Madisgram; I haven't lived with my parents for seven years, and at the point that I left, I would have gone completely crazy if I hadn't. Even when things have looked dire and I wasn't sure where I would live, moving back in with my parents is absolutely not an option. I'll do a lot of things before I'd ever live there again.

He is, and always has been, absolutely maddening. He actually grabbed me and spanked me once when I was 18 years old for something I said, I don't even remember what it was, but I laughed... I was thinking, "are you serious?" what a ridiculous thing to do. He always used scare tactics when we were kids, and obviously, he was a big scary person when we were little. But we got so jaded by the time our early teens hit, we were no longer afraid of him... well, we were afraid, we were just tired of being afraid and resigned to it rather than fighting it. He'd make horrible grimacing faces, even make threatening moves or say he would hit us, but didn't (not me, anyway). We laughed at his tempers, and he turned us into the bad guys, and we just went "OK, I'm a bad guy," basically. We defied him to do something worse, kind of masochistic. It never stopped hurting, though. Mostly, I was trying to figure out "why" and how I could make it all better, on my own, for the entire family, when no one else tried at all, and I was exhausted. That's how I ended up in psychiatric care at 14, but there's a whole different can of worms. Once, when he was being really cruel to me and twisting my words around into something horrible and every single thing I said became something it wasn't, I banged my mug on the table and the handle broke off (I wasn't trying to break it, I was just losing my mind not being able to understand why he was doing this to me and trying to explain to him, over and over, in a way that he couldn't mutilate every idea), so he tackled me onto the floor and wouldn't let me up. There are only two people in the world who have ever made me feel completely insane and powerless, and those are my father and the man I almost married when I was 19. Thank goodness I'm not in either of those situations anymore, and hopefully never will be again.

Those are all good tips. My brother has always handled this stuff a lot better than I have. I was always hoping for my father's understanding, and hoping that he would just be honest about his feelings instead of making everything into something convoluted so we could actually communicate, and it hurt that it never happened. But my brother let it roll off. I don't know how he does it. But I'm trying to learn how to do what he does, and those tips are a good thing to add to my repertiore of defense strategies. I guess it's like mental Judo. Anger does me no service, and while I'm still upset about the way things were, it's almost like a chapter has closed and I want to do things differently now. The realization that all of these things make sense if they are looked at as a disorder somehow makes it easier for me to deal with; knowing that I am powerless means I don't have to try to fix it anymore. And I'm feeling better about that. That's been a common theme for me lately, learning to let go, and stop trying to help everyone else when I'm the one who needs to dig out for the first time in my life. Actually talk about me when I go to therapy. It's just dealing with him when I have no other choice that's the problem, because staying away from him certainly makes me feel better. I just don't know how to cope with the rude things he says, it's so hard to ignore, especially when he's saying things that he knows are bothering me, or someone else (like my mom) on purpose. I have realized that trying to explain how the things he says and does make me or other people feel will be fruitless, and only lead to more pain.

Thanks for your responses, guys. I appreciate it. And thanks for wishing me luck on Saturday I'm not going to put myself in this position again if I can help it at all.