Letter To An Abusive Father

Dad,

I want you to know about all the things that I needed from you and all the things I didn’t get. I want you to know about how it has affected me throughout my life.

I needed your unconditional love

You may have loved me, but I never felt it. How could I? Your love was conditional. I don’t know if any one of the things I needed from you could be seen to have affected me more than others, but this must be high on the list. This has permeated every area of my life. Unconditional love from another human being feels foreign to me. The only love I received from you was conditional upon me being something or someone else, including giving up my own self to please others. Sure, there were teachers along the way, and the occasional kindness from a stranger, but not from the people who were supposed to love me. Supposed to value my worth.

Not getting that from the man that was supposed to be my model for my future relationships with men has caused me to search for that love my entire life. My entire life, dad. Teachers that could never be my dad. Friend’s dads that could never be my dad. Therapists that could never be my dad. A husband that could never be my dad. Oh, I got compassion, and I got people in my life that seemed to care, but it never filled the particular void, and it never will.

I needed happiness, acceptance and understanding

Thankfully, though I didn’t get these things from you, I have been able to experience a lot of happiness along the way and in recent years, I have learned to get the happiness for myself FROM myself. Acceptance, especially self-acceptance has been a very difficult challenge. I have so much room in my heart for accepting others but when it comes to myself, I felt worth less than others so often. I felt used by you, I felt discarded by you, I felt worth absolutely nothing by you. It has taken me a lot of work to feel like I have value, but I am doing it. I do have value; I know that in my mind and have started to feel that in my heart.

I needed peace, stability, and safety

The lack of peace, stability and safety growing up caused me high anxiety. I felt like

I was constantly walking on eggshells. As a child, knowing that any period of calm would be shattered at any given moment caused me to mistrust that calm, that peace. Today, if I trust it, it feels like I will get hurt or disappointed eventually, so why bother? I feel uncomfortable when I am not “busy”. I feel uncomfortable when things are calm. I am getting better at it, no thanks to you.

I needed you to hold my hand as I grew up and be there for me when I needed you

I needed a dad who would take care of me and keep me safe from scary monsters. That was impossible because you were one of the scariest monsters in my life.

I needed you to teach me that I had value

I should have been taught that I was worthy of love from a man. That I was worthy of love from anyone.

I needed you to show me that women had value beyond how they looked or for how they obeyed and pleased men

I needed you to let me be a kid

I had to take care of YOU. I had to cook YOU dinner and be criticized for not doing it right. I had to clean the house and change diapers when I was only a couple of years out of diapers myself. If you were drunk and I didn’t do it right, you would beat me with your belt. Hard. Laying over your lap. With my pants down to further humiliate me. Then later you would make me sit on that same lap while enduring things a child shouldn’t ever have to do. I was so scared.

I needed you to teach me about life and help guide me through it

Oh, how I used to feel so envious of the girls who could go to their dads and talk to them and get advice, dads who took them places, dads who went to those father daughter dances. I never went to one school dance, not one. I never felt like I would fit in. Even when I would get asked, I refused. It felt wrong because you said I was a slut or a whore to do so. Then when the church prohibited it too, I guessed it was true. I felt bad to the core. Too bad for even God.

I needed you to show me how to become an adult

I needed a dad that would tuck me into bed at night and give me a fatherly hug. Instead, you made me afraid. You scared me with the things you did to me and made me do to you, things that I didn’t understand. Things that scare me to this day with my own husband.

I needed you to show me how to be independent, and to stand up for myself

That would require learning self-worth and there was none of that to be had growing up in our home.

I needed you to teach me that I am human and not to strive for perfection to be accepted

I needed you to teach me value

I needed a dad who wouldn’t make fun of me as I got older, who wouldn’t make lewd comments about my child’s body becoming a woman. Everything about becoming a woman felt shameful. Everything. My value felt as if it was only to please others or pay the painful consequences.

 I needed you to teach me boundaries, to protect me, and how to protect myself

You didn’t protect me when I needed it most, and of course there was no protection for me even from you. I didn’t even know what a boundary was until recently.

I needed you to teach me right from wrong

My examples of right versus wrong?! Wow. Stealing, abuse, lying, selling drugs to young people, and much more. I am grateful every day that I received other examples and grabbed onto them for dear life. I wasn’t perfect but I came out of our home with a sense of what was right and what was wrong. Some of my siblings didn’t. And their lives were cut short because of it.

I needed you to comfort me when life was tough

I had myself, and mom. She comforted me and even if it was riddled with enmeshment, I got enough to survive. I got comfort from books, from dreaming about leaving, from others on the outskirts of my life. Never, EVER, from you.

I needed you to teach me how to express anger appropriately

You treated my mom (and all of us) with such violence and disregard. I begged to be the one beaten so that I could spare her and my brothers and sisters the pain and ridicule.

Most of all, I needed you to show me that I matter

Not because of what I do, what I wear, how good I do in school or how perfect I can try to be. I needed to know that I matter because I was me, your little girl.

I now know that you couldn't be that person for me.

I now know you had a hard life, and I know you struggled to survive.

I now know you struggled with the darkness, and the loneliness.

I now know that you craved the happiness, peace, and stability just as badly as I hoped for it.

Now that I am an adult, that little girl inside of me still needs you, so what do I do? I will never get the things I needed from you.

Without accountability, there can be no healing. I will never get that from you.

These things that I needed from you, and didn’t get, have caused me so much pain in my life. I have been carrying the shame around for so long and it is so heavy

For so long, I thought suicide was the way out of all the pain. It isn’t though. I have purpose and I have worth just for being born, and even though I forget that - sometimes multiple times a day, I am learning to accept me as I am.

I do matter dad. I matter as much as every other human being on this planet, but I fight to feel that every day. In every relationship.

I now need something from you that I will give myself. Amends for all the things you did to me, all the ways I have been affected by not getting these things from you.

I am letting go. I am choosing to lighten the pain. I choose love and forgiveness. I deserve that.