morris, & Rodrigues, 2011 ; Lee & Burkam, 2002 ). One of the reasons for the disparity could be that children living in poverty are disproportionately exposed to social disorder, which may affect children’s behavior ( Evans, 2004 ).

Interaction between Household and Neighborhood Characteristics

Household characteristics often interact with neighborhood contexts ( Gorman-Smith et al., 2000 ; Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997 ; Sheidow, Gorman-Smith, Tolan, & Henry, 2001 ). Poor families tend to live in disadvantaged neighborhoods. But more importantly, studies have shown that the negative effects of family poverty and other adverse events are even more prominent in poorer neighborhoods ( Lippman, Burns, & McArthur, 2004 ; Sampson et al., 1997 ; Wilson, 1987 ). Because neighborhood level psychosocial and economic stress constrain family functioning, families in these areas are more likely to experience household adversities such as substance use, incarceration, and violence ( Patrick Tolan, Guerra, & Kendall, 1995 ). As such, families in disadvantaged neighborhoods are more likely to experience a greater level of challenges in raising children ( Jeynes, 2007 ; Laniel, 2003 ; Roosa, Jones, Tein, & Cree, 2003 ; Sampson & Laub, 2008 ; Tolan, Gorman-Smith, & Henry, 2004 ).

For example, father’s absence in households is known to affect child outcomes, including aggression, delinquency, depression, other mental health problems, educational and economic outcomes ( Copping, Campbell, & Muncer, 2013 ; Hao & Xie, 2002 ; Harper & McLanahan, 2004 ; McLanahan, Tach, & Schneider, 2013 ; Pougnet et al., 2012 ). The effect of father’s absence is, for the most part, mediated through an unstable family context. First, household conflict associated with a father’s departure may affect children’s emotional instability and delinquent behavior ( Lansford, 2009 ; Mandara, Murray, & Joyner, 2005 ; Markowitz & Ryan, 2016 ; Single-Rushton & McLanahan, 2002 ). Children growing up in households with a high level of marital conflict may act out in response to the emotional disruption ( Amato, 2005 ; Cummings, Goeke-Morey, & Papp, 2004 ; Lansford, 2009 ; Markowitz & Ryan, 2016 ). Studies have argued that exposure to marital conflict increases parent-child conflict and consequently, aggressive behavior in children ( El-Sheikh & Elmore-Staton, 2004 ); and increases stress and anxiety in children, which leads to maladjustment ( Cummings et al., 2004 ; Jenkins & Smith, 1991 ).

Second, household socioeconomic conditions affect the child’s socialization ( Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 1994 ; Pfiffner, McBurnett, & Rathouz, 2001 ); and poor economic conditions due to father’s absence may create environments in which children develop antisocial behavior ( Brody et al., 2001 ; Russell & Odgers, 2015 ). In particular, households without a father present are more likely to be poor, and household poverty limits child life chances, which may increase antisocial behavior ( Harper & McLanahan, 2004 ; Najman et al., 2010 ; Russell & Odgers, 2015 ). To be sure, poverty, family instability, marital conflict, and neighborhood disadvantage are often correlated, making it difficult to draw conclusive causal relations concerning children’s academic/behavioral outcomes and their co-varying family/neighborhood characteristics.

Causal Inference and Analytic Limitations

Scholars often employ fixed effects models to control for unobservables ( Halaby, 2004 ; Markowitz & Ryan, 2016 ; McLanahan et al., 2013 ) Fixed effects models are particularly helpful when examining stable characteristics of individual and neighborhood factors that are highly correlated, which may be confounders of child outcomes and multi-level predictors ( Halaby, 2004 ). However, fixed effects models may not entirely solve the problem of selection bias. Diez-Roux (2007) argues that differences in stable individual level characteristics between individuals may contribute “non-exchangeability of individuals” between groups, even after controlling for potential confounders. It is because people do not randomly choose where they live. Thus fixed effects model which eliminates between individual variance by limiting analysis to within person change over time cannot account for a priori social organization of race that determines not only where one lives but also one’s life trajectory.

