ICYMI: On Father’s Day, Kelly Opens Up About Fatherhood and Breaking the Cycle of Abuse

"I wanted to be a better dad to my kids than my dad was to me."

In case you missed it, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly sat down with CNN's Jake Tapper at his home in Tucson for a Father's Day conversation about growing up in a household where he and his twin brother experienced domestic abuse. Kelly reflected on the lasting impact of his father's struggle with alcoholism and the lessons that shaped the kind of parent and leader he wanted to be.

Watch the full conversation here. See key excepts below:

On growing up with a father who struggled with alcoholism and violence…

"In the middle of the night, I'd hear him fighting and things would be thrown. And she would get hurt. I remember him dragging her once across the floor. Typical violent behavior by alcoholics, right?

"You kind of normalize it. You think other people have this same problem and later you realize that that's not the case. I saw him pull out his gun, like in a fight with my mother. He pointed it to himself.

"It's terrifying. And I remember thinking-I wasn't so much worried about my own safety. I was scared about losing my dad, you know? Am I second away from my dad being dead?"

On breaking the cycle of abuse when he became a father…

"I was probably in my 30s when I had kids and when I started thinking about being a parent myself. And I think-this is my sense is a lot of parents do this. They figure out what they didn't like in their own parents, and they try not to do those things. And I'd say that's the time when I really started to think, 'Man, this is kind of messed up.' You have a daughter who is eight years old and you're like, 'That's how old I was when my dad put a gun in his mouth.' So, I very rarely would even yell at my kids. It was very uncommon that I would get angry with them."

On turning what he went through as kid into a learning experience…

"I think my dad, with all the bad qualities he had and the cop good qualities he had, what I got out of it was some amount of resilience, to chaos, to how crazy life could get. I wasn't going to be him, right? I wanted to be different. I wanted to be better. I wanted to be a better dad to my kids than my dad was to me."