reachingout713
New Here
I'm reaching out to other people who understand the symptoms and difficulties that I have been experiencing for a long time, which have only worsened with isolation and depression.
Most of my life has been lived in fear from the time of my parents' divorce when I was a young child up until about four years ago when I learned of my father's death, after which I experienced a two year break of relief from living in fear. Along with a rough custody battle, there were a lot of threats of my father wanting to make my mother pay for leaving him when I was growing up, and him wanting her to suffer for it. Although she won the custody battle, he was still awarded custody for part of the summers, during which I remember him driving us through Mexico and telling us we were never going home again and would start a new life in Cancun, where the beaches were prettier. I remember my mother sewing money and phone numbers under the fabric of our suitcases at least two of those summers and crying uncontrollably each time we returned home again.
I never spoke of my father sexually abusing me until I was in college and had started getting counseling for some things that had happened throughout my life, but I never spoke of my fears of him killing me and my family until he was already dead. I always knew that he would commit suicide, because he spoke of it at various times throughout my life, sometimes when he would particularly be very angry with either my brother, or my mother, which resulted in me having reoccurring nightmares about him taking them with him when he went and leaving me in the world alone. He always felt close to me, and I always lived with a certain sense that he would spare my life, but at times, I believed that he would kill my brother and I to hurt my mother for "taking the children away and breaking up the family." I knew that it was not normal for my father to tell us that my mother was "full of the devil," but I was too young to process the severity of his abuse and impact on my healthy development until recent years.
My role in the family was always that I would stick up for him, explain his perspective to my mother and brother, and try to involve him in our family activities, which at times worked throughout the years until he would do something that would be unacceptable in the eyes of my mother, who grew braver with time and somehow learned how to not only cope with the fear of losing us, but also stand firm in facing him with courageous opposition while also holding her tongue as much as possible around us in effort to not destroy whatever there was left of our ability to see our father as someone we could respect and trust.
However, we all knew the danger that we were in and now talk openly about our awareness that he wanted to kill us all at various points in time. It was not uncommon for us to find him watching us behind trees in the backyard at 2:00 am whenever my brother and I got older and would go home to visit our mother, and although he would state that he was "just in the neighborhood," we were aware that he lived nowhere near us. I never realized the impact that all of this would have on me once the risks of it all happening were finally over after he took his own life in 2008.
A couple of years after I learned of his death in 2008, I met a man who was my roommate for a short time that seemed emotionally stable, kind and outgoing. It was only after I began a short-lived romantic relationship with him that I realized that he was not the person that I believed that he was, as he became very possessive, paranoid, angry, unstable and violent. His psychological terrorism on my life ended many months after he moved out of my home, because I was finally able to get an Emergency Protective Order against him once he was charged with felony assault for trapping and physically attacking me at my home, attempting to break into my house several times, stalking me repeatedly, and trying to sabotage every area of my life that was important to me, including my future success and ability to take care of myself financially. The parallel of both he and my father's mental illnesses brought a lot of trauma to the forefront of my mind, and I have not been able to shake it ever since.
I have lost a lot since then, because I could not function normally after he began to be threatening to me and the things, and people, in my life that I had worked hard for and been blessed with. Although I was an A student in graduate school at the time, my grades declined rapidly, and shortly thereafter, I was kicked out of my graduate program and denied the counseling and assistance that I needed to be successful in my recovery. This further traumatized me, because I had never failed a single class in my life and had worked very hard to rebuild my life several times in order to get to the place that I was at prior to meeting the man who attacked me.
For the last year, I have tried to regain my bravery and my emotional stability, as well as my academic status by contacting victims rights and advocacy groups, but I haven't gotten very far. I feel like my university abandoned me when I needed help, and I feel like my attacker got away with destroying my life.
Most of my life has been lived in fear from the time of my parents' divorce when I was a young child up until about four years ago when I learned of my father's death, after which I experienced a two year break of relief from living in fear. Along with a rough custody battle, there were a lot of threats of my father wanting to make my mother pay for leaving him when I was growing up, and him wanting her to suffer for it. Although she won the custody battle, he was still awarded custody for part of the summers, during which I remember him driving us through Mexico and telling us we were never going home again and would start a new life in Cancun, where the beaches were prettier. I remember my mother sewing money and phone numbers under the fabric of our suitcases at least two of those summers and crying uncontrollably each time we returned home again.
I never spoke of my father sexually abusing me until I was in college and had started getting counseling for some things that had happened throughout my life, but I never spoke of my fears of him killing me and my family until he was already dead. I always knew that he would commit suicide, because he spoke of it at various times throughout my life, sometimes when he would particularly be very angry with either my brother, or my mother, which resulted in me having reoccurring nightmares about him taking them with him when he went and leaving me in the world alone. He always felt close to me, and I always lived with a certain sense that he would spare my life, but at times, I believed that he would kill my brother and I to hurt my mother for "taking the children away and breaking up the family." I knew that it was not normal for my father to tell us that my mother was "full of the devil," but I was too young to process the severity of his abuse and impact on my healthy development until recent years.
My role in the family was always that I would stick up for him, explain his perspective to my mother and brother, and try to involve him in our family activities, which at times worked throughout the years until he would do something that would be unacceptable in the eyes of my mother, who grew braver with time and somehow learned how to not only cope with the fear of losing us, but also stand firm in facing him with courageous opposition while also holding her tongue as much as possible around us in effort to not destroy whatever there was left of our ability to see our father as someone we could respect and trust.
However, we all knew the danger that we were in and now talk openly about our awareness that he wanted to kill us all at various points in time. It was not uncommon for us to find him watching us behind trees in the backyard at 2:00 am whenever my brother and I got older and would go home to visit our mother, and although he would state that he was "just in the neighborhood," we were aware that he lived nowhere near us. I never realized the impact that all of this would have on me once the risks of it all happening were finally over after he took his own life in 2008.
A couple of years after I learned of his death in 2008, I met a man who was my roommate for a short time that seemed emotionally stable, kind and outgoing. It was only after I began a short-lived romantic relationship with him that I realized that he was not the person that I believed that he was, as he became very possessive, paranoid, angry, unstable and violent. His psychological terrorism on my life ended many months after he moved out of my home, because I was finally able to get an Emergency Protective Order against him once he was charged with felony assault for trapping and physically attacking me at my home, attempting to break into my house several times, stalking me repeatedly, and trying to sabotage every area of my life that was important to me, including my future success and ability to take care of myself financially. The parallel of both he and my father's mental illnesses brought a lot of trauma to the forefront of my mind, and I have not been able to shake it ever since.
I have lost a lot since then, because I could not function normally after he began to be threatening to me and the things, and people, in my life that I had worked hard for and been blessed with. Although I was an A student in graduate school at the time, my grades declined rapidly, and shortly thereafter, I was kicked out of my graduate program and denied the counseling and assistance that I needed to be successful in my recovery. This further traumatized me, because I had never failed a single class in my life and had worked very hard to rebuild my life several times in order to get to the place that I was at prior to meeting the man who attacked me.
For the last year, I have tried to regain my bravery and my emotional stability, as well as my academic status by contacting victims rights and advocacy groups, but I haven't gotten very far. I feel like my university abandoned me when I needed help, and I feel like my attacker got away with destroying my life.
