My story - triggers
randomdude
New Registrant
Things were not always nice at our house, but it was extremely important that we always pretended they were. If I expressed my feelings and they weren’t good, mom might get offended that we were not grateful for her, she might cry. She did completely give up her life for our family. When I was alone with her it was the best time ever, she was kind and nurturing.
But if my dad showed up, we all changed. He was authoritarian, aggressive, controlling, and miserable. He verbally abused my mother incessantly for my entire childhood. She would argue back. They would both be angry and hurtful to each other. It never seemed to matter in their heads one bit that their screaming at each other was incurring right in front of me, all the time.
On most days of my childhood, there was a point when all happy feelings were instantly cut off and replaced with sad feelings due to a fight in front of me. There were plenty of times that my parents were using the silent treatment on each other and, as a consequence, no one would be speaking to me either. There were plenty of times when their fighting caused me to start crying in front of them. They would continue fighting and not notice I was crying. I did feel very bad on one occasion when they started arguing with each other as to who was at fault for making me cry, but didn’t comfort me. There were times where my mother left the house as a result of an argument. I did not know when she was coming back and I have never liked being alone with my dad.
Dad was a problem drinker, in my earlier memories he would visit the bar two or three nights per week. He would often come home severely drunk. Sometimes he was a violent, mean, angry drunk. I remember seeing him take off his shoe and fling it at my mother. She avoided it but it hit the glass on our stove so hard it shattered into pieces. He also threw a knife at her during this altercation. I have seen plenty of fights end in smashed items or damage to the house. I never saw dad hit mom. It was just violence around her and emotional and verbal abuse. She never seemed happy, so I wanted so desperately to make her happy.
Mom was more of the disciplinarian. My earliest memories are of her chasing my older brothers around the house trying to discipline them with her “yardstick”. Mom disciplined me at a young age with spanks and slaps to the body and limbs. A few times mom slapped me in the face, but this wasn’t because I was being bad, it was because I said something that insulted her. I would also be given the silent treatment if I hurt her feelings.
Overall, I was not subject to harsh discipline or physical abuse by either parent. However, I did witness an incident that has been clearly burned in my memory:
My middle brother was always in trouble. It was a just string after string of costly and embarrassing incidents for my parents. This time he had a neighborhood friend who moved to a different area code and he ran up an expensive long distance telephone bill by calling his friend without my parents knowledge. We were all at the dinner table when my dad found out. My dad was about 270 pounds, my brother was probably 120 at the time. My dad bull charged him, picked my brother up off his feet, and slammed him to the ground. I saw the look on my brother’s face as he was cowering in fear and pain and in need of mercy, lying on his belly on the ground. My big fat dad then proceeds to jump on my brother’s exposed back multiple times in hard leather bottomed shoes, until he is knocked off my middle brother by my oldest brother and they tussle.
My middle brother lay for some time writhing in agony after he was jumped on. I have somewhat vague memories of him being badly injured and having to go to the hospital as a teen on a few occasions. He has had kidney dysfunction as an adult. While I don’t have many memories of my brothers being hit, hints I got from them and a sense that I always felt my father was a dangerous monster, make me believe they were both subject to physical abuse and emotional and verbal abuse throughout their childhoods.
When I saw my dad do what he did to my brother, I formed a belief that if I disappointed my father he would kill me. There was no way, my fifty pound body could withstand what he did to my brother.
I carried this belief around for a number of years. If I got in trouble for my behavior, broke something at the house, if I got a bad grade on a test, if I was caught having not done my homework, I would panic and begin sobbing, because I felt there was a strong possibility that I would be killed when my father found out about this. I always cried way more than everyone else in elementary school because of this. Boys, girls, and teachers repeatedly made fun of me for this and made comments disparaging me. My brothers called me cry baby, my dad made me feel like a sissy.
I was lightly disciplined and not physically abused because I always complied with my parents demands and expectations. Even after I realized the chances of my father killing or even hurting me in any way narrowed to 0 as I grew into an adult. I still felt the need to make life decisions based on his expectations.
My oldest brother graduated in 1988 and began that Fall attending a university 70 miles from home. I felt like I lost a protector. My middle brother did physically abuse me and mentally torture me as a kid. I began to live in fear of him too. If I were to pass him in the hallway, I would drop to the floor and curl up in a fetal position to protect my organs from the blow I expected to receive. I guess he bore the brunt of dad’s abuse and felt the need to pass it on. I guess I kind of preferred it that way because I got even more scared of my parents when he left, and it definitely felt like I had to deal with this dysfunction all on my own now.
