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Contains abuse - Jumping into the deep end
I'm new on this site but I guess there isn't much point loitering so I'm just going to do what I set out to do when I signed up, which was see if anyone has experienced something similar. I am going to keep this PG as possible, and mostly it is dealing with the after affects of it all (please bear with me, it could be long, and jump around a LOT, and also it could just be a stupid vent!!!)
So it's no surprise given the label and whatnot I was abused in my past. Mostly it was childhood-early teens, at which point my mom, siblings, and myself ended up moving cross country to escape the abuser (my dad). This wasn't as traumatic a time as you'd have expected for me - my siblings were very distraught, I remember just plugging in my music and spacing out for a lot of it. That's not to say I wasn't sad/happy, but I just think I was overwhelmed enough I didn't know what to feel. My mom was depressed so I spent a lot of time trying to be "strong" and "happy", and in her own words she was relieved she had "one child she didn't need to worry about". That made me feel nice, but I think it may have halted the healing process for me. I was the only of my siblings to be physically abused - they were abused emotionally and mentally, but for whatever reason if someone was getting beat it was me, allegedly because in his mind I deserved it and in my moms mind I could take it. This was never acknowledged to me as a child, minus on one occasion where my mom asked me to stay inside till I healed up so nobody would be suspicious. That was after a particularly bad incident, in which my family and several members of my extended family were present, but nobody intervened. I was 5 at the time. Skip forward now 8 years, and my mom was asking for legal help to keep my younger sister in custody (my mom waited around as long as she did because she didn't want my sister to have forced visitation, which is understandable, as my sister is very sensitive. The breaking point where she finally had to leave is when my dad snapped at her one night and went off - he didn't lay hands on her, but my mom said it looked like someone had "drop kicked a puppy" and she saw there wasn't any hope for him).i remember feeling very put on the spot when the lawyer asked if he had ever physically abused anyone, and my mom was like "Yes, my older daughter!!" We had never talked about it - it had happened a lot, but we just kind of would exchange glances and move on. I don't think I was even consciously aware that was a thing I could be upset about till that lawyer brought it up. Anyway, my dad was livid when I told the authorities and blamed me for the following separation and divorce. The thing was, once we moved away, we never discussed the abuse again? I remember listening to my mom recount her harrowing escape, my siblings enduring patience, and I would kind of be lumped in there under the breath like "oh yeah, and she was there to." I feel like the older I get the more resentful I become. I don't know WHY nobody stepped in to help, I don't know WHY nobody will acknowledge what happened, and when I bring it up I'm told "you know, it's just too uncomfortable. Why don't you get professional help?" But I can't afford it! I just want to talk to my family and have it seen for what it is! I don't know if they just got used to me pretending nothing was happening now it's a standard but. I have so many underlying issues because of it. I was diagnosed with PTSD and depression, but my mom still says "my strong unproblemed child :)", I starve myself, and I can't sleep with lights off, and I can't sleep at all because of night terrors most of the time. I just don't get why my sister was "the puppy who got drop kicked" when my dad yelled at her at 11 but when he started having his way with me when I was 2 I wasn't? How could a 2 year old do something so bad it doesn't warrant an intervention? Why was her life more valuable than mine?
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