Let me third this. I didn’t even realize I was doing this, as a small child, but I read every book and watched every show I could that depicted loving, functional parents. Then I created them in my own mind and I still draw on these phantom parents when I need support and someone to say the right things.
I’m currently living in a building on my father’s property and paying rent to my second step-mother, who still resides in the main house but doesn’t speak to my father any more than she can help it. She was one of those green-card brides; she’s from Siberia.
I’m on SSI, I get very little money each month, and the primary obstacle to me escaping is getting together deposit money for a new apartment, which is fairly impossible if my income stays the same. I moved in here early last year under pressure from my father and my therapist who felt that I needed the stability and support my father could provide me; we were going through one of our increasingly brief amicable periods, and I’d started inviting him to my therapy sessions, and my therapist of that time really took a liking to him.
I’m not seeing that guy anymore.
I’m going to say this in the nicest way I know how.
Your parents are evil fucking shitheads. And you are not them. (yea yea yea, I’m a psychologist, I recognize mental illness, mentally ill people aren’t always shitheads, I get it, I’m using hyperbole to make a point)
Keep working the therapy. Get a new living situation ASAP. Cut off contact with them and anyone else who tells you things that are similar to what your parents told you.
Look to charities and other service agencies for assistance with the deposit money.
Recognize that any brief fleeting “amicable” aspects of your father are fleeting delusions, and are not to be trusted.
The fact that you can recognize that the people who are your biological parents are not normal is in your favor, because you already know that this is not right. So, you’re ahead of the game in a lot of ways, further along the path than many people ever get.
So, there’s someone with a degree of sanity in the household. Where were you living before? Is there any casual work you can get to boost your income to get a deposit together?
Run fast, run far. Don’t bother to say goodbye.
Leave a note curtly saying you are moving with no forwarding address; move as far as possible as soon as you have enough do this. It’s worth changing continents to get away from people like that: you owe them nothing. A new life elsewhere may be unappealing, but by staying near such toxic people you endanger yourself. If you discuss this with them they will keep pulling you back in.
“Only the weak desire to be equal.” Actually that’s true, since in a nietzschian sense they are the only ones who need the power not denied to the strong; but you can be as strong as he by rejecting him completely as a cruel and inadequate father. Caring about ‘strength’ is anyway as much a weakness as ‘weakness’ itself. The only thing that matters is doing correct things.
Nothing could be more correct than unbitterly severing all emotional ties with someone who despises one.
Even better. You can hang out together without that being the issue. Go to movies, sporting events, plays – anything that lets you talk afterwards.
I was living with my mother, sadly. I dropped out of college in a very disastrous way, and her house was where I landed. She’s been in a long, steady decline for my entire life, she’s quite loony now, and in spite of everything, I still think she’s more dangerous than my father. If you’ve never been alone with a delusional person for a prolonged period of time- say, forced to share a workspace with them at a job- then I don’t think I can convey to you the damage that it can do to your sanity to have to constantly assert reality over their warped ideas of what’s going on around them. When there’s no third person there to out-vote them on what reality is, you can start playing he-said she-said games with your own mind. This past year I started calling her “The Basilisk” because of the paralyzing effect she has on my thought processes. My father, at least, usually doesn’t have the energy to start fights; he’s ill, alienated most everyone he’s ever known, and become a recluse. At present, I’m sleeping less than a hundred feet from him, but I haven’t laid eyes on him for over a month.
Oh, he moved to Orlando to live with his girlfriend’s parents. I’m in Atlanta. He just lets me call him on the phone almost every day. Our social circle has ablated rather severely since high school; one our closest mutual friends is in prison for something unspeakable, another is stationed at Fort Hood, TX, and another moved across the country for work and we lost contact with him. Other people found new social circles at college and sort of got absorbed into them, and sadly my implosion at my own college precluded me maintaining any of the nascent friendships I had developed there.
As long as you are near them, you can’t break off from them. Can you work? Can you get subsidized housing? You have to get as far away from them as you can, and fast. This should be your #1 priority. If you weren’t related to them, would you still be there? You need to separate yourself from them. If you have to work minimum wage to afford your own one-room studio apartment, then do it. Preferably in another city. On another coast.
