i feel alone. I see a therapist once a week but i still struggle and i don’t know who to talk to, so I’m coming here.I grew up with a mentally unstable mother and a step dad with slight anger issues, and i have absolutely no clue what lead to it, but my mother has been stuck in this state of psychosis for the past 6 years. i remember the night it happened. I was like 12 i think. she was pacing the house screaming and crying about the bugs eating her skin. She developed methods of ways to “get the bugs out” by using certain cleaning products and a vacuum cleaner nozzle (to vacuum the bugs/disease out of her eyes, throat, and other places). Obviously when i was 12, i believed she was terminally ill and her brain and face and body being eaten alive by bugs. The house became absolutely fucking disgusting. i had to fend for myself at times. watching my step dad screaming at my mother bewildered me. I remember a fight that happenEd, and all i wanted to do was protect my sickly mother, but it led to my step dad cursing at me and breaking things. I remember seeing her ill on the floor unable to walk properly telling me that we were going to run away. I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming at the top of her lungs while she vacuumed because of the pain. I’d always hear her moaning in pain constantly, and not speaking properly. Every single day until the age of 14 (when i had to leave the household) i lived in constant fear. I would go days without seeing her. Not knowing if the disease killed her yet. She would say it all the time that it would. My step dad wasn’t a help he’s let his anger out on me. I felt so alone and helpless and my chest hurt a lot. Whenever I’d come home from school, i would walk into a dirty house with the vacuum on. I would be relieved because that meant my mother was still alive. I would be terrified hearing her come downstairs because i couldn’t stand seeing her swollen face and being so unkept. She would look at me and start crying and yelling about how bad of a parent she was, and i felt like a source of her pain. So i always felt an insane amount of guilt. She ended up believing my dog had the same illness as her, and used the methods she used in herself, resulting in his death. She tells me she would do exactly what she did to my dog if i got the illness. This was a constant and daily thing for me. There was no connection. I had to leave them when i was 14. She was too sick to say goodbye to me. I’m 19 now and haven’t seen my mom since. I wasn’t aware it wasn’t a physical sickness until i was 17. I moved in with my biological father, who my mom didn’t like. so i had to deal with phone calls about how horrible he was. Phone calls with my mom, and living with my dad were almost two separate realities. She was forced into a mental hospital by my family when i was like 14-15? And to this day refuses to talk to anyone besides me. i was forced into treatment for 15 months,( age 16-17) and wasn’t allowed to talk to her. She to this day tells me that our relationship is permanently ruined and that she’s not my mom anymore, and she has better connection with other people than she does to me. (I didn’t mention that i used to be codependent at a young age, and also when i left the household, and she refuses to let that connection go). She tells me that i would be grateful if she was dead. Comparing me to my dad who had hurt her horribly. Letting her anger towards my family and everything that has happened out on me. I’m the person who takes the brunt of it, since she refuses to talk to any other family members. I don’t want to hurt her more than she already does, so i take it all.

currently struggling with feeling like i don’t have trauma and that I’m invalid, please don’t compare stories with mine rn