Actress and model Lily Collins has has opened up about the heartbreaking "sadness and anger" she felt at being abandoned by her megastar dad when he walked out on his family when she was just five-years-old.
In her new book 'Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me', the 28-year-old has written a chapter in it entitled 'A Letter To All Dads' in which she opens about the traumatic experience of her parents' divorce and not seeing her father very often afterwards.
But she also writes about how she now forgives him for "not always being there" and also for his many other "mistakes" - perhaps in reference to his well-documented battle with booze.
"I accept and honor the sadness and anger I felt toward the things you did or didn’t do, did or didn’t give me," she reveals in the chapter that reads like an open letter to Phil Collins from his daughter.
"My dad moved from our home in England to Switzerland, where he stayed for more than 20 years. He may have still been alive, but most of the time it felt as if he were completely gone.” She adds, “I knew he loved me, yet he wasn’t physically around to tell me.”
Lily reveals that she never gets drunk because of the horror of watching her beloved dad descend into the hell of alcoholism. "His battle with alcoholism, and my fear that he wouldn’t survive, forever altered my own relationship with drinking."
She confessed that she feared that he would end up dead from hitting the bottle too hard. “I was constantly afraid something would happen to my dad,” she writes. “No matter what I said or how much I expressed my concerns to him, the drinking continued…I was convinced that one day I would wake up to a phone call from halfway across the world saying that it had finally gone too far.”
Lily also touchingly writes in her new book about how she felt she was walking on eggshells with her father and had a fear of making him "angry" when she was a young child.
“Because my dad was often gone, I never wanted to do anything that would make him stay away even longer. I became extra careful about what I said and how I said it, afraid he’d think I was angry or didn’t love him. And the truth is, I was angry. I missed him and wanted him there," she writes.
She also reveals, “I’ve realized that many of my deepest insecurities stem from these issues with my dad. It’s taken me over a decade to resolve some of them (others I’m still resolving) and to finally build up the courage to speak my mind to him.
“Even if they’re listening, sometimes our dads still don’t truly hear what we’re saying. So feel free to read this letter to your dad or use it as a guide to write your own … All you can do is stay true and tell him how you feel.”
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