This is particularly important concerning multi-level predictors of children’s outcomes, because the causal relationship between child outcomes and time-varying predictors may differ by unmeasured child characteristics. If that is the case, within individual causal relationships established using fixed effects models cannot be entirely free of unobserved stable characteristics of individuals. Furthermore, these individual-level variables could function not only as confounders, but also mediators ( Duncan & Raudenbush, 1999 ). The issue of children’s aggression and delinquency is an example of the problem of uncertainty due to complex relationships between unobservables and selection bias. For example, child’s aggression may be influenced by neighborhood and family environment, but when child’s social, economic, and physical environment, as well as perception and reactions to child’s aggression vastly differ by child’s race/ethnicity, within individual analysis fails to capture such systematic difference between groups. While it is not plausible to address all the limitations of different types of analytic tools, hybrid models may be an effective approach to examine time-varying variables as well as stable effects of stable characteristics ( Allison, 2005 ). In this paper, we take advantage of the benefits of hybrid models to examine within-group fixed effects of time varying variables, father in a household, mother living with an adult male significant other, and income, while paying attention to stable characteristics, such as gender, race/ethnicity, neighborhood disadvantage, and parental adverse events. The focal relationship we will explore is the effect of father’s presence in the household on children’s aggression. We hypothesize that children whose father is living in the same household have a lower level of aggression. And, we further hypothesize that the effect of father in the household differs by the experience of parental adverse events and stable characteristics of children/family.

We used an existing dataset entitled “SafeChildren” which includes 424 students living in disadvantaged neighborhoods in Chicago. Students were enrolled at the time of entering into first grade in seven Chicago Public Schools (CPS), from 96 census tracts, all of which were located in predominantly poor and racially segregated neighborhoods. Overall, 42% of the study participants were black and 58% were Hispanic students; and 49% were male and 51% were female students. Over the thirteen-year study period, students were followed up approximately every 12 months, totaling nine waves of repeated measures on time-varying variables and non-time-varying individual, family, and neighborhood characteristics. Two additional waves of data included various long-term outcomes, such as high school graduation, incarceration, mental health, substance use, and teen pregnancy.

Dependent variables:

Children’s aggression was measured by the Teacher Observations of Classroom Adaptation Revised (TOCA-R), a valid and reliable teacher-reported measure of children’s behavior in the classroom ( Tolan et al., 2004 ). We used the TOCA-R aggression subscale that includes 10 items, rated on 6-point scale (1 = almost never to 6 = almost always). TOCA-R items include whether a child is stubborn, breaking rules, harms/hurts others and property on purpose, takes others’ property, fights, lies, trouble accepting authority, yells at others, and teases classmates ( Petras, Chilcoat, Leaf, Ialongo, & Kellam, 2004 ; Tolan, Gorman-Smith, Henry, & Schoeny, 2016 ). The aggression score was standardized to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation (SD) of 1. For this analysis, we used measures from six waves (Waves 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8: Indices 1–6). Child’s involvement with delinquency was measured by combining any school referrals due to any serious or violent events, or record of arrest. Delinquency was measured at Waves 10 and 11, and we created a cumulative measure using both waves.

Independent variables:

Several time varying and non-time varying sociodemographic variables were used. Non-time varying variables were race/ethnicity, gender, and the presence of parental adverse events. Race/ethnicity was a dichotomous variable including black and Hispanic (AfAm=1). Gender was also a dichotomous variable (Male=1). Parental adverse event variable was a dummy variable indicating whether parent(s) ever had problems with incarceration, substance use, and/or mental health issues. A primary caregiver completed the parental adversity survey questions. The items were dichotomous variables, measured as either yes or no.

Time varying variables included having father in the household, mother living with an adult male significant other, and household income. All time varying variables were also measured at Waves 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8. Father in the household, which was a dichotomous variable (Yes vs. No), was included in the analysis. To tease out the effects of having an adult male in the household, mother living with an adult male significant other was measured at each wave (yes vs. no). We created a summary variable for some of the analysis, which was a dichotomous variable indicating father living with the child more than 75% of the time, which meant that the respondents answered yes to the father in household variable five out of six measures. Household income was an ordinal variable with six categories, from less than $5,000 to more than $50,000. The distribution of income category within wave showed that the midpoint of family income was around $20,000, ranging from 37% to 64% of families had income less than $20,000. We created a dichotomous variable indicating household income less than $20,000, because only about 2.6% of households at each wave reported to have household income greater than $50,000.

To calculate neighborhood disadvantage score, we performed a factor analysis using census tract level % poverty, % unemployed, % less than high school education, % female headed households with children, and median household income. The average crime rate at the beginning of the original data collection was also used in this analysis.

