Search the Community

I thought I'd give my thoughts on this topic because it seems I have an issue that doesn't seem to be all that common (or at least not that obvious) around here. I've had a mixed experience with bullying in my life. Particularly in terms of mental bullying and psychological domination. In the house I grew up in. Insults were thrown about with total abandon and with accompanying rage. It seemed like the only way to carve out enough space for me to breathe was to issue a humiliation or shaming remark to someone that would act like a kind of mental cattleprod shock, that would temporarily dent the ego of the other and keep them away for a small amount of time. On a few occasions when the abuse and hostile atmosphere got too much I would lash out, I remember feeling satisfaction at striking my brother's skull with my fist. My violent fantasies in regard to my family are all to do with blows to the head. Looking back, obviously I loathed them for what went on in their heads the most. Physically nothing about them offended me (why would it?). Different brains in the same bodies would have been great. The fantasies I have had in the months of defooing all involve tying them up and issuing baseball bat blows to the head. Even now in conflict I feel the same way. In arguments if I feel attacked or cornered I slip into a terminator mode of detachment where all I see before me is a few pounds of offensive meat encased in a skull that if I cannot strike directly, I will use all my self-knowledge and knowledge of psychology to break it and turn it in on itself with shame, humiliation etc etc. I understand this will cause me no end of grief in my life if I cannot work through it. I think my prior counsellors have been intimidated by this 'inner bully' that I have and so when it came up their empathy dropped like a power line in a rainstorm, and the therapy continued in a kind of lifeless way until things petered out. In particular I feel women simply disengage when this part of me comes up, even if it is attacking those who are not present, because obviously they know it's ire could be turned on them too. I think (from what I gather), a lot of people in FDR are bully victims, and though they may be defooing and feeling lots of anger. This is the first time it has surfaced for them and so it is manageable. Whereas for me it feels as if my inner-bully surfaced rather early and has become a malignant and extreme part of my personality. I feel it stands in my way and isn't so nice to deal with for anyone. I was wondering if any of you have had similar experiences and what helped you handle it?

Originally posted on Medium! Enjoy! As long as we stay around corrupt, abusive, and nasty people who overtly attack us, implicitly humiliate us through clever language tricks, or invalidate us subliminally through a sudden but brief look of contempt that immediately follows earnest proclamations that attempt to convince us they “understand where we’re coming from”, our entire emotional apparatus will remain compromised. So long as we remain in the presence of toxic people, our emotions will remain toxic through overstimulation; guilt becomes toxic shame, humiliation becomes chronic irritation, fear becomes hypervigilance and paranoia, while anger festers into murderous rage. Let’s have a more detailed look at anger as an example. Emotions are just another kind of information; information in the form of energy and the information that is being communicated through anger is that, not only has there been a violation or a transgression against you, but also that something needs to change, hence the energy which is designed to propel you into action. For instance, if you feel angry after being insulted by a bully, your anger is saying “get away from this person” or “remove yourself from the interaction”. But what happens when we cannot remove ourselves from the interaction? What happens if we are children, have no control over our environment and can’t escape because the bullies in our lives are our parents? Or, what happens even when we can control our environment and leave, but for whatever reason mistakenly believe that we can’t? Well, it is likely then that the anger will turn into rage. The difference between anger and rage is that while anger carries the message, “take control of your behavior and change things by leaving the dysfunctional environment”, rage says, “since we can’t remove ourselves from the environment let’s change things by controlling the other person” or, more simply put, by fighting back. This is why rage is often coupled with violent impulses to inflict physical or psychological damage on the other person. Again, it is designed to propel us into taking action that will change something. But what if we can neither fight nor flee from an abuser, as is almost always the case for children? What happens when we can’t run or when any attempt to fight results in greater harm for us? What happens when feeling these emotions become dangerous for us? The answer is that we end up feeling nothing. We become depressed. We enter the ‘freeze’ response similar to what we would enter into in the presence of a grizzly bear, a beast that we can neither fight nor run from; we play dead. Now, to be clear, it is terribly tragic for a child to ever have to enter into this response as a result of being raised by hostile parents, but at the same time it is totally healthy and necessary for preventing the child from further harm. It is unnecessary when this occurs for an adult who does indeed have the choice to get abusive people out of his life. Once we escape the corrupt and commit ourselves to healing, we slowly but surely can heal our emotional apparatus. And once we are safe to feel again, we gain access to our emotions like anger and grow confidence in our ability to process reality and self trust that our emotions accurately reflect reality. Eventually, people’s sneaky and crazy making attempts to undermine us and blame us for our feelings becomes extremely obvious and pathetic. We become our own proof.

