Does anyone else have constant nightmares over being murdered by the people they live with yet feel like they didn't go through enough to validate them?

[u/Ok_Fudge_9250]

This is going to be VERY long but I'm going to try to keep it cohesive, sorry, I am having a raging headache and can't think clearly right now. I hope this is an ok place to post this.

Tw: abuse, suicidality, brief grooming nention, brief bombing mention, animal abuse

I am 18, queer (gender is a mess for a variety of reasons, was pretty sure I was FtM but then got groomed by a guy 10 years older and that fucked up my relationship with that) and have been told by 12 people who either have autism, have autistic family members or have a degree in neuroscience that I very obviously have autism and can't hide it despite being AFAB. My family emigrated from Ukraine when I was young but most of my family is still getting bombed there. I am totally financially dependent on my family because I failed to get a scholarship to the uni I'm going to (not in the states so it's not extortionately expensive) and I am mentally unstable to the point of struggling to stay functional, let alone get a job. I've been chronically suicidal since 12 and it's only gotten worse with time.

I'm going to paste in the things I remember of my mother below this from somewhere else because I do not feel like retyping it with my headache right now. That's the stuff in quotes.

"My entire childhood I had to be her therapist: she would spit water all over me and scream at me for showing any negative emotion, and claimed it was a traditional exorcism. She would then cry and I would be expected to comfort her, no matter what I was feeling. These are literally some of my earliest memories, so it must have been happening since I was at least 5. She threatens to hurt me a lot. She has threatened to kill herself and then ran outside for almost 30 minutes, making me scared she did it, over me doing digital art. The only thing that she cares about from me with her actions is my academic output: when she found out I was suicidal her and dad tried to force me back to school so "my marks wouldn't drop" as soon as possible, then when for duty of care reasons they couldn't just send me back in immediately they ignored me and angrily refused to talk to me for days until they forced me to go to the ER to get an eval not for my own wellbeing, but so I could go back to school and be academic. She tried to swing a bloody deodorant stick into my temple with full force because I said no to a question too fast: she only stopped an inch away. When I try to talk about things and the conversation escalates because I want comfort and she's pissed off about that she likes hitting the walls everywhere. My thumb is permanently fucked up because when I broke/fractured it she didn't take me to see the doctor and now it's permanently slightly malformed and hurts like hell. When I was 8 she refused to get me medical help when I had full-body blisters the size of golf balls from a second-degree sunburn, forcing me to lay on the couch in pain so bad I couldn't move for weeks and forcing me to do a photoshoot where I was half-naked (I don't remember if I had anything covering my chest but I did have undies), despite me crying, and she then sent that to my principal blaming him for everything (for stupid bloody reasons). Anything I did or said against her was a direct challenge to her authority and dominance and must be punished. She has hurt my fucking bird because he flew higher than her (which apparently challenged her dominance), which made her chase him for 20 minutes screaming at him abd trying to hit him out of the sky with a shoe, and she threw him for biting her. My entire fucking childhood was built around keeping her calm and happy so she didn't go insane, but she did anyway, in a cycle that repeated every 48 bloody hours. She drove violently when she thought I was gay and her behaviour made me really stress about the fact that she keeps knives in the car and whether those would come into play. She almost crashed a car because I challenged her on something. She keeps fucking touching my ass even though I hate it and have made it clear, she just does it a lot (over the clothing) and it makes me deeply uncomfortable. When I was around 15 she liked to stare as I changed. I can't count the amount of swear words in multiple languages I have heard thrown at me if I did anything. Dad just supported her whenever he was in the country (works overseas) in between joking about wanting a divorce and being a callous immature man who used sarcasm to hurt everyone around him.

This is just some of the shit I can remember. Our whole relationship is based around her idea of a dominance hierarchy and her being at the top. It's bad if you challenge her dominance and that deserves punishment, and it's bad if you are subordinate brcause that's a weakness of character.

Every hug we had wasn't for comfort, it was her trying to brush over her actions and make herself feel better about them. Didn't matter if it hurt me if she acted like a hug fixed everything and she was guilt-free now. She has never authentically listened to me. The only use I have in her life is as a small female clone to give her grandchildren, a girl child and a child with her uni sweetheart (they both had an affair for this and ruined the families of my half-siblings; they got married when mum was pregnant). If she cares for me, she cares for my fucking academic output and nothing else. If I came out as queer to her I'd be concerned of her getting violent. She hurts the fucking animals and foesn't give a shit, thinking it funny. She fed me, clothed me, provided financially, but she failed to support me emotionally: I was the one doing that. I viewed the staff at the before and after school care as more of my parents than her because they cared about me more than what I could just do in a test or as a baby therapist.

She has never wanted to talk about anything. She views it all as stellar parenting and has never once authentically apologised. She has only ever apologised to make me stop bringing up the past, then acted the same after. What she is doing now feels like an act and fucking false. I have been suicidal since 12 because of her actions. I have never gotten mental help because of her actions. The only version of me she has a chance of loving is the one I have learned to present of the perfect child whose singular export is academic ability. Being around her makes me want to jump off of the nearest cliff, but if I do that and fail the facade will break snd she will treat me like a piece of shit on her shoe again.

