I've never really told anyone my fully story before and just discovered this sub Reddit, so, here I go:
Lisa (fake name) and Jack (biological father) divorced when I was two. I was coached by Lisa that my then-stepmother was the devil, and Jack was a horrible person who was responsible for everything bad in my life. Lisa then met my stepdad (now legal father) Carl, and within a few years they got married and Jack handed over his legal rights as a father to him and overnight. Him and the rest of my massive extended family completely disappeared from my life, and all I was told was that I wasn't going to see him anymore.
Lisa would guilt and shame me with anything I did that she didn't fully agree with. I recently learned from old family friends that when I was very young, she would restrict me from certain foods in an unhealthy way, which I'm now coming to understand where my guilty feelings come from whenever I would have anything sugary, and my instinct to sneak and hide it. One time on vacation when I was 10, we went for a walk and I apparently said something she didn't like, so she said "If you don't do as I say, I won't tell you what to eat anymore." For whatever reason, that translated in my 10-year-old brain as an awful thing, so I was forced into apologizing. Later that day when Carl's mother offered me cookies, Lisa, sitting right behind her, glared at me in disapproval, so I politely rejected the offer. Looking back on it now, those instances were extremely bizarre and not normal.
I started realizing something was wrong with the way she was treating me when I was about 13. After overhearing her drunken verbal abuse to Carl, I came downstairs and told him to divorce her, but he was too deep in denial then. I was simply labeled as an angsty teenage brat who would "rebel" against her loving, generous mother who loved her daughter more than anything. My entire family believed this too, and would never accept anything I would say as truth. Lisa was a very pretty, tiny woman, which made it VERY easy for people to underestimate her, and she was very good at hiding her tracks and placing blame on me. I grew up from age 13-21 stuck in a family that would brag about how amazing of kid I was (I didn't drink/smoke/run away, etc), and how honest and loyal I was to people, yet would turn a deaf ear every time I defended myself against Lisa, which always made me look like your typical teenage brat. Constant remarks from Lisa would be things like, "Where did I go wrong raising you?" I felt unheard, backed into a corner, angry, and gaslit for over a decade.
She blamed the death of my dog on Carl, saying that he refused to pay for her treatment, which was 100% false. One time when I was 12 I found Jack's email and wanted to message him-- I was never told what really happened or why Jack chose to give Carl full custody of me, so I was curious. Lisa came into the room, went down on her knees and dramatically yelled to me that he raped her, so "why would you ever want to reach out to a rapist?!" She then coached me to write a mean email to him... I don't really remember exactly what I wrote, but it wasn't good. I found out years later that Jack never raped her, and he was actually an okay guy, despite some major personal problems. Looking back, that situation was all entirely coached by Lisa.
When my sister Leah was born in 2007 (I'm 17 years older than her), it got so much worse. I could see Lisa milking up the entire pregnancy as a way to get attention turned to her, which made me want nothing to do with it/I tried not to go near her at all, but it was the best way for her to control me as well. Normally a pregnancy would, naturally, be about the mother and her journey, but the way Lisa lapped up the attention in any and every way she could was sickening, and all of it targeted toward Carl and I. I have a fear of holding babies (they're so fragile), and when I respectfully explained this to Lisa, I saw a fire in her eyes as she thrusted the baby into my arms and yelled, "You WILL hold your sister whether you like it or not." One time when she came into my room holding Leah, she slammed my laptop on my fingers after I had asked her to leave, as she had been yelling. She's also yelled at me in front of Leah that she doesn't want Leah to know I exist, she doesn't want her to know that I'm ever in the house, or that she even has a sister because of how bad of a person I am. That was all motivated by me explaining to Lisa about my anxiety of holding infants.
