When I was four years old my father and mother divorced because he cheated on her. They had a really rough divorce and had lots of fights. Eventually, the divorce was settled and my mother and father could move on.
My father married his mistress, who I’ll call ‘E’ as to respect her privacy. My father was really happy with her and me and my sister got a stepbrother and two stepsisters with whom we got along really well.
Skip forward two years and ‘E’ started acting different and so was my father. My and my sister often couldn’t visit our father because he had to ‘work’, whilst in reality he was free.
When I and my sister were there we often weren’t allowed to eat at the table, which seven-year-old me didn’t understand.
Eventually, my father started becoming more distant, he didn’t wish me happy birthday anymore and missed a lot of important milestones in my childhood, like learning to ride my bike or events at school.
When I was nine my sister and I could only visit four days a month and had to sleep in separate rooms. I vividly remember that during one weekend that we were there I had accidentally broken a glass and ‘E’ had turned furious. She send me upstairs and had me take my socks off which nine-year-old me found really weird.
Then she showed me a piece of glass she held in her hand and said that this is what I deserved for my clumsiness. She pushed the shard of glass into the sole of my foot. I yelled and cried and tried to remove my leg from her grasp when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
It was my father’s hand, he was helping ‘E’ do this, I don’t remember what happened after that.
‘E’ also got into a huge fight with my sister and had pulled her by her hair down to the basement. After these two occasions, we decided to break all contact and tell our mother what had happened (we hadn’t told her before because, well he was our father) .
My mother knew this was serious but she was too afraid to alert the police since my father had threatened her with violence before.
Skip forward another five years, I was fourteen and at the same school my former stepsiblings attended.
Once I saw them all the memories started rising again. My two stepsisters were mean to everyone and lots of people hated them. Me and a couple of friends decided to retaliate and secretly put cigarettes in their bags
Apparently, this had caused a huge fight in their home and my father and ‘E’ decided to divorce. After this ‘E’ got into serious financial troubles and even became a prostitute, and my father became an alcoholic.
Yet in some sick way I don’t feel any remorse. My sister has been dealing with a severe eating disorder after all the ill-treatment from ‘E’ and has been hospitalised twice.
Now me and my sister are doing better, though we still have traumas.
We’ve thought about starting a lawsuit but because of our ages during the incidents legal advisors have advised us to just ‘move on’.
Anyway… I’m in a real moral dilemma: I did something that caused horrible things, yet I don’t feel any remorse, am I a psychopath?