#everyone's an abuser or a gaslighter or something else and those terms are thrown around so easily they lose the weight of their meaning

[theghostofashton]

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[defiantsuggestions]

I feel like I can't really say I was abused because it's not as bad as it used to be. When I was younger I wasn't allowed to eat until the house was spotless, my dad regularly hit and spanked me and put me in a headlock when I did some normal little kid thing like refuse to take a nap, I would walk into my room and find my stuff destroyed and thrown around because my dad was angry, my dad even tried to exorcise the "autism demon" out of me, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

As I got older it evolved more into just verbal stuff. Slurs, insults, screaming, gaslighting, etc. Not that that stuff didn't happen when I was younger as well, it's just that by the time I was about 15 he stopped causing any physical harm to me. And he says I deserve it all and everyone else has it much worse and no one else would be able to love me or put up with me and I still believe it most of the time. I did some really dumb things when I was younger (as in 12/13) that my dad still holds against me in any arguments we have.

Anyway, sometimes I feel like I don't deserve to be upset because he's at least changed a bit; and his parents were abusive, so I feel like I owe him sympathy.

Sorry this took so long to answer, it's a lot to cover and I have a few things I want to say.

1: if you are uncomfortable with the term "abuse" you don't have to use it. Go at your own pace, it's up to you. However, you do need to recognize the harm caused in order to process your trauma.

2: if you're asking for permission to call this abuse, ("I feel I cant say I was abused" reads more as not being sure if it counts than it reads as discomfort to me, but I wanted to cover that base too), then yes, what was done to you absolutely counts as abuse.

Abuse is what happens when someone with power hurts someone else, routinely, and the victim is unable to escape due to financial reasons, due to law, due to physical restraint, or due to conditioning.

Abuse can be physical. Abuse can be sexual. Abuse can be emotional and mental. Abuse can be financial.

A parent routinely doing things that hurts their child, for example, is abuse. It is impossible for the child to get away. There's a power dynamic being exploited and nothing the child can do about it.

To use another example; a romantic couple is abusive if one holds all the financial power and verbally assults the other on a regular basis, ignoring all protest because, well, they have the financial power and their victim can't leave. They can scream and yell insults all day, utterly distroy their partners self esteem, and there isn't a way to escape that.

Another example; a teen in school getting bullied by other teens. The other teens have numbers, and the victim is legally required to be there, and if the adults don't do anything about it and just let the victim suffer then that victim has suffered abuse.

3: if an abuser grows less abusive over time, or otherwise stops being abusive altogether, that doesn't make their previous actions no longer abusive. Your dad stopped hitting you- that doesn't make the fact that he used to hit you go away. Destroying your things, the physical assault, refusing to feed you. These things don't stop being abusive acts he did to you just because he's no longer doing them.

4: Verbal abuse is abuse. Screaming slurs at you and claiming you deserve it and gaslighting you is abuse.

5: Saying that no one else would be able to put up with you or love you? Abuse. My abusers used to do that, my abusers would threaten to throw me out on the streets whenever they were in a bad mood, to make me so afraid of abandonment that I'd put up with them and stop complaining. It's abuse. And it's awful, completely awful that he says those things to you. The fact that you believe it, that's something he did to you. He made you believe it. It's not true, there are billions of people out there and he has no fucking say in who would love you or not.

6: Being a victim of abuse is not an excuse to be abusive yourself. I was abused heavily, for decades, for what will ultimately be half of my overall life. If I go out and beat up a child and claim that I'm allowed to do it because I myself was abused, I'd be a terrible fucking person.

Your father being a victim himself in no way excuses his treatment of you.

7: You are not obligated to feel sympathy to your abuser. You do not owe someone who hurts you sympathy. If you feel sympathy regardless, if it is not something you can help feeling, remember that factually he does not deserve sympathy and you owe him nothing.

You're allowed to feel sympathy if that's what you feel, but don't let it cloud your judgment of what he has done.

8: You deserve to be upset. You have every right to be upset. I don't care that he's improved. He physically abused you and he is currently emotionally and verbally abusing you and the fact that you want to think it's okay that he does this is a symptom of being abused since childhood. He did this to you.

9: trying to exercise the "autism demon" out of you is shitty and ableist.

10: Overall, the things that your dad has done and is doing to you are, frankly, unforgivable, and you deserve to be angry at him for it. You deserve to be upset.

What you deserve, anon, is to be treated better. You deserve to be safe and loved and away from his abuse. He hurts you, regularly. Screaming slurs and insults and gaslighting you is hurting you. You don't deserve to be hurt. You deserve to be treated better than this, anon.

And I'm so, so sorry you've been treated this way.

You deserve better.