hey. for you to have done that... i'm fairly sure you would have picked that up from somewhere. little kids are pretty good at imitating. imitating parents especially. it is possible that your father did that to punish you, but it could also be the case that you picked it up from seeing your father do that to punish your brother.

> It had to be a way he abused me.

possibly... sometimes the past is one of those things that resists being neatly categorised into facts about what really happened. sometimes we resist that and force categories on regardless, but it is possible to process stuff in the present without committing oneself to facts about the past either way.

you work with feelings and desires and urges and rememberings that you have in the present. part of understanding them and moving on from them can involve initially elaborating them. the majority of people have more or less of a degree of certainty in things that are more or less accurate to the facts and more or less confabulations offered in our attempt to understand and find peace.

i think that a good therapist is able to work with someone to process this stuff without taking a stance either way on the veridicality or otherwise of memories. i also think that it is possible for a person to process their stuff without taking a stance either way on the veridicality or otherwise.

but this is of course a controversial issue and thousands would disagree with me.