My father (55) has been verbally, mentally, and physically abusive pretty much all my (20) life. He beat my mom (46) and my brother (25) for years and he used to beat me and my sisters (12, 16, 18) as well. He has stopped beating us for a few years but he still hits my mom sometimes.
About a month and a half ago, my mother decided to leave the house after a huge fight she had with my father and took my sisters and I (my brother lives in his own apartment) to her brothers house. It was a huge thing and we got a restraining order against my dad for a few days, and told him he has to leave our house. So we’ve been separated since then. For a few weeks after that, we all just took some time to think about what we want and what we should do. Obviously none of us kids could really figure out what that was because this is all we’ve known our entire lives and it was unfathomable for us to even think we would ever have power over our relationship with our father.
During that time my mom and family assured my siblings and I that nothing would happen unless we were comfortable with it and gave our consent. But for the past few weeks my mother has been really pushy all of a sudden and is going back on her word a lot. She has flown out to see my father (he’s living with his family in a different state right now) twice already, and recently bought tickets for my siblings and i to see him. We’ve all expressed how much we don’t want to do this and that she is making us unwillingly go see him, but she just keeps saying that she’s our mother and she knows better. She’s gaslighting us a lot and saying things like “I can’t believe my own children won’t trust me,” “I’ve only ever done what I think is best for you,” etc., which is ironic because it’s exactly what my dad used to do. She has been making us do a lot of things that we’re VERY uncomfortable with and every time she says, “We NEED to do this to move forward, this is something that NEEDS to happen.” She always tells us we’ll feel better about it once we actually do it, but none of us actually do. We just feel worse than we already did. She’s maintaining that we have to reconcile because that’s what we need to do Islamically, but I just don’t understand why everything has to happen so fast. I mean it hasn’t even been two months. And when we reminded her that she told us we didn’t have to do anything we weren’t comfortable with, she just told us, “I never said that.” Even though five of us remember her repeatedly telling us that. She even made us talk to him on a zoom call last week, and it went exactly how I expected: I started sobbing about 15 minutes in and left the room, and so did one of my sisters. My father just kept asking questions like “Why are you guys mad at me,” “What do you want to address,” and then kept defending his actions with lame excuses. I couldn’t even speak because I was the one who never spoke back to him and always did as I was told.
I’m so confused right now and I don’t know what to do. I can’t even trust my own mother anymore since she’s being so rash and erratic. I also suffer from severe anxiety and I don’t know how to even begin trying to get treatment. I haven’t been diagnosed but it runs in my dad’s family, and it has been debilitating for me since I was in middle school, leaving me unable to do a lot of normal daily tasks. I wish I could just get a job and cut everyone off but I know that’s haram and my anxiety makes it very difficult for me to work anyway. This whole situation is especially difficult because it’s important to us to deal with everything in an Islamic way.
This isn’t even the half of it but I don’t know how to explain everything. Any help would be appreciated.
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