My middle brother graduated in 1989 and left for basic training in Missouri during the summer. In the fall of 1989, I was eight and starting the third grade. My middle brother had completed basic training and my mom wanted to go see his ceremony and visit him. My dad did not want her to go or would not allow my mom to go. My mom went with her parents, against his command. I think it caused a massive fight that probably crushed my spirit so much I have trouble recalling the details.
It may have been at this time that I (and possibly my parents too) were contemplating divorce, I remember thinking it would be so great because the fighting would stop, my mom wouldn’t be treated mean, and she and I would have more time to spend alone. I then realized that I would have to spend some time alone with my dad if they divorced and I was terrified of that prospect.
In the wake of this world-shattering argument, my mother left me in the care of my angered father for a few days while she went on the road to Missouri with her parents to see my brother. When the school bus dropped me off at home the day she left, no one was there, I was kind of shocked that my mother actually did leave me and I was dreading my father coming home any minute.
But he never did. I eventually put myself to sleep. In what seems like the wee hours of the night I was awakened by loud noises coming from the front of the house and speech that instantly made me know my father had come home and he was extremely intoxicated.
I heard his footsteps come down the hall and I prayed that he turns into his room and goes to sleep. But I had a real bad feeling. There was a burst of noise as my bedroom door flew open. The monster came after me in my bed. I shouted and panicked and tried to avoid the monster, but it got me and it was pulling me out of bed. I knew that I was going to be killed on this night and I was struggling to save my life.
It dragged me to its bed and laid me down. But then the monster laid down also and it didn’t hurt me. A wave of relief crept over me, as I realized the monster only wants me to sleep with it, it does not want to kill me tonight. I do not want to sleep with it, but I will make it happy if it is not hurting me.
The feeling of relief was quickly interrupted by feeling the touch of the monster on my right side and then the forceful grip of the monster on my right forearm. The grip pulled at my arm. I sensed my impending death again and pulled back, but I wasn’t strong enough. My forearm and my hand kept moving closer to the monster. My hand made contact with the monster’s hairy disgusting body and felt it’s warmth and fleshiness. I knew my father was nude and that he had put my hand on his genitals. I felt immediate revulsion and jerked my body around as fast as I could. Surprisingly, I broke the monster’s grasp on my arm. He tried to grab my arm again, but his fingers did not get a hold and I slipped out of that grasp. I continued jerking my body around until I flew off the side of his bed. The monster says something. It is the pet name he uses for my mother.
I ran in terror, sensing the monster was going to chase me down. I made it to my room and shut the door. I grabbed my phone to call the police on the monster, but then I realized that if I call the police the monster will definitely kill me and I can’t be sure that the police will keep him away the entire time until my mom gets back. I decide not to call the police, but dial 9 and 1 on the phone, so I will only have to press 1 if the monster comes back. The monster begins snoring and I feel thankful that I wasn’t killed this night.
I did not sleep much that night. I realized that the monster was trying to make me touch his privates and I was confused and scared by what happened and the thoughts I was having at the time. Thoughts which I clearly remember having:
1. I touched my dads privates. Only his wife touches a mans privates. Is my dad making me his wife. Am I replacing my mom because she left. Will my mom comeback if she finds out I have replaced her, will she hate me, will I ever see her and be loved by her again.
2. My dad’s wife has to be a girl. Did my dad just turn me into a girl? But I don’t want to be a girl! How he could he take my boyness away from me? Why would he want to do that to his own son?
3. What my dad did to me was have sex with me. I have heard about sex and it has to do with touching people when they are naked. I have had sex. Women get pregnant from sex. I may now be pregnant with my father’s baby. My life will be so shameful if I have my father;s baby. Everyone will reject me. Because we are related the baby will be mutated and I will be a public spectacle and outcast.
4. Calm down – your body didn’t change, you are not a girl yet. But what if I grow into a girl? I must check myself regularly to make sure I am not growing breasts and my penis isn’t getting smaller and going inside me.
5. Is he going to keep doing this?
I didn’t take me long to realize these thoughts were not rational, but when I subsequently learned about homosexuality, that it was pretty much the worst thing in the world, and that my dad considered it abhorrent and unacceptable. I developed an intense fear that I was gay because I had touched a man’s penis, a man had wanted me to touch his penis, the event had locked me into gayness, and/or I inherited gayness from my father. The fear of being gay plagued me all throughout my teens years. To avoid any appearance of homosexuality, I changed myself to like more stereotypical male things and joined my friends in making homophobic comments. When I could tell a friend was trying to engage me in homoerotic horseplay (typical stuff for teenage boys), I refused to allow myself to be open to it and freaked out and shamed the boy. It wasn’t until I first had sex with a woman at 18, that I was able to feel somewhat secure in my sexuality, but doubtful thoughts did sometimes continue to creep in even after that.
