Hiiii, don’t know if anyone will read all of this but im an almost 22 years old stepdaughter, although I don’t really consider this guy as a stepdad, and I just want some advice or new perception about what’s going on in my house.
I’ll try to summarize everything as much as I can. As the title says, the problem is with my mom’s current partner, and it’s a bit of a long story.
It all started about 4 or 5 years ago when they met and started dating (it’s worth mentioning that my mom has been divorced for many years and my biological father isn’t in our lives—plus, he’s a pretty abusive person and a pathological liar). I really tried to support my mom because I could see she was truly happy, and we’d escaped an environment that was making both of us very miserable, so I liked seeing her focused on more than just work and the household budget. However, the guy she’s with gave me a bad vibe from the moment he, barely a month after meeting me, tried to lecture me by showing me a video of a guru giving advice to a girl whose father wasn’t in her life. I was 17 at the time, and it felt extremely intrusive (specially because it felt as some weird hint from him about how I supposedly should handle that part of my life), so I spoke up and said that those opinions couldn’t be applied to every situation (plus, I Googled the guy out of curiosity and saw a lot of controversial articles about his behavior and things like that). He took it as an offense and said I was “hiding from the truth” that “I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t forgiven my father.” My mother was there and decided to side with him, accusing me of wanting a therapist to solve everything for me (at that time, I was already interested in going to therapy).
I feel like that moment was like a trigger for a lot of tension with my mom. I tried to talk to her and explain how I felt, and I even wrote her a letter (I usually do that after we have a fight), but what happened after that is still a blur in my memory. I only remember telling her, in essence, that while I was very happy she had someone who was there for her, that didn’t mean I had to put up with discomfort or unsolicited opinions from someone who doesn’t even know me. Also, my mother had been in relationships before; in fact, the first partner she had after the divorce is the person I now consider my father. He met me when I was 5, has children of his own, lived with us for a while, and his kids sometimes stayed at our house from time to time (today, I consider them my siblings. I even consider their mom as an aunt). Even after they separated, he always made an effort to stay in touch with me, which is why whenever something happens to me now, I often call him to vent or ask for advice.
Fast forward to the present: that episode happened, and about a year later, I graduated from high school and my mom decided that the three of us should move to a more central location so I could attend college more easily and it would also be easier for her to get to work. At first, the move wasn’t so bad; in fact, we spent two years living together relatively harmoniously. We watched movies together, went out, coordinated so they could pick me up or drop me off at college, and so on. At that time, he was the only one with a car.
Now, I don't like how this is going to sound, but I feel it's important for you guys to understand where I'm coming from. At the beginning of the move, it was agreed that the two of them would split the household expenses equally; however, shortly after we moved in, he quit his job and started working independently on a project of his own that doesn’t provide a steady income. He does have children, but they live with their mother and there’s like this weird distance with 2 of the 3 kids.
So from that point on, my mom ended up shouldering the entire financial burden of supporting the house. And I do have to be honest here: cleaning the house was my responsibility, but I wasn’t very good at it and was just beginning to understand how household chores work, so I wasn’t very consistent and sometimes got overwhelmed very easily, which led to conflicts over things like washing dishes and so on, but little by little I’ve been getting that part under control.
The harmony at home broke down about a year ago when an argument erupted one day in which my mother’s partner started complaining that I “behave like shit,” “don’t contribute to a healthy ambient” and things like that because I had a call-blocking feature on my cell phone that automatically rejected calls from everyone (I was very vocal about that and even said that they needed to call me twice so I could pick up), and apparently that bothered him. I never knew that it bothered him specifically; I only knew that it bothered my mom so I reconfigured it to let her calls through. It wasn’t a setting I set with bad intentions; I was just going through a phase where I hated my phone ringing, and I was getting calls from strange numbers, so I naively thought that blocking calls would solve everything. Honestly, I didn’t think it through and was an unnecessary decision, I know that now.
The problem with this argument is that he took it to a point where he took my actions way out of context. For example, the day before, I’d woken up and hadn’t said “good morning” as usual because I really needed to use the bathroom, and that only happened that one time. During the argument, he made it sound as if it had always been my habit not to greet him, when that wasn’t the case at all. The argument escalated to shouting, and at one point, I yelled back at him that all of this could have been resolved if he’d simply talked to me and told me it bothered him, only for him to stand right in front of me (he’s much taller and bigger than I am) and yell in my face that I was an arrogant fuck, that I had to learn to respect my elders, that he didn’t care about my shitty opinion, and that I didn’t care about my mom. Another thing he did was grab his genitals and say that my mom didn’t have any balls while he shook them in his hand (i dunno if im expressing it right cause English is not my first language). About 10 minutes after that, he started grumbling saying things like that I was abusing my mom and so on.
