I Am a Child Abuse Survivor
It's nice that I can finally say all this without burdening my friends. This is gonna be pretty long and possibly triggering for some people (even though lots of people have/had it much worse than me).
My dad has high-functioning autism that went undiagnosed until earlier this year. My mom is schizophrenic and refuses to get help. And both were abusive. Things may have been okay for the first year of my life. I'm not sure. But things must have gotten bad after my sister was born. She's autistic and she had colic. I'm not blaming her or anything, but my grandparents have speculated that the stress caused my mom's schizophrenia to get worse. There was definitely emotional neglect, and we suspect that there may have been physical abuse as well. My grandma says that my sister would get this really mean look on her face and hit my grandma for no reason. My sister is autistic, not a sociopath. Probably she was doing something Mom had done to her or something. We don't really know. But my grandparents have told me that Mom would scream at me and my sister in public and someone actually reported her to the CPS once while we were on vacation. I remember being happy when my sister and I weren't left alone with Mom, but my grandparents could tell that something was wrong, and they would've reported my mom if it had been anyone else.
My sister and I used to be home schooled. And when I started first grade, things got pretty bad. See, I had convinced my parents to switch to a different curriculum after kindergarten because I hated that the curriculum I'd been using wasn't teaching me about science. (They didn't know that was my main problem with the curriculum. I just said that I wouldn't do my work unless I switched to another curriculum.) But then my mom didn't teach me ANYTHING except for math and how to write in cursive, and I didn't get any breaks. I was totally burnt out. I bet you can guess what she did next: She hit me with belts. Usually it was the soft end of a D-ring belt, but she threatened to hit me with the buckle. She also hit me and my sister with rulers and various kitchen utensils. (Nothing sharper than a butter knife, fortunately.) I remember sitting at the table where I was supposed to be doing my work in fear, with my mom glaring at me while holding a belt. She called me and my sister retards for not doing our work. I guess later being put in the gifted program kept me from viewing myself as stupid (academically, anyway), but my poor sister ended up in special ed and came to believe that she had a learning disability even though she might be even smarter than I am. I had a friend who was younger than me and hadn't started school yet, so I went over to his house every day (despite being very much an introvert) just to get away from my mom. My sister and I would often lock ourselves in her room or the family room to escape from our mom. Dad said that she once super glued the locks on the doors so we couldn't lock her out. He could see all these warning signs that there was abuse going on while he wasn't home, but he didn't realize what they meant because his sense of normalcy was so messed up from living with my mom and he was "in a fog" and he was also struggling with a porn addiction.
That's not to say that my dad wasn't doing anything to hurt me or my sister directly at that time. My sister was refusing to be potty trained (and yes, she's high-functioning enough that there shouldn't have been a delay in potty training), and my dad totally lost his temper and spanked her until she had welts. He was reported to the CPS, but they didn't do anything because it was a one-time thing. Boy, did they screw up. There actually WAS physical abuse going on in that home, and apparently they didn't even interview me or my sister. Believe me, at least one of us would remember it. Or maybe not. I don't even remember the incident. My aunt told me about it.
My sister and I were put in a private school when I was in third grade, since home schooling wasn't working. (DO NOT judge home schoolers. My parents just did it wrong, and it was mostly my mom. My dad didn't know what was going on when he wasn't home.) But after just one semester, we had to switch to a public school because this tiny private school with only 60 students wasn't equipped to handle my sister. But while the public school could keep her under control, what they did wasn't right. They intentionally misdiagnosed her with pervasive developmental disorder NOS instead of Asperger's syndrome so they would get grants. My sister was abused by the special education system. I'll get to the details later, as I don't really know anything about what happened before middle school. I ended up telling the school counselor about what my mom did. The CPS was called and they interviewed me. But they didn't take me away, probably because my dad was already making my mom leave because he was afraid that she would hurt me or my sister. My dad thinks that they backed him up and that's why she didn't put up more of a fight. Nobody sent me to therapy, but I talked to the school counselor all the time. I guess they let me keep talking to her about all this random stuff that wasn't even upsetting me just to keep an eye on me and make sure I didn't develop any problems. I wish they'd done the same for my sister.