Conceptual model:

Overall, we conceptualized that living in disadvantaged neighborhoods negatively affects children’s school achievement and behavioral outcomes. And, neighborhood environment influences family structure and functioning, while family characteristics, in part, mediate neighborhood effects on children’s outcomes. On the other hand, household characteristics such as race and income may also partially determine type of neighborhood in which families reside. Figure 1 depicts our multi-level approach to children’s outcomes, in particular, aggression and delinquency.

Conceptual Model

As shown in Figure 1 , complex multi-level factors influence children’s aggression and delinquency. Many household characteristics are highly correlated with neighborhood characteristics, while the effects of neighborhood and family factors may be moderated by children’s gender and race/ethnicity.

Descriptive statistics were used to characterize the sample. Black and Hispanic children were compared on key variables. Next, to minimize the problem of unobserved heterogeneity due to omitted variable(s), we take advantage of the current panel data. We performed a four-step analysis for this paper: First, we used multilevel models, individuals were nested within neighborhoods, to establish relationships between the outcome measures and the two level predictors. For the multi-level models, we used summary scores for all repeated measures of dependent and independent variables. Second, we used within group fixed effects models to draw more definite causal inferences between the outcome and explanatory variables, by washing out stable effects of stable characteristics of individuals. For the fixed effects models, we examined changes over time within individuals. Third, we ran a hybrid model to examine both time varying and stable characteristics of individuals. We calculated both the within individual difference at each wave from the individual mean, which represents fixed effects parameters, and between individual variation from the grand mean, which accounts for between individual differences. By using both within and between individual differences, the hybrid model allows both time varying and non-time varying variables in the model. Causal relationship between child outcomes and time-varying predictors may differ by unmeasured child characteristics. And, if this is the case, a within individual causal relationship established using fixed effects models cannot be entirely free of unobserved stable characteristics of individuals. Furthermore, these individual-level variables could function not only as confounders, but also mediators ( Duncan & Raudenbush, 1999 ). For example, race/ethnicity intersects with neighborhood characteristics that affect child’s aggression. However, when child’s non-time varying variable, race/ethnicity, determines unobserved mechanisms, by fixing non-time varying characteristics may limit our understanding of what contributes to child’s aggressive behavior. Finally, we constructed a structural equation model to examine the viability of our initial conceptual model in explaining aggression and delinquency.

Descriptive Statistics

Over the study period, just over 50% of children were living with father in the same household, from 54% in Wave 1 to 52% in Wave 8. Mean aggression was much higher for children who lived with father in the same household compared with those who did not ( Table 1 ). In addition, aggression score was consistently higher for male students (0.28) compared with females (0.03). Overall, black children had higher aggression scores (0.54) compared with Hispanic children (−0.13) for both male (0.72 vs. 0.01) and female (0.39 vs. −0.27) students (data not shown). Similarly, a significantly lower proportion of children whose father in household (9.1%), compared with children without father living in the same household (20.8%), was reported to have one or more delinquent incidences by the end of the study period (Waves 10 and 11).

Descriptive Characteristics of Children, by Live with Father in the Same Household

Note:Waves 1–8 include six measures (waves 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 & 8)

As expected, there was no significant difference in gender of child by father presence in home. On the other hand, significantly higher proportion of black children were living without father in household. Only 15% of children whose father resided in the same household were black children. Children living with father in same household were relatively better off economically, compared with those whose father was not in household: 45% of children who were living with father in same home were from household with annual income greater than $20,000, compared with those whose father did not reside in same home (17%). Naturally, those living with father in same home were more likely to live with father or a male partner of mother (94% and 13%, respectively).

More than 41% of households without father present had one or more parental adverse events, including mental health or substance abuse problems or history of arrest/incarceration. Furthermore, children living without his/her father were also more likely to live in disadvantaged neighborhoods, with average concentrated disadvantage score of 0.40, compared with those living with his/her father (−0.47).

Multilevel Mixed Model

Equation 1 elaborates a two-level mixed model. At Level-1, children’s aggression was regressed on male, black, household income greater than $20,000, and having parental adverse event(s). At Level-2, census tract level disadvantage factor score was added to the model. Because there was no slope difference by disadvantage, we allowed only the intercept to vary. Table 2 summarizes the mixed model results. Black children compared with Hispanic children were more likely to have a higher level of aggression. Male children were more likely than females to show aggression. Having a father in the household was associated with lower level of aggression. Children living in disadvantaged neighborhoods were more likely to show a higher levels of aggression. Random effects parameters showed that census tract level residual was 0.92, and child level residual was 0.07.