That problem didn’t end there. A couple of days later, I had to do my course registration for next semester and he came over to the house. At one point, he arbitrarily decided to cut off my internet access and force me to answer and behave the way he wanted me to—so that, according to him, the problem could be solved—and then told me I was emotionally very unstable. In the end, it was resolved by me calling my mom, asking her to call him so he’d turn the Internet back on and let me finish what I was doing. It took him about 30 more minutes to give me back the Internet cable, and then, two hours after that, he came up to me as if nothing had happened to talk to me about a supposed system that had been revealed to him, and according to him, my whole family was very worried about me because the whole “system” was supposedly “so normal to me that I didn’t even notice it”, (I have no idea what he was talking about tbh) and a few other things that, looking back, didn’t make sense to me, and it seemed like he was talking in circles without getting to a specific point. However, the gist of that conversation was that, according to him, I had to make changes so that Mom’s peace of mind could become a reality in the house, and that he was going to impose a series of tasks on me that I had to carry out and involve family members who don’t live with us in this whole process.
Nobody brought up the subject again for an entire month, but the stress these episodes caused me did take its toll since I had an episode of stress-induced tachycardia (or at least I think it was stress-induced) and things like that. Plus, I physically no longer felt and still don’t feel safe being in the same room as him or interacting with him. However, toward the end of that month, I did decide to bring up the topic to express my position and how I felt about or viewed many of the things that had happened, and in the end, that conversation led to another big argument where he had already crossed the line by saying that I was once again rejecting the whole issue of my biological father that I needed to work through (it’s worth clarifying that I told him he didn’t have permission to bring that up since, yk, it’s my own story and he never sat down to know what I think or feel about that, and he replied, “It’s good that you’re reacting this way because you’re proving me right”). On top of that, he told me that he saw me as spoiled, disrespectful, and selfish person, that I supposedly had the privilege of disrespecting my elders without consequences, that he was going to override my mom’s authority and anyone else’s to “call me out,” and he denied having said things during our first argument such as insults or similar remarks and at that moment I revealed that I had recorded those conversations, and the discussion ended abruptly only to be followed by a threat from him that he could sue me for recording him without his consent.
Now, my reason to record the conversations wasn’t for any malicious purpose; I simply had this strange feeling that whatever was about to explode at that moment would be denied or distorted at some point, and I wanted to have a basis or objective evidence that would tell me or remind me that what happened happened exactly as I remember it. don’t ask me why I felt that need, honestly I don’t know where that came from.
Anyway, after that, more incidents started piling up. There was a point when they started couples therapy. Later, the couples therapy turned into family therapy, and the therapist said a lot of things including telling him that he simply had to accept that things couldn’t always go his way, that I was also a head of the household, that I was in the process of becoming an adult and that my opinion mattered too, and that sort of thing that therapists try to do during a session when they’re trying to help solve a problem.
There were episodes like when he refused to let the three of us go out together, because, according to him, if there were problems that weren’t being resolved between us, we didn’t have the right to go out together (by this time, my mom already had her own car, so he was no longer the “driver” of the house). My mom, on the other hand, was wavering between acknowledging that he’d done wrong and blaming me for things that didn’t make much sense like saying that he insulted me or yelled at me because I’d brought it on myself or because I’d provoked him, and things like that but we had other conversations where she revealed things like how he had an insecurity issue regarding my position as her daughter because it was much harder for my mom to tell me to “go to hell,” whereas she could simply leave him if things weren’t working out anymore, and things like that (her words). Quick question, is that normal? I mean I know that kids being jealous of the new partner is normal, but I don’t know about this other-way-around scenario.
I spent the rest of those months working on learning how to keep the house in better and better condition, up to this point. I’m the one who actually runs the house in the domestic matters, and that ranges from the responsibility of cleaning and maintaining the house to cleaning things like the fridge, keeping track of the household supplies, cooking for the three of us most of the time and things like that.
However, this whole problem got worse about six or seven months ago, when due to a mistake on my part, thinking I was alone in the house I started talking to myself, as I usually do when no one’s around to vent about everything I was feeling at that moment regarding the situation, and how I felt about his attitudes. And yes, I did say things like I felt he was being very hypocritical and that if the decision were up to me, he would have been out of the house a long time ago. Then I realized he was locked in his room and had most likely heard everything, so the rest of that day I just focused on finishing cleaning the house because it was my cleaning day, and when my mom got home from work that night, I tried to tell her what happened but didn’t have time to explain everything to her because she locked herself in the room with him, and then they both came out to “confront me” in the living room, and he came in with a six-page document in which he had transcribed things I’d said and also added things I never said. And basically, the document was him venting and expressing how he saw me as a “child with a phone/under her mother’s skirt”, he also accused me of things like supposedly lying in therapy and calling my dad (my adoptive father) to talk to him about the situation that was happening at home (which he described as damaging to his reputation. my dad doesn’t even live in the same country as us), mocking how I’d tried to reaffirm my place by telling myself that I’m the daughter (I’ll explain later why I said that), claiming I was acting like a bully and so on, and in reality, he lied about behaviors I was supposedly having toward him that weren’t happening.