On medium this, to my great surprise, has become my most successful article yet, being my most viewed (767) piece with the largest read ratio(595 reads) of 78%. I shared this article in only two narcissistic abuse facebook groups before I went to bed around midnight and only 6 hours later both posts have gathered over 20 likes and much praise. And the thing is, this is one of the simplest things I've written. A piece which my inner critic usually opposes by telling me the next piece has to be a dazzling display of my analytical capacities being pushed to the max, with research and sweeping rhetoric. The lesson? Empiricism is the way to go. You just don't know if that thought you're having is boring or not until you share things. The “Narcissistic Dull” Much has been written about narcissists, in great length and in great detail. Such work has even spawned the invention of new terms and lingo to better describe characteristics that are typically displayed by narcissists as well as to establish a clear distinction between a behavior when its exhibited by a narcissist versus someone like you or me. For example, there’s rage and then there’s “Narcissistic Rage.” Anybody who’s encountered such fury will know that there’s a clear difference between the two. For example, I rage sometimes, like when I yell at electronics that aren’t working the way I want them to. However, it’s totally a guilty indulgence for me and something that if you happened to witness on accident, I’d feel pretty embarrassed about it and would be keen on persuading you that it’s not something I do a lot or think is ideal. When a Narcissist rages she feels no such shame. She does not consider the boundaries of others nor how her screaming tirades impacts those around her and if she does, she feels self righteous and that the abuse is justified. Even if she’s aware of how immature and mean her behavior is, she does not care. If anything, she feeds off the thrill of power and feeling of omnipotence she gets from provoking fear in others. However, there is one such characteristic that I’ve encountered repeatedly in narcissists I’ve interacted with that I don’t think I’ve ever read about, which is that they are so often incredibly, painfully boring. I’d like to introduce my own term by calling it the “Narcissistic Dull”. Think about what makes a conversation enjoyable. For me, it is when the other person brings curiosity into the interaction, is truly interested in what I have to say, listens and asks questions. This is what helps to keep me engaged. But, despite the narcissist’s wit and charm, that flashy novelty wears off during conversation because they never ask you anything, don’t listen, they never are interested in you and they just go on and on and on about themselves. And because they (wrongly) think that they are interesting, they won’t neglect to mention the tiniest details. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to listen to my mom say while we’re at Subway, “You see, I’ve never really liked bread. If I eat it, I like it burnt.” Sure, anyone can be dull, but if what I’m saying is a little boring to a friend, we can express ourselves and find a way to make the conversation fun again. When the narcissist is dull, she is extremely dull, doesn’t notice how bored you are or does notice, in which case she doesn’t care about your experience in the conversation and if so so happen to make your experience known, she will not take kindly to receiving any kind of feedback that isn’t what she wants to hear.

I think I just had a revelation just now, one dealing with knowing myself. I live in a dorm, and it seems this evening one of the other people in my dorm had brought some people over. And I could hear two of them talk. And when one in particular talked, something happened. I was filled with dread. Like, extreme fear filled my soul. God, it was so horrible. I was really terrified. And then it hit me. I recognize this. I have felt this before. It was a long time ago, but I have had this happen before on several occasions. This dread, this hellish fear that filled me, used to erupt when I saw people that bullied me when I was in elementary school. What is interesting, is that while I had this fear (have still), everything. EVERYTHING in my life, just feel so much harder. So frightening. When I know, on an intellectual level, that their not. Almost like the fear kind of spread to other parts of my psyche? I got so frightened. After a few minutes, something else came up: Anger. Intense hate. I just wanted him, and all others like him, dead. Just all dead. I didn't care how, just as long they were killed. After that anger and rage, I realized that I was familiar with that intense fear. And actually, now that I am writing this, I remember something else: That rage I felt. That intense hate. I felt that too, those years when I was bullied. It's really dark, that hate. It's very violent (mentally), very detailed. And honestly, they feel really good. Sadistically good. Anyways, the revelation: I have a hypothesis. All my years of being bullied (all of elementary, 9 years), I have sort of developed a hyper-sensitive ''radar'' for detecting people with bullying tendencies. Something else I realized, with the help of chatting with a friend just now: I have made some efforts to not think, and remember about my bullies. About how badly they treated me, how the humiliated me and threatened me. And now, when I am starting to do some true-self excavating, I think it could serve me to dredge up those memories, and study them. Because, maybe by turning away from that completely, I am missing vital information that could help me in my healing process. This was perhaps 30 minutes ago, and I can still feel the shock-waves inside me. God. it was so terrible. But I am really excited about this revelation, and my hypothesis, if it is correct. And, if it is not, what can be learned from this? Exciting. Excitement in the aftershock of intense fear. Its interesting I think. I can't express how good it felt to get this out of my system. I just thought and felt something. I love this forum. I love this community. I love the kind, honest, gentle, sympathetic in this part of the Internet. Just started chatting on the chat a few days ago, and I love the open, thought-provoking conversations there. Yes. You guys are great.

