I’m not angry at anyone except myself. I know that everyone in this thread is smarter than me because I was raised to be stupid and easy to control. The fact that I still live here 23 when I knew I was being abused since age 13 is proof of my incomprehensible levels of idiocy. My every instinct is telling me that leaving is more dangerous than staying. I’m going to therapy because I know those instincts are wrong and I don’t know how to change them. I’m taking actions that are helping me gain a greater sense of agency and independence, but that process is frustratingly incremental. I’m stupid today, but I was even more stupid 2 weeks ago, and I will be less stupid 2 weeks from now. I hate that I’m like this. I hate that I can’t just download the brains of anyone else in this thread so I don’t have to wait for my brain cells to hurry the fuck up and rewire themselves into a usable configuration. But that’s what I have to do. I have to push myself more and more to learn that I’m not as powerless as my abusers make it seem. I know this, but I need to feel it.

These people can’t do shit to me. They had to lobotomize me to have any power over me because they don’t have time to watch me 24/7. If I knew what I was doing, I could be gone without a trace in less than 24 hours. I just won’t do it because I’m scared that my conditions make me unhireable and I won’t be able to convince anyone to let me live with them. Both of these are untrue and I’m too dumb to see why. THAT’S why I’m going to therapy – because once I realize I have that power, that’s it.

Once I have a clearer mind, I’ll be using the resources that everyone linked and look up more of them on my own. I’m going to find a way through this. I’ll have to step outside of my comfort zone a lot, but it can be done. I’m going to stop asking strangers on the Internet to do all of the work for me and do it my damn self.

I’ve embarrassed myself a lot in this thread, but I can always improve, become less embarrassing, and slowly take off the clown makeup piece by piece. The people here are trying to tell me that I can do more than I’m doing now, and they’re right. It just needs to get through to me. Maybe it takes more than just Lemmy threads. Maybe it takes a therapist, experiences of doing things on my own, and maybe a few friends. But it will happen.

I want to thank everyone for trying to help snap me out of it. It’s going to take some work, but I know there’s hope.

Unfortunately, I’m disabled, jobless, and have nobody to go to. I would have left long ago if it were so easy for me to leave.

I agree with the principle, but in practice, the violence of American capitalism is what keeps me trapped here more than anything. If I end up on the street as a result of these interventions, I will freeze to death because the system doesn’t protect from homelessness. This kind of intervention would work great in a socialist society with guaranteed basic housing and sustenance, but that isn’t the reality right now. The reality is a system that brutalizes the most vulnerable and leaves them to die.

it sounds like you’re saying you have a kink, right?

Pretty much, but my kink is literally just being held and playfully overwhelmed with kisses. My brain would constantly tell me that I’d never be able to find a partner because the thing that turned me on was too childish and female-dominant. I started feeling better than I realized that I likely only felt so much shame about this because of my parents’ contempt for giving comfort and affection, coloring the act as taboo.

I think my parents keep my documents in a safe, which means they’ll have to know if I’m leaving. Maybe I can get the police to assist me in retrieving them?

I learned to program on my own pretty decently and made a website that a few thousand people use in a niche gaming community. I basically built a free product that’s very useful to a specific set of people.

Unfortunately, my college plans got sidetracked because I developed a chronic illness and it’s been hard to go places and pay attention to lectures. I tried online college at home, but my brother’s violence made it impossible to focus. Without a source of income, trying to continue with college might be risky, since I may not find a way to repay all of the debt.

Even homelessness is better than this.

I’m worried about freezing to death. Do you know of any decent cities in the U.S.? I have enough money to get a plane ticket to any state in the country.

Fortunately (or unfortunately?) I’m an adult, so at least I have more options.

I’m still deprogramming from all of this stuff. I have my first therapy appointment next week and I’m starting to realize that my situation might be particularly spicy. I kind of thought on some level that this totalitarian control is just the average conservative household and I just had to deal with it for a little longer. But now that my brother is getting angrier and making death threats against my own parents, I’m starting to think that my only option is to get the FUCK out of here.

Talking about self-harm and abuse to others may force a therapist to commit you into emergency self-care. Meaning they’ll reach out to emergency services to have to come get you if they feel you’re a threat to yourself or others.

What if it’s other people who may be a threat to me? Could they send the cops to my house if I talk about the fact that a couple of my family members tortured and killed pets and I repeatedly overheard them talking about their fantasies of mass murder, genocide, and their nonchalant willingness to kill me?

As you can see, I have very good reasons for being in therapy.

what are you smoking?

Emotional abuse, isolation, and mainstream porn lol.

I was gaslighted by my family into believing that I was fundamentally different from everyone else and didn’t fit in, so I socially isolated myself in childhood and basically got my sex ed from slop porn, which further compounded the feelings that something was wrong with me and I didn’t belong.

I’m working to challenge those beliefs by coming up with more positive theories, then asking online to test the waters, and finally asking people in real life to see if the consensus changes. So far, this has helped me to recognize that I have been living in a delusional solipsistic bubble that not even my own abusers recognize anymore.

