I keep trying to google things my father did to and around me as a child that I keep returning to as an adult, but it's like I'm either not using the right words or I'm not understanding how to label what I experienced. And I'm not necessarily seeking to diagnose him, just understand whether the things I experienced were a source of trauma and other issues for me as I've long suspected. I feel like I can point to an experience that was negative but I don't know how to understand its exact impact on me. I have been in therapy and have discussed some of these things but it never seemed like they were really weighed as having had an impact on me by the therapist.

For background, my dad lost his father young and due to behavioral issues as a young teen, he spent several years in a boys home where he experienced SA. He also grew up around physical violence and delinquency, being both the victim of bullying and an aggressor himself. As an adult in his 50s, he was diagnosed with adhd, depression and bipolar disorder IIRC. I lived with him for several months in 2021 and felt he reminded me most of an ex I had lived with before moving in with him. She'd had borderline personality disorder.

I know that my father is a complex person. I have positive memories with him as well. I'm not trying to assign fault, just understand what sort of behavior I was subjected so I can try to better understand my own complexities, so I can heal and outgrow things that continue to harm me and impact the quality of my life.

^ My dad has always had anger issues. Moreso when he was younger. Holes in the wall. Scared, cornered, and hurt my mom as a child but he seemed to feel it was accidental.

^ He would pin me down and tickle me by digging his fingers into my upper inner thigh near my groin. I never felt it was sexual, but it was the fact that he would never stop even if I was saying no, stop, or crying.

^ he rough housed with me a lot. One time when I was in elementary school, we were play fighting and I remember laying on my back and then his foot coming down on my left wrist, fracturing it. As an adult, he has occasionally reminded me about it but has always joked he did it on purpose. My mom recently told me that that incident had given her pause back then and that she had been unsure that it was entirely accidental.

^ my mom got involved with another man when I was around 10-11, maybe 12. My father found out by going through her emails and was able to get the man's phone number. On Valentine's day one year, he took me to where my mother worked and parked in the parking lot to stake her out, to see if she would be meeting this other man. During this stakeout, two things happened: we saw my grandmother (she worked at the same company) come out and greet an older man who was not my grandfather before getting into a parked van with him. The second thing was that my dad dialed the number of the man my mother was involved with and handed me the phone before telling me what to say on his voicemail, something to the affect of 'please don't break up my family'. I didn't remember either of these things until the last year or two when my mother mentioned that her husband (the man she left my father for back then) still had the voicemail saved.

^ once my parents separated, my dad would often bad mouth my mother to my brother and I to the point where I had always held her responsible for everything. He also frequently sobbed while I was with him on weekends when he thought I was asleep. I distinctly remember him listening to the same song over and over again while crying on the floor, saying my mother's name repeatedly as he did so. Sadly, I mentioned this to my mom recently and she actually remembered because when he had done this, he had been living in the apartment building next to where I lived with my mom, so she actually heard him doing this back then (through the walls) as well.

^ even as an adult, my father has always gotten upset (agitated and offended) when he attempts to influence my moods but can't. The earliest example: as a very young child, maybe 5-7, I remember driving with him in the car and being upset and crying about something. He stopped at a festival that was happening in the city and walked me through the crowd. Less than a minute into being there I had calmed but was still teary. A woman approached us with balloons and asked if I wanted one. I said "no thank you." My dad turned around, yanking on my hand and took me back to the car. I don't remember his exact words, but I do recall that he was angry that I was still sad and that removing me came across as punishing ('well if you're not going to be happy, we're not going to stay here then.')

^ I remember him spanking me a few times. Sometimes with a belt, but I think he may have used a plastic or wooden kitchen utensil also. I had a flashback of a particular instance a few years ago and said out loud while crying what I remember being told right after he laid me across his lap and before he had started to hit me: if you cover it up (protect my bottom with my hands) it's only going to get worse. I brought up being spanked to both of my parents in the last few years and neither one has any memory of that happening. In hindsight, I never recall my mother being present when it happened. When I told my father, at first he assumed I was joking but then I said I wasn't and he denied it. A moment later, he was visibly distressed and began to say he didn't remember but if he had then he was a piece of shit, etc. It felt like somehow he had become the victim who I had to console.