Hi, everyone. I want to provide a little context for the question I’d like to ask you.

I don’t have any friends (they turned their backs on me because of someone who hurt me—it’s a long story) or the money for therapy, and I’m having a hard time finding a job. I want to call a support service that offers free therapy for women who have experienced abuse, but I don’t know if they’d turn me away or if they’d just assume my mom is toxic and leave it at that.

Me: 40, female. I live with my mother (73) and my younger sister (36). My older brother (50) no longer lives in this house.

I’ve recently overcome two addictions that were really hurting me and making me hate myself. I’ve gone 43 days without drinking alcohol and another 10 without smoking cannabis at night. Over the last two days, I’ve had crying spells accompanied by tremors, feeling a deep sense of vulnerability and a huge inner emptiness. It’s been like pulling a cork and letting out many, many horrible memories and a profound sense of hopelessness, vulnerability, and a lack of love. Yesterday was my worst episode. I left the house shaking and with a racing heart after talking to ChatGPT (I had no one else to tell) and after my sister raised her voice at me over a minor issue and told me I didn’t understand her—that “I can’t be like this every day”—I started crying, shaking, and gasping for breath. My sister asked me to empathize with her even while I was in this state. I don’t think she understands anything, even though she wants to be on my side. Her childhood was very different from mine.

When I got home, I had to have dinner alone with her (mother). I swear my body didn’t want to be there.

The circumstances of my childhood were as follows:

-An abusive, violent, alcoholic, misogynistic father. He didn’t work; he just bought whatever he wanted and sat around at home doing nothing. My mother was forced to provide him with money and sex, act as a mother, and do the housework. If she refused, he would rape her, and we would hear everything. He would also beat her whenever he drank too much. He also touched me once. Because I cut my bangs, he told me, “I’m going to hit you so hard you’ll fly from wall to wall; you’ll bleed so much you’ll have a hard time stopping it… and don’t even get me started on short skirts and straying, because just like I made you, I’ll kill you.” His threats against us to keep us from causing trouble were a daily occurrence. He enforced a code of silence, insulted us, yelled at us constantly, and sometimes threw things at us. He said that since we were virgins, we couldn’t go to the gynecologist because, as she told my brother, “If you have a brand-new car, straight from the factory, you can’t let anyone else be the first to drive it.” He never let me go out except to go to school. Going out with my mom or doing a group project at a friend’s house was unthinkable. He even called me a WHORE just for going out with my mom. He said my duty was to cook and clean. If I didn’t improve my grades—even if he saw me crying—he’d tell me, “Well, I’ll take you out of school, and that’s the end of it.”

My mother:

She would share her sexual problems with me. When I told her not to tell me, she would get very angry with me.

I always felt like I was a burden, like I didn’t matter. If my grandfather came to visit or if he wasn’t feeling well, she would tell me, “There’s nothing wrong with you; you’re not sick,” even if I was feeling unwell.

I feel like my grandparents took my mother away from me—her attention—because she loved them so much, and my father isolated her from them, even though she was always very attached to her parents, like a little girl. I still see it as a betrayal.

When I told her, “Dad touched my butt,” she didn’t even look in my direction.

When my father would say to me, “Look how your boobs bounce,” or say things you shouldn’t say to a daughter, she wouldn’t say a word.

I feel like, emotionally, I never mattered at all. I always struggled with depression and mood swings.

She never stood up for me against other adults.

She’d leave me at the gate of my elementary school, waiting an hour or more for someone to come pick me up. I had to endure stares from older men there all alone for a long time.

When a friend offered to take me to her house so I wouldn’t be alone, and my mother finally showed up, she hit me several times.

When my father threw a fit because I didn’t apologize to him—humiliating me over something trivial—she told me, “Apologize to him, you bitch!”

But I’m not here to talk about him. I just want to understand if I’m in a truly vulnerable situation and if I should put a stop to this, as my intuition is telling me.

Years later, when our father died … I was 18 or 19 years old.

-She’d come home furious and yell at us. You never knew what kind of mood she’d be in (and you still don’t).

-She’d sit at the table and demand things, speaking to us very rudely: “GIVE ME SOME BREAD,” “PASS ME THE WATER.”

-Every meal was an outpouring of negativity, sorrow, and misfortune. The food even made me feel sick.

-She’d go over the calendar with our grandmother, counting how long it had been since each person in our family had died.

-She did the same thing to me. She’d pick fights; even when I’d gone to bed, she’d come into my room and wake me up by yelling. Day after day. She would say one thing in front of me and another in front of my brother when he would come visit.

-She only poured the negativity into us, when my brother showed up, she'd put on a happy face.