The next day my dad was super nice, he took me to my favorite restaurant and bought me baseball cards, he seemed more interested in me than he ever had before. Somehow, I knew exactly what he was trying to do – buy my silence. I remember thinking the kindness was unnecessary, because I was too afraid of him killing me to ever say anything, but I’ll take it anyway.
What my dad did to me hurt me in a number of ways, many of them longlasting, and many of them just being explored. I believe this event and other instances of abuse have led to me using substances, defense mechanisms, dissociation, and runaway thinking to hide from my feelings. I believe the pain has had to be stored in my body and has contributed to a reduction of my health and vitality. I believe the repressed sadness, pain, and fear have always bubbled up in my life to cause anxiety, lack of confidence, negative self image, and self-loathing. I believe that I have not trusted or been able to connect with people who do actually love me because of the abuse. I feel I had the right to explore my sexuality on my own and not to have to try to piece it together from a place of confused fear and homophobia, this incident took away my right to do that. I feel I stopped connecting to my emotions and forgot what it even meant to feel emotions. As a result, I lost a big part of my identity as a person and it will take great effort to reclaim it.
My parents did hurt me by causing and allowing this to happen. The fact that this only happened once, the fact that the contact was not egregious, the fact that he was drunk, the pretense that he was confused and thought I was my mom – do not change the facts that I was molested by my own father, that it hurt me, and that I continue to suffer from its effects. I have every right to be angry and it is not my responsibility to protect anyone or apologize for anyone. Though most stories of abuse are worse, I have every right to let my story be known and let my hurt be known.
I am strong. I fought back, and because I fought back I was not revictimized. My father never went after me again. I can see where he did try to act as a good father at times, especially as he got older, I can see he is a changed person and he doesn’t seem like a monster anymore.
My thought on this is, it is too late. I don’t want to be around you, I can’t love you, and I won’t feel sad or sorry when you die. I will forgive you, but I will never like, respect, or trust you. You hurt us all so much and you did something incredibly heinous. You will always be the monster to me.
.
But if my dad showed up, we all changed. He was authoritarian, aggressive, controlling, and miserable. He verbally abused my mother incessantly for my entire childhood. She would argue back. They would both be angry and hurtful to each other. It never seemed to matter in their heads one bit that their screaming at each other was incurring right in front of me, all the time.
On most days of my childhood, there was a point when all happy feelings were instantly cut off and replaced with sad feelings due to a fight in front of me. There were plenty of times that my parents were using the silent treatment on each other and, as a consequence, no one would be speaking to me either. There were plenty of times when their fighting caused me to start crying in front of them. They would continue fighting and not notice I was crying. I did feel very bad on one occasion when they started arguing with each other as to who was at fault for making me cry, but didn’t comfort me. There were times where my mother left the house as a result of an argument. I did not know when she was coming back and I have never liked being alone with my dad.
Dad was a problem drinker, in my earlier memories he would visit the bar two or three nights per week. He would often come home severely drunk. Sometimes he was a violent, mean, angry drunk. I remember seeing him take off his shoe and fling it at my mother. She avoided it but it hit the glass on our stove so hard it shattered into pieces. He also threw a knife at her during this altercation. I have seen plenty of fights end in smashed items or damage to the house. I never saw dad hit mom. It was just violence around her and emotional and verbal abuse. She never seemed happy, so I wanted so desperately to make her happy.
Mom was more of the disciplinarian. My earliest memories are of her chasing my older brothers around the house trying to discipline them with her “yardstick”. Mom disciplined me at a young age with spanks and slaps to the body and limbs. A few times mom slapped me in the face, but this wasn’t because I was being bad, it was because I said something that insulted her. I would also be given the silent treatment if I hurt her feelings.
