On my 18th birthday I wanted to go out and spend the day with friends. My parents said they didn’t want me to and they wanted me to stay home. I said I was 18 and an adult and I wanted to spend my birthday out with my friends.

I leave and enjoy a few hours until I get a phone call from my dad. He says “Come home immediately, there’s been a huge accident with mom and your youngest brother. We need you home ASAP”.

I rush home in a panic, spent an hour on the way home preparing myself for the possibility that half my family had died.

Only to find out that he had “played a joke on me” to get me to come home as a power move. No accident. No ambulance, no injuries.

“You think you’re an adult but I will ALWAYS be in charge of you” was what he said.

I’m 30 now and haven’t spoken to him in over a decade. I don’t think much about him since he’s pathetic, but when I do, I imagine that he’s rotting alone and unable to manipulate other peoples physchology and emotions 🙂

They died. At very crucial points in my life. My dad 4 years ago, i mom 1.5 months ago.

Its litterally the worst thing they ever did.

What, uh… what answers were you expecting in here, OP?

I remember my dad slapping me in the face for pronouncing “water” like an American. A bunch of odds and ends like that.

Kicked me out after high school. I ended up homeless for months. That was years ago, but the psychological damage never goes away. To this day I don’t spend money on furniture because I’m too scared I’ll lose everything again somehow. Even my computers have to be laptops forever now because I feel like if I get a desktop I’ll be fucked into losing it if I end up homeless again.

Goes to show that most people aren’t ready to be parents and need a good hard look at their life before getting into that, as well as at least some sort of parenting education.

When I was 15 or so my dad made a fake AIM address and posed as a girl from my school so he could encourage me to masturbate with the child porn he was sending me. When i got freaked out and stopped responding he called my phone and said that “the girl from school” was bothering him at work and I needed to keep talking with *her". I didn’t figure out that it was him until a decade later later. I remember panicking all night about what I knew was illegal images, so I told him what happened and he just mocked me for not knowing how to do an ip trace to see who it was.

Dad was a real piece of shit. But that was the worst thing he did to me personally.

When my brother and I were both in university, we lived in cities about an hour apart. We grew up about another hour away, so to visit my brother my dad had to drive through the city I lived in, passed the campus for my university, to get to the city my brother lived in. You could literally see the buildings on campus from the interstate through the city.

He would call me about once a month to tell me about the awesome weekend he just had visiting my brother and seeing one of their school football games. He would rave about how much fun it was and always say “you should come down too next time”. I would always tell him I probably would if he would tell me about it before the trip instead of after…

I started to resent my brother being the “obvious favorite”. For years we barely spoke. We reconnected like a decade later when we happened to live in the same city. One night around a few beers, we started hashing out old shit, and I brought up him being dad’s favorite and all the trips dad made to visit him.

That’s when I found out my dad made it all up. Our dad only visited my brother’s campus twice, the day he moved into the dorms and the day he graduated…

Dad - gave mother speed while pregnant with me, then abandoned the family before I was 1, never to be heard from again.

Mom - committed suicide before I was 10

Aunt - Was a raging narcissist who psychologically and emotionally manipulated/coerced me for ten years

Uncle - beat the fuck out of me for ten years

Growing up sure was fun…

Birthed me. Then they had the audacity to celebrate it each year there after.

Mom took the door off my room due to her not trusting me? Smoked a lot of weed but never ever in their sight or in the house. All I did was sit on my computer in my room. Absolutely horrible experience.

She ended up putting the washer and dryer in there with me too…

Mom divorced my abusive alcoholic father and married a man from England. I was 14 but she figured I had the maturity to know it would be ok if I stayed with him instead of moving to England with her and my brother. I was angry at her because I was 14 and dumb. She left me in the US and gave me no end of guilt for making my choice once a grew up a bit and realized I made a mistake. Once she and her husband moved back to Oklahoma I took a position in California and now I’m guilted for that at the age of 42 because she can’t see my daughter whom she never bothered to spend anytime with anyway because of her constant depression about having married another different kind of abusive man.

My mother passive aggressively bullied me regarding potential love interests to the point I was absolutely terrified of even mentioning boys from my class as dealing with her unfounded teasing was unbearable. This didn’t help at all with my romantic relationships, I was always lacking in support in the area as I turned the topic into a taboo during my adolescent years, at home in particular.

As for my father it’s not much what he did but what he didn’t do. He’s one of the smartest men I’ve ever met, he is good at managing his finances and networking yet he never gave me much support or pushed me to achieve anything in these areas - when he did it was briefly in the form of criticism. Again, this also snowballed into an adulthood problem I’m still grappling with.

My parents weren’t bad parents. They did their absolute best to raise me coming from trauma themselves. They still don’t even know they suffer from it. Their trauma made me feel like I was not good enough. However, I will pass intrinsic value and compassion on to my kids.

Nitpicked and poked fun at almost anything i watched/read/did/listened to, and anybody i interacted with, to the point that I sometimes struggle to find enjoyment in things, typically prefer to have a wall behind me and eyes on an entrance (they liked to sneak up and surprise me), almost exclusively use headphones for any form of audio, and struggle to form friendships with anyone.

There’s probably stuff that’s a lot worse in a vacuum, but tbh my dad giving me the talk about his own childhood trauma and the cycle of abuse. He concluded it by telling me to remind him of “the cycle” next time he’s raging.

Even as a kid I knew that telling a large, angry man with a belt in his hand and daddy issues, “hey, you’re acting like your father” would just make the beatings harder.

Second runner up is that apparently he convinced my brothers and sisters that I was the favorite and he never abused me like he did them. That meant they hated me and abused me too.

Third runner up is probably the hoarding or the 24/7 black mold exposure or maybe the animal hoarding, or possibly when he assaulted a woman in front of me (although technically not something he did to me)