It had a negative impact in my case. My mom married a horribly violent man. My dad married a narcissist who chose me as her target.

As terrible as the violence from my stepdad was, it was my stepmonster's emotional abuse that really caused the lasting damage. She told me disturbing things like my troll dolls had demons in them that would rape me at night. She lied to my dad and other authority figures in my life to get me in trouble constantly.

Her sister once said that she felt sorry for me because my stepmonster did not seem to have any maternal feelings for me. She said that my stepmonster had always been extremely selfish and manipulative, even as a young child.

The last straw was when she wrote a letter to my therapist about what a terrible, manipulative person I was. She even went so far as to say I was faking my illness, despite the fact that she had been there at the hospital and talked to the neurosurgeon who cut the tumor out of my brain. This letter was not solicited by me or the therapist, she just knew who I saw because she had driven me to a few appointments.

After reading it to me, the therapist told me it was the most disturbing letter she had ever gotten. I was an adult, but I was living with my dad and stepmonster at the time while recovering from the tumor. The therapist told me to get the hell out of that house because I was not physically safe around her.

I went back to the house and slept with the door locked that night. The next day I loaded up my car and went to live with other family in another state. I haven’t been back since and I have gone no contact with her. This was 4-5 years ago.

What really sucks about it is that it has isolated me from family members, who don’t understand why I can’t just get over it. Or worse, they say that it is both our faults, implying that I somehow did things to warrant what she did to me. It makes me feel terribly alone and isolated when they blame me for the abuse and for the painful rift in our family it has caused. I know they just want everyone to get along. I want that too, but I have to stand my ground because an adult emotionally terrorizing a 9 year old kid is a complete horror of a human being. Fuck that.

OP (or anyone else for that matter), if you are getting remarried and have kids, please listen to them. I told adults multiple times what was going on, but nobody believed me. Emotional abuse is real and it is so damaging to a child.