Sociopaths and their changing demands

For a very long time I have been a lurker here. For over five years I have been seeing a wonderful therapist, who has told me countless times that my father was a psychopath.

People sharing about their hateful children prompted me to finally post here because if a child can still affect a parent there is no reason for me to be ashamed of not having been able, as an adult, to escape the clutches of my controlling sadistic father.

Thank you for this post about shifting goals. Until reading it today I have felt like a complete loser in life.

My father would beat us up, and he tried to break my leg when I attempted to stop him from beating my mother up. For that I was taken out of the home. Today father would have done time in jail, back then he lied and I was put into an institution for emotionally disturbed kids. While I was there my mother took my young siblings to Germany and left me behind. I was not a teenager yet.

Now I read about and recognize it for what it was, the love bombing he did when I was in the institution.

When I lived with father my shoes were boy’s shoes because they lasted longer. My parent’s excuse was that I bit a dentist even though I do not remember ever having seen one. Father’s teeth were all taken care of yet the first time I saw a dentist was in the not so bad group home type of institution, where a lot of dental work had to be done; he was very cheap with his offspring. Yet when I was in Browndale father would come bearing gifts, even though he knew he was not allowed to visit. He knew how to make sure I would be around to know he tried to give me a guitar etc. He got suggestive lingerie to me and another time wrote me a letter with a Dear Ann Lander’s clipping of how a girl did not listen to her father and got an infection and pregnant. Many ugly insinuations came in the mail.

I ran away at the age of 15. I lived as a runaway /transient / hippie till I met my husband in Seattle. I was underage when I first met my husband and being Canadian I could not live there legally at first. We lied to my husband’s mother and told her that I was a fellow student; Dave attended the University of Washington. Those lies worked in my father’s favour in the future. I would get part time jobs from my husband Dave off the job board and make up names and Social Security numbers to be able to contribute to his mother supporting us. I truly loved Dave.

One Christmas I thought there would be no harm in calling my father to tell him I am married and happy because it would just be a long distance phone call and what harm could that do. You see my husband’s family found it strange that I did not have anyone.

A week after that fateful call my father showed up with his girlfriend and they charmed my non dysfunctional Seattle family to the point of allowing their son to move to Canada even though he had one more year of studies to complete. My father had promised to give us a house he owned in Hamilton, as a wedding gift. He also had Dave’s family convinced that their son’s education would be taken care of.

We became tenants, one of five other families of the most cramped tiniest apartment in that house. We were happy in love; therefore the size of the room did not matter. So my father moved us to Toronto and in no time we were fighting due to his meddling. My father purchased a one way ticket for Dave to go and visit his sister in the States, saying that Dave needed a holiday to get away from the stress. When dad purchased that ticket he promised Dave and me that he would get us back together again.

Immediately my father forced me to sign a postcard that said I was hitchhiking all over the continent, happy go lucky on my own while doing drugs. I forgot about that postcard till much later because I had no idea my father would send that card forward in an envelope to my aunt in Long Beach to put a California stamp on it and mail it to my father to forward to my husband’s family. When I did not hear from them my father had me convinced that Dave did not want me anymore.

After Dave was gone the goals kept getting changed. Father moved me to my uncle’s house in Toronto. I found a really good job as a cocktail waitress; I was able to find a nice apartment and live on my own from the tips alone. My father would come and collect my paycheque on paydays and deposit it in his joint bank account. I was not allowed to touch it, according to father. That job was not a place to be proud of working according to my father. Actually it was a nice place with nothing sleazy about it.

One of the times when father came to the house in Hamilton a tenant had a visitor who later told me that she knew my father had two children who were kidnapped away from him and taken to Germany (funny he never mentioned having me) and his brand of beer and cigarettes. When I asked her how she knew so much about him she said she would never forget those blue eyes when they were making love. She actually did work as a prostitute and was proud of it. But the place where I could make up to sixty dollars a day in tips legally back then was too sleazy for my father.

Father decided it was time I go to school so that was the end of that job. He took the money from the joint bank account to put a down payment on a house near High Park and he put the house in both of our names. That house became my prison because he had put my name on it.

At first I used a tiny screened in veranda facing the back yard as my living quarters then when I complained that it was not insulated he made a small ten by ten windowless room in the basement of that house to be my living quarters. I got to share the first floor kitchen with the tenants who rented the first floor. My father collected the rents and gossiped to the tenants about his wayward daughter. He taught them how to treat me.

He would come on the mornings when I had to go to school and in the basement act out drama about how he and the woman he was living with were getting along. He also played other games, think I was his entertainment and amusement. I felt as if I would not be a good daughter if I did not stay and listen. I was very late for school a lot. That first year my tuition was paid from the house income. I do not know how I survived because I had to beg whenever I needed anything and my groceries were brought when my father came, I did not even get an allowance from the house that was originally supposed to be paying for itself and my education. I remember that I did not even have a telephone while living in that house and I begged for one.

After the first semester I could see the surprise in his eyes when he saw that I was able to continue. That was when he refused to pay for the second semester saying that it would cost to much and take too long for me to make anything of myself.

So I applied for a student loan. But with the drama created in that house I could not function. When I washed the floor and the stove shocked me from the wet floor dad laughed with pleasure. If the other tenants would not have complained he had no intention of replacing that stove. Father rented to a male person who tried to rape me and after the rapist moved out he broke into the basement and then came to visit and bragged about being the one who stole my stuff. I got an English sheepdog and father promised free rent to the couple on the third floor if they would poison my dog.

Decided to work as a taxi driver after the school thing did not work out because I thought my father could not go to my place of work and demand my pay cheque. Cab drivers are self-employed in Toronto.

