Dear Emily,

I am not sure how my yesterday’s post affected you, so I wanted to add some clarification.

First, I’ve realized that you may not be able to leave your parents’ home just yet, because you don’t have the resources for that. You did share your struggle with low-paying jobs, and also that you needed to take a break from work in 2019. I don’t know how things are now, but it could be that right now you’re not able to move to a place of your own?

If so, I think it still would be important to not engage in fights with your father, but rather to put all your energy and strength into figuring out how to move out eventually, even if it’s not possible in the near future.

I have a snapping point these days and would happily go to jail if it came to that. He would never hit me now, as he knows I would put him in an early grave and hand myself in.

I guess my stance now is that if I’m going to lose anyway, I’d rather go down fighting and cause them damage too.

Please don’t be telling yourself that you need to fight this battle to extinction. He did cause great damages to you: your health suffered (both physical and psychological), as well as your finances and your career. The lowest point was probably in 2019, when you had a breakdown.

But you don’t have to waste the rest of your life on fighting him and ruining yourself completely. You are 38 years old, and even if you feel older and you said you feel like your life is over – that’s not true.

If you find proper help and remove yourself from your father’s toxic influence, you can recover. In 5 years from now you can have a good job (even run your own business if that’s your game), have a decent partner, and be removed from the nightmare that you’re currently living in.

It is possible, Emily. You don’t need to keep this fight till extinction. Because the only person you are ruining is yourself.

Now for the second point: in my previous post I talked about narcissists, flying monkeys etc. I don’t know how familiar you are with this terminology and if you have considered that your father is most likely a narcissist, and a pretty bad version of it. Those people are capable of ruining one’s life. So you’d need to equip yourself with knowledge and tools how to deal with him, and how to minimize the damage done to you until you can become independent.

What you would need for sure is to get help and meet some normal people, outside of your father’s orbit. Perhaps you can join a support group for victims of narcissistic abuse. Because right now, you said that wherever you go, people treat you poorly and you constantly feel like you need to keep a barbed wire around yourself.

That’s quite possible if you’re surrounded by people in your father’s orbit (the flying monkeys). Also, perhaps you work at a place with a narcissistic boss or a narcissistic colleague, who is spreading lies about you and so you find yourself in a similar nightmare like at home.

You’d need to start meeting different people, because believe me, there are well-meaning, non-narcissistic people out there, but you haven’t encountered many. Or you’ve been busy fighting with the narcissists that you haven’t noticed those other people too much.

If you’d like, I can point you at some resources about narcissism. For example, Dr. Ramani is a well-known expert on narcissism and has a popular youtube channel. She has advice on how to deal with narcissists, as well as flying monkeys, which I think would be super important for you, since you are surrounded by those people.