First of all, I should maybe mention the context of his apoplectic declaration was me accusing him of insulting me constantly during a very heated argument. One of his go-to bits of rhetoric in the past few years has been “When will you understand that you and I are not equal?”, which he uses as a justification for pretty much anything.
Secondly, I actually spent a lot of time thinking about his “Only the weak…” argument after he made it, and the conclusion I came to was that the reason “the strong” would want “to be equal” is so that they could not be alone. But hey, my dad prefers to be roundly despised by former life-long friends and family alike, (and I mean besides me) so I guess that just didn’t hold appeal for him.
If this is a whoosh then you got me. But I can’t take the risk. I’m going to share some free advice courtesy of the artist Pink:
NSFW- (…and I’ll be damned if I’ll link the sanitized radio-edit version.)
Ya think…!?
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Find thee a lawyer who can spell ‘malpractice’ and ‘contingency’ (and who won’t crush on your Dad).
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Get the Hell outta Dodge, girl.
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NOW!!!
(I think even Opal will forgive me for this one)
You need to get away from them. The environment is toxic and polluted. You can’t recover with someone pulling you down.
Subsidized housing is dead in this part of Georgia; the programs stopped being funded or something. I’m doing okay with my own personal stability, and conceivably could work a part time job; at this point the only way to find out is to try and do it. However, I’m utterly dependent on my SSI and I’ve been terrified of losing it. It’s the only financial stability I’ve ever known, and I keep imagining this scenario where I try to work, lose the SSI because I have other income, then lose the job and find myself up shit creek. My work history is abominable; since graduating from high school I had maybe ten different jobs, and none of them lasted more than a two months. I also have crap for skills.
The really crazymaking financial hole I’m in right now though is my car. It didn’t pass its emissions test, and I couldn’t update the tag; now I’ve got a traffic ticket for an expired tag, and I can’t see how the hell I’m ever going to get the money to do the emissions repairs, update the tag, and pay the fine without at least a month at a part-time job.
The only bright spot in the financial picture is my comfortably well-off Aunt & Uncle in Texas who might help me… but are also related to me, and therefore at least a little crazy. Part of my motivation for starting this thread is the wrestling I’ve been doing with their fluctuating opinion of me and how to cope with it if I ask them for help. They’ve hurt me very badly in the past.
The longer you’re enmeshed with them, the harder it will be to break the co-dependency that you’ve come to live with. You may think you aren’t co-dependent, but, just by virtue of the fact that you’re living with them still, you are. It might be hard to see a way to get away, but that just means you’ll have to try harder. You’re way too important to let them rip you apart any more, ever.
Edited to add: written before your last post was posted.
Let me take a wild-ass guess, Strain of Thought. Dad’s mentally ill, right? That, and alcoholism, can inspire people to be wonderfully “honest” like this. Toxic people don’t make good mirrors, so try not to judge yourself by what he says. It’s hard to be the child of someone who is mentally ill, especially if they have a personality disorder, which is why there are so many books out there that seek to help people cope. Hang in there, and know you’re not alone.
I know that Mr. Rogers (yes, from the PBS TV show for kids, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood) had said that he’d received many comments from kids from abusive homes that his show helped them get through terrible times. They clung to his words about being worthy people in and of themselves. (Interestingly, my husband’s own abusive father forbade him to watch the show when he was a kid; the argument was something to the effect of Mr. Rogers being a “pansy” but now I wonder if he wasn’t blocking out a potential source of comfort and self-respect.) If it’s still in reruns on PBS or can be found via the Internet - and frankly, what can’t these days? - then who knows, you might find that a good starting point.
I think you’ve reached a turning point by this realization, and you have the potential to totally change things for yourself. Therapy is a good first step…
What you parents have said and done to you has no basis on who you are, the qualities you have, or your value as a person. I hope you can understand that, if not now eventually. Your parents have resented and abused you since you were a little child, I assume. There is no child that deserves that, and no child that’s unworthy of love from their parents. It hasn’t been you, all this time; it’s been them. They could have given birth to Jesus and it would have been the same.