She was a gymnastics coach at my high school and used that as a way to keep tabs on my only form of social life. When I asked her to give me space and freedom to enjoy the only thing in school that I liked (I had no social life), she told me that "she was there first" and had every right to keep volunteering as a coach. I suffered for four years watching her try to befriend the few friends that I had, and was bizarrely awkward about hanging out with them and seeking their acceptance. Looking back on it now, I can see that she was trying to make up for her horrible experience in high school by using MY own experience to her advantage, even when it hurt me. I was miserable. She would even subtly talk negatively about me to my friends in a manner that's really not appropriate for an adult to do.
I worked at a summer camp for 4+ years as a counselor, and would spend 3 months there while driving back home every now and then during my days off. In 2010, when I was at the peak of resisting and rejecting her heinous behavior towards me more and more, she turned my bedroom into a guest bedroom without warning-- repainted the walls, removed my bed sheets, etc. I was heartbroken, especially since my family knew how sensitive I've always been about having a place to call home. For years she'd always like to remind me that whenever I visited Jack on the weekends when I was younger, he never bothered to give me my own bedroom (I'd sleep on couches) and I should absolutely hate him for not making me feel at home or giving me my own space. The irony of her doing the same thing to me later on still confuses me. That Christmas Eve when her side of the family was here for the holidays, she got so angry at me (for whatever reasons) that she locked me out of the house in the snow with all of my food in the refrigerator (I was training for a Cirque du Soleil audition) and claimed that she would call the police on me if I didn't leave. I snuck back into my room from the side entrance and hid in my room all of Christmas. This happened more than once for reasons I don't understand.
At the end of the summer when I was about to come home from working at camp for the last 3 months, Carl sent me a warning text to let me know that Lisa was planning to ambush me and kick me out of the house the day I got back from camp. (Carl was being emotionally abused and was in a form of denial. The only way he could manage to help me was letting me know about things like this in secret.) In response, I came home in the middle of the night and packed anything and everything I could into my suitcases and car, and waited until morning. When I heard Lisa leave the house in the morning, I sprung out of bed and used the next two hours sprinting back and forth from my car to the house and stuffing anything I could fit into the car. I was dripping in sweat and exhausted, and knew she could be back at any moment. It was one of the most satisfying moments of my life driving away from that house for good without her realizing that I had moved out before she had a chance to tell me to leave. When she texted me that I need to leave, I responded with, "What do you mean? I'm living with Carl." (They were divorcing at the time and he had moved out.)
My dream has been to get into Cirque du Soleil since I was a kid. Whenever I'd show videos of my heroes in certain shows and how I aspired to be like them when I was older, Lisa would sarcastically and very clearly respond with, "Wow, those must be the BEST PERFORMERS IN THE ENTIRE WORLD to be able to be in a show like that," and saying other very obvious things to hint that I wasn't talented or strong enough to ever get into the company. Her apparent claims to knowing what it takes to be in those shows came from her gymnastics background in college, but it was that much more discouraging to hear this from my own mother. This went on for years until I left the house.
In college when I was struggling with the "freshman 15," I told her that I was going to abstain from sugars for the rest of the semester. Within a week, she sent me a care package of two dozen brownies. When I came home during my college break, I said something apparently not to her liking, so she ran upstairs, grabbed the "Proud Parent of NYU Student" and said, "See this? This means NOTHING to me." And threw it in the trash. Another example of her "gift giving" was weeks after I had had a conversation explaining my disgust for animal fur, and told her how upset I was about how they were essentially tortured. A few weeks later for my birthday, she gets me a very expensive fur coat, and quickly said, "If you don't want it, I'll take it." Stuff like this was constant, and always unapologetically in front of Carl and my little sister, and her extended family, who are still in complete denial that there's anything mentally wrong with her.
My parents had given me a car for my 17th birthday, and the title was understandably in her name since I was so young back then. Being a newer driver, I'd sometimes get parking tickets for an overrun meter, or accidentally forget to move my car when parking in NYC. Anytime even the smallest thing came up (and it was not often), Lisa would grasp it as a chance to shame and guilt me for being a horrible and irresponsible child driver. Any meter ticket would get forwarded to her email or sent as a letter, and she would jump on it immediately. By 2013 when I was living in Chicago, far away from her grasp, she would still text me about the smallest infractions. The car was her last remaining connection to me, and the only excuse she had left to text or call me.
