Hi, thank you for all the beautiful insights.

I feel like I need to vent and want to elaborate a bit as to what happened to me: My parents are emotionally distant. My dad is a misogynist and when I was little, I sensed this and consequently toned down my femininity to appease him. If you watch How I Met Your Mother, I’m just like the Robin character.

My dad ruled with an iron fist. If me and my sister misbehaved, he’d hit us but not our brother. During my teenage years, he added verbal abuse to his portfolio, some of the highlights including ‘frog face’ and ‘fat bag’. He also began supplying me with laxatives, fat blockers, and diet pills. Some of the pills later were being banned in other countries for causing death but he still insisted that I took them. He also abandoned our dogs after he deemed them to be no longer of use to him due to ailments or old age. I would come home from school and found them no longer there.

One night, for whatever reason, he went mad and beat me more than usual that my mom had to pull him back, crying (she usually just stayed away). After that, I stopped talking to him. We were living under the same roof and I just simply refused to talk to him. Even when we went out to a restaurant, I would just sit there, ate my food and refused to acknowledge him. It was my way of saying “You can’t expect me to act like nothing has happened. You have to apologize and make things right!” This went on for about 7 years, facilitated by my mother who was most concerned with keeping up appearances.

During this time, I was accepted to and graduated from Harvard. Ivy leagues education is something that has been ingrained in my family and a source of pride for him (both my parents went to an Ivy League school) and he missed the experience of having a daughter who go there because he was too proud. Shortly after graduation, I got a job in another country and moved there. It was around this time that I decided to end my feud with him. My strength and courage to do this came from being in a loving relationship with my gf and my sense of accomplishment. I was confident enough that I’d be able to let him back into my life without losing control over it to him.

Few years ago, my dad came down with an unknown ailment and had to be hospitalized. I flew back home and in the hospital, I embraced him and kissed his cheek and caressed his hair, something that if I had done in the past, would have made me convulsed uncontrollably from sheer awkwardness. His reaction was totally unexpected: there was a silence, then he began to sob. His lips quivered as he struggled so hard to contain his emotions. My mother was in the room and she, too, was tearing up. It was one of those profound moments in your life that can’t be expressed with words.

However, I’m sorry to report that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks. After all the dust has settled, he reverted to his old tricks. Granted, he doesn’t verbally or physically abuse me anymore, he is still imposing his thoughts and logics on me. He once told me to drink beer to lose weight because he said it helps trapping the fat. I fell sick earlier this year and my parents took care of me, afterwards, he started peddling diet pills to me again, thinking it was an okay thing to do since they took care of me. Sigh.

As I am in the middle of a long and arduous journey towards forgiveness and letting go, I guess my point of posting is, I’d like to know what to do in those darker hours when you can’t help but letting your issues get to you. Like, I’d be okay most days but I’d unravel into this monster in a heartbeat when I’m exposed to certain trigger / stimuli (as Matt termed it). I’d heard beautiful father-daughter stories and I’d just lash out on my gf big time. Sometimes I’d just cry for no reason and she has to console me even though it has nothing to do with her. Basically, I just want to be a normal person with normal emotional reactions to things.