Childhood Psychological Abuser Is Deceased, One Down , One To Go

[user27357]

My Father lost his wife at 35 and remarried within 6 months. Part of the grief of his losing my mom was the normal stage of bargaining (also denial, self blame, etc.). Part of his bargaining was to promise my dieing mother that he would raise me in the church she was clinging to as she died. She was not a religious person before she was sick and neither was he, neither was I. The woman he married (my new stepmother) is the most over the top follower of the most restrictive and oppressive religion I personally know of.

They tried to bring me around by systematically breaking my spirit and tearing apart my belief systems. I was seperated from friends and family, dressed differently, dropped into a new school and kept from the sports and activities I was involved in. Food was entirely different, new rules, new everything. And when I rejected it, I was blamed for the trouble it caused them. There was never any attempt to ease me in to the loss of my mother or the entire change to my life. Any arguments from me about the new life I was being force fed brought me physical abuse.

I left home at 14.

And now I hear my father has died.

I can't feel sad, he has been dead since he decided it was easier to follow a religion than think on his own. He stopped being my father when he showed me that he had no compassion or empathy, especially no love. I swear to this day I feel more pain for his loss of his wife than he ever did for me for the loss of my mother and entire life.

I am not sure what to think at this point, or what I do think. There was never much hope he would be a Dad. now he never can be, 100% sure.

I got screwed on the parent account, I guess this just brings it back to mind.

And the super religious step mother that doesn't deserve the term mother, even step? she lives on, spending his estate, donating the largest part to her sick and twisted cult of a religion. She manipulated him for 40 years, and she has his estate to show for it. Look at all the neat stuff she got by keeping her husband scared of her wrath and locked into a life of submission to her cult and judgemental nature.

I win because I ran as soon as I could get my own legs. She wins because she gets the sum total of his net worth at death. And he loses because in his moment of grief he bargained away his own life and the love of his son and grandchildren to a religion that let him and his dieing wife suffer without relief.

I wish I wasn't so suddenly reminded of how angry I was, I am falling back into it.

The bastard father I was given has died. The horrible second wife he has afflicted me with lives on. Maybe there is peace when I hear she has also died. The last shoe will fall someday, As long as she is alive she is the focus of my anger and resentment, maybe it will die with her, someday.

 

[J_trustno1]

I don't know what will be the right message to type here but you have been through a lot of tough shit given by these people. I can relate to your past but in different ways. I don't want to go into too much detail about my past because we are are talking about the pain you have been through and still going through it. That so called father of yours is now "free" from all the abuse he had provided you with and that woman is enjoying his money without any guilt. All I can say here is that they are/were filthy bastards. Your anger is justified because of the abuse n torture you were put through but the only person suffering right now is you not the man who died nor that bitch who is trying to be all holy. She still has the concept of life wrong because charity to church or any place won't change the kind of horrid person she was to you when she took away your childhood. I see the same shit with my relatives when they pretend to be nice to outsiders and donate at the temples but those f*cking bastards stole away my innocence and childhood.

Lastly, holding onto your anger for too long won't do you any great because stress will play around with your body and can lead to other health problems. It is best to find a healthy way of releasing your anger and seeking some therapy. The reason I am saying this is because my stress and anger has affected my physical health and I take 5 pills a day and 2 more will be added after another test. They are all related to my physical health. so please start looking after yourself and start being kind to yourself because nothing can be changed but yourself.

 

[Deleted member 12723]

I have lost both of my abusive parents. I feel so for you. I understand the anger and the rest of emotions and thoughts that go with this experience. You are not alone and you are perfectly normal for what you have been forced to endure and suffer. It is a betrayal and I think that is the hardest one to heal from, it sure has been for me in my life.

You are better than you think you are and you are not as bad as you think you are. You suffered and you survived. This is just amazing. I am wishing you the very best in your healing and recovery.

 

[Karen12]

@enough - I haven't been through the death of my abuser yet (he is 85 so it can't be too much longer) but I think you are handling it very well. I am not really sure what to expect when that times so thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings about it. I think anger is a very reasonable and normal reaction.

