<human>: Can you provide a brief overview of the text?

I have been dating my boyfriend for about a year now, and I really think it could work out. He treats me with love and respect, and more recently, we have been more open about talking about the future, as well as generally more open discussing our past and current feelings. Once or twice I have hinted at things in the past that I don't really want to discuss, and have never talked about with anyone outside of my immediate family. 

Without getting into a lot of detail, my dad was physically and emotionally abusive for the first 16 years of my life. He still loses his temper occasionally, but for the most part I consider the past to be the past and want to think that I'm over it. I don't consider what I went through to be worse than what many people have gone through, and I don't feel that it's very useful to dwell on it. But of course, I know that there are lasting effects - my overpowering fight or flight response, difficulty in trusting others, and fear of disagreements, in particular. 

Recently my boyfriend has asked me to talk to him about this (though I doubt he has any idea what /this/ is). I'm reluctant to because it's hard to talk about and not that relevant anymore, because I don't want him to feel like I am making excuses for the way that I am, because I don't want him to think that it's an issue, and because if our relationship continues to become more serious, I don't want this to affect how he sees my parents and the potential for a positive relationship between them. Despite everything, I love my parents deeply, and am working toward fully forgiving my dad for everything that he did when I was younger. 

Anyway, I'm not totally sure what to do. I feel that for our relationship to work, these are the kinds of things that we should be able to talk about, but there are consequences for actually doing so. I've tried to talk to a therapist, but I've been skeptical as to whether it actually helps out, and a large part of me thinks that the best thing to do is just to pretend that everything never happened, but given the lasting effects, maybe that's not the most healthy thing to do.
<bot>: need to deal with lasting effects of childhood abuse, not sure if necessary to talk to bf for several reasons, including that it would probably hurt the potential relationship between him and my parents.