‘ Don’t judge me for severing contact with my father’

Like Meghan, Elizabeth Segal* has cut all ties with her dad. Here she explains why it was essential to her well-being and happiness

Thomas Markle has popped up again, this time on breakfast TV, to claim that his pregnant daughter has been ghosting his texts.

‘All families, royal or otherwise, should be together at the holidays,’ said Thomas.

Like Meghan, I didn’t see my father over the holidays. People find this shocking. ‘You’ll make it up,’ say well-meaning friends. ‘All families have tiffs.’ Well, no, not like this.

Severing that connection wasn’t something I did lightly. It was a last resort, essential to my well-being and happiness. If you’re judging me, as you may have judged Meghan for cutting off her father, then lucky you. Clearly you’ve enjoyed a conventional, happy childhood. You have no idea of the dark forces that can cause a family to fracture.

In the days when I did still go home for the holidays, when I tried to maintain some sort of relationship with my father, I’d feel my mood start to drop as soon as I drove out of London.

By the time I reached the town where I grew up, I’d be overwhelmed by sadness, resentment – and anger.

It was here that my father told me and my sister not to cry in front of him after our mum died when I was in my twenties. A year later, he told me to get out of the family home because I’d objected to him bringing back a woman we’d never met to stay the night in what had been Mum’s bed.

Years earlier, when I was a teenager, I’d come home from a night out to find a police car outside the house after he’d hit Mum. But the odd drunken punch wasn’t the worst of it. Domestic abuse, I know now, can take many forms. He was manipulative, dishonest, controlling – even controlling the money that Mum had to spend. He’d plead poverty, then turn up driving an expensive new car.

‘But he’s so charming, your dad,’ people would say. Yes, narcissists often are. Their behaviour can tip over into the criminal, too. I’ve since discovered that he took out a second mortgage on his elderly mum’s house.

He’s the reason I’m in therapy. Although I haven’t seen him for nearly half a decade, those emotions forged in childhood have a long half-life.

Many of us will have seen friends in a toxic relationship. We know they need to end it. It’s chaotic, dysfunctional. They’re unhappy – they’re not themselves when they’re with him.

But what if that man happens to be your father?

Cutting my father off for good – after several periods without contact – has given me a peace, of sorts, that I’d never have attained were we still in touch. It was a positive step and a brave one, prompted by the birth of my daughter four years ago.

In his most recent interview, Thomas Markle said, ‘There has to be a place for me,’ in the baby’s life.

But providing 25% of a child’s DNA doesn’t give you an automatic role in its life. In fact, for me, motherhood was the wake-up call to cut off the dysfunction at source so that it couldn’t harm the next generation.