You are welcome ((rainwind)). What tends to confuse so many individuals is that they compare their personal history with "what they are told is supposed to be". If a parent dies we think we are supposed to be grief stricken, however, that is not what happens when a person has nothing in their parent/child relationship that is there "to grieve". However, what is often really grieved is what should have been there but was not.

Unfortunately rainwind, people have children and are really not knowledgeable about what the true responsibility of raising a child really means. Therefore, what often happens is a parent gets frustrated when they are actually required to "know" how to fill the normal needs of a child and they often take that inadequacy and frustration out on the child. Often they are even reminded subconsciously of how they themselves did not receive the proper nurturing and can express anger towards their own child, not even realizing they are really experiencing their "own loss".

When your father hit you the way you have discribed, he did that because showing you care and love is something that made him extremely uncomfortable instead of him being able to experience "pleasure in getting in touch with his own nurturing from his history".
It is such a deep subconscious wound/lack that often the individuals that struggle this way do not realize the harm they are causing to their child where the child thinks the parent resents them, when it is not about that at all. In a way it is on the PTSD spectrum because with PTSD a person chooses to "avoid" any reminders, and may express anger, stress, and deep resentments they don't understand on a more conscious level, often it is a deep "fear" that is expressed in dysfunctional ways to a child that has no way of understanding "why" and instead learns that "needing is bad or wrong". This is expressed in "self talk" which is why it is important that when someone who is struggling utters negative self talk that they pay attention and say, "that is not true, I deserve to need and get comfort", this is how the individual slowly "heals" and gains on that deep "hurt" that they never deserved to have.