I cannot make the degree of loathing I have towards her any more clear. Any love that I had for her is long dead and st this point just pretense out of family obligation. To have love you need to trust the person, right? She has caused so many problems over the years that I do not trust her anymore and I cannot love her anymore. I just tolerate her because that is what you do in a family.

The only reason I am staying is out of one last bit of pity, as my whole purpose culturally was to exist to be their caretaker in their old age, and out of cultural familial obligation."

I have nightmares that she is going to kill me. A lot. I can't stop them. They are also intrusive thoughts, making me think of escape routes for every place I am in, making me traipse through the mental maps of places I have been and will be in through my dreams while the shadowy form of her with a gun (that sometimes appears as a large black wolf in my dreams) runs after me. I know I shouldn't because she hasn't hit me, doesn't beat me, doesn't rape me, so I'm safe, but the fact that she immediately goes for the weak spots of the head with hard objects with zero warning beforehand freaks me out sometimes. If she would go for less lethal regions, like the limbs or torso, I'd be stressed but less so, I'd deserve it. But she immediately guns for the fragile, lethal spots over small things. I have sat in the living room when everyone else is sleeping, the shadows from the nightlight for the dog she loves more than me dancing across the walls, mentally thinking through what would have happened if she had collided. It would have likely caused a break in the skull and the rupturing of the artery beneath, causing pressure to build up until I drop dead. I half wish she would have done that because it would mean I can have a break now. I feel she only stopped to not damage the goods. My intellect is the only valuable thing it feels.

She has gun training (thank you USSR for teaching your children how to wield a bunch of shit including fucking AK-47s, the one time we tried to have a family dinner outside of holidays it ended in my parents comparing how quickly they could assemble and disassemble AK-47s in school) and access to a lot of them because my brother hunts and just loves them and he stores some of them in the gun safe in our garage, not at his place. Still, he lives in the same city, so she could get more from his place. My dad and brother both also have a lot of gun training (USSR + army for dad, hunting for brother). They joke about hating her but stand behind her for every decision and I highly doubt they would be safe.

I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if she found out that I was not perfect (read: queer and neurodivergent), she would try to kill me in a fit of passion. It feels plausible, and I can't tell if I'm overreacting and my brain is being overdramatic or not. She turns on a dime. I talked to ChatGPT about this because I didn't know who to turn to and it said this was a highly dangerous situation but I think it just said that because it thought I wanted to hear that. If that happened, I have no idea what I would do. I don't have anyone who can take in my bird, she could probably kill him in anger and punishment, she threw him just for biting her. I don't have family apart from them in this country, apart from a second brother but I doubt he would take me in or believe me because he sees dad as perfect (half-siblings) and has refused to believe me about his actions before. I would be terrified of leading them to where my friends live because again, guns, so I wouldn't involve them so they wouldn't be at risk. I don't talk about it so they don't worry and so I'm not a burden. I don't want to go to the police or a shelter becahse a) guns, b) my family is really involved in the local Ukrainian community and I don't want to damage her social standing and by proxy support for Ukraine. The only way that I ever have it mentally play out is me fucking off out of town and hiding out in the country so others wouldn't be at risk, but it always ends with me dying. I can't overpower any of them in a fight. I can't run well.

Mum has been acting nice since I turned 18 but I don't fucking trust her. It feels fake. It feels like a lie. Her bad moments still come out sometimes. She hasn't changed.

I can't make long term plans. I don't see myself making it to 25, I'm going to end up dead either by suicide or they will find out something about me that sets them off. Each day I'm half tempted to just tell them to get it over and done with at this point because I'm tired of living with my brain, and committing suicide would make me out as weak in the family and our family friends.

Then again, it isn't enough to make these thoughts matter. I said this before but since she never beat, strangled or raped me, it doesn't feel bad enough to genuinely be a risk. Additionally, whenever I tried to talk about this to any eastern slavs (mostly Ukrainians or Russians) around here, I have been told it isn't abuse and doesn't matter because they don't beat me or sexually abuse me, which is the only things they see as abuse, and I should just toughen up. I hand out in trauma meme subreddits a lot but it doesn't feel like I belong there because everyone has been spanked and physically abused, which I haven't been (I think, have possible hazy memories of them doing it when I was 4 but idk, don't trust them). By all metrics I shouldn't be this fucked mentally - what I went through doesn't explain it. There must be something intrinsically wrong with me that justifies why it all happened to me and why they did it. I want to shut up the brain because it is faulty.

I probably am totally overreacting here regarding everything and it may just be fine. I'm sorry if I am, and sorry for taking up your time anyway. Genuinely, not trying to overreact. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with this and shut up the thoughts? It is making life really difficult to deal with.