Why cant I speak to my dad????

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I just cant. Theres no reason for it. It started years ago and has continued into my adulthood. I desperately want to speak to him and ask him questions but I just cant bear to. Ive thought long and hard about it. I will have hour long monologues with my mum (have done for years) my dad raised me as a youngster.... my mum suggested I may have been abused which would explain it I suppose but it started at about 14 out of the blue - I just one day couldnt bear to talk to him - impossible to explain the emotion... it felt... cliched I dont know.

I've been dealing with the same thing as well. I'm able to talk to my mum for hours, but I'm very quiet around my dad. I want to talk to him as much as I can talk to my mum. This also started for me at the age of 14. I guess that my dad always came down hard on me for things that my mum would only give me a reminder and a few short words about. I think I gave up hope at that age. He treated me like an idiot quite a few times when I was between the ages 12 and 14 and I gave up hope. There's so much I want to say and ask, but I'm not sure how he'd respond. Will he treat me with dignity and respect, or will he act the same way Charlie Babbitt acted towards his brother, Raymond in the movie Rain Man. I love my dad a lot, but I seem to clam up when it's just him and I in the same room together.

I love my dad a lot, he's a great guy - very sweet and funny. And yet, I can never talk to him about anything emotional/personal. I have to keep everything completely trivial when I talk to him. I can talk to my mom for hours about any subject under the sun and have a strong desire to be near her at all times, whereas I could go days without saying a word to my dad and couldn't care less.

Anytime I do make an attempt to have a personal conversation with him, he gets irritated because he can't understand why I am such an emotional person. His thought processes run on pure logic, and he thinks it's my mom's job to "talk lovely" to people. Plus there was that whole fiasco when I came out as a bisexual in my early teens, and he got extremely upset because of his deep-seated religious beliefs. That incident caused me to lose a lot of my trust in him.

Don't get me wrong, like I said, my dad is a wonderful person. He's just not the kind of guy you want to talk to about your innermost feelings.

Ah I see - you guys have understandable reasons however whereas I just cant. My dad wants me to open up - he actually does ring and makes an admirable attempt but its like selective mutism except in public I suddenly overcome the problem and not only that but I can sustain a conversation as long as he directs it and I can talk in monosyllables. When I do try it just feels like a mammoth effort. In public my anxiety surrounding my need to be accepted and be normal overrides it and though its robotic and unnatural I can do it.

Also my dad was always the lenient one while my mum beat me alot as a kid mainly because she basically had full charge of me 24/7 and all my ADHD OCD Aspie traits