Can't Afford Therapy, So I'm Here To Vent Into The Void. (Also posted in the raised by narcissists subreddit)
Posting this here because I honestly want more eyes on my experiences in hopes of feeling heard.
CW: VENTING ABOUT ABUSE (PHYSICAL AND MENTAL/EMOTIONAL) BY A PARENT, NARCISSIST PARENT, MENTIONS OF DRUGS AND ALCOHOL, MENTIONS OF MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES, SWEARING
If something in the ensuing vent/rant isn't properly tagged, please let me know and I'll update the CW in an edit. Also please pardon any formatting issues, I am posting from my phone.
On Tuesday, May 12th, 2026, my father wrapped his hands around my youngest brother's throat and started choking him, screaming "YOU BREAKING MY SHIT?! YOU BREAKING MY SHIT?! I'M GONNA FUCK YOU UP! I'M GONNA FUCK YOU UP!"
The only reason my brother didn't call the cops to press charges is because, according to him, "Dad didn't leave any bruises, so there's not much physical proof. It would be your word and my word against his." I kept insisting we should call the cops and press charges anyways, but he said no, and he's the one who got assaulted, so I'm respecting his decision.
We've discussed what happened to our support system (Our Aunt, Our Mother, Our respective friend groups). But for me, I'm still mentally and emotionally processing the event itself, and I've been internally cataloging my memories of how it's all escalated to this. And like I said in the title, a professional therapist is currently not an option, and I really want to get my thoughts out now.
Yes, I could journal, but I emotionally process better when I have someone to bounce my thoughts and feelings off of.
Yes, I could continue to talk to my support system, but they've all either lived through or heard about the stories already, and there's only so much of my emotional baggage I can share with them before it starts burdening them and infringing upon their own problems.
Which brings me here, to the void of internet strangers. If you'd like to interact, feel free.
Our cast of relevant characters (All Fake Names) :
. Me (Female, Age 30) [Diagnosed with ADHD at Age 5, Diagnosed with Autism at 25, also currently sporting a Bipolar Depression and Anxiety diagnosis]
. My Dad (Male, Age 57) [6 ft. 6 in/198 cm tall; 400 lbs./181 kg]
. My Mom (Female, Age 56)
. Younger Brother, "Saul" (Male, Age 25)
. Youngest Brother, "David" (Male, Age 23) [Diagnosed with Autism at age 3; 6 ft. 7 in./201 cm. tall; 380 lbs./172 kg.]
[Yes, my brothers and I are all adults who still live with our parents. David is attending college and is currently home for the summer. I can't speak accurately on Saul's situation. As for me, a combination of unsteady employment, unstable mental health, and poor financial decisions have all contributed to my current circumstances. Thankfully I now have support and a steady enough job that I should be able to start taking steps towards finally moving out]
[I'm listing Dad and David's sizes as well as mine and David's mental diagnoses because I feel they are relevant details that factor into our behaviors, and I'd rather list them right out the gate then go on a tangent about them later.]
So, Dad is an undiagnosed neurodiverse Narcissist with severe alcoholism and drug addiction. He doesn't like to listen to doctor's and he doesn't think he needs therapy or anger management - to him, everyone else is the problem and if people just listened to him there wouldn't be any issues. He's been in AA since before I was born, but thinking back it doesn't seem to have done much to help with his behavior. If anything, it feels like he's conned the entire local AA community into revering him as a model member and role model, feeding into his ego mania while he hasn't done any actual work on his own personal 12 step program since his first year of sobriety.
In fact, my mom found out she was pregnant with me three months after he became sober, so I basically had to grow up through his recovery journey. I asked her a few years ago if she had any regrets about her and Dad's relationship; she told me if she had to do it over, she wouldn't have children with him again. She wasn't saying she regretted having me specifically, she regretted experiencing Dad try to be a parent to us. During this conversation I also asked her why she never left Dad and continued to let us be subjected to what we in our family refer to as his 'temper tantrums': she told me she was trying to protect us the only way she knew how, that she wanted to always be there to interfere and keep him from going too far. She knew that if she had divorced him, there wouldn't be enough evidence to provide her with sole custody, and any split custody agreement that left us alone with him would have been disastrous.
His parenting style can best be described as ruling with absolute authority from a place of impatience and anger; using his massive size and loud voice to scare and intimidate us into obeying him; lashing out whenever he felt disrespected; and never, ever saying the words "I'm sorry".
