Bellamy Young Details Her 'Regret, Shame' from Late Father’s Cirrhosis Battle: 'It Hurts My Heart' (Exclusive)

The actress opened up to PEOPLE about how she’s overcome feeling “haunted” by the way she treated her late father as he battled cirrhosis and hepatic encephalopathy

For the first time, Bellamy Young is opening up about her late father’s health condition and why it took years for her to get over the “shame” she felt because of it.

The Scandal star, 52, recently spoke to PEOPLE about her father, who died when she was a teenager after alcohol abuse led to him being diagnosed with cirrhosis, a condition where the liver is scarred and permanently damaged, according to the National Institutes of Health.

“My dad was a drinker. His cirrhosis diagnosis came from his drinking,” she tells PEOPLE. “There was always a lot of social drinking but I knew my dad did it at home by himself, too.”

“There wasn't a dialogue about alcoholism or anything like that. We just sort of kept it in a box and didn’t talk about it,” Young adds.

With cirrhosis, scar tissue replaces healthy tissue and ultimately prevents the liver from working properly. When the cause of cirrhosis is long-term alcohol abuse, treatment typically involves refraining from alcohol and taking medications to prevent further liver damage.

At the time, Young says her family “felt very isolated” because of her dad’s diagnosis, keeping it a secret and assuming it was “just a bump in the road” with his health. “Everybody's trying to be the perfect family — there is no perfect family — so we didn't talk about it with anybody,” she says.

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However, ten months later, Young and her family noticed a number of behavioral and cognitive shifts with her father.

“He started to change. His demeanor would be more frustrated, more angry. He was an accountant and eventually lost sort of control of numbers, which had been completely part of his identity,” Young recalls. “What took us back to the doctor is one day he forgot how to get home from the building he worked in for decades.”

“We went back to the doctor and the doctor mentioned the word hepatic encephalopathy and really not much more,” she says. “So now we went home with words that were really hard to say and even harder to understand.”

Young learned that her father had stage four hepatic encephalopathy (HE), a neurological disorder due to chronic, severe liver disease. With liver disease, the liver struggles to filter natural toxins out of the body and those toxins can travel to the brain. Symptoms of HE include anxiety or irritability, cognitive impairment, personality changes, coordination or balance problems, difficulty concentrating, disorientation, and more.

Without much information on HE, the family remained “isolated.” Her father’s alcohol abuse and subsequent diagnoses were issues Young admits she “really hated in a stompy, selfish way.”

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“When I was little, we never did sleepovers at my house. There was a hospital bed in our living room with a very sick human in it, my dad. So when I was a teenager, going on dates or going to football games all felt a little fatuous.”

“I was a big jerk. A lot of it was me being really aggravated. You're a teenager and it’s just like eye roll, he's drinking now during the day. Very little compassion,” she adds. “The media sells us a generic happy childhood that I think is quite rare and when things don't look like that at home, resentment filled up.”

Young was 15 years old when her father died from the condition.

The actress has spent the decades since going to therapy, unpacking the “regret and shame” she felt toward how she treated him as his health deteriorated. She believes her response at the time, not only as a teenager but as a caregiver, was simply due to a lack of information.

“Yes, he has a liver disease, but you have no way of intuiting that it could affect his personality or his ability to think or do his job or show up for the family,” Young says. “We just didn’t know.”

“I was so mean to him and it still haunts me. I have regrets for days,” she continues. “But all that sort of bad action comes out of fear and ignorance and thank heavens there's more information on HE and nobody has to feel that alone or confused or afraid anymore.”

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That’s why Young is partnering with Salix Pharmaceuticals and Understanding HE, to make sure other families and caregivers have the proper knowledge about HE. Five million people in the United States have been diagnosed with chronic liver disease and 80% of people with cirrhosis may develop HE, Young notes.

“Nobody has to be walking through this blind anymore,” she says. “That would've been the magic bullet for us if we'd just known it existed, what to expect, what to look for, how we could be better caregivers to him. It would've made a difference.”

“It hurts my heart now and I look back and I know I didn't walk through it the best I could. And that pain makes me deeply grateful to get to talk about it in a public way now so that nobody else has to be confused or guilty or uninformed.”

Today, Young says she’s in a much better place, although reflecting on the past can be difficult. She urges others to lean on their loved ones when going through any kind of health battle because a sense of community “is of equal importance."

“If I can just be gentle with myself, with other people, then it's a good day,” Young tells PEOPLE.

“It's hard to watch someone suffer,” she adds. “I’d love for us to find community in caregiving.”

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