Hello! It's hard for me to start my story, but I hope to be able to tell myself what weighs on me.
When I was 6 years old, my mother went abroad.
One morning I woke up, she was gone. Then my sister and I had the prudence not to ask my father, who had been walking like a storm cloud for months, what exactly was going on.
In the beginning, our grandmothers looked after us, helped at home and cooked, but since they also had their own care and own house, at one point all the housework was left for me and my sister.
Then, and now, he was a workaholic to the marrow of his bones - he got up at 5 in the morning and came back at 19 in the evening, talked constantly about his work, lived for it.
When he got home, he expected us to set the table and wait for him to have dinner together. My sister and I, who is 2 years older, we're expected to listen all night to his problems at work, to his colleagues, and to the on-duty question "What were you doing at school?" We had to answer "Nothing, especially. Everything was okay. "
God forbid we had a problem and we were stupid to share, you start shouting and insulting that we are crazy, that we only bring him problems, and he already has a lot. That's why we were good at school and my sister and I were excellent. Because he often shouted and insulted us anyway - why something is not ironed properly, because the stove does not burn / then we had a fireplace /, why eating is unsalted, why we are not nice and a plate and so on. Only I know how many times he shouted at me all night, and how I hated him screaming with a full throat because I failed to light the fireplace.
I was 9, my sister was 11, and we were both generally afraid to go home. There were days when he wasn't muttering and screaming, but they were so few that I can barely remember them, and the worst part was that we never knew what would happen. How it was dependent on whether or not he had problems during the day. He never told us that he loved us, he never showed us that he supported us, I tried my best to prove to him that I deserved my parent, my own father to love me and be proud of me. But it never happened. With us, he bragged to his colleagues and acquaintances about what his daughters were like, how they coped, and what a good family we were. The reality was different. Let's not forget that we never had personal space, every night when we went to bed he would invade us, there would be no phone calls without talking through you. When I felt vulnerable and cried at a movie, or my sister, we would be ridiculed for being weak, for not being able to cry like that and not showing ourselves to people.
My sister was interested in psychology much earlier than me and told me that he is a narcissist, that is why he cannot love, support, teach you how to deal with your emotions, because he himself is not capable. It made sense because he was the child of divorced parents with a lot of quarrels and dramas and a very authoritarian parent figure, but I didn't want to believe it.
Because at 19, I was trying to make him see that I was good enough, constantly sacrificing my happiness to prove myself to him. To prove to him that I was not defective, as he always made me feel.
And at the moment I feel constant initial guilt, a side of conflicts, rather a defense of my position, because every time I mentally return to past quarrels with him and I feel defenseless. I do not feel comfortable in my relationships with others and I am constantly looking for some external validation.
There was a time when I did everything for others and I couldn't list five things I did for myself. Nobody really knows me.
Now, I'm distancing myself from my friends and trying to figure out how to move forward? How can I create my own values and learn to receive validation from myself and not from others? How to get rid of the past and guilt?
A confused 19-year-old girl