Apparently, when he first went sober, his very first sponsor told him that his "I'm sorries" were now worthless, that Dad had used them all up, that no one in his life believed he was actually sorry/remorseful any more because of all the shit he'd pulled. What that sponsor failed to get through Dad's thick skull is that such a mindset need not apply to any children Dad would eventually have, that his "I'm sorry" allotment could be reset with us. Yeah, sure, saying "I'm sorry" with your actions is commendable, but from my perspective, if you don't say the words and then actively change the behavior you're sorry for, any apologetic actions are still worthless. If anything they came across as more of a bribe to just forget the offense ever happened.
He often made 'jokes' that my brothers and I were easily replaceable/expendable growing up. He was raised on the belief that your Spouse comes before all, even your kids, and if something happens to your kid you can always make more. He continued that thought process into raising us - he was an amazing, doting, loving spouse to Mom and treated her with all the love and respect he had in his heart, and continues to treat her so to this day. Whenever I would downplay Dad's treatment of us, I would always say "Dad is an amazing Husband, and a loyal Friend, he just hasn't always been the best Dad."
A Highlight Reel of My Memories of My Dad:
. Earliest memory, I was three or four, I was bringing a glass of milk to him or mom. I tripped on his foot and spilled milk onto the carpet. He started screaming and chased me into the kitchen where I ended up cornered. Mom got between us and I hid behind her leg until he stopped yelling and left.
. Around age six or seven I got my first bike, Dad insisted on teaching me. He yelled at and insulted me everytime I fell, and he got frustrated/impatient whenever I cried over my bloody knees/hands/elbows. I quickly stopped trying to learn out of fear. He repeated the behavior with Saul, who also decided not to learn. He didn't bother trying to teach David.
. In a furniture store parking lot (I think I was seven or eight?) I worked up the courage to ask him why he was harder on me than my brothers. He told me it was because I was a girl and he needed to "toughen me up".
. That time he called me a bitch when I was in middle school after I overslept and missed my bus and Mom asked him to drive me. Mom hissed at him that I could hear him since their bedroom door and mine were open and our rooms were across the hall from each other. He didn't say sorry, he just silently bought me a convenience store donut for breakfast before taking me to school.
. Whenever he gripped me by the back of my neck as a kid and would yank me around, or how he used gripping me by the back of my neck and squeezing as a way to silently communicate his anger at me in public.
. He slapped my brothers and I upside our heads all the time growing up whenever we did or said something he thought was stupid, to the point where all three of us would flinch at any sudden movements. I still flinch to this day, though he slowly phased out the behavior after David turned 18.
. My first memory of him saying "I love you" to me was when I was walking out the front door at around age 13.
. Sometime when I was between the ages of 16-18, Dad noticed I still had an electronic recording device loaned to me by a tutor in preparation for a big speech I'd had to give when I was 13. We were all loading into the car on our way to a weekend family getaway. As we drove away from the house, Dad was continuing to tease me about having essentially stolen it. In my head, I was hearing him call me a bad person, since in my mind, stealing=wrong=bad, so I kept insisting it wasn't stolen, I just hadn't returned it yet because I kept forgetting to give it back. He refused to drop it, kept insisting that it was stolen, saying that it wasn't mine and I still had it, "So what does that make it, OP? What does that mean, huh?" He kept asking me "What does it mean" over and over, with a shit-eating grin on his face, trying to get me to admit he was right. I was being stubborn, and thoughtlessly quipped back "It means you're an asshole!". He slammed on the breaks. We hadn't even left our neighborhood yet. He asked me to repeat myself. Quietly, I said again, "it means you're an asshole." I was grounded for that entire vacation, we spent the entire three to four hour car ride in oppressive, dead silence. That night, when we had dinner with some of my parents friends who lived in the area, Dad was recounting the whole thing to them, and added on that it took all his restraint "not to drag [OP] by [my] hair out of the car and beat [me] on the side of the road".
. The various times he would scream at me until he was red in the face and I was left crying and scared. I would be between the ages of 12-20 during these.
- I ate some sandwich rolls I didn't know he was saving for a barbecue he was hosting later that day. He screamed until I ended up crying in the shower. Mom sat with me and when I grabbed a razor to shave my legs she asked me to put it down, afraid I was going to cut myself.
