Can someone tell me if what happened to me was actually traumatic or not?
Hi I’m 17f. I know the tittle probably sounds strange but in the shortest way to explain it, I know that the stuff that’s happened to me is bad but I don’t know how bad. The reason I crave to know exactly how bad is because I can’t conceptualise severity in my head without something like a rating out of 10 for example. I believe it’s due to the fact that my brain works extremely logically (think Sheldon from the big bang theory) because I’ve spent most of my life completely emotionally numb. I feel like this could come off as “fishing” but I promise it is not I am not looking for sympathy at all I just want to understand. I will attempt to summarise my life below:
From the age of 2 I was abused by my stepdad. The types of abuses he inflicted on me were verbal, emotional, physical, sexual, psychological, and neglect. There were other things like favouriting my sister heavily (his bio child). Some things he did of note were:
- holding knives to my throat, kettles of boiling water over my head and other similar things.
- kicked me out of the house as early as 9 at night (we lived in a really bad area)
- essentially bullying me since I was very young (typical name calling, fat shaming and alike)
- isolating me from my mum and sister so I felt like an outsider.
- locking me in cupboards for hours without food or water.
- strangling me, beating me till I passed out, throwing things like glass at me.
- ripping my carpet up on only my side of mine and my sisters room and dismantling my bed because I didn’t deserve them as well as ransacking my half of the room and destroying everything in it.
I’m sure you can get an idea of the things he would do from what I’ve listed
Then when I was 13, on Father’s Day he and my mum were in a not talking phase (they would have smaller arguments then for weeks they wouldn’t speak and then eventually he would reach his max and explode) and my mum had gotten him presents but he refused to open them. I’m not completely sure how because I was upstairs at the time but they argued and then he started beating my mum. I then heard the screaming and ran downstairs and tried to punch and scratch him to get him to let go of my mum. After I did that he turned his attention to me and started hitting me. My sister had ran into the garden with my mums phone and called the police at this point and then after some time he stormed up to his room (the details are fuzzy I have a hard time remembering a lot of my childhood).
The next part gives a good idea on how my mum acted in this dynamic. For some context, that day I had completely cleaned my room so it was spotless. He then came downstairs into the garden and said to me “go and tidy your room it’s a shit tip”, and then stormed back upstairs. I knew he hadn’t actually gone in my room and was just trying to get me to go upstairs, so I looked at my mum for some guidance on what to do. She said to me to go upstairs, so I did. When I was standing at the bottom of the stairs I could hear him in my room but it was like he was trying to be quiet to not let me know he was in there. Luckily, just as I started to go up the stairs, I saw the police sirens through the window and ran to open the front door and told him where he was. I have no idea what he was going to do to me if I had gone into my room but I don’t think it would’ve been anything good.
He as then arrested and held in custody for 24 hours. Every-time something like this would happen and he would get arrested my mum would cave and let him come back into the house again like nothing happened. However, this time I refused to pretend like nothing happened and so for the following 6 months I refused to acknowledge he was even there. I did not speak to him or even look at him.
Then it was Christmas Day and I was very ill (I had strep throat and covid at the same time) and I had lost my voice so couldn’t speak. His other daughter was at our house as well as his parents and he didn’t want them to know I wasn’t speaking to him because then they’d ask why so he kept trying to get me to talk to him. To cut a long story short he came into my room where I was laying in bed and gave me a bottle of water and tried to hand it to me so I just pointed to my desk next to my bed. He didn’t like that and said “you’ve been brought up not dragged up use your manners” and I replied “not by you”. After that he blew up and threatened to kill me twice. That was when I decided I had had enough of him and the next day I went to the police station to explain everything. The police the alerted social services who told my mum he had to leave or my sister and I could get taken into care and so after that he was gone. However my mum was still answering his phone calls and to cut a long story short, she told him it was me that went to the police.
Shortly after that my mum was in and out of hospital for about 8 months and I was home alone for most of that period (my sister went to live with my aunt till my mum was better). During that time period he stalked me and tried to kill me multiple times. I had to get a non-molestation order against him.
Eventually it was taken to court and he was found guilt but didn’t receive any prison time because he was also a very heavy cocaine addict and alcoholic.
That is the story of my stepdad but heavily summarised. Now for the story of my bio dad.
To start that story I have to go back a bit to when I was 9. I always suspected I wasn’t my stepdads child purely because of the way he treated me vs my sister and because he would say thing to my mum like “she’s your child not mine” but I didn’t know for sure yet. Anyway on Christmas Eve him and my mum were arguing and he told me that he wasn’t my real dad and my dad didn’t want me. He said it to hurt my mum. He then went upstairs and my mum proceeded to tell me it was true that he wasn’t my dad and my real dad didn’t want me and left when he found out she was pregnant. About 5 minutes later he called me upstairs and told me it wasn’t true and he was just joking so I had to pretend I thought he was my real dad even though everyone in the house at that point knew he wasn’t.
So anyway, after those 8 months of my stepdad trying to kill me, one night I decided to message my bio dad on Facebook and basically told him to go fuck himself. He then replied and said he’d like to get to know me and fast forward to 6 months later I moved from the UK to Australia to live with him. I now realise he love bombed me and I just wanted a dad so I was very susceptible to it.
