I think I'm ruining my family

I've been struggling with depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember, but I only started getting help around fall of 2014 because that's when it got so bad that my parents noticed and decided to do something about it. I've been hopping from medication to medication since then, I'm currently taking lamictal and buspar and I like them both. This past winter I had to drop out of school (it was my last semester of senior year) because the stress of senior thesis was too much and I didn't like my program anyway. My doctor did a cheek swab for a genetic test that told us what medication I'm supposed to be on, and lamictal was the result. As the seasons changed and the medication started doing it's job, I felt so much better. I was taking care of myself and finally enjoying my life.

Then I ran out of money and had to move back in with my family in the suburbs. I've never really liked living with my family, even when I was a kid, but I can't ultimately put my finger on why. They're obnoxious but ultimately loving and supportive, so I feel super guilty about my dislike of them. My dad is verbally/emotionally abusive, sometimes even physical, so neither I nor my sisters (who also live at home) have liked living with him. My sisters and I are all adults (19, 22, and 24) so it's hard for us because we only have one car between the three of us and our parents still treat us like children. My mom always ends up being the mediator.

My sister and I don't fight often, but when we do, it's bad, and it's mostly them against me. I don't know why they get along better with each other, it's just been that way our entire lives. Since we were kids they would team up against me or leave me out of whatever they were doing (I'm the middle child), and I grew to resent them for it. I'm not without fault here, I push their buttons as they sometimes do mine. Even as an adult I'm always paranoid that whenever they do something together they're intentionally leaving me out because they don't actually like me. I try to keep cool when we fight because I have a bad temper but they know exactly how to get under my skin and I just loose it. We got in a fight yesterday and I broke the mirror in their room after they left and decided to leave the house. My phone was broken, so I knew my family couldn't contact me, but I didn't want them to. I had to get away from them for a couple hours.

When I came home, all I got was crap about breaking the mirror. I tried to tell my mom that living at home was making my depression worse, that external factors like not being able to go out whenever I wanted to, not having control over how my family members treat me, etc were what's been impacting it. But whenever I tell her how I feel, her solution is to just dump me in the hospital. I try telling her that when I was in the psych ward I had a horrible experience (all the doctors were condescending and didn't present real solutions for my mental illness, they were just putting band-aids on a broken bone, also they kept talking about god and jesus and I don't believe in that kinda stuff), but she doesn't believe me. She tells me the doctors were doing exactly what they should have done.

In the end she ends up gaslighting me. I know that I don't want to be around my family because I just genuinely don't like being around them, not because of my depression. I want to go out and be around my friends, my boyfriend, even complete strangers. I don't want to isolate myself, I can take care of myself, I just don't want to be around my family. I know what my depression feels like and that's not what's making me not want to be around my family. But all she says is "I don't get it, thats not normal, that's your depression making you say that". whenever I try to tell her how being around this family makes me feel, her response is "thats your depression making you say that, you don't actually feel that way". So we just end up fighting, I tell her to just leave me alone and let me cool down, and she comes back with the same gaslight responses. "You don't want to be alone, thats your depression talking, you don't actually feel that way." Again, I KNOW that it isn't my depression behind my dislike of my family.

Back to the other night, after my mom finally gave up on arguing with me, my dad came downstairs. He asked me why I broke the mirror, I told him because I was mad at my sisters. He asked me if I thought that was an appropriate response (this is coming from the man who notoriously breaks things when he's mad) and I said yes (because it felt really, REALLY good to break that mirror and I still don't regret it). He then told me to leave the house and poured himself another drink. I went upstairs to leave and he said "I misspoke, I don't want you to leave", but I knew he didn't misspeak, he said exactly what he wanted to say, and I told him that. So I left again, mind you this is the middle of the night, and my mom tried to chase after me. I told her what her husband had said, and I was feeling so hurt by being met with mostly anger when I came home the first time that I just kept walking.

I know I'm not without fault here, and I know my mental illness does plays into it all. I often can't control my emotions around them and it all just boils over at once and i wreak havoc. These emotions are so strong, I can't find an adequate outlet for them. I know that by randomly disappearing and fighting with my parents I'm just hurting them and our relationship. The problem is, while I'm trying to fix myself, they're doing nothing to fix themselves. My dad keeps drinking and saying horrible crap to me and my sisters. My mom keeps gaslighting me, which is genuinely making me doubt whether or not I actually know the difference between when I'm depressed and when I'm not. My sisters keep fighting with me (but not with each other).

At the end of the day though I feel like everything is my fault, and that if I didn't have this mental illness we wouldn't have these problems. I know I can be toxic, and I feel like my family would be better off without me. I've been trying to get a second job so I can move out and stop torturing them, but it's been months and I still havent been hired anywhere. There's no one else I can stay with indefinitely. I've been in cognitive behavioral therapy, which doesn't work. It's that "just think positive and your mental illness will go away" garbage. Sometimes the exercises lead to me justifying my father's abusive behaviors to my therapist's face. My therapist is a really nice guy though and I feel guilty for not being able to tell him that this isn't working. My mom is trying to get me in to see a new therapist but she won't return our calls and we don't know of any other non-CBT therapists our insurance will cover.

The only reason I think about killing myself is because I don't know how else to get out of this, nor how much more I can take. I don't know how much more my family can take. I know that if i was able to move out and live away from them, repairing our relationships would be much easier since they wouldn't have to put up with me all the time and vice versa. When I don't have to be around them all the time, I like coming home every now and then to see them. I can handle them in small doses. Ultimately, we're all at our wits end, and I think it's my fault.

tl,dr; I'm tearing my family apart, my family is tearing me apart, I don't have a way out, and I'm scared.

