I (23M) am a broke online college student living with my parents. I have an abusive brother (25M) who also lives under the same roof.

My brother is a narcissist. He believes that he is the most important person in the universe. Boundaries and respect do not matter to him. He will hijack every conversation into being either constant self-aggrandizing or personal attacks and force me to repeat it back to him. He is physically violent when provoked and he has killed multiple animals by beating them to death with his bare hands. Unfortunately, he seems to consider “no” to be a provocation. He searches through all my stuff without permission and I’ve had to start being careful about what things I leave lying around.

My parents do not care about this. My father doesn’t because he’s the OG narcissist who passed it down to my brother and actively cheers for my suffering, and my mother doesn’t because she is the enabler who chose to stay married to my father and told me I had to suffer the abuse endlessly like she does.

I don’t have any irl friends because I have medical conditions that make it difficult for me to be outside on my own for extended periods of time. I also can’t drive because of that. It sucks. This isn’t to say it’s impossible for me to go out, but it’s hard and kind of risky (my condition can cause me to faint).

I have constantly been told to give up on being treated like a human being, but I have begun to recognize that my family is feeding me false narratives of hopelessness to keep me complacent and submissive. I surely have power, but my internalization of their narratives is obscuring the ways to exercise it.

What would you do in such a situation, or if you have been in a similar situation, what did you do?

EDIT: I live in the U.S.

  • dingus@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Agreed, @sprigatito_bread@lemmy.world. Get a job. Any job. Ideally one that could pay a bit more than minimum wage and/or one tangentially related to the field you want to go into. But you can’t afford to be too picky. That’s step one.

    Step two, move out. I know you said you don’t have friends. You don’t need them. But you need to find a roommate because you’re unlikely to be able to afford to live on your own.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/roommates/comments/1fipamp/best_roommate_finding_apps/

    This reddit link has some ideas/websites to try for step two. It’s not an exhaustive list on how to find a roommate, but it’s a start.