Where I give a backdrop to my self-knowledge journey so far I suppose my journey over the last few months has reached something of a full cinematic conclusion within my dreams, one of which I have not previously experienced in my life. I don't experience lucid dreams, and this one surely wouldn't qualify as one, but it was at least tangential to a lucid dream in its intensity. I should start by saying that I was raised in a life of fear. My parents through their carefully crafted manipulation put me through a gradual process of transformation from a curious and outgoing young child into a shell of a person by age 11 with a crippling panic of public interaction rendering me nearly catatonic when it came to simple tasks such as checking out at a cash register. I was changed countries 3 times, I was relocated through multiple states and cities, I changed schools nearly every year from age 4 to 12, having to adapt myself to each new public school prison and its corresponding juvenile inmates. Empathy and love never existed in my childhood, only from a few good teachers and older models did I learn any sense of a faint echo of what these things might be. My mom was and is a narcissist, she learned this from a childhood of poverty surrounded by 5 older sisters who would strangle the life out of her and dominate her will, something I assume she resolved to never allow to happen again in her adult life. Consequently she sought out to only find those she could exercise control over. Not a big surprise she became a staunch leftist. She was and is full of feminist venom and malice, though she would never say as much in words. To her I was the distant reflection of an alcoholic absent father who might leave again (which ultimately lead to the one thing she feared in any case). She was a master manipulator, she developed a method of affection and affection withdrawal that would leave me constantly seeking her good graces. If at any early age I did not demonstrate any consideration for the "error of my ways", if I was not apologetic, she would escalate the situation by increasing my punishments until I relented. My mom loved to echo socialist rhetoric in a manner, it was always for what was "good for the family as a whole", especially the last move we made at age 12 when I was finally starting to make friends at the school I was at in the suburbs of Chicago. The entire family moved for the last time to South Florida, for "the good of the family" which was in actuality nothing more than her desire to live in warmer climate, there was zero economic reason to move otherwise, my father did not change companies, he just transferred offices. She was also very fond of forcing me to apologize to her or my sister or anyone regardless of whether I agreed with her reasoning or not. This was the most vile brainwashing of all, having to affirm something I did not believe over and over. Consequently my inate intelligence which far surpassed anyone else in my family became subdued and I behaved aloof and brutish, like my father. My father was and is a shell of a human being. His childhood from what I can gather from uncles and hearsay, was incredibly violent. So violent that he refuses to discuss it. He was my mom's enforcer. When I was "misbehaving" she would send me to my room and then send my father late at night upon his return from work to give me the verdict and the threat of escalation if I continued disobeying. This threat dominated my entire childhood. He rarely hit me but it was enough to issue these threats in his aggressive tones to continuously keep me at bay. I wanted to have nothing to do with him and really despised him as a person, his cowardice disgusted me to my soul, but I did not know to what degree I felt this until recently. He enjoyed humiliating me at public gatherings he had with office workers or his mom's friends. Always cracking a joke at my expense when I felt the most vulnerable as a forced social introvert; the betrayal would tear at me and make me feel like I could die. On one occassion I was dreading giving a speech in class that had been offered as an extra credit opportunity, and I decided to seek his advice the night before to see if he'd reassure me it would be ok to not do it. It was an extreme rarity for me to seek any sort of counsel from my father but I was so terrified of the speech I thought I might convince my father it would not be necessary. He responded with rage at the idea of abandoning the chance to marginally improve my grade and when I told him I didn't want to do it and I would not do it, he threw the chair he was sitting in at me. It was a plastic lawn chair and didn't really hurt physically, but the sense of sociopathy and betrayal of confidence echoes within me to this day. At times I would feel so exasparated and hopeless from the complete lack of understanding of my feelings I would explode with rage within my room lashing out violently at any inanimate object I could find until my mom would knock on the door and threaten to make things worse for me if I didn't stop, and so I learned that I must resign to be a slave and live passively within that existence or else not survive. Even at the age of 13 they managed to subdue me; the first overwhelming passionate rebeliousness when puberty was hitting me hard and all my understanding of the world was being flipped and inverted. The threat of sending me off to military school was sufficient in that case. Is it not bizarre and yet completely