It sucks. The thing people can’t understand is the impact of living with the crazy. When that video of the Texas judge was going around, while it seemed that he was extremely overboard, I didn’t hear the crazy in his voice. I could be wrong, but it sounded to me like I heard a bully but not someone who had lost his marbles.
The OP’s father sounds like the crazy. Like my father. When you get someone dumping meat scraps onto a pile in a girl’s room, you have no idea where it’s going, because the person has lost all reason. It reminds me of the shit my father would do. One of the worse beatings I ever came after I gave my father the wrong sized spoon for breakfast. When I was six. Who the fuck almost kills a kid over that? That’s crazy.
Or being beaten because my father had thought* he had told me something and beat me because I didn’t do what he had said. Yes, living with someone who forces his wife to get down and lick his shoes clean. Yep. Them are the crazies.
So ironic that the father and mother go off to Bible study. Sick.
For me, there’s two problems. One is the fear. That people develop anxiety issues is pretty much documented.
The other is what happens when you grow up with no love. Or insufficient love. Where was your mother that day? Watching and then off to Bible studies with Daddy. My mother, too, was a battered wife and unable to protect us, and we missed out on growing up feeling like we were worthwhile human beings, valuable enough to be cared for.
For me, become a parent myself, and watching my children be, well, children, makes me understand how crazy it was. Yes, I’ve got a young child, at 4 and a toddler, 2, so they test our patience, but nether my wife nor I have felt the need to hit either hard enough to leave a palm-shaped bruise on their cheeks, like my father would do. That’s crazy and out of control.
I can see what normal kids are like, and how different it was in our crazy home. And the effects were wide-spread. My kids aren’t watching me like hawks, looking for the tiniest changes in mood. They don’t have to worry if they are being led down the garden path into an ambush.
My memories of the abuse are fading. One thing which worked for me was to hear stores of other people and to taunt my dead father with those. “You think you were crazy? Shit, you never once dumped scraps of meat in my bedroom. Amateur.” Thank you. That’s a new one to throw in that man’s face.
I’d replace “should” with “may” because it’s not 100% but people say in many cases it does help.
*For years, I had assumed that he had told one of my siblings and only thought he had made a mistake, but my mother confirmed he would often just think conversations had happened which had not. Growing up with someone who is unable to distinguish reality from fantasy is not the funnest thing, and generally not recommended.