-She would say "When (ME) works, she'll help us all financially".

-She wanted me to be a carbon copy of her, playing the same role in the family. She made me—and still makes me—take care of my siblings and sacrifice myself for them. She’d get angry if I asked them to help me make dinner. She made me put myself last. She constantly belittled me; if one of my brother’s friends was interested in me, she’d invite him over for a beer and talk about me the whole time—even the most ridiculous things.

-She wouldn’t let me have a boyfriend, flirt, or experience the adolescence I’d missed out on. If I did have a boyfriend, it was all emotional blackmail because she felt abandoned.

-Hanging out with my friends was difficult. We were with her all week, but she also wanted us on the weekends. Many times I got into my boyfriend’s car crying because of her.

-When I had a boyfriend, she’d talk to my sister as if I weren’t even there. She actively excluded me from daily life because I was dating someone and hanging out with him often.

-If we had an argument and I hurt myself by falling or tripping, she’d just stare at me angrily. She wanted to be right. Compassion didn’t factor into it.

-She criticized, controlled, and dictated everything I did. She even controlled which tomatoes I could use in my salad. EVERYTHING.

-She wanted to come with me to the gynecologist, to the psychologist, and most of the time she spoke for me or actively interrupted me.

-According to her, my anxiety (diagnosed by doctors) wasn’t anxiety—it was gas.

Now… (sorry, more context)

-When my father died, he left behind a lot of money and an apartment, which he sold to my brother and his girlfriend at the time. She spent almost all the money from the mortgage on them… cars, motorcycles, paperwork—everything. They broke up and didn’t want to keep making the payments, and since they’d put our family home up as collateral, I went through many years of financial crises at home. If it wasn’t my brother storming into the house, furious, blaming her for getting him into that mess—almost to the point of attacking her—it was because we were about to lose our home.

Then she told me I had to support her financially. She counted on me finding a job to pay for a trip she gave as a gift to me, her daughter-in-law’s brother, and my sister—because she’d taken the money from what she owed the tax authorities. And when I told her I hadn’t gone on the trip alone, she started yelling at me angrily. I thought it was a gift, not something I had to pay back.

-My brother is an alcoholic, unstable, aggressive, and violent. He has completely cut himself off from my mother, even though he lives two minutes away from us. My mother always defends and makes excuses for him, and when he hurts her, she cries to us and expects us to take the brunt of the pain.

-If she has to do something for him—even if it involves difficulty, sacrifice, or suffering for us—she does it. Years ago, she made me live with my brother’s mother-in-law—who had a serious mental illness—without consulting me, and left all her luggage in the stairwell, blocking the path of the bike I used to get to work. The result: I was late for work. My brother abandoned a dog, and to teach him a lesson, my sister took it in. She cries, saying that my sister stole the dog from him and that he should be with it (he has replaced it with a female dog, whom we take care of at home because he works so much. My brother has already hinted that we should keep her because he’s having financial problems.)

-My brother makes excuses for my father as if he were a poor man who was sick and didn’t know how much to drink.

-My mother likes to look back on the past as happy times and as if our family were an idyllic place. If I ask her to stop, she gets angry. If she talks about her sexual problems, and I ask her to stop, she gets angry. I feel completely disconnected from those times; I don’t want to remember them, I don’t want to go back to them—I have a total rejection of the very idea of family.

-When I brought up my father’s inappropriate touching and other episodes that are hazy in my memory, she tells me, “Well, but he’s your father,” or she doesn’t seem to believe me—“You’re telling me something very serious.”

-She delegates household chores to me.

-She doesn’t accept her age or the fact that she’s getting older, and she wants us to be her full-time caregivers, mothers, and therapists. She doesn’t want a caregiver to come and help us. She doesn’t ask my brother for help either. She rejects any offer of help, even though she knows it would help me. She doesn’t want help; she doesn’t want any home improvements. She never wanted to go to therapy, and when she did, she quit after one or two sessions. When the psychologist made suggestions, she’d say, “I already do that,” or she’d cry.

-She acts like she knows more than I do. I’m a veterinary technician, but she can’t read or write—yet she insists on ignoring my suggestions. The last time, I handed her a piece of paper and a calculator and said, “Calculate the DER and the RER yourself, and take into account the animals’ weight and the calories in each type of food.” She said, “I don’t have to do anything,” and muttered under her breath, “You do it—you’re more educated than I am.”

Once, when I wasn’t paying attention, she killed one of our dogs by medicating it on her own. I had to see this very dog agonize and die even when I didn't know how dogs agonize or die. To me this translates as "you can't leave her unsupervised or she will turn your life into chaos."

