Hi all! Throwaway because my main has personal info and my art on it. I’m 20 gnc and I think my dad is abusive, but it’s hard to tell because everything is so little now that I’m an adult. When I was younger and he was drinking, it was screaming matches and crying, but now it’s little comments and jokes at the expense of me, my mom, or my interests. My mom said today “well, he’s a narcissist,” and that inspired me to post here. There are a lot of details and context surrounding this, but I’ll just go into what happened today for the sake of brevity.
I had a 30 minute telehealth therapy call in the family room today (my room is in a sort of transitional state and there isn’t really another accessible place for me to take calls). My house has 3 floors (upstairs, downstairs, basement) and he was taking a shower in the bathroom we currently share upstairs. At the top of the hour, he had a work call in the basement. I had been discussing how his behavior during my childhood sort of messed me up in adulthood, and I had moved on, but with 8 minutes left in my therapy appointment (that he knew about), he comes downstairs after his shower. So he basically entered the room that I was in while I was in therapy, and I get that it’s a communal area, but I just needed it to be my area for 30 minutes and I thought he got that. He did the same thing last week, letting his dog out the back door while I was on my call and waiting by the door. I sent him this message after: “please try to respect my space when I have confidential therapy calls it’s really jarring when I’m processing trauma and I hear someone else close to me it makes me feel unsafe.” I think this is a good firm message, but he made the excuse that he had to be down in the basement for a work call which I understand, but I wish he had been in the basement in the first place instead of taking a shower and knowingly messing with my call. Anyway, is this appropriate for this sub? I don’t want to call him a narcissist because I don’t know if he’s been diagnosed with NPD and I don’t know enough about the term to fully make a claim that he is one, but he acts pretty narcissistically sometimes.
Bonus example: Every time I like something (media mostly), it’s something for him to make fun of. And every time I like something he likes, I have to like it in the exact same way, otherwise he gets to make fun of it. He always wants a “driver’s tax” when he takes me to get food (I don’t drive) which I know technically since he pays for the food, he should be able to have some of it, but I have a weird relationship with food and eating which he knows about, and he knows the “tax” thing annoys me and I told him recently that it makes me feel like I don’t deserve to have all my food. He said he would try to remember that.
I don’t know guys, help a dude out. Any advice is helpful, or if I’m overreacting let me know because that’s a real possibility.