logical how that which deeply repulses us the most as a child is what we come to depend on the most to exist? At age 20, still living with my parents, I developed severe and devastating panic attacks. They would often last entire nights and leave me in complete fear for my life and drained and exhausted once they had passed. Eventually I went on antidepressants for it and subdued all these feelings for a time, but I had to increase dosage as time went on to continue to subdue the feelings. After a time the antidepressants had me so sick I could barely digest food or get out of bed. It wasn't until later on when I had changed my dietary habits, quit the meds, and left my parents' home that I began to slowly recover. Unfortunately, that was not until 26 years old. I was somehow stuck within the cycle of abuse and dependency at home, I became the same as a prisoner who had grown too institutionalized to exist outside in the real world on his own. I went to the local university though I had plenty of opportunity to leave. I took trips to Europe to try to escape them with some faint dream of finding a job with my EU passport and never coming back. Inevitably I would come home after only a week suffering from a depressive meltdown of loneliness. My mom had bred dependency in me to the point I was a cripple without her presence. I did not keep romantic relationships and my parents had no problem with the state I was in so long as I remained submissive. I could not talk to strangers or even make a phone call to a business without difficulty. In time I managed to become more independent but it was with great difficulty. Fast forward to two years ago, I discovered FDR and began to examine very critically everything I'd been taught. After reading On Truth and RTR I began to seriously question the falsities behind my family, but it still took me a great deal of time to unravel just how deep the trench was. 6 months ago I began a relationship with a girl who was a self-proclaimed libertarian. In the initial period I told my mom about her and she immediately went snooping on her facebook profile to try to dissect her, subsequently telling me she might potentially be trying to use me or kidnap me. She was actively trying to sabotage my relationship before it had began and this from an entirely different state. Incidently she has repeated this pattern in the past and yet I allowed for her abuse and manipulatition to continue in order not to upset her. Unfortunately my ex was not at all what I had initially expected (though for entirely different reasons than my mom's initial paranoias), demonstrating serious irrationality steming from a fire and brimstone strict Christian childhood. When things inevitably broke apart between us I realized at the time I had really just been trying to replace the affections of my mom with someone else, not actually solving any of my own problems or exploring self knowledge in any meaningful way (in spite of the material I had read up until then). For the first time in my life I was honest about what I wanted out of my relationship with my mother: Nothing. I told her I didn't want to talk to her anymore and blocked her everywhere I had her as a contact online. She of course sent me a pitiful narcissistic email about how I spent my whole life trying to run away from her in spite of her best efforts. It's important to note here that I did not defoo my father. At that time I was so angry with my mother and the realization of how deep her manipulation was, that I felt some pity for my father as this empty shell who was being driven around by her for decades. I had the naive view that a sense of empathy still might inhabit my father and upon a confrontation he might feel remorse for the past reign of fear and bullying and humiliation he had exposed me to. So I kept communication with on a very casual basis by phone only discussing the bare minimum until he came into town last week. Where I confront my father and all illusions are destroyed The entire night before my father and I were scheduled to meet outside a Panera Bread near my house I was filled with trepidation and enormous fear. I felt as if I might arrive at the meeting and die right there on the spot, such was the intensity of the fear. When I got there he was sitting in a table outside the restaurant with the family dog, a tiny perfectly groomed Maltese who my mom had molded into her perfect specimen of affection and loyalty.. He'd dropped off my mom beforehand at a mall to go shopping, thankfully she had no desire to see me either. I was immediately emotional and it took me at least 5 minutes stewing in fear to finally mutter anything of significance. Finally I broke loose. "Do you know the difference between sympathy and empathy?" "Yes, of course," he said. "Well, I have been thinking about it for a while, and I don't think there was ever any empathy in our family" My father rolled his eyes, "Why does this matter, why do you bring this up?" "Because there was never any consideration for my feelings, no curiosity as to why I felt a certain way, why I was acting out, nothing" "I wasn't a psychologist, I was your father, I wasn't responsible for you feelings, only for raising you" (wtf?!) "So you mean that my feelings didn't matter to you, you had no interest in learning about them?" He dodged the question, "when you turned 12 years old you started to despise us and think we were terrible people, I have no idea why you decided we were terrible