At one point she demanded that I "give her car back in 24 hours," which was not possible since she was in Connecticut and I was in Illinois. A few weeks later I had to drive back to CT to visit friends and she somehow found out, as she has a habit of Facebook stalking me and making up fake accounts. The next morning I got a call from the police telling me that if I don't hand over Lisa's car to her, they'll be forced to arrest me. Lisa had gone to the police station to falsely accuse me of stealing her property, all knowing that Carl was in California with no way to help me while I was alone in his house. As I was on the phone with them, I could hear her in the background pretending to cry. I told Carl, and the moment he threatened to Lisa that he would stop paying the car insurance, she texted me saying that she "called it off, sweetie." It was then that I told her to never speak to me again, and that was the last thing I would ever tolerate from her in my life.
The next morning, she texted me that she was outside and coming into the house to drop off laundry and to walk the dog, "so you should probably go upstairs if you don't want to see me." I told her to leave the laundry on the porch and that I would walk the dog, and to leave and stop encouraging unwanted communication, since I had JUST told her less than 12 hours ago to never contact me again after she had tried to get her own daughter arrested for reasons I'll never understand. I locked the door, and that's when the yelling started. She would not stop banging on the door and yelling, and exclaiming random things to me like, "You're hurting your baby sister!" in desperation. She kept using the dog as an excuse to come in, so I took the dog, opened the door a crack, and the dog ran out to her before she had a chance to push the door in. It was a horrifying moment realizing the insanity of my own mother in those few seconds of opening the door--- she was pressed against the door, and as soon as she realized what I was doing, she started to scream with her eyes bulging, trying to force herself in as forcefully as she could. I slammed it and pressed my body against the door so she couldn't break it down, and her screaming escalated. (I had to record the entire thing on my computer's photo booth in case it turned ugly, and so my family would finally believe me.)
There was no logical reason for her to continue yelling and pounding on the door as I was staying silent the entire time/not instigating, and she was starting to scare me. I ended up, ironically, calling the police to get her off the property. Turned out to be the same police I was on the phone with the other day, and they finally realized what had been going on and said that if she came back they would arrest her. I haven't seen her since, but apparently she's had thyroid cancer and even tried to use that as a manipulation tactic. Last text she wrote to me a few months later was, "Hi, I just wanted to let you know that I have cancer." I responded with, "That's terrible, I hope it works out for you." and blocked her number. She still to this day tries to use Leah as a means of getting to me, and it's been very hard to have a relationship with Leah at all since Lisa is so insanely controlling and overbearing with her, just as she was with me. It's bizarre because I am seeing exactly the way I was raised, except now it's with Leah. Lisa and Carl divorced when Leah was 3, which was exactly the same age I was when Lisa and Jack divorced.
Since escaping her grasp, I've developed an autoimmune condition that flares up whenever I'm under a lot of stress. It was a combination of genetic predisposition and my body simply not being able to withstand stress anymore, so it shut down. I still struggle with PTSD and anxiety, and physically shake when under a lot of stress when it involves other people. I'm so much healthier and happier since 2013 and am on the road to remission, but it's still quite a ways to go. I can only hope that Leah gets through this with the support of Carl, because I am physically unable to be around Lisa without having a PTSD response and activating my condition. Hopefully Leah will understand when she is older and can see for herself just like I did.
Also: I got myself into one of the top professional circus training facilities in the world, and am in Cirque du Soleil's international database under a special file called "future talent." Suck it, Lisa.
Thanks for listening <3
Submitted January 29, 2017 at 11:06AM by throwaway4444444442 http://ift.tt/2jDqQiC offmychest
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