Things seemed to be going better for a while after my mom left. I was having some issues. I had low self-esteem. I was being bullied. I was hitting my head hard enough for it to actually hurt whenever I did something stupid. I had suicidal thoughts for the first time when I was only nine years old (but all it took to get them to stop was for my dad to tell me that my body is God's temple and I can't destroy God's temple). But I had friends and I wasn't being abused at home anymore. I was upset when my mom's visitation rights were taken away when I was in fifth grade (I didn't know why at the time, but now I know it's because of an email she sent to my dad about a delusion that could cause her to hurt my sister), but that wasn't that big of a deal. Then I had my first crush... And she was a girl. I didn't realize it was a crush. My parents hadn't been in love, so I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't even watch all those silly Disney sitcoms that all the other girls my age watched. I thought a crush just meant thinking that someone of the opposite gender was really cute. I also didn't know that girls could like girls. I became obsessed with her and ended up sending her a creepy email asking her to be my best friend because I was too nervous to ask her in person. And my dad read the email. I mean, I knew that he could read all my emails. He told me when he set up my email account that he would have access to it. But I guess I didn't really think about what it meant. He got really mad at me when he saw that girl's response to the email I sent her asking her to be my best friend. After that, I didn't trust him anymore. And he stopped showing me affection because he thought I didn't want it anymore.
Like the summers after third and fourth grades, I spent the summer after fifth grade at a daycare center. But things were changing. I had great friends and I had a lot of fun learning about China and the Olympics (it was 2008) and playing with my friends, but some of my friendships got destroyed. I don't remember what happened now, though. I also just wasn't as happy because of the previous year.
Middle school was hell. I was crippled by guilt for what I'd done to that poor girl, along with everything else I'd ever done that was stupid. I hid this by acting like a friend of mine who always acted really hyper and weird and annoying (which I thought was hilarious), which caused me to lose all my other friends and most of the school hated me. I also wasn't doing my homework because I was so miserable (I still aced the tests, though). So I had my dad threatening me and telling me I didn't have any friends. He was always telling me what I was doing wrong and never what I was doing right. I thought I couldn't do anything right.
Around the end of sixth grade, just before I found out that my "best friend" had been pretending to be my friend that year because she felt sorry for me, my dad got a new job so he could work from home. Then that summer, he lost his job. I had joined a group that many would argue was a cult and I was spending my days posting on the internet, running through fields of flowers, and trying to open a portal to another world using sheer willpower, while my dad was locked away in his room watching porn. My sister and I had worked out a system to make it easier to get along. Despite my dad losing his job and my cat dying, that was a pretty good summer.
Well, seventh grade started. After a couple weeks of shyness, I returned to the hyper, wannabe-random behavior. And again, I wasn't doing my homework. My dad told me it was MY fault that he lost his job. The reason he wanted to work from home was so he could stay home to make sure I did my homework (FAIL), so he took a job that would let him do that even though he knew he might lose it because of all the court stuff that was going on because of the divorce. So I had a dad who was blaming me for everything AND telling me I had no friends, and then he found out about the "cult" (which I'm still not sure I'd consider a cult because I really don't think it was a religion and many members, including me, had actual religions and we didn't believe that there was any contradiction) and his reaction was terrible. I kept sneaking around and visiting the website of the group because some of those members were true friends and much better friends than my one friend at school. I was always in trouble. My dad took away the thing that was helping me cope. He even took away my diary and my sketchbook (two more coping methods) just because they contained things related to the "cult." He didn't understand that being in the "cult" was what was keeping me from killing myself or something. Whenever he wasn't in his room watching porn, he was verbally abusing me and my sister.
