Ask Lemmy

I'll (23M) try to summarize:

• Mom and Dad were authoritarian parents who never gave us comfort or affection. They were very impatient and demanding. Dad would physically and verbally abuse us. Mom would do nothing to intervene. Even when he threw a goddamn toddler across the living room.

• By the time I was born, my parents didn't appear to have any romantic or sexual chemistry. It was a constant hot-cold dynamic of fighting and silence.

• My parents had fragile egos; any criticism would lead to rage and punishment. Brother turned out the same way, but his anger would lead to violence.

• Since I was the youngest, I was bullied by Dad and Brother. I was shamed for being sensitive to the abuse and wanting comfort.

• Brother would easily become explosively enraged and take it out on his environment, screaming and breaking things. Mom and Dad made fun of his reactions and didn't care about his feelings.

• Dad was overtly hateful and would openly advocate for genocide for any country or group of people he didn't like.

• From a young age I became intensely sexually attracted to receiving nurture and affection. This created far fewer awkward moments than one might think, thanks to the environment I lived in, but it led to paralyzing insecurities later since it was a behavior my parents never exhibited and mainstream pornography didn't showcase it.

• I also became insecure about my empathy and desire to care for others because none of my family members modeled this behavior.

• The moment Brother discovered YouTube (probably 7-10 years old), he immediately looked up videos of characters being set on fire and melting in a grotesque fashion. When Dad allowed Brother to play a superhero game, he spent the entire time killing all of the civilian NPCs and laughing at their deaths instead of following the game's objective.

• Even without my low self-esteem, expressing myself authentically in school as a kid was risky because my bullies would relay anything I said and did back to Brother, creating a decentralized surveillance network.

• I believed that nobody would ever like me because I was sensitive and wanted care and was shamed for those things. I struggled with masculine gender roles and felt like I was unwanted by the world. I became suicidal and wanted other people to hurt me.

• I was scared of expressing my feelings and ideas because I thought this would be met with violence if I said or expressed anything that my family didn't like. I learned to be stone-faced and speak as little as possible unless I saw a strategy in doing otherwise. I pretended to listen to and care about my other family members so they wouldn't kill me. The surveillance wherever I went ensured that this authentic expression was impossible in-person.

• Around age 13, I retreated into solitude. I had a seemingly unexplainable impulse as a young teen to bypass my family's totalitarian control of information and self-expression by securing Internet access on other devices or bypassing parental controls. I befriended people in chat rooms and felt like it was safe to be me, though I still struggled with socializing immensely. I educated myself about everything I wasn't allowed to learn about and slowly learned how to talk to people. This outside contact is what made me feel less isolated and allowed me to learn about how pro-social humans think and act, though my sense of normalcy was still distorted by my immediate environment.

• Once I suspected I was being abused and made a futile attempt to call it out, my mother taught me to fear Child Protective Services and never tell anyone about the conditions at home or else CPS would put me into a worse place.

• We had a dog, but I had to witness Dad beating the poor thing every fucking day while Mom pretended nothing was happening.

• My parents insisted on me keeping the bedroom door unlocked even when they knew I might be jerking off. Once, my Dad forcibly unlocked my door while I was masturbating to see what porn I was watching, something he used as blackmail 7 years later.

• I had to reconstruct a vision of what love looked like through my vivid sexual fantasies and verify with online friends that they have similar feelings.

• Brother developed a worldview in which he is a god and his seminal fluid makes him powerful. He explicitly wants to "dominate" women and "destroy their egos" and he cites random reoccurring numbers and symbols as signs that he is the chosen one. He dreams of living in a mansion with dozens of wives and hundreds of kids. He says that relationships built on cooperation and compromise are too complicated and it's more practical to take absolute control.

• Brother, seeking an outlet for his rage, went on to torture and kill a bird and display its corpse in a tree and beat his ex-girlfriend's cat to death. He fantasizes about shooting up peaceful protests and believes that emotional men are the downfall of civilization. When Dad asked him if he would be willing to kill me, he said yes, thinking I couldn't hear. Most recently, Brother went into a destructive rage and threatened to kill Dad with his knife. I stayed holed up in my room and prepared to jump out of the bedroom window if I had to make a run for it.

• Mom pearl-clutches and threatens to withhold sustenance from me if I criticize her, but will allow Brother to scream at her and command her and won't even protest.

Earlier this week, I finally woke up and saw that all of my family members are batshit insane and incapable of change; there is zero logic to their behavior and all of my insecurities were me indirectly blaming myself for it. I took some short trips out into the real world and found out that pro-social and progressive people are everywhere. Much of my anxiety lifted and I could suddenly see examples of people loving and caring for people like me everywhere. I finally felt like people could love me and I felt genuinely happy FOR THE FIRST TIME because I realized the world is WAY less hellish than I thought at first and it's worth the effort to escape. I accepted so many things as normal because I was too scared to talk to anyone in the real world to challenge my beliefs.

Now, I'll have to risk my life to escape, but the chance for freedom beats the slow death of depression. Even if I am killed in my attempt to find freedom, I don't think anything is more painful than submission. I will die at the happiest point of my life.

Unfortunately, I'm very suspicious of men because of the whole violence and homicide thing. I want to know how common men like this are in the general population and what signs I should look out for. Although, since most murders are committed by those the victim knows, I have a feeling that the men who I have to worry the most about are the ones who live under the same roof.

So I'm curious how fucked this is. Worst 20% of households? 5%? 1%? Should I expect people with trauma like this to be walking around everywhere, or did I genuinely win the shit lottery?