feeling guilt for the insect

My father has abused me for years. I’m not.. exactly sure if it happened because apparently everyone thinks that he’s lovely and that I’m the one who’s wrong, but I’m pretty sure he did. I’m not sure who’s correct and who’s incorrect. 

He’s shoved me. He’s screamed at me, swore at me, ripped apart the kitchen in arguments with my mother, seeks validation in everything that isn’t him. Put himself and our family aside for his work. I hate him, because he’s made me like him; his own aggression has imprinted on me, and I have NPD, along with having been toxic to others in the past due to his abuse. I don’t like him, I don’t forgive him for abusing me to the point where I became like him. How can a 40 year old man be so immature that his 14 year old son gets therapy before him? How immature can he be that he doesn’t realise the harm his actions cause? 

It’s gotten to me lately though. To see an abusive, terrible person with your symptoms ignites disgust already, but to have to personally deal with one that made you the way you are is worse. But today I’ve realised just how wretched he actually is.

He’s £2,000 in debt. He acts as if he lives a life of hell because the family he abused disapproves of him. He cried to me and asked if I felt bad. Out of all the symptoms of NPD that I have, a lack of empathy is the one that I sadly don’t. I used to think I was unempathetic but I’m not all that much. I feel.. genuinely bad. Not because he deserves pity, but because he’ll never realise why no one likes him. Why he has to fake happiness. Why his closest some despises him. 

He’ll die thinking he’s pure, and misunderstood, rather than knowing that he harmed people. It makes me sick with a pitiful sadness. I don’t like that he doesn’t know what he’s done, and I feel pity because he genuinely doesn’t understand. He’s like a child crawling for its mother the way he looked for care within me. Another example of the emotional incest he’s put me through. 

It’s a horrid feeling, to realise that there is no true ‘evil’ to fight against. There is no stereotypical daemon that the angels have to smite. The people in society who are ‘evil’, for the most part, are either children shaped by their traumas and mistreatment, who are too unintelligent to get therapy, who put their negativity out on others; or self-serving, manipulative people. My father is the first. I could have been exactly like him if I didn’t know I was being toxic. I could have been exactly like him if I had more resentment. If I didn’t try my best to not make my negativity everyone else’s problem. 

I shouldn’t feel empathy. You can understand that someone is hurt, while still accepting that they were bad for you. You shouldn’t feel bad for your bullies or abusers if they’re not doing anything to help themselves. But still, it tugs at the string he placed in my heart. That string he placed when he groomed me. He said he might kill himself. 

I wish this would stop.