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How do I Get Out of This Highly Toxic Household? In Need of Urgent Help!
I'm leaving out a lot of specific details for the sake of anonymity, but I'm a nearly 40-year-old man who is part of a deeply dysfunctional family and can't think of any way out even after decades of trying.
My mother was a prostitute and a drug addict long before I was born, had all of her (several) children from different men, but then got on the straight and narrow before she had me (one of the reasons I've been her prized child). She got back in the church, was married, and had a stable family for the first time in her life. It was short-lived because my dad left her and she had to end of living with her sister who was another single mother with children around the same age. We all grew up together and the church also helped to take care of us. Then, my oldest brother ran away from home, and you can say that was the beginning of the end. My mom relapsed and went back into promiscuity and drug use and we were abandoned as children for a while, aside from whenever my aunt and the pastor's family could step in. You might be able to imagine what kinds of things happened with all of these children and teenagers running around with little adult supervision, which is a whole other story, but things I struggle with today are probably a direct result of things that happened back then...
In the midst of this, my mother got pregnant from one of the men who she still doesn't know to this day and came home with a newborn baby and then went back to the streets leaving children to help raise a baby, including myself who was very poor at it at 5 years old. My mother got clean not too long after that and we moved to a different state where she found another church home that helped to raise us and teach us the ways of God. Somewhere along the way, my mother relapsed again and got pregnant with another child, a girl who's our youngest sibling. Shortly after my sister was born, my mother decided to change her life for good and became an evangelist. In this transition, we went from having an inconsistent but laid-back (and at times, too laid back where she failed to teach us discipline when we needed it) mother to a religious zealot who was a very judgmental but absent parent. Most of the things we learned as far as family values came from our grandmother who raised us for the most part, but could only do so much... I was also my grandmother's prized grandchild. And as you might imagine, being the "hero" or the "good one" can not only cause narcissism to develop but can also put a tremendous burden on a child to be perfect and to be a people pleaser.
I was always the "quiet one" or the one who was more timid, but I also had a very deeply troubled side of me that I tried to keep hidden. Everywhere I went, people said I was "weird" or thought I was "retarded" because I didn't talk much. I now realize I fell into the category of "the lost child", one of the common but not so talked about or understood roles in dysfunctional families. I think I was 17 when one day in church, this "prophetess" called my family up in front of the church and told my mother that she needed to watch me because I was "sneaky", while wagging her finger in my direction and my older brother standing next to me profusely shaking his head, yes, in agreement. Needless to say, this has been a label that has followed me everywhere like a dark cloud of judgment and shame hovering over my head. With it carries negative connotations of "weak", cowardly, immature, irresponsible, unaccountable, dishonest, degenerate, evil, wicked, bad, snake-like, guilty, perverted... and everywhere I go, people have the same opinion of me, which has often caused me to feel more shame and guilt and the need to hide even more. This on top of a lot of rejection (even romantic), neglect, and abuse I experienced as a child has maybe contributed to me being "the most insecure" person that people have told me they have ever met.
I still feel like a 6-year-old child most of the time if not every moment of my existence, and my mother has often taken advantage of this and uses the bible and "prophetic words" to justify why I should stay under her and never leave home. And yet, I live with so much disrespect and emotional abuse. My younger brother who also lives here is very troubled and very immature; you could say he's a bully. I, as a troubled child, used to beat him up and verbally and emotionally abuse him when we were children and he, in turn, became an abuser, himself, even to our little sister and apparently our nephew. He even punched our grandmother in the stomach when he was younger and called her a b#%*. These things were dealt with years ago, and now he isn't physically abusive but he's emotionally abusive to everyone around him, including my mother and especially me. I've attempted to make things right with him and repair and build a relationship between us, but between my own inability to communicate with people who I don't trust (I don't trust anyone in my family) and the wall he has around himself, it's been impossible to foster any kind of healthy relationship with him. He was a very nice nice and at times shy kid who also had a but of a "mean" streak, so there's really no telling how much of this is nature and how much of it is nurture, but he's so closed off that he doesn't give us the chance to really know or understand him. He's even worse a communicating than I am.