Two-Level Mixed Effects Model Predicting Children’s Aggression

Fixed Effects Model

Having a father in the household was one of the significant predictors of children’s aggression. However, mixed effects models do not necessarily control for all unobservables. To examine further the causal inference between father’s presence in the household and children’s aggression, we utilized the within group fixed effects model. Within group fixed effects model examines change over time within individual, thus washes out unmeasured stable characteristics of individuals. Individual dummy variables and wave dummy variables were used. Non-time varying, stable characteristics of individuals and differences between individuals are dropped out of the model, leaving only the effects of within individual changes.

Fixed effects model findings for the whole sample and by race/ethnicity are presented in Table 3 . Interestingly, father in household was no longer significant. To further explore potential reasons for the different findings between the mixed model and the fixed effects model, we subsetted the data by race and ran the models for each racial group. Father’s presence in the household was not significant in all models.

Within-Group Fixed Effects Model Predicting Children’s Aggression

Hybrid model

We propose that non time-varying characteristics, such as gender and race may moderate the effects of individual and neighborhood characteristics on aggression. Furthermore, instead of within individual differences, that is, change in the presence of father in household, contextual factors may determine both the likelihood of having father in the household and aggression.

To examine stable characteristics while taking into account changes within individuals, we performed a hybrid model. In addition to the father in household variable, we added a variable indicating whether the mother was living with an adult male significant other. This decision was made because father in household could mean either the effect of having one’s own father in the household or the effect of having a male adult in the household. So, introducing the status of mother living with an adult male significant other could help tease out the effects of father versus the presence of another adult male.

Table 4 summarizes the model. The first model using all cases showed that the between difference in father in the household was significant but that the within difference was not significant. Black children had a higher aggression level compared with Hispanic children. Male students, compared with female students, had a higher aggression level. Students living in more disadvantaged neighborhoods were more likely to show a higher level of aggression.

Hybrid Model Predicting Children’s Aggression with Interaction Terms

Note:HH: household

AA: African American

It is possible that the effect of a father in the household may be dependent on family functioning. Children whose parents are having problems with incarceration, substance use, and mental health, having father in the household could be a source of stress, especially if the father is having problems. To further examine the differential effects of having a father in the household, we ran hybrid models separately for those who reported parental adverse events and those who reported no parental adverse events. The second and the third models in Table 3 show the difference between the two groups. Overall, the amount of variance explained by the model was twice as high for children with no parental adverse events (16%) as for children who experienced parental adverse events (8%). For those who experienced parental adverse events, none of the time varying variables showed significant relationships with aggression. Being male and living in disadvantaged neighborhoods increased the level of children’s aggression. Students with no parental adverse events showed a very different pattern. Those who had a father in the household had a lower level of aggression. Students whose mother had a partner other than the child’s father had higher aggression, black children compared with Hispanic children, and male students, compared with female students had a higher level of aggression. Interestingly, neighborhood disadvantage did not seem to have a significant effect on children’s aggression.

We then introduced two interaction terms: being male with father in household and being black with father in household. The interaction between male and father in household was significant only for those with parental adverse events. Figure 2 depicts the effects of the interactions. For black male children, having father in household was associated with lower aggression when there was no parental adverse events, while having father in household was associated with higher aggression when there were parental adverse events.

Mean aggression score difference between children whose father was living in the household, by Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and parental adverse events

For black children living in households without parental adverse events, having father in household was associated with lower aggression only for male students. For Hispanic children living in households without parental adverse events, having father in household was associated with lower aggression for both male and female children.

For black children living in households with parental adverse events, having a father in the household was associated with lower aggression for female children but with higher aggression for male children. For Hispanic children, having father in household was associated with lower aggression for both male and female children. But for male children, the effect was very small.

Causal Paths

Finally, we ran structural equation models to explain aggression and delinquency ( Figure 3 ). Children living in disadvantaged neighborhoods were more likely to experience parental adverse events, less likely to have a father in the household, and less likely to have his/her mother living with an adult male significant other. Black children were more likely to be affected by neighborhood disadvantage, not having a father in the household, and parental adverse events.

Path explaining aggression and delinquency

Total effects of factors for aggression and delinquency are summarized in Table 5 . Overall, being male and living in disadvantaged neighborhoods was positively and having a father in the household was negatively associated with aggression. For delinquency, aggression and disadvantage were positively associated with delinquency.

