It may help- a lot- to be more complete in your description of your father.

A traumatizing event in my life was being choked into submission as a 7 year old by my father, enraged at my refusals. I spent twenty some years depressed and not knowing why, and the whole experience trapped me. One day in therapy I remembered, but I saw him with new eyes- his fear, his frustration, his feeling of impotence, and his grasping for the one thing he knew to do- and had vowed to himself never to do- to replay the abuse visited on him by his stepfather.

In that instant of understanding was forgiveness- that his error was on its face brutal, but in his world it was masquerading as a path to peace.

He was blind and self serving, and it damaged me until I was old enough to understand and realize I didn’t have to be in relationship to him any more as a person in one of his worst moments.

I learned that my pain as an adult was my inability to put the qualities and manifest love of my father into the same worldview. But when I understood him as all these things, his struggle to be good and his duels with the demons of his own dysfunctional parents, I could let all of it go and love him for his aspirations and many good accomplishments. In that moment I had no more pain.