Dear Dad

Dad,
Thank you for the funds to continue my education. I appreciate the support and am enjoying my masters in counselling immensely. It is helping me to grow and I feel extremely passionate about the material and a potential future career.
I was surprised by your letter and your assistance considering we haven't spoken in some time. I am not able to forget our most recent exchange without continuing to address it. I wish it were something that I could sweep under the rug so easily, but that type of coping has already caused me more trouble than it's worth.
Everything I spoke to in my initial letter is still true to me. Despite you may not perceiving your behaviour as sexually threatening, I must assure you that it very much felt that way to me. I was not only a child when you were making sexual comments about me and grabbing my butt, but a sensitive person. The way that you behaved towards me led me to feel terrified and extremely unsafe for much of my life. I have experienced a great deal of anxiety as an adult, including panic attacks that have been triggered by interactions I have had with you.
I believe that you were doing the best you could as a parent. I understand that parenting is not easy and am not sure of my own desire to become one. I wish I had felt that I could have expressed to you more directly how I was feeling at the time. Holding in my feelings in was very harmful to me psychologically and contributed to my desire to suicide as a teen and ongoing feelings of suicidality as an adult.
I'm not sure if you know this but, I endured quite a bit of sexual violence in my undergrad including rape, assault, harassment and stalking. These experiences have likely further fed into my fear and discomfort around men. These events were not your fault, but reminded me of the feeling of powerlessness that I felt when I was a teen when you made flirtatious comments towards me.
I feel like you don't and can't understand the connection here. We are very different people and I get the sense that you do not value the emotional world as I do. I believe this is quite a significant obstacle to us having a relationship.
I am an emotionally-oriented person, it is something that I do not feel I have a choice about. In the past, I attempted to drink and think my way out of my emotional world, but that behaviour contributed to my poor mental health. As I've become older and attended to my emotional life with more care, I have reduced my experience of suicidality and felt more confident. I believe that this effort lent me the confidence to return to school and pursue more lofty goals.
What I desire most is to have a father that interacts with me in a completely platonic way. This is not a normal request for a daughter to have to make. I have come to understand that this is standard behaviour for a father and your flirtatious style of interacting is out of the norm.
I do not know how to reconnect. It is not for a lack of care, love, or effort. All of my life I have wanted to feel safe around you. I have tried everything I can think of to make peace with my emotional experience and reactions to you. I have poured hours of time into counselling, groups, art, self-reflection, meditation, convincing, and forcing myself to let go of the past. Because I love you very much and I have been feeling so ashamed that I am afraid of you in this way. I am afraid I did something to make you feel sexual towards me. That I was a bad daughter and somehow I caused this.
I can no longer think that way because it is not useful to me. It hurts me. I cannot take responsibility for your parenting or your behaviour. Only you can. If you want a relationship with me then I need you to make the effort to understand my experience. I don't know what to do. I'm sad and I miss you, but I am unwilling to return to a reality where I hide how I'm feeling around you and pretend I'm fine. I would literally rather die because that's what hiding my feelings makes me want to do.