Total Effects on Aggression and Delinquency

Our analysis demonstrates that neighborhood disadvantage directly affects children’s aggression and also is mediated by family functioning. Using multiple approaches to explaining children’s aggression, we found that children’s aggression seems to be affected more by stable characteristics of individuals and neighborhoods. Living in disadvantaged neighborhood was shown to be significantly associated with a higher level of aggression, controlling for other relevant variables. This pattern is confirmed by the multilevel model, hybrid model, as well as structural equation model.

Neighborhood disadvantage also influenced the likelihood of experiencing parental adverse events such as parental incarceration, substance use, and mental health problems and father’s absence in the household, which were shown to increase the level of aggression. These findings indicate that neighborhood disadvantage directly affects children’s aggression and also is mediated by family structure and functioning.

Multilevel model findings indicate that being African American and being male are associated with a higher level of aggression. However, these relationships may be spurious. The hybrid model examining both changes within individuals and stable characteristics of individuals showed that race/ethnicity and gender effects may differ by household context. For children with parents who had adverse events, being African American and being male seem to be associated with an increased level of aggression. For those with parental adverse experiences, the parental adverse effect was smaller for African American children compared with Hispanic children. Furthermore, the interaction between being male and having a father in the household seemed to increase aggression for those with parents who had adverse events, but the main effect of gender was not significant. These results suggest that parental adverse events may affect males more than females. Interestingly, previous studies have argued that females are influenced more by family problems and males are affected more by neighborhood context ( Ehrmann & Massey, 2008 ). Scholars speculated that it might be because females tend to stay closer to homes and males tend to be “out” in the community, thus the source and the level of exposure to risks may differ by gender. Our findings seem to contradict previous studies, which might be because of the characteristics of the study sample. The study participants were African American and Hispanic children living in predominantly disadvantaged neighborhoods in Chicago, which is quite unique compared with previous studies that often compare whites and other minority students. Although this topic is beyond the aims of the current analysis, it would be worth further exploring in future research.

The effect of race/ethnicity needs further evaluation. African American children may experience unique challenges that are distinct from Hispanic children. African American families are more likely to live in neighborhoods that are disproportionately affected by concentrated incarceration, substance abuse, and other social and economic stress ( Besbris, Faber, Rich, & Sharkey, 2015 ; Browning et al., 2006 ; Browning, Cagney, & Iveniuk, 2012 ; Bursik & Grasmick, 1993 ; Coulton & Irwin, 2009 ; Crowder, 2010 ). Because of the limitations of the data, we were unable to tease out African American children living in affluent neighborhoods which may differ from those in disadvantaged areas. But the findings seem to indicate that neighborhood disadvantage and family functioning are more important factors for determining aggression; and race/ethnicity may have different effects for children living in different family conditions.

Future research also would benefit from examining additional factors that may be affecting family structure. Further exploration is necessary to understand how the role and quality of parenting (e.g., emotional support, supervision, attention) by the mother and/or the father is associated with children’s aggression and whether it can moderate neighborhood context. The construct a parent present in the household must be expanded to measure the parent’s provision of care to meet the child’s need including biological/physical (e.g., nutrition, sleep, safe household conditions, exercise), psychological/social (e.g., nurturing, support, opportunity to play with others, guidance and discipline, educate), and financial (e.g., adequate shelter, healthcare, clothing). Better understanding of the role of adverse parental experiences on children’s aggression is needed, particularly how this experience is influencing his/her parenting and if the child also has experienced adversity.