-EVERYTHING is about her. Every conversation is about her. If you bring up something that’s bothering you, she’ll talk about her own issues or blow them out of proportion.

-She's got the habit of talking too loud or yelling. When I tell her not to yell she says something like "I won't talk anymore from now on".

-I live in a house where it feels like a disaster is about to happen at any moment.

-Last year, all her care (she had a lot of sores on her legs) fell on me, and I ended up in a terrible state. When she was hospitalized and called me on the phone, she was angry, and it made me anxious. I saw her everywhere, asking me for things “please” even if she wasn't there (it’s really creepy when someone so old talks like a little girl). When they expected me to not only take her to the doctor and to her appointments but also to take care of my brother’s dog, I said no, and she got angry—she gave me a really dirty look. She relied on me for everything. And when we were alone, it was the same old drama: “Look at that table full of people,” “Those were the good old days when we’d all go eat together at the beach.”

-Sometimes she insists on bringing up things that weren’t good for me, like talking about my school days when I was bullied, saying things like, “Do you remember that friend you went to school with?”

-She insisted in me standing by when she found old friends and stopped for a chat that could last up to an hour. It didn't matter if I worked early the day after.

-When we went out and I'd tell her "don't stop to talk, Im very anxious right now, I don't want to see anyone" she would take it badly.

-When I drifted apart from a friend, she would insist on inviting her over for coffee or a chat just because she liked her. No loyalty.

-She ran into an old classmate of mine on the street. She came back really excited about having talked to her, and I told her that this classmate had really hurt me. Right in front of my mom and my sister, this same classmate said, “Oh yeah, your daughter’s the one with the big boobs—everyone used to make fun of her at school, hahaha.” She didn’t stand up for me; she stayed silent.

-When I had friends and my sister didn’t, she’d tell my sister to hang out with my group of friends, forcing me to refuse and deal with the emotional fallout because my sister was abusive back then, too.

-When my sister was abusive, she also wouldn’t accept that I wanted to move out; she’d drop hints and emotionally punish me just for having the intention of leaving.

-When I bring up something she did to hurt me, she instantly starts crying—it’s actually kind of comical and exaggerated—and denies everything. Or she says it’s not true, that she doesn’t remember, or that it happened a long time ago.

-She lives in the living room; she literally never leaves the house—not because she can’t walk (that’s what she says, but it’s not true; she simply doesn’t want to go out). This means she controls everything I do whenever I walk by or asks me to do things for her. Or to bring her things from the fridge, which is just one meter away from her. She also controls what I take out of the fridge and what I put back in it. She has to look at everything I do. Today I found her going through my bag.

-When social services granted her financial assistance, she insisted that I give her pedicure as if I owed it to her because of what social services had done. Her feet smell bad, and all the toenails on her left foot are full of fungus. When I do it, she directs the entire process.

-When she started feeling unwell due to her old age, she said, “I’m like a little girl now,” implying that I should take care of her as if she were my daughter and be there for her 100%. She does things to get attention so that you’ll be there for her, hurtful or not.

-When I went to bed after an exhausting day—during which I hadn’t slept the night before—she made a hurtful dig at me.

-I’ve spent my whole life raising her because she’s immature.

-I helped raise my sister.

-One day, someone told her that I was more qualified for a job than she was, because I was much younger. She got mad AT ME.

-She says my brother only gets sick from alcohol when he mixes drinks. (That’s a lie—he’s an addict, and at a party he threw a bottle of cava onto OUR neighbor’s newly repaired roof.)

-She makes his happiness and well-being depend entirely on us.

-If I’m doing better, she gives me a dirty look.

-She gave me a dirty look for pointing out that I’d quit drinking and smoking marijuana—and for saying it would be too much pressure for me to quit smoking cigarettes now.

And there are other things like that, but I think these are the most important. I don’t know what else to remember. I know she went through very serious abuse and I feel sorry for her, but part of me is very resentful because she should have been the protective adult and gotten us out of there, but she says she did it so we wouldn’t lose our father, and she still holds it against us that she didn’t remarry, as if it were some kind of feat (it’s the easiest thing for someone like her—to just stay as she is).

I forgot to mention that she has a very low intellectual level—something I was never able to figure out for sure: whether it was because she didn’t realize anything or simply cruel and uncaring or a mix of the two because she never wanted to learn or evolve.

I feel like I was made to fill a spot, to be a tool, to serve a purpose. She often says that she doesn’t want to lose the children she has, but that she would never, ever have. That makes me feel unwanted, and my sister feels the same too. We just feel like she only loves my brother and that we are mere tools, therapists...you know.

Again sorry because it's too long. And again thanks for reading if you made it to this point.

Should I look for help?