He's in his 30s, now, and so am I, and all of this time we've lived in the same house, for the last decade or so, we've probably said no more than 100 words to each other. He's extremely hostile toward me: has read a very personal (romantic) letter of mine, taken it to my mother and let her read it and outed me as gay, has shown her other personal (sexual) things that I wrote to try to humiliate me, has spied on me, hacked into my computer (along with my mother who also hacked into my personal emails, has told her almost every moved I've made, has gotten up and walked out of a room when I started talking, has come into my room and thrown my mail on my desk so hard that it knocked things on the floor, laughed and snickered when I've gotten chastised or exposed, aggressively opened my door to catch me dancing or singing or anything that could be embarrassing to let me know he was spying on me, laughed and snickered when I've gotten chastised or exposed, mumbles under his breath, sucks his teeth and rolls his eyes any time someone pays me a compliment or he sees me laughing or shown some signs of happiness, sighs loudly whenever he hears my bedroom door open, jerks his body, throws his head back, and stomps off whenever I go into the same room as him, goes into his bedroom and closes or slams his bedroom door whenever he sees me coming, and he always looks at me with his face frowned up with such hatred in his eyes for me. When he was an adolescent, he told me to "burn in Hell", and years later, when he found out I was gay, he has made sure to let me know in the most passive aggressive ways how much he hates the fact that I'm his brother and that I even exist. He doesn't even say thank you when I buy or do things for him. He's let me know in enough ways that he has nothing for me but hatred, and I have lived with this for YEARS. The rudeness and disrespect that my mother has put up with has also enabled this behavior. He's heard me and my sister talking and told both of us to "shut up", as ADULTS, and has told my mother to shut up after she asked him to simply bring in some groceries while he was playing a videogame after she's come home from a long day of work and buying groceries for HIM to eat. When my sister spoke up and defended her, he's physically fought her, and instead of my mother disciplining or checking him, she scolded my sister for speaking up.
This is the same daughter she's secretly verbally bullied for years and told her that if she knew she was going to be gay (my sister being bisexual) that she would've never had her. Yet, she lets my brother go around as a 30 something year-old man slamming doors in her house like a child and talking back to her disrespectfully while she just complains about it and asks him what she ever did to him instead of enforcing boundaries. She literally gives him an allowance and pep-talks him like he's 5 years old when he does something good. He walks around with a permanent attitude and emotionally terrorizes everyone in the house...one of the reasons both of my sisters stay away for the most part. My mother was told, when he was a child, that he was mentally challenged, but instead of getting him helped, she just "rebuked" it like the zealous Christian that she is and said it was a lie of the devil. One of my mother's favorite phrases is "the devil is a liar!", especially when you tell her about some flaw in her character. She becomes irate when my sister tells her she enables us, but she really has enabled all of her boys in some way and crippled all of us. My oldest brother is now serving a life sentence for murder, my brother under him now has a label that will follow him for the rest of his life, including dictating where he can live, I'm a near 40-year-old man who's never been in a relationship, never learned how to drive, never finished college, and has to "sneak" away any time I go out of town and dread the office meeting (that comes along with bible quoting, speaking in tongues, rebuking, guilting, shaming, berating and belittling all done in the name of God) I'm going to get when I get back home, and my the youngest boy has an eternal chip on his shoulder and no social life or social skills.
It took me a lot of "rebelling" and tons of counseling to finally realize that I live in an insane asylum and a cesspool of demonic activity, and yet, I'm still TRAPPED in it feeling like there's no way out. I've racked my brain for YEARS, trying to figure out how to get out of this situation and have not found any solution. I've even looked up homeless shelters but a shelter seems like a dramatic decision to make being that there's no domestic violence going on. However destructive and debilitating, all of the abuse is mental and emotional, so how do you even report or get tangible/physical assistance for such a thing? And part of me feels obligated and responsible for a lot of this and like I don't have a leg to stand on because of the things I've done. That's why I feel trapped; because I'm part of the very system that's done so much damage to me. And I know that my mother uses my guilt, low self-esteem, and timidity against me and is her way of controlling me, but I still feel powerless against it, and even though I know she can't do anything to me physically, and even though I can talk about all of this to friends and other people, I find it very hard expressing myself to her or my brother directly. I feel like a helpless child in this environment, which is why I want and need so desperately to GET OUT! I just don't know how. I can't even focus on my studying or anything that would help improve my life while I'm here, or even think clearly. It's like my brain is highjacked. I don't feel like I can do anything constructive while living here. I just need help getting out! I'm open to any advice or ideas you might have.
Last edited by Akhu999 : 19-07-2021 at 07:03 PM.
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Best wishes.
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