Adoptee Story: Anonymous Fellow Adoptee

My mother was the one who was the most physically and emotionally abusive. My father was a passive-aggressive workaholic and would just avoid being home because she was emotionally abusive towards him as well. They kept the cycle of abuse that they’d grown up with going. So much gaslighting happened in my family, I was told multiple times that so much of what I would say that happened in our family, didn’t actually happen. I was told that I was just ungrateful. I was told I was a liar, that I was a horrible person and there was so much wrong with me. I was told so often that I was wrong that to this day I have doubts about being right and constantly check with others before believing I’ve made the correct choices. I became the family scapegoat. If something I said made the family look ugly to the public, I was guilty of making the family look bad. I was blamed for things that were out of my control, things people outside our family did. I was physically abused into my teen years because of things others did. My father tried to stand up to her for me but eventually he was cowed into subservience. He had married a woman who was abusive towards him just like his mother was to him. My father tried a few times too but my mother would always intervene on my brother’s side. Eventually, my father gave up trying to be a parent to us.  My mother was browbeating my father until she died. He enabled her behavior and was a silent accomplice. 

My brother would find something that terrified me to the point I would cry and have a mental breakdown because I was so scared. My family would look at me like I was the one overreacting and encourage his behavior because he was “just being an older brother”. He would terrify me with mice, dead or alive because I have a rodent phobia. He would drive wildly and erratically in a way to scare me. He would throw me outside into the snow and lock me out of the house in the winter and laugh as I froze. He’d make up stories about how I had misbehaved or hadn’t done my chores. My parents thought he was just a brother tormenting his sister, just a normal familial squabble between siblings. They didn’t want to acknowledge his behavior. Eventually my brother would yell and scream at my father until he’d get what he wanted. My mother usually sided with my brother.

When I told my mother that my adoptive brother was sexually, physically and emotionally abusive, I was told I was a horrible person to lie like that and because I made such a horrible story up. I told her how he was sexually abusive towards me, how he would threaten to kill me with a gun to my head or would choke me saying how he always wanted to see and feel what it would be like to kill someone. He would wake me up at night crying and drunk, nude in his room. Sometimes with a gun in his hand, sometimes in his mouth. For some reason I would still comfort him, help him into bed, and kept his secret. I was so programmed to be the victim that I would still help one of my abusers.

I confronted him years later after I was extremely intoxicated and he started crying and threatened to commit suicide right there in the parked car in front of his wife.