In eighth grade, I had another crush on a girl and realized that I'm bisexual (edit several years later: I'm actually straight; I haven't been attracted to a girl since I was 15 and I think it was genuinely just a phase in my case), so I was in trouble for that. I was even more depressed than before and I almost entirely stopped doing my homework. My dad told me that I was ruining his and my sister's lives and that it was my fault he didn't have any friends. My teachers were concerned about me and sent home an envelope containing a questionnaire to determine if maybe I needed help. I opened it before giving it to him, and I thought about writing a letter saying that, while I never talked about the things in the questionnaire, I thought about them all the time. But I was too afraid of what my dad would do, so I glued the envelope closed and gave it to my dad when he got home. After destroying a couple friendships due to not knowing what was socially acceptable, I started cutting myself and eventually attempted suicide. I thought things were gonna change after that because we all started going to therapy (this was when my sister was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome), but nothing really changed. My dad had to pay the full price of the trip to the ER for some reason, and he told me that he was gonna go bankrupt because of me. My grades were even worse than usual and I had failed two classes third quarter. My dad told me that he wouldn't let me celebrate my birthday if I failed any more classes. I failed half my classes at the end of the year, and I didn't get a birthday. He told me that he would kick me out when I turned 18 if I didn't graduate from high school. I had intended to run away that summer, but then he went into my bedroom and found a backpack with clothes in it (the only things I'd packed so far because I wasn't allowed to wear those outfits anyway) in my closet.
In ninth grade I became SEVERELY depressed. Before it had kind of come and gone, but in ninth grade, it became almost constant. I was only happy during acting class. My dad was still focusing on telling me everything I did wrong while never telling me what I did right. I later read in a book about child development that it's really important to give children both praise AND criticism. But when I told him that, he said that it doesn't apply in all situations. So basically, if a kid is severely depressed and attempting suicide every weekend, be sure not to make her feel good about herself! Yeah, my dad's an idiot. At the end of March, I didn't even start a major project and I thought that the school would call my dad and tell him. I was too afraid to go home and face whatever he would do, so I slit my wrist in a Walmart bathroom. (I didn't hit the vein, fortunately.) I was in a mental hospital for a week. Not that it did any good. My dad still told me everything I did wrong. He even called me disgusting once. And he made me feel so bad about being into girls (even though I was no longer a Christian) that I attempted suicide again because of it.
After that, my grandparents convinced my dad to let me stay with them for the summer, and then I got to stay permanently because it was better for me there. (Even though he was messed up and abusive, my dad actually does care about me.) People were being really mean to me at school, so I switched to home schooling, and this time it was being done right. My grandma home schooled my dad and my uncle, after all. But even though I was no longer being abused and bullied, I still wasn't okay. That's how trauma works, after all. At the time, I had enough symptoms of borderline personality disorder to qualify for a diagnosis (and I'd had the symptoms for long enough). I guess my psychiatrist didn't think that was a possibility because I was so young, and my therapist was an idiot and thought that people with borderline personality disorder were all sociopaths who were only nice to you if they wanted something from you. Even though she was an idiot, I guess she did help me, since I no longer have nearly enough symptoms to qualify for a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. I ended up in the mental hospital again and was put on very high doses of mood stabilizers and antidepressants. But while I am doing a lot better than I was before, I'm still not even close to all better. I am experiencing something called a Fi-Si loop. It's something that INFPs and ISTJs can experience (although it's called a Si-Fi loop for an ISTJ). Basically I'm in a constant state of hating myself for everything I've ever done wrong. I mean, logically, I know that I'm not a bad person. But I feel like I'm a horrible person who doesn't deserve to live. Every time I do something wrong, whether it's morally wrong or just a silly mistake like making really bad soup, I feel like a horrible, worthless person. I guess that's what happens when you're treated like everything you do is wrong for years. I do forgive my parents. My mom is schizophrenic and wasn't in control of her actions, and my dad was all messed up from living with my mom for 15 years (plus he has autism and he was struggling with a porn addiction). My dad is getting his sense of normalcy back now, and he's been in counseling because he got busted for child porn. He was sobbing and apologizing over and over when he called me to tell me what had happened, as I was the one who was hurt the most by his porn addiction. He's becoming a better dad.
But I'm still scarred by everything that happened. I insult myself over every little thing. I cut myself as punishment. I don't exactly have depression, but I definitely have a mood disorder of some sort. I'm not even trying to get better because I still feel like I deserve to be miserable. I didn't even realize until fairly recently that my dad abused me. I knew he was a horrible dad, but I didn't realize it counted as child abuse. I wish my grandparents had reported him. Maybe I wouldn't be so messed up. And I wish I'd told the CPS about all this stuff when they investigated my dad. I didn't know it wasn't normal at the time. So now almost every day, I think about everything I've ever done wrong and I hate myself. I've even had suicidal thoughts recently. I just don't know what to do.
Of course, my sister is pretty messed up, too. As I said, she was abused by the special education system. They treated her like she was stupid, so she thought that she had a learning disability until she mentioned having one and my dad told her that she doesn't. According to her, they kept her from socializing with other kids. By the time she reached middle school, she didn't really need to be in special education anymore, but they tried to keep her in there to get grants. One time, the resource room teacher sent my dad an email that made it sound like my sister had done something awful. He yelled at her while she cried and tried to explain what REALLY happened. Then he read the email again and realized that my sister was telling the truth. The teacher had just phrased it in a way that made it sound like she'd done something horrible. He hugged my sister and told her he was sorry. After that, he pulled her out of special education. But they kept trying to prove that she still needed to be in it. If she did something wrong, even if it was something that a neurotypical kid might do, they put her back in the resource room. One time, she was in choir class and this girl cornered her. She hit the girl in self-defense, and she got in trouble while the mean girl got candy. (I had issues with that teacher, too. One time some boy was sexually harassing me. I told the teacher and the boy denied it, and the teacher believed him instead of me.) Finally, the teacher sent her to the office the moment she walked through the door. The vice-principal asked, "What did you do this time?" and my sister said, "Nothing!" So the vice-principal called the teacher and asked what my sister did, and he said she didn't do anything. The vice-principal was like, "Then why did you send her to the office?!" My sister was pulled out of that class. Eventually my dad had to pull her out of that school entirely and home school her, so the school reported him for not educating her. (Edit: It was actually his coworker who reported him.) She was sent back to public school in ninth grade and my dad thought it would be okay because it was a different school, but the teachers kept getting her in trouble for things that other kids did and didn't get in trouble for. Dad had to pull her out again. Now she's depressed and paranoid and probably has social anxiety disorder. She stopped doing her work and has so little motivation that all she does is draw and scroll through Tumblr. Thanks to our parents and that school, she may never have a normal life.
Child abuse sucks.
Also, don't blame my grandma for my dad turning out to be a pedophile. It happened because of some experiences he had at school that she didn't know about. And he has NEVER sexually abused a child himself. There's a whole backstory to how this came to pass, but this is already really long.
My dad has high-functioning autism that went undiagnosed until earlier this year. My mom is schizophrenic and refuses to get help. And both were abusive. Things may have been okay for the first year of my life. I'm not sure. But things must have gotten bad after my sister was born. She's autistic and she had colic. I'm not blaming her or anything, but my grandparents have speculated that the stress caused my mom's schizophrenia to get worse. There was definitely emotional neglect, and we suspect that there may have been physical abuse as well. My grandma says that my sister would get this really mean look on her face and hit my grandma for no reason. My sister is autistic, not a sociopath. Probably she was doing something Mom had done to her or something. We don't really know. But my grandparents have told me that Mom would scream at me and my sister in public and someone actually reported her to the CPS once while we were on vacation. I remember being happy when my sister and I weren't left alone with Mom, but my grandparents could tell that something was wrong, and they would've reported my mom if it had been anyone else.
My sister and I used to be home schooled. And when I started first grade, things got pretty bad. See, I had convinced my parents to switch to a different curriculum after kindergarten because I hated that the curriculum I'd been using wasn't teaching me about science. (They didn't know that was my main problem with the curriculum. I just said that I wouldn't do my work unless I switched to another curriculum.) But then my mom didn't teach me ANYTHING except for math and how to write in cursive, and I didn't get any breaks. I was totally burnt out. I bet you can guess what she did next: She hit me with belts. Usually it was the soft end of a D-ring belt, but she threatened to hit me with the buckle. She also hit me and my sister with rulers and various kitchen utensils. (Nothing sharper than a butter knife, fortunately.) I remember sitting at the table where I was supposed to be doing my work in fear, with my mom glaring at me while holding a belt. She called me and my sister retards for not doing our work. I guess later being put in the gifted program kept me from viewing myself as stupid (academically, anyway), but my poor sister ended up in special ed and came to believe that she had a learning disability even though she might be even smarter than I am. I had a friend who was younger than me and hadn't started school yet, so I went over to his house every day (despite being very much an introvert) just to get away from my mom. My sister and I would often lock ourselves in her room or the family room to escape from our mom. Dad said that she once super glued the locks on the doors so we couldn't lock her out. He could see all these warning signs that there was abuse going on while he wasn't home, but he didn't realize what they meant because his sense of normalcy was so messed up from living with my mom and he was "in a fog" and he was also struggling with a porn addiction.
That's not to say that my dad wasn't doing anything to hurt me or my sister directly at that time. My sister was refusing to be potty trained (and yes, she's high-functioning enough that there shouldn't have been a delay in potty training), and my dad totally lost his temper and spanked her until she had welts. He was reported to the CPS, but they didn't do anything because it was a one-time thing. Boy, did they screw up. There actually WAS physical abuse going on in that home, and apparently they didn't even interview me or my sister. Believe me, at least one of us would remember it. Or maybe not. I don't even remember the incident. My aunt told me about it.
My sister and I were put in a private school when I was in third grade, since home schooling wasn't working. (DO NOT judge home schoolers. My parents just did it wrong, and it was mostly my mom. My dad didn't know what was going on when he wasn't home.) But after just one semester, we had to switch to a public school because this tiny private school with only 60 students wasn't equipped to handle my sister. But while the public school could keep her under control, what they did wasn't right. They intentionally misdiagnosed her with pervasive developmental disorder NOS instead of Asperger's syndrome so they would get grants. My sister was abused by the special education system. I'll get to the details later, as I don't really know anything about what happened before middle school. I ended up telling the school counselor about what my mom did. The CPS was called and they interviewed me. But they didn't take me away, probably because my dad was already making my mom leave because he was afraid that she would hurt me or my sister. My dad thinks that they backed him up and that's why she didn't put up more of a fight. Nobody sent me to therapy, but I talked to the school counselor all the time. I guess they let me keep talking to her about all this random stuff that wasn't even upsetting me just to keep an eye on me and make sure I didn't develop any problems. I wish they'd done the same for my sister.
Things seemed to be going better for a while after my mom left. I was having some issues. I had low self-esteem. I was being bullied. I was hitting my head hard enough for it to actually hurt whenever I did something stupid. I had suicidal thoughts for the first time when I was only nine years old (but all it took to get them to stop was for my dad to tell me that my body is God's temple and I can't destroy God's temple). But I had friends and I wasn't being abused at home anymore. I was upset when my mom's visitation rights were taken away when I was in fifth grade (I didn't know why at the time, but now I know it's because of an email she sent to my dad about a delusion that could cause her to hurt my sister), but that wasn't that big of a deal. Then I had my first crush... And she was a girl. I didn't realize it was a crush. My parents hadn't been in love, so I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't even watch all those silly Disney sitcoms that all the other girls my age watched. I thought a crush just meant thinking that someone of the opposite gender was really cute. I also didn't know that girls could like girls. I became obsessed with her and ended up sending her a creepy email asking her to be my best friend because I was too nervous to ask her in person. And my dad read the email. I mean, I knew that he could read all my emails. He told me when he set up my email account that he would have access to it. But I guess I didn't really think about what it meant. He got really mad at me when he saw that girl's response to the email I sent her asking her to be my best friend. After that, I didn't trust him anymore. And he stopped showing me affection because he thought I didn't want it anymore.
Like the summers after third and fourth grades, I spent the summer after fifth grade at a daycare center. But things were changing. I had great friends and I had a lot of fun learning about China and the Olympics (it was 2008) and playing with my friends, but some of my friendships got destroyed. I don't remember what happened now, though. I also just wasn't as happy because of the previous year.
Middle school was hell. I was crippled by guilt for what I'd done to that poor girl, along with everything else I'd ever done that was stupid. I hid this by acting like a friend of mine who always acted really hyper and weird and annoying (which I thought was hilarious), which caused me to lose all my other friends and most of the school hated me. I also wasn't doing my homework because I was so miserable (I still aced the tests, though). So I had my dad threatening me and telling me I didn't have any friends. He was always telling me what I was doing wrong and never what I was doing right. I thought I couldn't do anything right.
