Chrissy Metz Details Painful Emotional & Physical Abuse At The Hands Of Her Stepfather In New Memoir

Bless Chrissy Metz.
In her new memoir This Is Me, the 37-year-old actress opens up about her impoverished childhood and suffering physical and emotional abuse from her stepfather.
The This Is Us actress tells People of her rough upbringing:

“I’m a tough cookie. But it’s one of those things that attempts to break your spirit.”

Chrissy’s father left when the celeb was eight years old, leaving her mother, Denise, to raise three children on her own. Denise later welcomed another baby with a boyfriend who skipped town before meeting Metz’s future stepfather, a man she called Trigger.
Related: This Is Us‘ Saddest Moments
In her book, Chrissy writes:

“My mom married Trigger at the courthouse. Soon she was pregnant again, with another girl, Abigail. Trigger loved his two biological children, and was even welcoming to Morgana. Me, not so much. My mother was always at work, so she didn’t see how he treated me. My body seemed to offend him, but he couldn’t help but stare, especially when I was eating. He joked about putting a lock on the refrigerator. We had lived with a lack of food for so long that when it was there, I felt like I had to eat it before it disappeared. Food was my only happiness. And so, I began to hide my eating. I’d get up in the middle of the night and eat. I’d sneak food to eat in the bathroom. Cookies, chips. Things I could eat as fast as possible to avoid detection. Things that would give me the brief bliss of numbness.”

She went on to describe Trigger’s abuse:

“I don’t remember why Trigger hit me the first time. He never punched my face. Just my body, the thing that offended him so much. He shoved me, slapped me, punched my arm. He would hit me if he thought I looked at him wrong. I remember being on the kitchen floor after he knocked me over, and I was begging to know what I did. He just shoved me hard with his foot.”

When she was 14, it got worse:

“When I was fourteen, Trigger began weighing me. He’d get the scale from the bathroom and clang it hard on the kitchen floor. ├óΓé¼╦£Well, get on the damn thing!’ Trigger would yell. ├óΓé¼╦£This is what you need to know.’ He sat in a chair next to the scale as I got on. ├óΓé¼╦£Good God almighty!’ he yelled every single time. The number then was about 140 or 130. Most of my friends weighed about ninety pounds. ├óΓé¼╦£Why are you getting fatter?’ he demanded. I look at pictures of me from that time, and I would be so fine with being that size now. But I thought I was gigantic. By then the beating had escalated. One time he hit me, and I looked right in his face. If I had a gun, I thought, I would shoot you.”

She admits she clung on to any points of connection with Trigger, even though he treated her so terribly:

“Afterward, I was so upset with myself. How could I think that about this person I loved so much? Because I really did love him. This man did more for me than my father ever did. He was smart, and I was allowed to quietly join him in watching the Ken Burns Civil War documentaries on television. I clung to [these points of connection] because I needed to figure out why this person could do right by me as a provider, but be unable to love me.”

Shockingly, Chrissy reveals that she and Trigger are on good terms now: