Verbally Abusive Father

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Let me first state that I have aspergers and that I am 30 years old living with my parents. Not because I want to or because I am lazy. I am terribly afraid of failing at being on my own. I do not have a license yet though I have a permit. I am truly afraid that I am not capable enough to be able to stand on my own two feet just yet. I do not enjoy living this way.

To the point however, I just recently had a run in with my father. You see I have cats and my father has dogs. I noticed one of the dogs was near the feeding table trying to get to the cats food. I yelled at the dog to stop and he ran away. I was not acting maliciously or overly hostile toward the situation. My dad who was sitting in a lawn chair began insulting me about reacting to the dog's behavior saying you don't pay for the cat food which I do sometimes. When I'm having a hard time financially my mom helps me. I told him this has nothing to do with it that the dog has food of his own to eat. Which my dad replies 'You are just a nut. you haven't done anything today except sleep.' I informed him that my sleep schedule was messed up and I was having a hard time with it and when I did wake up I made a point to feed my cats and organize my room. I also said I do not enjoy for my schedule to be messed up and why would I call my sister about melatonin dosage the other night as well as ask my father earlier today for advice if I enjoyed having a messed up routine. To which he smiled and called me a nut again and said that I am worthless.

I did get upset and talked to my mom about it and then poured half a glass of everclear 99 proof with wine cooler mixed in. This is the best I can do to cope. I do not take anti psychotics or antidepressants because they make me worse with no beneficial results, and heap on side effects instead. My mom doesn't have any answers but I think she wishes she could help me.

My father on good days is nice and talkative and helps me with daily things that I seek advice for, but he drinks alcohol sometimes too. Not enough to get fully outright drunk though.

I wish he could see what his cutting me down does. It harms my self esteem and makes me want to go off and die. I do not enjoy struggling through life with my problems and I am not a nut job, I just have a harder time than others. For him to act as though I enjoy being outcast and possibly weird or love having more daily struggles hurts me very much. He acts as though I'm a freak and take joy from this but I have only striven to try to be normal and his insults do nothing to help this..

What can I do? I've tried talking and explaining things to him as a rational person would but he just walks away like he's condemned me to being completely irrational like nothing I say makes sense.

Sorry to hear it.

Every time I've been depressed or thinking miserably that I can't handle something, the thing that helped the most was to just do something about it. Sometimes even tiny progress toward actually accomplishing something is enough to stop the viscious cycle.

It is possible to get around without a car, even if it is inconvenient.

I'd try making a list of everything preventing me from moving out, and then figuring out how I could eliminate everything on the list.

friend silver future.....i'm way older than you and left home early in life. things were much simpler long ago and i'm sure that in today's world, i would be lost.

my father never said a kind word to me...ever. i was always worthless, a moron, disgusting. when i started stuttering he just laughed at me and said to stay away from him. he did not know if i went to school, or if i was sick, or even that i was alive.

my mother was no help. she was severely manic-depressive and would either lay in bed like she was dead or would be literally running into walls. i spent much time with my grandmother. she suffered from hebephrenic schizophrenia. she would tie me in a chair and pick imaginary bugs off my body. she would use a paint brush to spread bleach over my skin.

i existed by staying with other guys in the gang i was in. i worked at a pool hall from age 10 and the owner would let me stay in the room used for drunks to sleep it off. at 17 i escaped for good by joining the military.

i regret that your father is the way he is. nothing you can do will change him. if it's not possible to get out on your own, you must try to fit in with what he wants.i'm sure he tells you...it's my house....right? do you work? if not, any sort of job would probably ease some of the tension.
. if i could make it till i could get on my own, i bet you can also. i have cats and dogs as companions. i do not have a single human i could turn to for help. you can always count on non-human animals to love you.

I don't have anything to say about the situation itself, but you were right to keep the dog away from the cats' food. Cat food is not good for dogs; it's like what would happen to a human if we ate nothing but hamburgers every day. (Dogs are omnivorous; cats are obligate carnivores; cat food is no good for dogs, though it's not poisonous to them or anything. And your cats need to eat, too--how will they do it if a dog gets to the food first?)

re. melatonin dosage: Try 3 mg at bedtime, or a half-hour before. It's so nontoxic there's no recorded LD50, so you can't really damage yourself if you end up being sensitive. The worst thing that'll happen is you'll sleep for twelve hours or something... You're right that the sleep cycle is important. If you can get that under a bit better control, you might be able to stop self-medicating with alcohol which, as you know, has side effects that are worse than what you're likely to experience on heavy-duty antipsychotics. There's actually a pretty big connection between alcohol and sleep problems; you've probably got some kind of vicious cycle going there...

Anyway, good luck with the sleep cycle thing. If you're going to bed too late to force yourself earlier, you could try going to bed an hour *later* every day, until your bedtime eventually goes through morning, into afternoon, and finally into the evening where it belongs. You'll want an alarm not just for waking up, but for going to bed--and a personal rule that you will not shut off the alarm until you are actively getting ready for bed. Lots of times, sleep and autism are related by way of not being able to plan and follow plans very well, or by hyperfocusing on something, or by not knowing how to figure out your own body's signals. Having an external alert is useful. I'm currently experimenting with a PDA for this purpose. They don't sell them anymore (you'd have to buy a smart phone), but you can get an old one very cheaply, and you don't really need anything new because alarm and calendar functions are very basic programs.