Around the end of sixth grade, just before I found out that my "best friend" had been pretending to be my friend that year because she felt sorry for me, my dad got a new job so he could work from home. Then that summer, he lost his job. I had joined a group that many would argue was a cult and I was spending my days posting on the internet, running through fields of flowers, and trying to open a portal to another world using sheer willpower, while my dad was locked away in his room watching porn. My sister and I had worked out a system to make it easier to get along. Despite my dad losing his job and my cat dying, that was a pretty good summer.
Well, seventh grade started. After a couple weeks of shyness, I returned to the hyper, wannabe-random behavior. And again, I wasn't doing my homework. My dad told me it was MY fault that he lost his job. The reason he wanted to work from home was so he could stay home to make sure I did my homework (FAIL), so he took a job that would let him do that even though he knew he might lose it because of all the court stuff that was going on because of the divorce. So I had a dad who was blaming me for everything AND telling me I had no friends, and then he found out about the "cult" (which I'm still not sure I'd consider a cult because I really don't think it was a religion and many members, including me, had actual religions and we didn't believe that there was any contradiction) and his reaction was terrible. I kept sneaking around and visiting the website of the group because some of those members were true friends and much better friends than my one friend at school. I was always in trouble. My dad took away the thing that was helping me cope. He even took away my diary and my sketchbook (two more coping methods) just because they contained things related to the "cult." He didn't understand that being in the "cult" was what was keeping me from killing myself or something. Whenever he wasn't in his room watching porn, he was verbally abusing me and my sister.
In eighth grade, I had another crush on a girl and realized that I'm bisexual (edit several years later: I'm actually straight; I haven't been attracted to a girl since I was 15 and I think it was genuinely just a phase in my case), so I was in trouble for that. I was even more depressed than before and I almost entirely stopped doing my homework. My dad told me that I was ruining his and my sister's lives and that it was my fault he didn't have any friends. My teachers were concerned about me and sent home an envelope containing a questionnaire to determine if maybe I needed help. I opened it before giving it to him, and I thought about writing a letter saying that, while I never talked about the things in the questionnaire, I thought about them all the time. But I was too afraid of what my dad would do, so I glued the envelope closed and gave it to my dad when he got home. After destroying a couple friendships due to not knowing what was socially acceptable, I started cutting myself and eventually attempted suicide. I thought things were gonna change after that because we all started going to therapy (this was when my sister was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome), but nothing really changed. My dad had to pay the full price of the trip to the ER for some reason, and he told me that he was gonna go bankrupt because of me. My grades were even worse than usual and I had failed two classes third quarter. My dad told me that he wouldn't let me celebrate my birthday if I failed any more classes. I failed half my classes at the end of the year, and I didn't get a birthday. He told me that he would kick me out when I turned 18 if I didn't graduate from high school. I had intended to run away that summer, but then he went into my bedroom and found a backpack with clothes in it (the only things I'd packed so far because I wasn't allowed to wear those outfits anyway) in my closet.
In ninth grade I became SEVERELY depressed. Before it had kind of come and gone, but in ninth grade, it became almost constant. I was only happy during acting class. My dad was still focusing on telling me everything I did wrong while never telling me what I did right. I later read in a book about child development that it's really important to give children both praise AND criticism. But when I told him that, he said that it doesn't apply in all situations. So basically, if a kid is severely depressed and attempting suicide every weekend, be sure not to make her feel good about herself! Yeah, my dad's an idiot. At the end of March, I didn't even start a major project and I thought that the school would call my dad and tell him. I was too afraid to go home and face whatever he would do, so I slit my wrist in a Walmart bathroom. (I didn't hit the vein, fortunately.) I was in a mental hospital for a week. Not that it did any good. My dad still told me everything I did wrong. He even called me disgusting once. And he made me feel so bad about being into girls (even though I was no longer a Christian) that I attempted suicide again because of it.