It’s been helping me a lot. Things keep getting better because I’m questioning all of the assumptions that make me feel defeated and hopeless. I’ve never been so happy to be wrong about everything. Thanks for the feedback.

He’s definitely the golden child. There’s an illusion of fairness, but I am viewed far less favorably than he is despite his numerous crimes and transgressions. They are usually spread far enough apart that things “reset” and I seem to be the only one who understands how messed up he is. Nothing sticks to him. He his held in positive regard no matter what he does, and I am held in negative regard no matter what I do.

I am doing online college because it’s cheaper than in-person. I am worried about accruing too much debt because I am anxious about my ability to pay it off in the future.

U.S. Sorry for the late reply.

My original plan was a CS degree and try for a remote job, but with the direction the tech sector has been going, I’m not sure that I like my odds. I’m looking at possible majors I can pivot towards, but I haven’t decided yet. I’ve just started classes, so I don’t have that much of a sunk cost yet.

The big issue is that I have a condition called POTS that gives me brain fog and can cause fainting if I sit or stand up for more than a couple minutes. That makes it difficult to do most in-person jobs. So I have to find something that works with that and will still exist in the U.S. economy once I graduate.

I haven’t. I’m worried that doing that would be taken as an act of aggression and would lead to retaliation.

Also, my brother hasn’t physically attacked me yet, not since we were teenagers. He’s just being threatening and intimidating right now. But I also know that he suffers from fits of uncontrollable rage and has the capacity to kill. In one episode where he killed his girlfriend’s cat, he said that he lost control of himself and started wailing on the poor animal. I haven’t heard of him doing any premeditated violence; it always seems to happen in the moment. But he doesn’t seem to feel remorse for his victims after the fact. There is also no criminal record of the things he has done.

There is something deeply wrong with him and I think that he is a ticking time bomb.

• Fetishizes female submission and powerlessness
• Shows interest in “petite” women almost 2 feet shorter than him
• Values women for how “pretty” they look
• Says the Epstein situation “doesn’t matter”
• Likes to sneak into other people’s private spaces without consent

I gotta hand it to you God, I think you might be onto something

I’d guess they are very sexually repressed.

My dad DOES have a tendency to make an unusual amount of phallic jokes, to the point where one day I responded with “You know, it’s okay to be bi, you can just say it” and boy he did NOT like that

But i wonder why dad was upset op isint gay.

Every day, my dad liked to call me the f-slur and threaten to kill me or kick me out of the house “if he found out” I was gay. Apparently, I wasn’t in on the joke: in his head, he ALREADY KNEW I was gay, and so his words weren’t meant to prevent me from being gay, but rather to make me terrified of him.

It seems like he was angry because he lost a critical control mechanism over me and desperately sought to bring it back. I will never forget how shocked he looked when he saw me actually happy for the first time in years and I playfully deflected his insults instead of engaging with them. He sort of shut down and became depressed for a couple days before he came up with a new way to control me.

It seems that there is nothing that he and my brother hate more than my genuine happiness. Since they believe that they define who I am, how I feel, and what I am capable of, any feelings I am “not supposed” to feel will be violently crushed by them.

I am not supposed to be happy.

What has therapy been like for you? I’ve never done therapy before, and I’m kind of worried they’ll try to criticize and gaslight me into playing nice with people who I’m 90% sure are narcissists or try to get me to ignore the limitations that my health problems give me. (But then again, I can’t help but notice that I was socially conditioned to expect shame, punishment, and destructive guidance if I ask for help.)

I just thought I had to be seen as “sufficiently masculine” in order to survive. I thought that it was too dangerous to be authentic because people would constantly fight me on it. I used to see that as a universal thing, but now I’m aware that some people are vastly more tolerant than others, so you can just hang out with the ones who accept you.

Funnily enough, in my case, I couldn’t hide my “deviant” traits because they’re written all over my demeanor. Nobody has ever seen or treated me as a manly man. Not one. My gentleness is obvious no matter how much I try to suppress myself. That means that every friend or acquaintance I have ever had liked (or at the very least tolerated) something about me that I thought would be universally shunned. Theory debunked. I just ignored the evidence.

What’s the alternative? Pretend to be someone you aren’t and end up in a situation you hate where you aren’t happy?

I used to think that I had to, because I was afraid that nobody would accept me for who I was. It seems like the beliefs in my post are a last-ditch effort by my fear to hold me back (“You can’t be yourself because everyone will despise you (which also means that nobody can be attracted to you) and a small subset of people will react violently while bystanders watch.”)

My worldview over the past decade, the one that I’m actively trying to dismantle, has been that, despite having the right to free expression on paper (in the U.S.), we unfortunately live in an intolerant authoritarian culture that stifles that free expression through social shaming. Deviations from traditional masculinity, I believed, would lead to one being universally shunned in everyday settings, and may lead to severe social consequences. As you can imagine, it’s hard to change a belief if you’re too scared to challenge it (going outside, talking to people), which is why it stood for as long as it did. But now I understand that I have to challenge it because the downstream consequences are literally ruining my life.

Basically, I grew up in a right-wing echo chamber, so my brain learned to expect everyone to be intolerant of deviations from stereotypes.