My stepdad growing up with was pretty horrible. He had convinced himself that since he was raising my brother and I instead of our biological father, that he was a saint. Would do abusive things often, whether it was beating us black and blue during alcohol induced blackouts, or finding new and horrible ways to punish us for the smallest of transgressions like playing too loudly. One of many times, he made us kneel in the kitchen with our pants down, with tiny pebbles all over the hardwood floors so that it would dig into our knees and make us bleed. I had dietary issues growing up, and I couldn’t really eat meat, but he was a “meat and potatoes kind of guy”, so he would force me to stay at the kitchen table for hours and hours until the late night with school in the morning until I finished all my food, even if it made me physically ill. Hmm what else, oh, washing our mouths out with soap, belts on our backsides, he would smack my mouth during the time when I had braces for talking back and I would constantly have bleeding and infections from the cuts. Not to mention the creepy more than borderline sexual abuse when my mother and him finally got divorced. Things like as a preteen trying to teach my friends and I how to deep throat vegetables. Trying to assess our breasts for “cancer” and etc. The funny part is, they had two children after my brother and I, and to this day he has never laid a finger on either of them and they actually think he’s a saint and were too young to remember the abuse so they think we are just lying. Go figure.