- He had an old desk or table made with fake wood/plastic material that was peeling. I picked at it, unthinking of the consequences. He screamed and screamed and Mom tried to defend me, calling it an accident, and he yelled "WHEN THE FUCK IS IT NOT AN ACCIDENT WITH HER, HUH?! WHEN IS IT NOT AN ACCIDENT?!"
- After two years of owning a little bamboo plant given to me by my best friend, he noticed that, with the way I'd been watering it, there was now a water ring on the table in the living room where I'd been keeping it. He screamed and then eventually stormed out of the house. Mom took me on a drive around town until we found a place to park and we both just sat and cried until we calmed down.
- At a dinner with extended family shortly after the events of George Floyd, when one of my extended family members started to speak in support of the cop, I openly disagreed with him. Dad repeatedly told me to shut up, yelling louder and louder until he screamed at me and drove me away from the table in tears and I had to sit the rest of dinner out in the Host's bathroom trying to calm down. Later on, he said his reasoning was that he was trying to "protect me" by shutting me down first before anyone at the table could.
. This one happened after my first stint in the mental hospital, sometime in my early to mid 20's: I was running late to either work or a job interview one day and I was boxed into our driveway. Without thinking, I simply drove over our front lawn to get to the street. He went ballistic, screaming and threatening, and when I told my friends at the time about it, they encouraged me to leave the house and seek refuge at a domestic violence shelter. I found the closest one and passed their intake interview, so that afternoon I went home, packed a suitcase, and left. I ended up coming back home after a week, after it was made clear I would lose my phone (which he paid for), my car (which was solely in his name), and easy access to medication I needed to help me manage my ADHD.
. My mom and I have shared a shoe size since I hit puberty. We used to have the exact same pair of little black boots. One morning, some time between my late teens and mid twenties, she was searching for her pair and couldn't find them. Our bedroom doors were open, and she saw my pair on my bedroom floor. She asked if I'd taken her shoes, I told her no. When she couldn't find her shoes she started asking if my shoes were hers in an exasperated tone. Again, I told her they were mine and I didn't know where her shoes were. Dad marched into my doorway and demanded I hand over my shoes, thinking I was lying about taking Mom's and getting upset about it quickly. I picked my shoes up off my floor and sat upright on my bed, again stating that no, these were my shoes. He demanded I hand them over again and again I refused. Then he came to my bedside, grabbed me by the back of my neck and slammed me face forward into my mattress, reaching for my shoes as I tried to hold them out of his reach. He was screaming, Mom was yelling at him to let go, I was yelling at him that they were mine. He got ahold of my shoes, tossed them to Mom, then marched out of the house. About five to ten minutes later, Mom found her shoes in a different room in the house.
. After I experienced a major mental breakdown (due to my bipolar depression going untreated, lost access to my ADHD medication, and zero support for my AuDHD and its impact on my life and studies) and failed out of my bachelor's degree program, I did a stint in the mental hospital, then began working full time and paying my parents rent. Ever since, my Dad's go to threat(s) whenever he was unhappy with me were variations on him evicting me onto the streets and leaving me homeless, threats of him destroying my personal property, or a combination of the two where he threatened I would come home one day and find all my stuff on the lawn.
These are just the core memories of stuff thats happened to me personally that stick out to me the most.
As you can see, Dad doesn't take kindly to anything vaguely resembling an act of disrespect against him, his wife, or his property.
Growing up, his alcoholism was the excuse for his temper. From my perspective, he was never really held accountable and his temper tantrums were often excused by our mom as "He's an alcoholic, he doesn't really mean it, he really does love you". I got used to walking on eggshells around him and always trying to be wary of not setting him off. Mom was the safe and good parent, the one I could rely on for mental and emotional support. I didn't bother trying to call CPS as a kid because he was friends with all the cops in our local police department (between his volunteer work with them and probably also due to his participation in AA) and I didn't think CPS would care since he didn't beat me heavily or leave any lasting bruises or send me to the hospital. And then by the time I entered adulthood, his behavior was so normalized to me, with none of our extended family or other adults in my life ever stepping in, I didn't even think his parenting could be considered abusive until my twenties. Plus, like a lot of narcissist's, he was funny and charming and charismatic, and he had his occasional good moments that made it worth wading through all the shit.
