Keeping Me Scared; Is This Abuse?

MtnTime2896 · 02:58 PM

My dad kept me scared. I don't know why, maybe he liked it, or maybe he just didn't know how to stop terrorizing me in different ways. Who knows?

Threats of physical violence? Sure, why not throw that into the mix, but he did more than that , that has me wondering(besides I'd rather not even attempt to refer to a single time he threatened me). This is one of the areas that are so confusing for me. When he was drinking and he'd take me with him to go to his friends for a "get together" he'd get wasted. Really, hardcore fall on your face drunk. Then, sure enough, it was time to drive nearly an hour back home. When he would drive, he did surprisingly well; if you called going eighty in a thirty-five residential and almost driving us into on-coming traffic doing "well". He was decent at keeping it straight and when he wasn't I would tell him. He'd laugh and he'd say, "Why are you so scared?" and he'd start swerving the car like crazy and joke about driving us off of the road (which was a cliff in a specific area). He'd laugh harder and harder the more terrified I became. Drinking and post-sobriety, he would run into my room late at night screaming at me to get up and proceed to "freak out" that my sister or brother or whoever the ****, was in some sort of accident/danger/abducted what have you. It'd scare the **** out of me and I'd get up terrified and calling said person, only for them to answer and say, "Oh, I'm fine. Dad pissed me off so I left." Dad would be sitting back smoking a cigar and tell me, "Now tell them to get their *** back here." When I was really small he'd convince me that I was going to be killed by monsters and such; whatever, not a big deal. As I grew older, it was "Get up, there's someone outside." I'd get up and grab a gun and run outside to meet him; he'd laugh and be on his cellphone, like it was some ****ing game that was so hilarious that he scared me again. To this day, he over-exaggerates car accidents, hospital visits and **** with my mom over text to scare me into calling him and asking what's happened. "Haha, nothing, it's fine."

I can't even tell you how many other things he's done. All I know is, he laughs when I'm afraid and then looks proud as hell over it for a couple hours and then he has to pick a fight with my mom, my brother or me. I don't know if any of this can be classified as any type of abuse, other than the threats of violence, and yes it did get violent a few times, but he wasn't the physically abusive one in my life; that belong(ed) to two other people. I'm at war with myself and others who know about this about whether these things are abusive or he's just a ****. I can't place it in my mind because when I think of abuse, I think of the classics; to the same token, I swore I was never abused right up until last year around March.