What incident as a child do you think had a huge effect on your personality?

My mom was diagnosed with a rare disease (scleroderma) in 2010 (I was 11). She obviously needed support from my father and I but instead, he just started to make it worse by becoming an alcoholic. He started to get home really late and drunk every single day and made our lifes hell (turns out he was a drug addict since before I was even born but I didn't learn about that until 2014). I loved my father more than anyone growing up, but eventually I started to hate him more than I've ever hated anything in my whole life. He verbally assaulted my mother, constantly asking her for money (probably for drugs) and throwing stuff on the floor if he didn't get it. Whenever things were calm and we were off to eat or something like that, he'd go to the bar an hour before we left and pick us up late and drunk once again. There were also suicide threats from him.

Once, he asked my mom for money but she kept refusing, which led him to point a knife at her. I shouted at him, went and hugged my mom while we were both crying and he pointed the knife at me. I was "forced" (I put that in quotation marks because I wasn't forced as such, just encouraged by my mother who just wanted the best for me even if she wasn't happy) to forgive him countless times but it was a inevitably repeating cycle.

2013's Summer, we were at my grandparent's beach house, my cousin was with us. My mom, my cousin and I went to the beach. My dad was supposed to come with us when he woke up as he was taking a nap. Instead, he came when we were just leaving. We went back to the house, but he stayed there. He came to the house 4 hours later at around 00:00AM, without his shirt, without the house keys and the drunkest I'd ever seen him. He basically made a scandal, everyone in the street was looking at him, he started hitting his head against a wall, pushed my grandparents and nearly dropped them on the floor. He didn't stay home that night and I told my mother "that's enough, I've suffered enough. We both have". She agreed with me and we decided to leave without him the next morning. I felt relieved for the first time in 3 years, but to my surprise, my mother asked my uncle (who is a police man) to search for my father and bring him home. He did at around 02:00AM and I was super pissed and scared to have him back there. He tried to talk to me the next day and played the victim role, thinking I loved him and saying "don't worry, your mom and I are not divorcing, don't be scared about it" after she asked for a divorce. I obviously ignored him and stopped talking to him up until his birthday, when I just said "Happy birthday" while passing by, to which he replied "that's not enough". My mom looked at me crying, so I decided to hug him.

They tried to work everything out again while my mom knew I was having a hard time living in the same house as he did. I was the happiest kid during my childhood but this started to make me be alone in my room and getting less happy everytime something happened. My father would usually talk to me about his problems, thinking I was supporting him when I was just trying to ignore someone who I didn't consider my father anymore. He HATED my grandparents (who I also consider my parents because they've looked after me since I was born) and would constantly whine about them not putting him in the house's writtings or whatever that's called in English (thank God they didn't).

My mom found out he was keeping around 500€ every month for drugs or whatever and had a lot of debts, so she finally decided to divorce him. Even so, she decided to give him 35.000€ (divorce's money sharing, don't remember what that's called and kept doing the laundry for him until he made another scandal and we had to call the police. After that, I tried to help him but he just kept drinking and doing drugs so I fully stopped talking to him. He texted me a couple of times just to start arguments and tell me I was going to be a drug addict like him etc. I haven't said a word to him in... close to 2 years I believe.

This has completely changed my personality and my way to see things. I'm not a sociable guy anymore, I don't like going out, I barely have any friends left, I find myself depressed most of the time (I'm doing better now), I'm not the happiest while I'm around family meetings and I'm just 18 years old. Thankfully, my mom is doing good and has found someone who's everything I could've hoped for her as a partner and for me as a father figure. Oh, I forgot to mention my grandmother is traumatized with my father's events and is constantly remembering them. Sorry for the long ass post, but it felt good to write this out. Sorry for any spelling or grammar mistakes, English is my second language.

/r/AskReddit Thread