Overall, I was not subject to harsh discipline or physical abuse by either parent. However, I did witness an incident that has been clearly burned in my memory:
My middle brother was always in trouble. It was a just string after string of costly and embarrassing incidents for my parents. This time he had a neighborhood friend who moved to a different area code and he ran up an expensive long distance telephone bill by calling his friend without my parents knowledge. We were all at the dinner table when my dad found out. My dad was about 270 pounds, my brother was probably 120 at the time. My dad bull charged him, picked my brother up off his feet, and slammed him to the ground. I saw the look on my brother’s face as he was cowering in fear and pain and in need of mercy, lying on his belly on the ground. My big fat dad then proceeds to jump on my brother’s exposed back multiple times in hard leather bottomed shoes, until he is knocked off my middle brother by my oldest brother and they tussle.
My middle brother lay for some time writhing in agony after he was jumped on. I have somewhat vague memories of him being badly injured and having to go to the hospital as a teen on a few occasions. He has had kidney dysfunction as an adult. While I don’t have many memories of my brothers being hit, hints I got from them and a sense that I always felt my father was a dangerous monster, make me believe they were both subject to physical abuse and emotional and verbal abuse throughout their childhoods.
When I saw my dad do what he did to my brother, I formed a belief that if I disappointed my father he would kill me. There was no way, my fifty pound body could withstand what he did to my brother.
I carried this belief around for a number of years. If I got in trouble for my behavior, broke something at the house, if I got a bad grade on a test, if I was caught having not done my homework, I would panic and begin sobbing, because I felt there was a strong possibility that I would be killed when my father found out about this. I always cried way more than everyone else in elementary school because of this. Boys, girls, and teachers repeatedly made fun of me for this and made comments disparaging me. My brothers called me cry baby, my dad made me feel like a sissy.
I was lightly disciplined and not physically abused because I always complied with my parents demands and expectations. Even after I realized the chances of my father killing or even hurting me in any way narrowed to 0 as I grew into an adult. I still felt the need to make life decisions based on his expectations.
My oldest brother graduated in 1988 and began that Fall attending a university 70 miles from home. I felt like I lost a protector. My middle brother did physically abuse me and mentally torture me as a kid. I began to live in fear of him too. If I were to pass him in the hallway, I would drop to the floor and curl up in a fetal position to protect my organs from the blow I expected to receive. I guess he bore the brunt of dad’s abuse and felt the need to pass it on. I guess I kind of preferred it that way because I got even more scared of my parents when he left, and it definitely felt like I had to deal with this dysfunction all on my own now.
My middle brother graduated in 1989 and left for basic training in Missouri during the summer. In the fall of 1989, I was eight and starting the third grade. My middle brother had completed basic training and my mom wanted to go see his ceremony and visit him. My dad did not want her to go or would not allow my mom to go. My mom went with her parents, against his command. I think it caused a massive fight that probably crushed my spirit so much I have trouble recalling the details.
It may have been at this time that I (and possibly my parents too) were contemplating divorce, I remember thinking it would be so great because the fighting would stop, my mom wouldn’t be treated mean, and she and I would have more time to spend alone. I then realized that I would have to spend some time alone with my dad if they divorced and I was terrified of that prospect.
In the wake of this world-shattering argument, my mother left me in the care of my angered father for a few days while she went on the road to Missouri with her parents to see my brother. When the school bus dropped me off at home the day she left, no one was there, I was kind of shocked that my mother actually did leave me and I was dreading my father coming home any minute.
But he never did. I eventually put myself to sleep. In what seems like the wee hours of the night I was awakened by loud noises coming from the front of the house and speech that instantly made me know my father had come home and he was extremely intoxicated.
I heard his footsteps come down the hall and I prayed that he turns into his room and goes to sleep. But I had a real bad feeling. There was a burst of noise as my bedroom door flew open. The monster came after me in my bed. I shouted and panicked and tried to avoid the monster, but it got me and it was pulling me out of bed. I knew that I was going to be killed on this night and I was struggling to save my life.
It dragged me to its bed and laid me down. But then the monster laid down also and it didn’t hurt me. A wave of relief crept over me, as I realized the monster only wants me to sleep with it, it does not want to kill me tonight. I do not want to sleep with it, but I will make it happy if it is not hurting me.
The feeling of relief was quickly interrupted by feeling the touch of the monster on my right side and then the forceful grip of the monster on my right forearm. The grip pulled at my arm. I sensed my impending death again and pulled back, but I wasn’t strong enough. My forearm and my hand kept moving closer to the monster. My hand made contact with the monster’s hairy disgusting body and felt it’s warmth and fleshiness. I knew my father was nude and that he had put my hand on his genitals. I felt immediate revulsion and jerked my body around as fast as I could. Surprisingly, I broke the monster’s grasp on my arm. He tried to grab my arm again, but his fingers did not get a hold and I slipped out of that grasp. I continued jerking my body around until I flew off the side of his bed. The monster says something. It is the pet name he uses for my mother.