We use teacher reports to identify child’s aggression. This measure is vulnerable to implicit bias of teachers in evaluating student’s behavior and consequently discipline. Studies have shown that teacher’s implicit bias results in disproportionately high number of black students being labeled and called out for misconduct, delinquency, and behavioral problems ( Barden, Maddux, Petty, & Brewer, 2004 ; Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016 ; Neckerman & Kirschenman, 1991 ; Staats, 2014 ; Weitzer & Tuch, 2005 ). Although there is no way of estimating teachers’ assessment of student behavior in this was biased based on student’s race/ethnicity, we could assume that there exists implicit bias against minority students. It is possible thus our study might have overestimated actual aggression among black students. However, it is potential limitation was minimized by utilizing fixed effects model that eliminates between individual variance. In addition, teacher’s implicit bias indeed increases the likelihood of children being subject to real discipline and expulsion. More important implication of implicit bias affecting teacher’s student evaluation perhaps is that biased teacher’s assessment contributes to disproportionate arrest and incarceration in minority communities. In recent years, a disproportionately high number of poor minority students are funneled into the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems, as a result of zero tolerance policies. The “school to prison pipeline” phenomenon describes the increasing trends of students being sanctioned, expelled, which explains high rates of school dropout among poor minority schools ( Darling-Hammond, 2007 ; Heitzeg, 2009 ). Skiba and Knesting (2001) argues that zero tolerance policies do not seem to improve school safety. Rather, such policies effectively push potentially troublesome students out of the school system ( Advancement Project, 2005 ; Skiba & Knesting, 2001 ). The problem is that the “school to prison pipeline” does not affect all students equally. Between 1999 and 2007, the percent of black students being suspended has increased by 12%, while the percent has declined for white students during the same period ( Hoffmann, Dickinson, & Dunn, 2007 ; Skiba, Eckes, & Brown, 2009 ). While black students make up 17% of students in the U.S., 37% of suspensions and expulsions were black students ( Heitzeg, 2009 ). Skiba and Knesting (2001) argue that it is not because of differences in behavior, but because of differential enforcement of zero tolerance policies ( Orfield, 2005 ). Thus our study findings concerning child’s aggression needs to be contextualized within the school to pipeline environment where same level of aggression or behavioral problems would more likely to result in more severe discipline for minority students.

Having a father in the household was associated with a lower level of aggression in the mixed model. Interestingly however, the within group fixed effects model showed no significant relationship between having a father in the household and aggression within the individual. Hybrid models, with both between and within group differences in father’s presence, indicated that it is not within individual variance but the between individual difference was the significant factor associated with aggression. It is quite difficult to conceptualize what this means, because if we accept that there is no causal relationship between a father in the household and aggression, we may not have reasons to further explore the effect of father in the household. But this finding also seems to suggest that some other contextual forces which precede the relationship between father absence and aggression may determine who may be likely to live in households with other characteristics that affect both father absence in household and aggression. These stable between individual differences are shown to be more important than change within individuals. When there are systematic selection biases, a statistical method that is suited for determining causal inference cannot fully tease out larger contextual and systemic forces that sort individuals into certain types of households and neighborhoods. Although currently we do not fully understand how neighborhood context influences individual outcomes, multiple methods can help explore different types of data in many different ways, which may contribute to current literature on inequality and neighborhood.

Neighborhood context influences children’s outcomes, in part by affecting family structure. While race/ethnicity and gender may independently affect children’s outcomes, neighborhood effects may be moderated by race/ethnicity and gender as well. The complex interplay between race/ethnicity and neighborhood characteristics needs careful analysis. But decomposing the effects of intersecting factors using statistical methods may provide only limited knowledge. Because individuals do not randomly reside in certain neighborhoods, simply accounting for similarities between individuals within neighborhood does not eliminate all statistical biases. Likewise, controlling for stable characteristics of individuals cannot address systemic differences in contextual variance between individuals. But statistical methods are not designed to address all biases in the first place. Each statistical approach provides unique strengths and weaknesses, and collectively, we will be able to better understand causal relationships between where we live and how it may affect our life chances, and hopefully find ways to mitigate negative effects and outcomes of inequality.

Author bios:

Sage Kim, PhD is Associate Professor, School of Public Health, Department of Health Policy and Administration.

Elizabeth Glassgow, PhD is Assistant Professor, College of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics.

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Self-Esteem

Fatherless daughters: the impact of absence, a daughter’s sense of self may be shaped by what a father is not able to give..

Posted May 26, 2023 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

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• While most research focuses on the impact of mothering on children, fathers play an important role too.
• From self-confidence to relationships, fathers have a particularly strong influence on daughters.
• Even if a father is physically present, his emotional absence can negatively affect a daughter into adulthood.

One summer day, when I was nine, I came in from playing jump rope, discovered my father unconscious in his chair, and thought he was dead. He survived another 20 years, but for the rest of my childhood and early adulthood, I lived with the fear of losing him. The possibility that, at any moment, I might suddenly be a fatherless daughter shaped the woman I would become.

