My stepfather would purposely scare me. I’d be walking down the hallway and he would jump out.

He’d take my brother, cousin and I on these weird homemade versions of “scared straight” where he’d drive us through the (projects) systemically underfunded neglected cities populated by majority of black and brown people. While driving in these neighborhoods he’d threaten to kill us if we ever ended up in the projects as adults or ever did drugs. He’d yell and go in verbal tyrants in the car during these long car rides.

When he didn’t like my behavior, after doing something he probably didn’t want to do. IE. Pick me up from a cousins house, pick me up from school events, basically making him do any public facing activity he’d get very passive aggressive. In front of people he would be charming yet on the way home he would speed, purposely drive like a crazy person or have a verbal tantrum on the car ride home. Many times he did that when I was the only person in the car with him. Then I was to pretend as if nothing happened once we got home.

One time he was driving and he was going up a very steep hill. He pretended as if the car couldn’t make up the hill and so we slid back a little. I was terrified and he was just making it up to scare me. I was about 7 or 8. I got home and told my mother what happened and she just said minimized it.

The baseline was constant body shaming, (i was under weight as a kid) so anytime I had an extra slice of something or asked for something extra like a cookie. He would say, “ your aunt started off skinny, look at her now” at that time she was struggling with over eating. He belittled, laughed at, overly tickling me until it hurt.

I’m black and i grew up in a systemically underfunded redlined city. I have been in therapy for a long time and although I knew this was abusive, understanding this behavior as psychologically terrorizing is a whole other level. The layers of cptsd are so deep.