 

[Lucycat]

he is 85 so it can't be too much longer

I have had similar thoughts about my own father ( who is now 74) but I had a grandfather that lived to 98. So potentially it could be a lot more years...

 

[Karen12]

We are long-lived in my family, too. Nobody will tell me when my parents or siblings die. I have to check the Social Security death records regularly. That's the only way I'll find out.

Any change in my mental state affects my body. I'm amazed people like my parents who are so thoroughly corrupt haven't physically rotted away. Sometimes I think God keeps them alive so they can have time to reflect and repent, although I don't think that'll happen.

 

[user27357]

More thoughts about this new situation: Many more thoughts. This is my longest post ever.

It just isn't an easy package to get wrapped up when a person you were supposed to be able to trust and be loyal to dies before the expectations are met.

iI my original post I told you all about how my father had died after years of no contact and I told of the abuse I suffered when my mother died and my father remarried a deeply religious member of a cult like religion.

My parents came back to me several years ago with open arms and a request that I be the one child they could count on in their old age. My siblings ( one maternal, 2 step) were not going to be there for them, but I on the other hand had always been forgiving and made concessions to their weird cult like beliefs. They asked to move to my county and made me the executor of their will and gave me the legal power to make their medical decisions and started handing me the control of their estate.

Of the 3 other kids, my youngest sister is the only one that followed into their religion, marrying another member and raising their kids in the "church". Because of what I see as small differences in their practices she has been almost exscommunicated from them for years. My 2 step sisters took their mothers example to heart and became shameless seakers of reward in their relationships. One actually becoming a prostitute and living a rollercoaster life of drugs and partying and homelessness and despair. The other has remarried to higher bidders at least 3 times that I know of, with affairs and reconciliations all along the way. She lives a life of luxury in spite of never having worked a day beyond her first wedding.

I guess I was their best choice, in spite of the fact that I had never given them any hope of ever accepting their cult beyond tolerating their eccentricities. I raised 3 successful kids, kept the same job in a field I put myself through vocational school for and have been married to the same woman for thirty years now. All this in spite of being a lost sinner that has ignored the true path in their judgement.

So they moved here, into a smaller home than they were used to. I built an outbuilding here for their extra belongings. We had them over for dinner once a week, on the only weekend day they were allowed to do things like that because of the cult. We changed the art in our home, we taught our kids how to behave around them to help them be comfortable here, we got used to the prayers and the literature left here after every visit and bit our tongues a lot.

The common ground that I shared with my father was home improvement, fishing and sports. We worked on his new home together, he helped with the new outbuilding here, we went fishing when there were fishing opportunities and an available day that wouldn't conflict with his religion. And we watched sports on TV together but couldn't attend live events because of his restrictive beliefs limiting our travel time.

Things were strained but tolerable.

Then the strain became too much.

Stepmother actually asked my daughter to change her wedding day so she could attend, the date they had chosen was in conflict with her religion. We invited her to a symphony concert my daughter was performing in and when a multimedia visual depicted Pele, the hawaiian goddess of fire she walked out rudely and obviously with great disapproval that no one in the hall could have possibly mistaken for anything less than judgemental condemnation of the images of fire and a womans form dancing amongst the flames.

He decided he needed to see a favorite team play a playoff game at my house so he waited till the very minute that he was allowed to leave the home on their holy day (sun down) and drove here to watch the second half, evidently against her wishes because after that she started making demands on our respect for her religion beyond mere tolerance. She expected me to help her enforce her wishes on him in spite of my life long open disagreement with every part of it and I refused openly.

It was game on at that point.

When I learned that a family that carries power at my company was retiring and moving to their neighborhood, I asked my father to please talk to her about leaving them alone and not trying to convert them to her cult. He agreed to. He seemed to understand my fears about her and the way she operates in regards to recruitment.

