The Rage My Father Gave Me — New York Magazine

I was taught my whole life by my parents, his parents, teachers, and most of what I read and viewed that it is my job to take care of men, to submit to them, to do the work required to sustain every relationship, and to sacrifice everything, including myself, to do that work. I am angry that I was trained to expect so little from him and to be so e

After years of hearing my father rant at my flaws, one loss has caused me to take up his rant. I’ve internalized my father—his impatience, his perfectionism, his rage—until his voice doesn’t just feel like my own, it is my own. I no longer need my father to torture me. From this day on, I can do it all by myself.

They realize that if their lives are a reaction to dad, then dad is still in control. They discover that they can be different from dad without being the opposite. They often come to realize that they have more traits in common with their fathers than they had previously realized or wanted to accept.

The story is a tragic example of the deep damage that can occur in a toxic parent-child relationship when the more normal feelings of mutual affection get distorted into a mirroring of the mutual defenses of numbing and out-of-control acting out.

Years later, my cousin would recall this last and worst beating by saying, At this stage if someone said it they would call it abusing. At the time, though, it was a father's prerogative—and an echo, perhaps, of many generations, many childhoods. For everyone in our family has an opinion or an anecdote of the family temperament, variously described