I'm just gonna vent idk if this will get any attention but I just want my story to be out there.

When I was a little kid my dad was a really scary person. My dad owns a company which often times caused him a lot of stress which I understood as a kid. Unfortunately his outlet was drinking. He would get drunk all the time, whether it was a weekday or weekend. And he would always take out his stress on me and honestly as a little kid I felt it was something I did that made him mad. Why else would he target me? Several instances when I was really young (first grade / kindergarten) was him once coming into our living room while I (little me 40 lbs) was laying on our couch. For no reason this man about 225 lbs decides to lay on top of me. I remember crying and panicking, I couldn't move, it was hard to breathe, and I was yelling for help from my mom. None of which made him get up, so no, he wasn't just playing around. Another time, when I was still only about 6 or 7 years old, he wakes me up in my room at 3 a.m. and starts yelling at me for a bad grade I got in 1st grade.... this was before I even recieved letter grades.

Fast forward to later in life around 4th grade, my parents were having an awful argument they we in each others faces screaming for god know what reason and he starts to push my mom (who is the kindest most angelic person I have ever known) so even being as young as I was I tried to get between them along with my sister who is 2 years younger than me. We end up getting knocked over and my mom decides my dad's being too violent and calls the police. I still remember watching my mom talk to the police officers on our front porch. They literally drove up our driveway and onto our lawn. To this day my dad says they took him to spend the night in the hospital but he wasn't so drunk he was dying so I'm confident he spent the night in jail.

When I got older it didnt get better. He would have instances where he would yell and get in my face for no reason at all, I knew not to provoke him as it would only get worse. I wish I could describe every terrifying instance but it happened so frequently I can only tell you it made me fear him in really awful ways. One of the things he'd frequently do is ask broad questions with no evident point. For example he'd just stop the conversation we were having (which was like walking on egg shells to begin with) to ask me "Why?". This was so common and it scared the hell out of me because I didnt know how to answer, normally I could just tell him what he wanted to hear and try to keep him calm but I didnt know what to say at that point. And the worst part was how persistent he was because if I asked him what he meant by that he would only repeat his question as if he didnt even know what he was asking.

Arguably the worst time in my history with my dad however, was when he went on a low carb diet. If you didnt know, beer has a lot of carbs. Sounds great for me right? No. Instead of beer it became gin and tonic or gin mixed with some other drink and he got drunk more frequently and faster. When I was 15 he came into my room early in the a.m. and had his handgun which he would use to gesture around with. This was strangely one of the times I was less afraid though, more so because to this day I'm confident it wasn't loaded but it's still sick to think he would bring it into my room, wake me up, and proceed to break the rule of "don't point a gun at anything you arent trying to kill". There was also an instance that same year where I did nothing to warrant a reaction. I was quietly taking portions of food for dinner and putting them on my plate, when he walks in and pushes me up against the counter and for what felt like an eternity had an MMA style stare down with me inches away from my face before my mom broke it up. I remember my heart beating out of my chest. Living with him was like living with an abused dog that you never knew when he was going to bite.

It was worse at times when my friends were around he didnt care if he scared them either. Once my friends could drive and we were all about 16 or 17, he began a habit of kicking them out of the house in violent fashion, he never touched them thankfully but still he would yell at them to get out of his house. I wish I could explain better how he would act, it was so malicious and random.

One of the worst times came when one night my sister and I both had friends over and we were all just socializing in our basement and my sister ate something that she thought was making her have an allergic reaction and wanted to get her inhaler which was in our prescription drug cabinet. He saw her going through the cabinet and immediately assumed she was getting drugs for people to take downstairs even though there wasnt any serious stuff in there anyway. He went and slammed the cabinet shut while my sisters hand was still in it which hurt her and now she is freaking out, I come upstairs to find this playing out and I'm the big protective brother so I start talking to my dad trying to explain she just wants her inhaler, all while the panic attack he caused her is not helping her breathe.

We make it out to the living room and he sits down on our couch, inhaler in hand and says he'll give it to her if she sits down and talks to him and she definitely does not want to talk to him. She and I were both scared shitless. I make sure she is behind me always so she's safe and he cant come up to her and she tells me to just forget it and come back downstairs and I told her to go downstairs and I'd stay there knowing if we both went down he'd only follow us and be our friends problems too. Anyway he took me telling my sister to go downstairs very poorly and only got more mad.

I told him she didnt want to talk and said he should give me the inhaler and I would give it to her and took a few steps towards him to grab it when he says to me "take another step and I'll fucking kill you" or something to that tune, I distinctly remember the "I'll fucking kill you" part. So obviously I go back to where I was standing and I'm trying my hardest to be as non threatening as possible and I have my hands behind my back. I tell my sister to go downstairs and to let me talk to our dad. This caused him to get up and stomp his way over to me and put his hand over my face and start pushing me up against the table and scream "this will never happen again" and I didnt know what to do so I pushed him and he stumbled cause he was drunk and for a second he was stunned but he came back at me with a punch to my chest. Which I wasnt truly hurt by all that bad but I saw it as an opportunity to de-escalate the situation by making him feel guilty which managed to keep him to only talking until the yelling finally woke my mom up and she made him go up to their bedroom where she then argued with him / bitched him out and told me to make everyone leave. They heard everything happen, they watched me ball my eyes out when I finally didnt have to be strong for my sister and for my safety in front of my dad. They left and my mom made my sister and I stay home.

I love martial arts. I did tae kwon do for 8 years and I currently do muay thai and juijitsu. I'm 160 lbs and 6'2 and I am not physically threatened by grown men by any means, I have threatened men with the same stature as my father with violence if they are are trying to assert themselves above me in some stupid pecking order or something. I do this with confidence, knowing that they likely would end up unconscious one way or another if they tried to fight me. But my dad man.... I'm 19 and to this day he still has me scared, I know it's because of all the mental torture he's put me through and it really frustrates me because I'm not afraid of his build because I have threatened men his size. It's because of him, I freeze when he's angry. I'm like a deer in the headlights... and it's so scary to think how defenseless I feel. I hate it so much.

It's mostly because of him I dont drink. I'm afraid of being the person he is. I still have a hard time picking up on when people are drunk because my idea of drunk has always been angry and scary. I'm tired of people not understanding that my life hasn't been easy because I grew up in a home that was big and we had nice new things, the means to getting that money was at my father's expense, it stressed him out. And when he was stressed out he took it out on me.

To anyone who took the time to read this, thank you. I just needed to let my story out in the open for all to see.

Edit: TLDR For most of my life my dad put has me through hell due to his alcoholic tendencies and although I'm completely capable of beating the hell out of him due to dedication to martial arts and a love for MMA, his past mental abuse makes me scared like I'm still the weak little kid.