My father would go up north every Thanksgiving to close his cottage up. On thanksgiving I pulled a double shift driving cab and when I came home the girl from the third floor was sitting on the stoop crying. She said that my father and Stacy had put my dog Freedom in the trunk of the car and taken her up north to let her go in the woods ‘where all animals belong’.

For the first time I really got angry with him because to me the dog was the child I never had and helpless. I went to a cabby friend’s and kept phoning dad’s house till he finally came home from the cottage and angrily I told him that in Canada people go to jail for killing pets and he would be calling a jail cell his new home. He said nobody would believe me because he is family. He was right. He abused me all my life knowing that nobody would believe me. He was the charming father who could make me look off because he knew how to trigger my PTSD.

I went to stay with another cab driver and we found a lawyer Roger Timms. Roger got the house put into my name because of a technicality. My father told everyone that he had bought his daughter a house because she was not capable but in truth the down payment came from the deposit of my paycheques into that joint account. To this day I have heard gossip that my father bought me a house and I squandered it. My father still collected the rents because I could no longer go back to the house after getting angry with him, due to what I now know to be PTSD. In retrospect that cabdriver I thought was a friend was an opportunist who wanted to collect the rents and when he saw he was not getting anything from me he became my father’s friend. Toward the end my father opened up all of the windows so that the pipes burst. Lambert oil was another bill for me to pay; they would fill up even with the windows open that winter. That winter the year was 1980 and it was a relief to put that house behind me because my father no longer had a place to come and terrorize me.

I did move out of the city and with time became emotionally healthier. Father stalked me and when healthier I would think that I was strong enough to see if maybe this time he had changed and after all does not the bible say to honour thy father and mother. The parental love bombing would then turn into an abusive relationship with my dad over and over and over again because of my stupid belief that good would triumph in the end and that people mellowed as they got older. All my life I lost people and jobs because of my father to the point of not being able to function anymore.

For example when I was still driving taxi my girlfriend discovered the TTC was hiring women. My father found out that I was going to apply the next morning and he threw a fake heart attack fit in the basement, holding his chest at his heart while heavily panting, stating that if I went I would be putting my father in the grave. My girlfriend Cindy, who had only driven cab a very short time, got hired. I would definitely have been hired but could I have kept that job with my father meddling?

Only after his death have I been able to own a pet that does not suffer abuse because of my father. He would kick my pets if I did not talk rough to them. I knew he would kick them hard if I was not doing a soft shove that I faked to be hard. Father separated me from most of my girlfriends. Lillian Davidson is the only person who saw through him but she is no longer with us. Now I realize just how lucky I was to have lived with her and known her. She is the only person who told my father off for the way he treated me and he actually did not try to turn her against me. Think God brought her into my life at that time because she kept me safe from him when I most needed safety. Without Lillian I do not know if I would be alive today and that is not an exaggeration because I was an emotional mess when she met me. She got me on a disability pension because I was so emotionally beat up that I was giving up and the streets would have been my last place. Now I believe my father would have wanted that for me. My life had a semblance of normal in Lillian’s company and home until she died. After Lillian died my father and his girlfriend beat me up really badly, at his cottage in 1992, because I refused to give his girlfriend my Pembrooke Welsh Corgi puppy. Yes the same girlfriend who a dozen years earlier helped my dad put Freedom the sheepdog in the trunk of the car and drive out with my dad to abandon the dog in the woods.

My father has bad mouthed me to the point of where, even though I do not have a criminal record, people who knew him thought I am a prostitute. When I rationally explain to them how ridiculous that is I have been told to ’get over it’ or how liberal in their thinking they are. This is a discovery I made after he died. Imagine the surprise if your cousins were to, in a matter of fact way, imply that you may still be working at that. The cousin’s I saw after my father’s death have lived all this time thinking that. Now I know why I had not seen anyone for over forty years while they had Christmases, family get togethers, weddings and funerals. My cousin’s told me I am a prostitute and it was impossible to convince them otherwise. Father had 13 siblings and I remember the get togethers for any and every occasion with these cousins, prior to Browndale. Think this ugly gossip may have started when I went to Browndale because in that day and age the child was always seen as the one who was wrong. I lost my husband’s family and now I know why. Wish someone would have clued me in a long time ago about the things dad was saying but I guess that if they believed him they thought there was no reason to say anything to me. With that knowledge everything has fallen into place. The ugliness toward me when I was first introduced to people and the way that people, who I knew never had a chance to know me, turned on me always puzzled me. For example the women who had the cottage next to my father’s sold hers because on occasion he would bring me up to his cottage. That seemed a bit extreme, like a strange reason to sell her place at the time even though she very strongly showed how much contempt she had for me.

I have an opportunity of getting subsidized housing in a lovely Lithuanian place for people over 55. None of my relatives would be there because they all own property and shall be taken care of by their children. I put in the application last December and earlier this week my girlfriend and I went to see where on the waiting list I stand. While there I spoke to a tenant, who was sitting outside, about the apartments. She asked me my Lithuanian last name and when I told her it seems she is a good friend of my cousin’s wife’s mother. On one occasion when the mother of my cousin’s wife saw me she let it be known that she had absolutely no respect for me. It was shunning at its best. I am reconsidering moving into this lovely place near a beautiful Toronto huge park, for which I have waited a very long time to be able to become old enough to get into. Because of my father’s poison the PTSD is kicking in big time. I am too paralyzed to even see my therapist because I do not believe that she can change the actual facts. I do not think it is possible to move in without being shunned in my new home and if they are anything like my father’s family Lithuanians do love their gossip.

Six years ago, when my father died, I felt relief I had never known before, thinking that he cannot hurt me anymore. Moving into this place has been my goal that my therapist and I have spoken about since I first saw her over five years ago. This goal has kept me going but now I am not so sure. To be emotionally abused again in my old age because of my father would damage me spiritually.