Hi everyone,

How are you all doing? I’m 20 years old, attending classes and currently getting the most out of my education. I’ve been going through tough emotional times with my family for countless months, kept trying to deal with it and asked multiple people for advice, but it just hasn’t helped. The issue here is with my verbally abusive dad, and it seems like there’s nothing that I, nor the rest of my family, can do to deal with him.

He likes to yell and throw insults at us quite a lot. On top of that, try to make each of us feel like absolute garbage while at the same time feeling guilt for things that are beyond our control. He comes from a background where his family did pretty much the same to him, so now he wants to inflict all that emotional pain on us. I’m worried that there will eventually be a breaking point where either the rest of my family or I will suffer a heart attack from the stress, specially my mom, who seems to always be his main target.

Just recently he yelled at her and I in our car, for about 20 minutes straight. I don’t want to explain why, because it was for a stupid and insignificant reason. Because the car is such an enclosed space, that fact just made his yelling more ear-piercing than usual.

He basically has the mind of a child, throwing temper tantrums expecting to get away with it. And unfortunately, he does.

***I’ve reached a point in my life where if I get yelled at like this, even for 5 seconds, my mind will immediately think “oh please just stop, I can’t take this anymore, no more please no more”, and I just lose every ounce of clarity and focus. This leaves me weak to trickery. If someone puts me on the spot, I’ll immediately want to leave that situation, because all the yelling that my dad has done has made me pretty anti-social and wanting to stay away from everyone. So someone could ask me something and I’ll say something in return that’s completely wrong and unintentional, and they could use that against me for future conversations. I could give the wrong impression to someone that quickly. And usually if I tell them “sorry, now’s not a good time”, they just look at me weird and respond with something like “uh...okay?” which really frustrates me.

That brings me to another point. I have quite a lot of built-up frustration and fury, to the point where little things will sometimes cause me to just completely rip my own shirt apart. I only damage my own property, since there are no repercussions from others, the only repercussions are having to buy new shirts and wasting the time and money doing so. I would prefer to not do this, but it’s the only thing that’s helped to relieve my anger. Stress balls have made me angrier and always cause me to just toss it across the room, and THEN rip my shirt apart.

Just recently I’ve started exercising, because I need to lose weight, and fortunately I’m making progress. However, it hasn’t helped my frustration. And I sometimes get angry shortly after eating, so I can’t just exercise to get rid of that anger, since my appendix will start to hurt.

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Back to the yelling issue. Moving out isn’t a solution because that will leave my mom vulnerable to his abuse, and on top of that they’ll lose our only home, which is a 1-bedroom apartment.

I have these constant episodes of anxiety and it feels like my stomach is turning inside out. I have an appointment to speak with a psychologist next month, but that’s just way too long. And what if they aren’t able to help? The last time I went, all they did was say “okay” after every little thing I said, then told me generic things to just not think about anything that’s bothering me. Didn’t even bother to tell me *how*.

So, my anxiety is affecting my social and academic status quite dramatically, and I can’t take it anymore. I need help, seriously. My mom too, she needs just as much help.