My father beat the sh1te out of me, to the point that I amd heavily scarred and suffered permanant brain injuries and have had a lot of psychological issues and problems with anger management.
However, despite having a undeniably violent streak and having an exceptionally short fuse, I can honestly say that I made a decision very early on, when still a child in fact, that I would NEVER hit or harm my children.I have stuck to this, to the point that in fact I don't even raise my voice to my children. This is, accoordning to a psychiatirst who once assessed me, because I am trying to recreate the type of childhood that I wanted, rather than the rather sh1te one that I had, and is again a form of control as ruby has mentioned.
The anger that I felt was directed outwards from my family to people who were deemed to be a threat to it, sometimes in a very broad sense, and I must admit that there was a time when I found violence immensely soothing, however i can never concieve of a time when I would have found it possible to consider abusing a child, and although we might have cr4p role models, be brought up by psychos', be hot and harmed by those who should protect us, I don';t believe that ever should be used as an excuse to justify the propagation of violence against children. We all have a choice. We must learn to evolve and to excercise it and not hide behind our own misfortunes.
My father has lost any power he ever had over me, because I have not visited that abuse onto my children, so anything he did to me is no longer important, he has no power, he's just a sad man who missed the joys of parenthood, whose rotting in the ground with no-one to mourn him.