NOTE: can TRIGGER, so be careful. Thanks.

Sorry for the long post:

Today while I was at home, trying to relax and clear my mind of the daily stresses, I found myself sinking back into the past again and remembering things that I probablly would have been better off forgetting.

But even with the anxiety of these past memories making me feel extremely uncomfortable at the time, I did come across a startling realization:

About the time my baby brother was born, the situation between me and my step father was beginning to spiral out of control. The abuse, I believe, was at its worse, or at least it was getting to the point where it was visibly affecting me.

My stepfather use to take my brother up stairs to my room and just stand in the door way and stare at me.

For a long time he wouldn't say a word, but just stand there in the door way with my baby stepbrother in his arms and give me this disgusted look.

The anxiety would build in me to the point that I was on the verge of screaming, or crying, or both. Usually when my step father came to my room, some "punishment" was going to be issued, and my "punishments", if you would say, often fell under the term of abuse.

Sometimes I think he liked watching me gradually collaspe under the weight of my fear of him.

During these times though, when he had my baby stepbrother in his arms, my stepfather would suddenly break the silence and start talking.

He wouldn't be talking to me, but he would be talking to my baby brother, as if he could understand what was coming out his mouth.

He would tell my brother that I was a nobody that I wasn't going any where. He said that if I was going somehwere, "it would probably be to jail or some loony bin."

I would just sit there at my desk, powerless to make him stop, or question his motives for having a "secret" conversation with my infant brother while I was right there.

He would go on, telling my brother (while looking at me) how the "evil" inmates in jail and the "evil" doctors in the hospitals would take away whatever dignity I had left and leave me with less than I had at home (which I can say wans't much).

My stepfather would paint these horrible pictures in my head of what the jails and "loony bins" would do to me, and how what he did do me at home was nothing in comparision to what could happen.

I remember dwelling on these things for hours at a time, terrifying myself to death with all these vivid images that I think I was far too young for.

I think what hurt me the most was that my younger brother was there...hearing it all (it didn't matter if he could understand it).

My brother hearing how much of a criminal and nutcase I was made me feel awful. This hurt me more than any beating could have.

Even though all this happened five or six years ago, I today still have this unnatural fear of prisons and hospitals.

Even though I know its completely irrational to think that I will be thrown away into some dungeon like prison or some prison like mental hospital, I still have this intangible wall in my head that makes me believe if I discuss some of the things I think (my personal feelings), I will be labeled "crazy" and be put away somewhere; becoming the nobody that my stepfather predicted I would be.

Sometimes this wall keeps me from discussing some things that I should with my T...sometimes it keeps me from showing any anguish at all.

Now if only I could explain this to my T without breaking down into silence...the type of silence that I think my stepfather casted over me those years ago.

It's a good feeling to know why you act the way you act, but at the same time, it's crushing to know that someone had so much control over the way I thought that I can't speak when I need to the most.


Just something I thought that I needed to "write" down.