After that, my grandparents convinced my dad to let me stay with them for the summer, and then I got to stay permanently because it was better for me there. (Even though he was messed up and abusive, my dad actually does care about me.) People were being really mean to me at school, so I switched to home schooling, and this time it was being done right. My grandma home schooled my dad and my uncle, after all. But even though I was no longer being abused and bullied, I still wasn't okay. That's how trauma works, after all. At the time, I had enough symptoms of borderline personality disorder to qualify for a diagnosis (and I'd had the symptoms for long enough). I guess my psychiatrist didn't think that was a possibility because I was so young, and my therapist was an idiot and thought that people with borderline personality disorder were all sociopaths who were only nice to you if they wanted something from you. Even though she was an idiot, I guess she did help me, since I no longer have nearly enough symptoms to qualify for a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. I ended up in the mental hospital again and was put on very high doses of mood stabilizers and antidepressants. But while I am doing a lot better than I was before, I'm still not even close to all better. I am experiencing something called a Fi-Si loop. It's something that INFPs and ISTJs can experience (although it's called a Si-Fi loop for an ISTJ). Basically I'm in a constant state of hating myself for everything I've ever done wrong. I mean, logically, I know that I'm not a bad person. But I feel like I'm a horrible person who doesn't deserve to live. Every time I do something wrong, whether it's morally wrong or just a silly mistake like making really bad soup, I feel like a horrible, worthless person. I guess that's what happens when you're treated like everything you do is wrong for years. I do forgive my parents. My mom is schizophrenic and wasn't in control of her actions, and my dad was all messed up from living with my mom for 15 years (plus he has autism and he was struggling with a porn addiction). My dad is getting his sense of normalcy back now, and he's been in counseling because he got busted for child porn. He was sobbing and apologizing over and over when he called me to tell me what had happened, as I was the one who was hurt the most by his porn addiction. He's becoming a better dad.
But I'm still scarred by everything that happened. I insult myself over every little thing. I cut myself as punishment. I don't exactly have depression, but I definitely have a mood disorder of some sort. I'm not even trying to get better because I still feel like I deserve to be miserable. I didn't even realize until fairly recently that my dad abused me. I knew he was a horrible dad, but I didn't realize it counted as child abuse. I wish my grandparents had reported him. Maybe I wouldn't be so messed up. And I wish I'd told the CPS about all this stuff when they investigated my dad. I didn't know it wasn't normal at the time. So now almost every day, I think about everything I've ever done wrong and I hate myself. I've even had suicidal thoughts recently. I just don't know what to do.
Of course, my sister is pretty messed up, too. As I said, she was abused by the special education system. They treated her like she was stupid, so she thought that she had a learning disability until she mentioned having one and my dad told her that she doesn't. According to her, they kept her from socializing with other kids. By the time she reached middle school, she didn't really need to be in special education anymore, but they tried to keep her in there to get grants. One time, the resource room teacher sent my dad an email that made it sound like my sister had done something awful. He yelled at her while she cried and tried to explain what REALLY happened. Then he read the email again and realized that my sister was telling the truth. The teacher had just phrased it in a way that made it sound like she'd done something horrible. He hugged my sister and told her he was sorry. After that, he pulled her out of special education. But they kept trying to prove that she still needed to be in it. If she did something wrong, even if it was something that a neurotypical kid might do, they put her back in the resource room. One time, she was in choir class and this girl cornered her. She hit the girl in self-defense, and she got in trouble while the mean girl got candy. (I had issues with that teacher, too. One time some boy was sexually harassing me. I told the teacher and the boy denied it, and the teacher believed him instead of me.) Finally, the teacher sent her to the office the moment she walked through the door. The vice-principal asked, "What did you do this time?" and my sister said, "Nothing!" So the vice-principal called the teacher and asked what my sister did, and he said she didn't do anything. The vice-principal was like, "Then why did you send her to the office?!" My sister was pulled out of that class. Eventually my dad had to pull her out of that school entirely and home school her, so the school reported him for not educating her. (Edit: It was actually his coworker who reported him.) She was sent back to public school in ninth grade and my dad thought it would be okay because it was a different school, but the teachers kept getting her in trouble for things that other kids did and didn't get in trouble for. Dad had to pull her out again. Now she's depressed and paranoid and probably has social anxiety disorder. She stopped doing her work and has so little motivation that all she does is draw and scroll through Tumblr. Thanks to our parents and that school, she may never have a normal life.
Child abuse sucks.
Also, don't blame my grandma for my dad turning out to be a pedophile. It happened because of some experiences he had at school that she didn't know about. And he has NEVER sexually abused a child himself. There's a whole backstory to how this came to pass, but this is already really long.
26-30, F