I'm not really looking for answers, I know there's not a lot anyone (except a doctor) can do, I just needed to finally get all of this off my chest to people who can relate.

Tearing:

You say:

The only reason I think about killing myself is because I don't know how else to get out of this, nor how much more I can take. I don't know how much more my family can take."

Again you say, "I don't know how else to get out of this"

One way you might consider getting out is getting out mentally.

If you go into a problem with a negative unconscious, then you see no out, because you have programmed your uncon. to not solve the problem. So it's like looking into a box canyon. There's no way out.

But there is a way out, you can get out the way you got in, you just don't see it, because you have programmed yourself to not see the answer but to stay in the problem.

about yourself you say,

"I've been struggling with depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember" and are now taking an anti-dep which is helping.

about your family, you say,

"My dad is verbally/emotionally abusive, sometimes even physical, so neither I nor my sisters (who also live at home) have liked living with him. My sisters and I are all adults (19, 22, and 24) so it's hard for us because we only have one car between the three of us and our parents still treat us like children. My mom always ends up being the mediator."

Something is going on there. Everybody still lives at home. Nobody's in school, nobody's working, right? We all stay at home and fight. Right?

I can imagine that's pretty rough. I don't see how all of you are doing as well as you are. I couldn't. My family surely could not.

We were the worst kids, small and grown, that there ever was. Of course, we were all sexually abused, so I don't know how we got along as well as we did.

So, I'm sure your family is better than the family I grew up in. Nobody could be worse.

So, I'm not foreign to what you're talking about.

Why is everybody still at home?

And you say about your father, ""My dad is verbally/emotionally abusive, sometimes even physical, so neither I nor my sisters (who also live at home) have liked living with him"

Has your father ever struck your sisters? Does he holler at them? Does he criticize them?

Has anybody ever reported him? What does your great mother say when you Dad is beating up on the kids? What does she do when he's beating up on the kids, or when he's being verbally abusive?

OK, I've just found a positive. Reason...to...get...out. They're both horrible, but that's must my view. Like you've already said.

One thing I'm saying here is, if you were raised in a negative household, like I was, it might program your unconscious to be negative, like mine was.

And you're taught that problems are horrible and can't be solved. Well, half of that is right, in my view. Problems are horrible.

But the other half is wrong, I learned late. Problems, can, in fact, be solved, and it increases the chances that they can be solved if we go into the problem with a positive frame of mind.

Your problem is getting out of the house. Can you do volunteer work? Can you work in a hospital? ("Volunteer Services!") Walk a dog at the kennel, help in a senior citizens home?

That did help me tremendously one time, my mom (yeah I had trouble with her too) got me to sign up with a group that did menial work such as putting stickers on soap boxes.

It got me up in the morning, got me around people, one of whom told me about a job situation (security company), I got the job, and another job later, and it all started with putting stickers on soap boxes.

You said you had trouble with transport. Sounds like it. I've hand that, too, but maybe you can get someone to drive you, or get to a bus line.

You could pay them to get you out of that house for a few hours. Like, $25 a day.

I agree with F27, work on getting an education. Even if it is adult school, then maybe college. That would be the best thing for you. Work on moving somewhere else. You are in a toxic environment right now.

Honestly I still have to read your post, as it was real long. I got part way.

We are all a work in progress here. We are all striving to get better. I think therapy would help you a lot if you aren't already going. It would help you look at the whole situation with objectivity.

I hope that things get better soon. I will finish reading your post and write more.

Welcome to the forum.

Hugs, Karen...

thanks for the support everyone. I am going back to school in two weeks to start finishing my degree in journalism, I've started a different program but my past credits earned me a minor and got most of my extra curriculars out of the way. My dream right now is to get an internship on the other side of the country and be completely out of their lives for a couple months. Deprogramming my negative filter has been hard when all their negative energy gets in the way, I've got some new crystals and a sage bundle to cleanse my room. I'm hoping going to talk therapy to vent to someone who's trained to work with this kinda stuff will help unload all this negativity. My sisters do have jobs, my little sister works full time so she's out of the house a lot, my older sister works about 30 hrs a week. I'm just stuck at home cause my job is a student job on campus so I don't get many hours over the summer.

As for my dad none of us really recognized it as abuse until recently. We would get disciplinary smacks as kids, but that's such a standard for older generations that my mom didn't question it and my sisters and I figured we'd deserved it for what we did. The physical part stopped when he put his hands around my little sister's throat a couple years ago and my mom called him out on it. The verbal abuse is mostly him screaming and cursing at us over minor things, it's gotten worse over the years, I think it's cause he figures we're adults who can "handle" it as opposed to little kids. It wasn't until I came back home that I realized that kind of behavior isn't normal. When I was younger I thought everyone's dad acted that way when they were mad. I don't think my mom recognizes it as abuse, and he doesn't yell at her or hit her or anything. At this point my sisters and I are all just trying to get out of the house in one piece so we don't wanna deal with the drama of convincing our mom, we just do our best to stay out of his way. Also we're financially dependent on him, so we can't get rid of him, at least not yet. My mom works too but their combined income is what pays the bills.

Thanks again for the support, it means a lot to me.

Tim Tam, yeah I tend to shut solutions down before I think them through, that's what I need to work on getting better at. I don't think my sisters are the same way bc they don't seem to be struggling the way I am, but they might just be better at hiding it. They have more positive attitudes in general. As for journalism, right now I'm interested in investigative stuff, like exposés