Mothers and mothering occupy a lot of space in psychological literature, but the role fathers play in a daughter’s development does not get equal attention . The National Initiative for Fatherhood, the nation's leading provider of research on evidence-based fatherhood programs and resources, reports that according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 data, one in four children in this country lives in a home without a biological, step, or adoptive father. Their research indicates that children raised in a father-absent home face a four times greater risk of poverty, are more likely to have behavioral problems, are at two times greater risk of infant mortality, are more likely to go to prison, commit crimes, become a pregnant teen , abuse drugs or alcohol , drop out of school.[1]

Daughters growing up without a father face specific challenges. Fathers influence their daughters' relational lives, creativity , sense of authority, self-confidence , and self-esteem . Her relationship to her sexuality and response to men will in part be determined by her father’s comfort or discomfort with her gender and her body, starting at birth. (This post addresses one’s personal or biological father. The capacity for “fathering” is not based on anatomy, nor is it gender-specific.)

In post-modern societies, both parents may contribute to the family’s financial stability, or the mother may be the primary wage earner. However, through the lens of patriarchal values, a father is a failure if he cannot provide for and protect his family. Fairytales convey societal and psychological truths in magical settings, and many of the most popular tales— Cinderella, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White —depict the reality of inadequate, neglectful, or harmful fathers.

The story of Hansel and Gretel portrays the quintessential feckless father. He can neither provide for his family nor stand up to his wife’s cruel demands. Instead, he succumbs to her insistence that they leave their children in the woods to die so that they, the parents, can have enough to eat.

Why does the father disappear after the first page in some tales as if his relevance hardly matters? In real life, though, we know that an absent father is a haunting presence for his daughter. She will wonder why he left, why he has abandoned her, and if she did something to cause him to disappear. She will look for him in the men in her life or perhaps choose men who are the opposite of her father.

One positive outcome for fatherless daughters is hinted at in some fairy tales, as in The Girl Without Hands . The story recounts the survival challenges faced by a daughter who flees the father who maimed her. With no father and no sympathetic maternal figure to rely on, the heroine undergoes a self-revelatory process. In undertaking a series of impossible tasks, she discovers her moral and emotional strength, her courage and inner authority. She survives and thrives.

Psychotherapist Susan Schwartz has written extensively about the wounds daughters suffer from inadequate or harmful fathers. In The Absent Father Effect on Daughters: Father Desire, Father Wounds , she notes that fathers often have difficulty relating to a daughter’s emotional life. Even if the father is physically present, the daughter may feel unseen and unknown and will take on the burden of this failure as her own. She will feel a lack in herself. She may also strive to fulfill her father’s expectations in sports, in scholarship, in financial success, or she may try to fill his emptiness, his depression , with her own energy. Dr. Schwartz describes how a father’s wounds can depotentiate a daughter’s capacity to use her energy for herself, which can compromise her ability to focus and value who she is.[2]

Author Patricia Reis’s book Daughters of Saturn: From Father’s Daughter to Creative Woman is part memoir about her father, part analysis of the father-daughter relationship. She finds Freud ’s theory that the meaning in life is found in work and love too reductive. For women, she says, another dimension must be added. That question is “Whom do I serve?”—self or other.

“It is not enough to claim our power as women: we must be able to use our powers consciously, knowing where and how our energy is spent, on what, on whom, for what purpose—both in work and in relationships.” [3]

To be a fatherless daughter is to feel abandoned by a paternal figure, emotionally, physically, or both. A father may be absent from the home for reasons beyond his control. The list of reasons is extensive, and each situation impacts a daughter differently. Illness and death may burden her with additional grief , while military service, deportation, adoption , incarceration, divorce , or disinterest will have their own effects. A father who is physically present but emotionally distant, manipulative, abusive, or depressed also sets up a daughter for psychological distress. Her sense of herself, her ambition, her independence, and her trust of the world will be shaped by her relationship with her father.

Fathers who long to have a deeper relationship with their daughters might ask themselves: What is my daughter trying to tell me about herself? What does she want me to see? How can I be more curious about her and her experience in the world? And they might ask their daughters, “How can I be more attentive?”

[1] “ The Statistics Don't Lie: Fathers Matter ,” The National Fatherhood Initiative

[2] Schwartz, Susan, The Absent Father Effect on Daughters: Father Desire, Father Wounds. Routledge, 2020

[3] Reis, Patricia, Daughters of Saturn: From Father’s Daughter to Creative Woman. Continuum International Publishing Group, 1995, Preface pp xiii-xix.

Dale M. Kushner, MFA , explores the intersection of creativity, healing, and spirituality in her writing: her poetry collection M ; novel, The Conditions of Love ; and essays, including in Jung’s Red Book for Our Time .

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