This is an automated archive.
The original was posted on /r/relationships by /u/artistnamedj on 2024-01-23 04:30:25+00:00.
I (26f) have always had a pretty rough relationship with my stepdad. Tw; child abuse Here is a brief summary of some of the worse part of things.
- He has physically assaulted me as a kid. One time he got angry with me for whatever reason when I was… 8/9? And he started screaming at me and then choked me. I told my mom and she said “I’ll talk to him and tell him to not do that again”
- He used to make me do meaningless chores. We have a pond near my house and he would make me walk around the perimeter of the pond at 12 years old and flip the rocks during the summer. It only stopped because my parents were weedeating out there one day and they moved one of the rocks and found a copperhead underneath. My mom told my stepdad that I would never flip the rocks ever again because I could’ve easily been bitten. Looking back, I have no fucking idea what the point of was to flip the fucking rocks.
- He made fucking crazy rules with no backing behind them, and if I questioned or disobeyed then that meant I was a bad kid.
- He put up cameras to watch everything in the house “for intruders” but it never made any sense because there would be cameras in the kitchen by the stove?
- He’s racist and completely disowned me whenever I dated a black guy. My family went on a family vacation and I wasn’t allowed to go because I was dating someone who was black.
- He found condoms in my room at 19 because he would regularly strip search my entire bedroom, and he got so mad that he stretched a condom completely out and stuck it on my head and then started screaming in my face about how big of a w**** I was. He was pressing his finger against my face and when I went to literally just move his finger, he said don’t try to fight me and then slapped me across the face. Also told me he was going to drown me in the pond. All of this happened in front of my mom and she didn’t do anything.
- He would regularly tell both me and my mother how I would end up “pregnant at 16 with a black guy” because I would get bad grades or something minuscule. This happened when I was around 12, maybe 13? He even once told my mom out of anger that he was willing to bet on it and told her to put money up for an actual bet.
- I would frequently come home as a kid with my clothes in trash bags ready to get thrown out because my room wasn’t clean (I was fucking depressed because he made my life hell)
- Most recently, I was stranded in the middle of a snowstorm because my boyfriend and I had gotten into a car wreck, and when I told them how i was hurt that they didn’t offer to come get me or seem concerned, he cussed me out, started screaming, and said “fuck you both” I thought I was fine but I ended up having a concussion and a neck sprain. We were stranded in a remote area so I had to be in a hotel for 2 days without being seen by a medical professional until today. (My parents still haven’t and probably won’t ever apologize for that one)
- He would “joke” about drowning me in our pond. Sometimes I thought he would actually try to do it.
This is a summary but doesn’t really explain some of the other shit that’s happened that has really fucked with me. I don’t have the mental capacity to explain it on Reddit and I don’t think it’s okay for me to go into detail with a bunch of strangers on Reddit about it either because it’s not good.
My mother will never leave him. Whenever I would beg her to leave him when I was growing up, she told me that I was still young and I still had a life to live but she didn’t have much time and my stepdad makes her happy. (She was 44 at the time)
I’m struggling because I feel like she’s an enabler. I was in a very physically abusive relationship at 19. (He shoved an AK in my mouth and then tried to drown me in a creek, and come to find out- he had told his friends how easy it would be to kill me and bury me in his field because his parents had a lot of land.) looking back, I think I only was in that relationship because it felt like home. Everything that he did to me felt normal. Whenever I told my mother about this, she dismissed it per usual and refused to acknowledge any of it and told me how bad of a problem child I was.
The most recent snowstorm incident really bothered me because I’ve forgiven them for the most part, and I thought they had changed with old age, but it seems like they haven’t. I’m okay from the concussion, but it all just feels like a stark reminder of shit that’s happened to me.
I don’t have much family because all of mine on my biological dad’s side is overseas, so cutting off my parents feels hard because I literally have no one left besides my aunt. What should I do? Is any of this normal?
Tl;dr : my parents are toxic and my stepdad is abusive. How does someone go about effectively cutting contact without feeling guilt?