I ran in terror, sensing the monster was going to chase me down. I made it to my room and shut the door. I grabbed my phone to call the police on the monster, but then I realized that if I call the police the monster will definitely kill me and I can’t be sure that the police will keep him away the entire time until my mom gets back. I decide not to call the police, but dial 9 and 1 on the phone, so I will only have to press 1 if the monster comes back. The monster begins snoring and I feel thankful that I wasn’t killed this night.
I did not sleep much that night. I realized that the monster was trying to make me touch his privates and I was confused and scared by what happened and the thoughts I was having at the time. Thoughts which I clearly remember having:
1. I touched my dads privates. Only his wife touches a mans privates. Is my dad making me his wife. Am I replacing my mom because she left. Will my mom comeback if she finds out I have replaced her, will she hate me, will I ever see her and be loved by her again.
2. My dad’s wife has to be a girl. Did my dad just turn me into a girl? But I don’t want to be a girl! How he could he take my boyness away from me? Why would he want to do that to his own son?
3. What my dad did to me was have sex with me. I have heard about sex and it has to do with touching people when they are naked. I have had sex. Women get pregnant from sex. I may now be pregnant with my father’s baby. My life will be so shameful if I have my father;s baby. Everyone will reject me. Because we are related the baby will be mutated and I will be a public spectacle and outcast.
4. Calm down – your body didn’t change, you are not a girl yet. But what if I grow into a girl? I must check myself regularly to make sure I am not growing breasts and my penis isn’t getting smaller and going inside me.
5. Is he going to keep doing this?
I didn’t take me long to realize these thoughts were not rational, but when I subsequently learned about homosexuality, that it was pretty much the worst thing in the world, and that my dad considered it abhorrent and unacceptable. I developed an intense fear that I was gay because I had touched a man’s penis, a man had wanted me to touch his penis, the event had locked me into gayness, and/or I inherited gayness from my father. The fear of being gay plagued me all throughout my teens years. To avoid any appearance of homosexuality, I changed myself to like more stereotypical male things and joined my friends in making homophobic comments. When I could tell a friend was trying to engage me in homoerotic horseplay (typical stuff for teenage boys), I refused to allow myself to be open to it and freaked out and shamed the boy. It wasn’t until I first had sex with a woman at 18, that I was able to feel somewhat secure in my sexuality, but doubtful thoughts did sometimes continue to creep in even after that.
The next day my dad was super nice, he took me to my favorite restaurant and bought me baseball cards, he seemed more interested in me than he ever had before. Somehow, I knew exactly what he was trying to do – buy my silence. I remember thinking the kindness was unnecessary, because I was too afraid of him killing me to ever say anything, but I’ll take it anyway.
What my dad did to me hurt me in a number of ways, many of them longlasting, and many of them just being explored. I believe this event and other instances of abuse have led to me using substances, defense mechanisms, dissociation, and runaway thinking to hide from my feelings. I believe the pain has had to be stored in my body and has contributed to a reduction of my health and vitality. I believe the repressed sadness, pain, and fear have always bubbled up in my life to cause anxiety, lack of confidence, negative self image, and self-loathing. I believe that I have not trusted or been able to connect with people who do actually love me because of the abuse. I feel I had the right to explore my sexuality on my own and not to have to try to piece it together from a place of confused fear and homophobia, this incident took away my right to do that. I feel I stopped connecting to my emotions and forgot what it even meant to feel emotions. As a result, I lost a big part of my identity as a person and it will take great effort to reclaim it.
My parents did hurt me by causing and allowing this to happen. The fact that this only happened once, the fact that the contact was not egregious, the fact that he was drunk, the pretense that he was confused and thought I was my mom – do not change the facts that I was molested by my own father, that it hurt me, and that I continue to suffer from its effects. I have every right to be angry and it is not my responsibility to protect anyone or apologize for anyone. Though most stories of abuse are worse, I have every right to let my story be known and let my hurt be known.
I am strong. I fought back, and because I fought back I was not revictimized. My father never went after me again. I can see where he did try to act as a good father at times, especially as he got older, I can see he is a changed person and he doesn’t seem like a monster anymore.
My thought on this is, it is too late. I don’t want to be around you, I can’t love you, and I won’t feel sad or sorry when you die. I will forgive you, but I will never like, respect, or trust you. You hurt us all so much and you did something incredibly heinous. You will always be the monster to me.
.
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