You’re living there? PLEASE LEAVE. As soon as you can, to where ever you can go. Check craigslist in your area for renting a cheap room in someone’s home - a lot of people I know who are entirely financially dependent on their SSI do this. Honestly, I feel a homeless shelter would be better than living with these evil people who have been trying to destroy you for your entire life. And there is no shame in taking refuge in a place designed just for that. Speaking as someone who also grew up with abuse - leaving home was the only way I could begin to heal, and function mentally and emotionally for the first time in a decade. If I hadn’t somehow gotten out, I shudder to think what would have happened to me.
Please PM me any time if you feel it would be helpful.
When I was 11, my parents decided it was time to admit that our living in T was not a “temporary” situation, ditch the rental and buy a flat. We went to see this one they were considering: it’s a 10th floor, with the balconies overlooking an 8-floor fall. I remember standing in this empty room, feeling like shit (specifically and partly due to having the mistaken notion that the amount of air was limited, I was convinced that, since I was useless and could not do anything right, I shouldn’t be allowed to go on breathing and therefore wasting air which would be better used by having anybody else breathe it), and walking out on the balcony. And looking down. It was quite a long way down, probably long enough that climbing the rail and jumping wouldn’t hurt… much.
I stepped back from the rail saying “No. I refuse to believe that God is an idiot” - what I actually meant was “damnit, there has to be something I’m good at, what I have to do is find it!”
Mom heard me, asked “what was that?” “Nothing, Mom.” “OK then!” From her point of view, nothing happened… then again, she also refuses to admit that Middlebro’s poetry about suicide, written at age 7, is anything but “sweet” (she never wanted either one of us).
My self-esteem didn’t just go and jump up; it took me a lot longer to discover that there were actually quite a few things I did well than to find out that air gets recycled (yay!) - I remember the relief when I found this out, actually, since it meant that my wasting air didn’t really have a negative influence on the world… only the fact that I still hadn’t discovered anything I (knew I) was good at. One of the things that eventually helped was praise from people who had nothing to gain from praising me: their esteem of me helped me grow one - but I also had to learn to accept and recognize praise; it’s a bit of a cycle. But I had the time to grow a self-esteem because of that conscious decision to go and find one.
Accepting that your parents are poison for you is very, very painful. They are the first people who should be in your corner, damnit, how can they be so hurtful?
You have made that discovery. Right now you still feel like shit; getting better will take time. I do hope you can get out of there and get better soon - I can tell you that I appreciate that you write well 
Flee. From these people and from this place. It is the only way, my friend. You have no good choices, that’s clear. But you must get free of where you are, in my opinion.
If I were you, I’d sell the car for whatever I could get, buy a bus ticket to where my friend lives, spend a couple of weeks on his couch, move to the YMCA for a couple of weeks, repeat. During those two months, find a cheap room and a part time job. Experience life around people who respect you, for a change. It could not possibly suck as greatly as if you stay where you are.
Recognize that the approval, love and support, you keep looking for, from your parents, isn’t ever going to be forthcoming. As adults we can see it’s all a sham and the only support and approval worth seeking, in life, is from yourself. Almost always, in life, when ever we are seeking it, we’re, in reality, seeking it from ourselves.
No matter what you choose to do next, it’s going to be very hard, challenging and upsetting, from the sounds of things. So why not suck all that up in the name of new adventure, a new life even. If you want self respect, do something that challenges, something daring, something for you, something you’ll be proud of. It could be the first step to a new future for you, but you have to step up and take the wheel. You might not get where you’re headed but at least you won’t be floundering anymore.
There’s a whole wonderful world out there where you can live a healthy and rewarding life, I promise. The question is, really, how badly have they damaged your ability to break free of them? You’re 29. If you don’t make your move soon, you may never, in my opinion.
GET OUT ! GET OUT ! GET OUT ! (Like your hair is on fire!)
I know it’s trite, the but phrase “Fake it until you make it” is great advice. Pretend. What do you think a sane, confident, competent person would do in your situation? Rent a room? Take the leap and find a job? Move to Texas? Pretend you’re that person, and do that thing.
I can’t tell you the shock I experienced when I discovered that I had been pretending to be a goth diva for so long that I had become, in fact, a goth diva.
Good luck to you, and the sane, competent, confident person I foresee you becoming.