this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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that's boring. and tbh i don't even want revenge, literally all i want is for him to acknowledge that he hurt me, but he refuses to even admit he ever even acted aggressively or anything towards me
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents might be the book for you. It wrecked me for weeks, and then I had one of my parents read it. It wrecked them too. This sort of thing is a generational trauma.
yeah, 100%. my dad had an extremely abusive upbringing, like his (adoptive) mother forced him to sleep in the dog house and hit him with whips and crazy shit, so he can't even perceive that the way he treated me was abusive (even though i have a fucking scar from where he threw a knife at me for literally no reason) because what he did to me doesn't even register to him as abuse because he loves me.
i'll look into the book, but fwiw, i've had many years of therapy, and i've near enough made peace with the idea of not having him in my life. i really struggle to communicate with him, his denials register to me as gaslighting which is really triggering, so it's hard for me to help him. he also doesn't read books at all, probably because of undiagnosed dyslexia
Christ, what a mess. Sorry for that. I just can't stop recommending this book to everyone, but I know books can't solve every problem. It did help me reframe things, but it did also slightly burden me with a certain understanding about the way the world is. So much boils down to emotional immaturity and people never growing up.
I went through this with my mom. In one of our last conversations, I mentioned that years ago, when I was 18 and lived with her briefly, I took like fourty of her seroquel pills to try and kill myself. "Remember when I slept for three days straight?" And told her what I remembered of that time. Instead of her saying, "oh wow I didnt know that happened" and empathizing or something, she just denied it ever happened, got mad at me and called me a liar.
I never spoke to her again. I dont remember our last words but this one one of the staws for me.
The last time I spoke to my step father, the real abuser, was when I was 16. Letting go of that mess was easy.
Sometimes healing, or "forgiveness" (I hate that word) is in letting go. My Bio dad/mom were both raised pretty fucked up, especially my bio dad, not dissimilar from what ur father went through. I mourn his childhood, but not his death (he died) nor who he was as an adult.
Stay being good to yourself, I hope you find peace and healing in letting go <3
it's not your job to help him. it's your job to help yourself.
I think i had some good thoughts regarding this in my big-ass reply to you, so if you don't read all of it, here's the relevant bits:
Half the problem with those is that it is SO easy to justify doing things. Oh, your kid turned out well with a decent job/family/friend group? Well, everything you did must have been worth it then!
I ran into that thinking with my grandmother, when we were just casually discussing pre-k in the context of its effects on people's chances in life. She immediately threw out the classic, "well, all of [your parent's siblings and your parent] came out just fine, and we didn't let them start until first grade! Earlier schooling would have doomed them!"
For them, everything was with "a reason," even if that reason is completely post-hoc. They don't do 'X thing' that is socially inappropriate? It's because they were spanked for doing it! Spanking is good! They have a good job now? It's because they were yelled at if they weren't studying for hours after school! Yelling is good!
And conversely, they don't care if the person was hurt. In your example of the traumatized man with an eating disorder? It's his own damn fault. He was always going to turn out that way. He might have even been fat if he wasn't yelled at!
It's just sickening. There's a reason to cut off parents who don't acknowledge their actions.
tbh, I doubt any of that would get through and it would just prolong an unhealthy relationship.
It's best to cut ties and move on if possible.
Source: my mom sucks and nothing is ever her fault. The exception to the rule was when she got wicked drunk at my dad's memorial service and kept shouting that she'd killed him. She only stopped once a couple people stepped in to try and reassure her that she hadn't, which brought the focus back on her. (Spoiler alert: she did. Without her actions he'd still be alive.)
Oh that's definitively more complicated and much less actionable, you'd have to engage with them a lot to change them in the right direction, or just Hope™ that someone else does that job for you.