There's a stereotype I've seen in my social media feed that oldest daughters are just like their fathers, with the same temper and backbone. But that's not me - that honor goes to David.
David, who's got a heart of gold and a D&D Paladin's sense of justice, who got Dad's temper and charisma and size. Once puberty hit him like a semi-truck and put him on a level playing field, he constantly would go toe-to-toe with our Dad, defending Saul and I from Dad's wrath. Especially after Mom stopped getting in between us and Dad once we reached adulthood, citing that now that we were adults, it was our responsibility to manage our relationships with our father.
Ever since David turned 18 and graduated highschool, his and Dad's relationship has been slowly eroding away. We thought the worst of it was two or three years ago, again in May: Dad was peeing and for some reason decided to flush (I think the dog was trying to drink the toilet water?) Only for the toilet to clog and the water to start rising. Mom yelled at him, Dad freaked out because he couldn't stop mid stream. David started laughing, cause of course, objectively, it was kind of a funny situation. Dad got embarrassed, and when Dad feels embarrassed he reacts like an angry cornered animal. He stormed out of his bedroom and stalked to where David was in the living room. Dad was red faced and screaming, and as David tried to tamp down his laughter, Dad slapped David in the chest hard enough to knock him into the living room recliner. I watched it all happen from the main hallway leading into the living room, Mom heard it all happening from her and Dad's bedroom, and as Dad stormed back into the bedroom, Mom cried about how Dad's behavior was going to ruin his relationship with his children. I followed David into the garage to console him. David and I talked about how the two of us have been mentally waiting for Dad to strike one of us like that, waiting for him to to cross the line and actually hit us so that it would finally justify all of our negative feelings towards him. David described just feeling numb now that it had finally happened. I hugged him and did my best to provide emotional support.
When David went away to school for his Bachelor's Degree last August, he basically instituted a no contact trial with Dad. David didn't answer Dad's calls, texts, didn't even want Mom or I to share any updates about him with Dad directly. Dad hated it, and whenever he heard about someone talking to David he'd make passive aggressive comments about how "Oh, so this person gets to talk to my son, but I don't?"
David upgraded to low contact after Dad reached out to warn him about some bad storms in David's area. Between the limited time spent together when David came home for breaks, the space at school, David going to therapy, and a subtle shift in Dad's behavior at home (he seemed to be getting slower to anger and opting more for communication rather than lashing out) David was beginning to have hope that maybe, just maybe, he could wind up having a relationship with Dad after all.
Then Tuesday happened.
I woke up to the sound of something crashing to the floor and then Dad was screaming. I hid in my room until Dad's lunch break was over, and once he left and I was sure it was safe, I came out to find David and learned what had happened.
And once I did I felt something in my mind break as my heart sunk.
Now it feels like its all gone to hell, like there's been an irreversible shift or seismic break in the foundation of our family dynamics.
David has once again gone numb, all hopes of improvement are dead in the water, any repairs to their relationship burned to ash. He and I have been doing our best to avoid Dad and engage with him as little as possible. I can't bring myself to say I love my Dad anymore. I feel like I'm going through the five stages of grief, but I can't even tell what I'm grieving.
I feel so incredibly guilty that I haven't been stronger, haven't protected my brothers from my Dad like I should have.
I'm feeling guilty that all I could do was hide in my bedroom like a coward
I'm angry that Dad would pull this shit, but not surprised
I'm angry that I had to grow up with a father I feel I needed protecting from, a father I feel I needed to protect my brothers from (and failed to protect them anyways)
I'm scared about what's going to happen moving forward I'm terrified of Dad's violence escalating further.
David plans to resume No Contact with Dad once he's away at school. I'm working with my friend whom I share a storage unit it with to pack up my belongings and get them to safety while I save up to find my own place.
Up until now, I'd felt comfortable in the stress and chaos of living under the same roof as my Dad. Yeah, it sucked, but it was what I was used too, and familiarity was a lot less scary than the unknown of living on my own, especially after my Hell Year at college.
But now, after all the years of excuses and downplaying and lack of accountability, the lack of consequences, the years spent lying on my back and never calling out Dad's shitty treatment of us for fear of his anger and the repercussions; now a breaking point has been reached.
I hope this whole ordeal doesn't end up as another buried hatchet.
I hope I can find the strength and carry out the plan to leave.
. . . I hope the fucking bastard dies first so we can experience a world without him in it.