The first couple of months were great and I got the dad I’d always wanted and then he switched and became horrible. I believe it was because the initial argument that caused his switch was when I got my first grade back in law studies as a B. Baring in mind I’d never done that subject before and was 2 months into it whereas everyone else had been learning it for 2 years. Anyway he told me I wasn’t good enough and it changed somthing inside of me and I instantly went back to the emotionally absent robot I had spent my whole life being. Before this switch I was very affectionate so my theory is that because he wasn’t receiving the emotional validation from me anymore he didn’t like it.
My dad never hit me but those 2 years living with him were the worst 2 years of my life. He was extremely manipulative and emotionally/ psychologically abusive. He was 10000x worse than my stepdad had ever been. Some of the things he did are as follows:
- Saying if I’d known then what I do now you still wouldn’t have a dad (referring to when we got in contact)
- Saying I love you because I have to but I don’t like you
- once after a big argument where I actually felt fearful of my life I ran to his friends house and told her everything about how he was treating me. She told me it was abuse. After I left her house she then called my dad and told him everything I said. The next day he sat me down and tried to convince me that I was lying to and manipulating everyone and then told me that he doesn’t believe that anything in my childhood actually happened because “if I can lie about him then I’m obviously lying about my childhood too”.
-He refused to pay for medical bills and essentials alike knowing I had no source of income as I could not legally work due to my visa so I had to steal money from him and upon him finding out he preemptively spread the narrative that I was lying about how it was for medical bills but would purposely say that my excuse was that I was taking it for “medical bills” (medical bills in a mocking tone) so that when I say that’s what it was actually for to people they wouldn’t believe me to isolate me as well as grounding me for a month.
- Planting seeds in my head about how my friends don’t actually like me to isolate me for example when my best friend got a boyfriend she couldn’t spend as much time with me (we spend so much time together that her time with her boyfriend was bound to cut down on our time together) and I knew that the rejection I was feeling was souly my own issues and that she was doing absolutely nothin wrong and handling it in the most perfect way anyone could so when I confided in my dad about it he tried to convince me that she liked her boyfriend more than she did me. He did this with every friend I had as well as with my mum aswell (parental alienation)
- I Can’t disagree with him when discussing a topic and if I do I’m automatically “just trying to start an argument” - he wants the idea of a child looking up to him and idolising him without question but not the actuality of being questioned
- Wouldn’t buy me deodorant - best friends mum had to and things alike
- He said he was going to start being a “Bare minimum parent” because I wasn’t grateful enough - wouldn’t buy me food
- Screaming at me calling me a cunt and alike when he was angry
- He said that my stepdad was right for the way he treated me and when I said living with him is like living with my stepdad he said that I was the “common denominator”
- When I got a Therapist to talk about my dad the therapist was good friends with my dads friend and told her everything I was saying the whole time who told my dad the whole time
- Would make it clear My childhood “wasnt that bad” and his was worse and I need to stop talking about it (I was thinking and speaking about it to try to accept it happened and he kept telling me that I was attention seeking and going on about it)
- Told my manager to stop giving me shifts once I was able to start working
- would often tell me he’d pay for things like school trips and school fees till last minute. He did the same thing with my prom ticket and I had to borrow the money from my best friend or I wouldn’t have been able to go.
- Told me he wouldn’t care if I lived or died or what I do
- I had a Pilondial cyst - refused to take me to the hospital because it’d be busy even though I was in excruciating pain and crying couldn’t sleep, eat, and couldn’t go to the bathroom and when I did finally go (I got my friend to drive me there) I was pre sepsis and rushed into emergency surgery (surgeons said it was the worst they’d ever seen)
- Said I was attention seeking for going to the doctor all of the time - everytime I went it was for a genuine reason and ended up resulting in those problems being fixed or diagnosed.
- Told me I was attention seeking for telling my closest friends about my bad childhood
- he wouldn’t speak to me for weeks and because he was always in the living room (open to the kitchen) I would go days without eating just so I wouldn’t have to be around him. He would make himself dinner and not me. He knew I wasn’t eating anything.
Then I got permanent residency shortly after graduating and was able to work. As soon as I could afford it I bought a plane ticket back to England and when I told my dad I had booked my flight (about one month before I left) he didn’t speak to me for a week and then the next 3 weeks he went back to how he was when I first moved in with him. I’d be lying if I said those 3 weeks weren’t the hardest 3 weeks of my life. I couldn’t even think about my dad without bursting into tears but it was like my body was crying and I had no control over it. Whatever it was that I experienced in those 3 weeks I truly would not wish on the worst person on earth it was so excruciating that Every-time I think about it it feels like pressing on a bruise covering my whole body. I will be going back to Australia to do a biomed degree at university next year and will be completely independent for the first time in my life.
I have tried to summarise my life as much as possible and have missed out a lot but it’s still pretty long sorry. I would truly appreciate if anyone could honestly tell me if what’s happened to me is bad or not. I know it’s bad to some extent because I have chronic heart issues basically from my body being in fight or flight too long and also bipolar disorder but I just can’t conceptualise how bad. I think the reason I want to know so bad is because my dad got in my head about how I was the bad one and nothing that bad has ever happened to me. I think this will help me get closure.
Thank you for reading this and for commenting if you choose to.