Hi guys. So I am an 18 year old pre med student and I am going to have my entry exam to medical school in a couple months.. Now a little background -The issue is that my father is emotionally, verbally and physically abusive. He often threatens to pull us(my brother and I) out of school because “it’s my money”, “you are living at my mercy” etc etc. He is the classic narcissistic, hypocrite parent. He is tyrannical, unpredictable and never really made an effort to be a parent except paying the bills. I mean, there have been points of time where he got our ages wrong on plane tickets etc. He hasn’t physically abused me, but he has hit my brother. How extreme is the magnitude of physical abuse? Well, once my brother ate cuppa-noodles in place of a balanced meal and my mother was reprimanding him for it, and that exact moment, my father came back from work and then he flew into a rage and said “there is never peace in this house”(which is not true). After which he proceeded to drag my brother(14 year old) down the stairs and kept hitting him. My brother ended up with a perforated eardrum and several bruises on his face and arms. The next day he came to my brother with tears in his eyes and said “please forgive me, I was drunk”. This is just one incidence, there have been others. Did I mention my father is a doctor? Now coming to his relationship with my mother. He is a disgusting husband, and you can go ahead and check all boxes on emotional, verbal and some physical abuse(I have recently come to know that he hit my mother when she was pregnant), I do not know if there has been sexual abuse in their relationship. The problem is that he thrives on conflict, feeds on it. And ever since I was a child, he goes off periodically on my mother, finding faults in her “if you can’t make your husband happy, what have you accompilished in life?” She is a doctor too. He unjustly accuses her of neglecting him which is not true. Now, my father’s lifeblood is attention, he will get hold of the mic at someone’s wedding and proceed to give a speech without being asked to, basically he can not tolerate attention not being on him. So, ever since I was a child, whenever he went off on my mother, he would make me sit in the room and listen. In the beginning it seemed so fascinating, he seemed like god, the man with the power and the charm berating my mother. But in the past couple years I have realised that that was so wrong on so many levels, I can’t even begin on that. But fortunately, I’ve made it relatively unscathed so far and plan to seek psychological assistance once I go to college(fingers crossed, in a different city). But for the time being, when he blows off on my mother, like today he walked off in the morning and threatened to not come back(he’s done a lot of these, he always comes back, proceeds to scream and scream at my mother for an hour or two, regains calm and acts like nothing happened from the next day, until he does it again) it really affects me badly. Like I had this great study rhythm going with the revision and everything and now I haven’t been able to concentrate for the last 3 hours. And I live in India and the education system is well, not that pedagogically superior like that in the USA or UK, and here the score on the entry exam is the final word on whether you get into med school or not(no interviews or essays are taken). So the score is paramount. Since the exam is just in a couple months, and you can’t retake it for another year, I really need to focus. Because if I do not get a top score, I probably won’t get a college in the city I want and I am dead scared of having to go to a college in my hometown and live under this tyrannical man’s roof. But even then I find it so hard to concentrate after he creates these periodic(twice a month approx) scenes. So, I have two months left to go, I’ve made it pretty well this far, but now I need help. Can you guys suggest some ways I can stop going into flashbacks and focus on my study? Like block it out temporarily? Just for two months? Thanks. And thanks for reading this loooooong thing.