The cult is so restrictive and based on a false prophet that is so obviously flawed that very few people will have anything to do with it, most people that know the name of the church withdraw at the very mention of it. She has a long history of keeping her beliefs a secret, finding a way to endear herself to a new person through offers of help with shopping or babysitting or accompanying them in healthy activities like walking or swimming or helping with dietary changes. After a few weeks, she starts in on the religion, and shortly after that the friendship ends and she discommunicates them, making every effort to show her judgement of them as weak and evil people that now know the true path but ignore it, just like she has done with me for 40 years.

As soon as she knew I didn't want her to bother these people or associate me with her cult in any way, she practically ran to their door. I made the request that they be left alone and that if it was impossible for her to leave them alone that she leave my name out of it. That was on a friday afternoon, and by sunday morning I was being told that they were new friends with their new neighbors and that my name had come up and that I was wrong to worry because they had nothing but good things to say about me. I figure she had about an hour and a half between being asked and the beginning of her holy day to make the contact because I was back at their house the day after their holy day before sunrise to take my father fishing and thats when I got the news

You might think I am paranoid about the work/ parents conflict, that my fears of the new neighbors inevitably being shunned having any effect on my career are exaggerated. I wish that was true but unfortunately I work in a place where family association is everything and skills and hard work are secondary. This family has over thirty members where I work, if you include spouses and best friends and children of best friends and so on, and they do, most definitely. Almost all of them outrank me, few of them have any education beyond high school and none of them have skills (?) outside of supervision and management. Those of us that do the skilled jobs and earn our pay do so with the knowledge that those upper positions are unattainable and our best shot at survival is to keep our heads down and fly under the radar of those in the family. IT HAS BEEN A GOOD JOB, you just have to understand the situation and deal with it. Don't get in the way, don't complain, and stay off the family radar.

She put me on the radar in a big way. When I told her I was unhappy about her actions she started in telling me that maybe I wasn't worthy of working for her new friends anyway and that if it was gods will that I suffer for my lack of belief, well thats just the way it was and it was entirely out of her hands now. She was spending hours at their home, she was walking with them three times a day, she was sharing recipes.

Talking to my father about it was fruitless, he would agree with me and tell me he was going to talk to her about it but return loaded with new words in his mouth that she had placed there. It was obvious he was paying the price for making even a weak attempt to sway her from working on the new neighbors. When he finally told me outright that he "would always choose the church over anything or anybody because the church was always right", I parted company.

We never spoke again.

I did hear that true to form they had passed judgement on the new neighbors and were no longer in contact, but I heard that through my work.

Written out like this I can see that I did what I could to try to make it work and did what I had to when It wasn't going to. Beyond what I have told here are a hundred more stories of her judgementalism and his weakness and inability to confront her.

Basically I think she believes that any thought that enters her head comes from a higher power because she has worked so hard at keeping out all evil thoughts. I also think that in her mind just being uninformed about a subject and confused by it's complexities makes it evil because if god wanted her to understand it she would already. A case in point: She once convinced a diagnosed schizophrenic that she could help them recover through her religion and dietary changes and the first step was to stop taking the drugs immediately, which they did. My attempts to explain even the basic facts about mental illness were rejected, she thought I was speaking for the devil and anything I said in warning her of the dangers of getting a schizophrenic to stop treatment cold turkey just spurred her on in her quest to do what she believed she was ordained to do.

Wow, telling that story makes me wonder if she is the one with voices in her head.

I think the hardest part of all of this is living with myself after allowing it ti happen. I am wired to seek the love of my parents and to honor and trust them. I was weak and allowed myself the luxury of thinking it was a possibility in spite of having 40 years of pure evidence that it wasn't possible. She has no love to give. He had no love for anyone but himself and his only motivation was to make his own life easy by not crossing her in any way.

He was willing to watch me leave home at 14 to make her happy, he missed out on his grandchildren to honor her innability to travel on weekends, he missed graduations, weddings, high school football championships, soccer games, even births. He missed life.

Nott my fault, I should be able wrap this up and be done with it.

Except I should have been done with it at age 14 and as it turned out I would have been much better off if I had. I have to live with that 40 year mistake now.

I am going back into therapy to get some help dealing with all of this. Somehow I think I am close to what could be the closure I have denied myself for so long.