people but I think we were very leniet with you considering your attitude in that time." I get indignant, "did you never stop to think how destructive it is to change a kid from a school every year for 8 years in a row, did you not think it would have been helpful to understand what I felt about that?" "So what if you changed schools? I don't see a problem with that. My responsibility was to be your father not to fix the whole family around your feelings." "Was it your responsibility also to humiliate and make fun of me at your private parties with friends, to throw a chair at me when I came for your advise the one damn time I had the guts to do so?" He laughed nervously and pathetically. "It's not funny, I said, half in tears. My father became all of a sudden tranquil and with a very seemingly introspective tone he blurted out the following abomination, "you're right about me throwing a chair at you, that wasn't right, but let me tell you, in that time I really feel that I should have hit you more to teach you respect back then, you were out of control and we let you get away with it then." My illusions all suddenly ended with that exact moment. How could I possibly still be afraid of this pathetic human being? He'd not only not shown any empathy but actually doubled down in spite of seeing me in clear emotional pain when expressing these things. "Ok," I said. "I see that you don't get it." I immediately stopped feeling overwhelmed and calmed down pretty quickly. I resolved to reserve my inevitable and unavoidable defoo with him for some other time and continued with some petty small talk for a few minutes more, which was all I could stomach before getting the hell out of there. It is amazing how greatly illusion and mythology can obscure the truth about relationships. In spite of all the self knowledge work I had already done, in spite of all the reading and journaling and exploring of some painful subdued emotions, I had not been aware of how disjointed from a logical perception of reality I was when it came to my father. I realized that my father for me had just been a sort of last chance desperation for me to salvage and reconcile my past. I had known all along that my father was completely unfeeling, but I simply hadn't been ready to accept it. The fear was too enormous and crippling. After the encounter I had very little fear left of him at all, it was all relegated to remnants of past fear and emotion. It was within this context that I had an incredibly powerful and vivid dream only 10 days later. A true gem of a dream. Where the dream happens and I discover my rage I was in the kitchen inside a strange home I did not recognize. I was sitting at a table apparently waiting for dinner to be prepared while my father and mother were actively cooking. My dad was holding a knife and actively cutting away at something imperceptible. I apparently muttered a comment which irritated my dad and he feigned a motion with the knife in his hand as if he was going to throw it at me. This seemed to me to be something I had seen him do before but I could not place it. I immediately reacted with unusual anger and blurted out "Why don't you try it you fucking coward?!" Incredibly, this enraged him so much that he actually threw the knife at me but missed. I was initially shocked and appalled that he'd gone through with it but did not let my anger subside, "I can't believe you did that, I'm calling the police immediately!" Suddenly my father and mother seemed to grow panicked at the realization of what he had done and my father started throwing other knives at me. As I dodged them I ran out of the kitchen and up a flight of stairs I did not recognize to the second floor. I ran into a room and in a panic tried to lock the door behind me but it would not lock. I looked around the room for something to use to defend myself and found lying next to the bed my warhammer. A warhammer is an enormous medieval hammer used for piercing and brutal blunting of armor piercing. In an era where swords would not penetrate armor with ease, the warhammer was devastating. This was the only object in the entire dream that I recognized, because I own one in real life and also keep it next to my bed as a home defense tool. As soon as I grabbed the warhammer my fear of dying ended, I felt suddenly empowered and ready to face the attack. I discovered my rage. My father burst into the room with a baseball bat and swung at me but missed. I walloped him across the torso hard with the blunt end of the hammer and he went down. I then ran from that room onto a balcony and resolved to jump but just then my mom popped out from behind me and started firing a cross bow. She missed me and I turned and knocked the crossbow away from her as she was loading another arrow and pushed her away. I then finally jumped out of the window and began running as I hit the ground. Decades of fear began to fade away. I woke up calm and relaxed, though tired. As I type this I am smiling and still reflecting upon the complete relief at finally escalating to the point I always longed for in past confrontations before the pang of regret would hit, the inevitable realization that the threat to my life would be too much to bare, the resignation to slavery. No longer will I be slave to ghosts or the living dead. I know now I am so much stronger than they, that their decades of abuse could not enslave me. I am free. The warhammer is still propped up next to my bed and it will stay there.

