Ask Hax: Woman can, with help, change abusive dad's legacy

5:40 PM, Feb. 19, 2013  |  Comments
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Adapted from a recent online discussion.

Dear Carolyn: My father was an awful dad. He was the first person to ever call me a terrible name (I was 9) and was absent when he wasn't antagonistic. Bad, bad dad.




- Anonymous

Dear Reader: Oh my goodness - you'll get no tsk-tsking from me, not even close. You have not been "complicit." A father who calls his 9-year-old a terrible name is knocking her off the grow-and-thrive path and squarely onto the survival path. You didn't have any say; from an age before awareness, you have simply done what you felt was necessary to get by, because that was the one choice he gave you.


You had no say then, but you do now. How you respond to what he's done to you - and what you make of yourself now - are the priorities you've earned. In other words, Guide yourself onto the grow-and-thrive path. Because a dying father means you're likely to need it anyway, Look up your local hospice provider and find out what counseling services they offer. It's not as if you can pluck compassion off the shelf and take it to the register, but hospice comes close. Take your truth there, and your mixed feelings and your self-loathingand no doubt your anger at your fate in the parent lottery, and leave it all there. You're not petulant, you're not ungrateful, you're a survivor of enduring, systematic abuse.

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