Every year, the run-up to Father’s Day starts weeks before the date itself. Adverts, cards in shop windows, friends posting photos with captions about the best dads in the world. For most people it’s background noise. For me, it’s a reminder of a door that’s been closed and one I closed myself.
I disclosed that my father sexually abused me as a child and he denied it. The family members I expected to protect me, believe me and stand with me chose, instead, to protect the status quo. It was a hard pill to swallow, not just the original wound, but discovering that being believed and being defended aren’t the same thing and that you can’t always count on getting either.
It’s worth saying, because it’s so often misunderstood, that for many survivors, the abuse isn’t something carried with full clarity from the start. Memories and understanding can surface years, even decades, later, triggered by becoming a parent yourself, an unrelated life event or just because the safety of therapy finally makes room for it. That delay doesn’t make it any less true, but it does mean disclosure rarely arrives when families expect and that mismatch can feed disbelief even further.
I’m a psychotherapist, so I understand, professionally and personally, how much nature and nurture and learned behaviour shape a person. Growing up around violence, addiction and chaos can explain so much of how someone comes to harm others. I hold that understanding every day in my work. But understanding is not the same as excusing and it never brings the person who caused harm to the table to actually talk, take responsibility or repair anything. Empathy has its limits, and I’ve learned the hard way that too much of it can tip into being a pushover by mistaking your own compassion for an obligation to keep absorbing harm.
It takes real strength to speak your truth and hold your boundaries when the family you expected to have your back doesn’t. You have to choose yourself when the people closest to you have chosen comfort over confronting what happened.
I’m not writing this from some resolved place. I haven’t arrived anywhere tidy. This is still a lonely road, even now, around this time of year especially. But I’ve come to believe it’s a necessary road for my own recovery and it has to be walked rather than escaped.
If you’re a survivor reading this and any of it lands close to home, the disbelief, the family choosing the easier path, the strange grief with no clear shape, you’re not imagining how hard this is and you’re not alone in it.
If anything in this has affected you, please know support is out there: my own free support group for survivors, which you’d be very welcome to join, One in Four (oneinfour.ie), Ireland’s specialist support service for adult survivors of child sexual abuse, Your local Rape Crisis Centre and The Misneach Centre, who are also here to listen.