Hello Freedomainers, I have recently contacted Stefan, through the Sunday Show, during a trip with my family to the country of origin. The question that I was struggling with was how to resolve the problem with my father that has been going on for my whole life, my lack of choice. The problem of screaming and threatening to get the outcome he deemed as best case for my life. So I had very little choice and whenever I had preferences that did not agree with his views I would get punished physically or verbally, to "correct" my behaviour. Here is the link to the Sunday Call in Show recording from Stefan's page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvOIodsjO-k I guess after finishing the podcast and after listening to Stefan's argument for how I should approach the situation, I felt quite anxious about implementing it and also doubtful that it would not work. So I pondered on it and after a while, when I returned to United States, alone with my father, the conversation started but not by me. I was constantly verbally threatened and humiliated about why I choose not to continue my Computer Science Degree which I had completed almost an Associate's Degree worth of material, some non transferable since my poor grades. My father had invested about $4000 plus money for transport and books to it and the rest I paid with loans about $6000. I don't recall making the most informed decision about my major, nor about going to college. As soon as I left high school my father had requested me to take some summer courses at the community college where we lived. At the time I had no working permit since my parents had not yet overcome that barrier due to my father constantly moving from job to job and not being able to find any sponsor for the Green Card application. The fear of having the same retaliation, over me preferring not to go to college, from my father would bring much verbal abuse and I would be thrown out of the house if I disobeyed. (these threats would be casually dropped at dinner parties and as a rule that I had heard numerous other times in other situations). I thus kept my grades a secret and kept up a facade of truth about my grades and school work. I would also be constantly lectured about habits that I had picked up such as staying up to late and not having good study practices. I was scared of being thrown out of the house and not have any protection due to my inability to work. This continued until my mother acquired her Green Card and thus the family. Maybe a year after that I bumped into Stefan's youtube page, and I started with self-knowledge. I have made the decision that going to school now and having to pay another $50,000 for the rest of the Computer Science degree which I do not find that I can place my passion into as I have been doing with philosophy and psychology. During my decision process my parents requested an official transcript from my school and I gave in and wrote the application, and they discovered about my failing grades. Back to after I returned to America, the verbal abuse continued, and my father demanded to give him reasons why going to college is a good thing and why finishing something that you started is a good thing and that what I was doing, by not continuing, was a bad thing. This happened almost 2 weeks straight, the conversations initiated by him full of verbal humiliation, threats and manipulation, If I did not comply to what he wanted. Every time I would state that it was my choice and I did not want to go and that I needed help with resolving some of the problems that he had caused in my childhood. After my mother and brother arrived to United States two weeks after we had I began to stop talking about it and also left the house in order to avoid not being yelled at after numerously telling him that yelling and and the verbal humiliation is destructive to be and brings a lot of fear. Then the manipulations. If I would continue to leave (leave the conversation) I would have to pay him to stay there and if I would leave I should not come back. I got progressively more angry and I did something regrettable. My father came into my room and he started as always to tell me what I was doing wrong and why I could not clean my room in a timely fashion. I told him I did not want to talk to him, and he kept screaming and I told him to go scream at other people to see if they would listen. At that point I was in a fight or flight state. He brought up that in his house he gets to scream as he wants and if I am crazy and need to see a psychologist to go do that, something that I mentioned to him about me needing some psychological help to resolve some of the problems he and my mother have caused. My anger took the best of me and I pounded on my desk, and screamed “Get Out!”I obviously cannot handle being around either my father and even my mother. I have a younger brother that is going through almost the same situation that I was going through when I was younger but in a way probably more because my parents have no choice but to be with him; I was sent to my grandparents for my younger age and I had very little exposure to my father or my mother as oppose to my brother. There is no community or family help that they are a part of here in the isolation that they choose in United States.I have had a few friends tell me I could stay at their houses or on campus with them, but I am just recently starting a job in the area.I do not know how I should handle myself, and what should I do in case of my father always verbally abusing me, until I can get out of the house. I have even had threats upon my property. I fear for my sanity. What I had exposed was rage directed at him and frankly I just got out of there and stopped shortly after that happened. I feel like the rage, even as Stefan pointed, even if it is directed at the right people, it is still continuing the cycle that my parents put me through. And that also angers me and frightens me. And what about my brother, what if I leave I usually was there for protection at times and for his support? I know there are social workers that I could call but I’m just scared of where he would end up or if that will only provoke my father even more. Lengthy, but you guys decide on my communication effectiveness.