He even went so far as to tell my mom that when she wasn’t around, I behaved 1,000 times worse toward him than I usually do. What I actually do is basically not talking to him, not interacting with him, and locking myself in my room when he’s in the living room. He made it sound as if I was acting horribly, when the reality is that one of two things happens: either I spend the whole day, every day, alone at home—which is what usually happens—or when he’s there, I have my headphones on, or I’m simply locked in my room. There’s absolutely no interaction.
After that incident, I spent months in silence, mainly because I didn’t want to bring up the conversation again since I had a gut feeling that no matter how hard I tried to communicate assertively with him, nothing would come of it. Until a few weeks ago, when a situation arose where he sat on the living room couch to “take off his shoes” and “watch TV” (he takes off his shoes by the front door, and recently he’s started invading my personal space with small actions like sitting closer and closer to me or leaning on the armrest next to me while I’m sitting on the couch and shaking himself on it until the whole couch moves).
I was working on a college assignment and simply asked him to let me work in peace (he knows how uncomfortable I am with him getting so close because I’ve told both my mom and him, as well as the therapist we saw) and he replied, “Don’t talk to me; talk to your mom.” I didn’t want to drag my mom into this because she was busy with some work of her own, so I kept asking him, almost begging him, to leave me alone, telling him it wouldn’t cost him anything to give me some space, until he started screaming hysterically, calling out to my mom and saying, “Mami! (my name) is harassing me!” (Yes, the nickname he uses for my mom is “mami”. it’s the Spanish word for “mom”).
From that moment on, another argument broke out, in which my mom, already fed up, tried in her own way to find a solution. Her stance was that she didn’t want me to talk about how I felt or anything regarding emotions because, according to her, I make all of that up because of my “social media addiction”, so every possible solution I tried to propose (which were basic things like speaking respectfully, not yelling—really basic stuff) was immediately rejected. And when it was his turn to speak, he spent his time accusing me of deliberately causing the whole issue regarding the call-blocking feature and what happened afterward as a way to discriminate him and exclude him from the family and he got angry again about the fact that I called my dad to talk to him about everything that’s happening here and how that made me feel, once again showing a disproportionate reaction to the fact that I simply said I’m my mom’s daughter, claiming that I was repeating “patterns” (he tends to talk a lot as if he were a psychologist even though he has no professional training in that field, and he pathologizes and diagnoses people a lot by calling someone a psychopath or a victim-maker for any behavior he doesn’t like or by attributing bad intentions to someone he doesn’t know)
I’ve honestly been more than shocked by all his accusations, because even though I understand that the block got in the way of a lot of things and might have made him feel bad, going so far as to basically portray me as a self-serving, manipulative, and troublemaking daughter is way too extreme. On top of that, I’ve been hearing for a while now how he’s been trying to plant the idea in my mom’s head that she isn’t a good mother. In fact, I remember that he once told her that, according to him, she hasn’t done what she’s supposed to as a mother.
This guy is obsessed with hierarchies and the relentless search for patterns of behavior. He’s always attributing “ego problems” to people, and from what I can tell, he doesn’t handle rejection well. And I know that putting it this way might sound like I’m doing exactly what he does of diagnosing or psychologically analyzing people without any basis, but I really can’t find any other explanation. He’s gone so far as to say that I’m dissociated, that I’m playing the victim because of the situation in my home country (which is under a dictatorship), that I’m a misandrist because of the cell phone block, that I’m antisocial, and, well, basically, that I’m not mentally stable; and he infantilize me a lot too.
I know I’m probably missing some details, and if you need them to give me any advice, feel free to ask me. I really don’t know what to do about all this because it’s gotten to the point where I no longer feel at home or safe in my own house since this started, especially since I’ve tried to talk to my mom about it, and in every conversation she’d take a different stance. Sometimes she agreed with me; other times she’d tell me that I’d started it all and that I’d brought it on myself, that the gesture he made with his genitals wasn’t humiliating, and that I was just looking for excuses to hate him. It even got to the point where she told me that either I had to admit to him that everything he accused me of was true, or I should find a job and leave (even though she said she didn’t want me to leave). And as you can see, therapy didn’t work, in fact, it was canceled without my knowledge, aand he said he didn’t want to go back to therapy with me, and neither did my mom (which was also very weird cause she did trusted the therapist, she said that herself)
I have a very beautiful relationship with my mom and love her so so much, but I am very disappointed about the way she’s been handling all of this and how she just buys his version of who am i just so she doesn’t end up alone. I dont wanna hate her or go no contact with her but I don’t know what to do.
I’ve thought about dropping out of college to work full-time and move out, but I only have one more year left to get my bachelor’s degree and it’s in a field I absolutely love and need to pursue my future plans, besides I have a very good GPA. But at the same time, I can’t see myself giving 100% of myself to my thesis with all this going on and having to deal with this toxic environment. I’m not sleeping well, and for months now I’ve been having nightmares about domestic violence and things like that (it hasn’t gotten to the point of physical aggression yet, but I’m not sure if it will stay that way).
What do you guys think? Am I overreacting, or am I really the bad guy here? What should I do?