My name is Eri and I’ve struggled with anxiety since i was about 4 or 5 years old. My anxiety stemmed from my dad being verbally and sometimes physically abusive to me. I just dealt with most of the abuse as a kid because he had partial custody of me and i was absolutely never allowed to skip a weekend with him.And as a kid i never really understood that what he was doing was abuse. As i got older i noticed a lot of his manipulative ways and his heavy drinking so i decided to start seeing him less. Seeing him less just made him more paranoid so the abuse got worse. He would call me everyday and sometimes multiple times a day and a lot of the time he was intoxicated when he would call me. When i was 16 i became a Christian and that’s when things blew up. I had given him so many second chances to change and when i was finally fed up with him i cut off all communication with him. This led to him showing up at my mom’s house at random times or going to places like church where he knew i would be. He would also leave me paragraphs of texts telling me how much of a horrible person i was and quoting the only two scriptures he knew and telling me that God hated me. Then he went as far as to seek out every person i knew so that he could tell them that i was an awful person and that he thought i was going down the wrong path and that he thought i was drinking and partying. when i turned 18 i moved away, changed my phone number, and cut off all communication with my dad’s side of the family. I’m now married and happy and secure but my anxiety is still something i struggle with every single day. Most of the time I’m too afraid to leave my house because I’m afraid I’ll see my father when i go out. I rarely sleep through the night because i still have nightmares about him. And now a new thing that’s been happening to me are my PTSD attacks, i could be having a conversation with someone and something they said will trigger my PTSD and it’s like I’m reliving a bunch of horrible memories like a movie in my head. I joined thetribe because writing out my thoughts really helps my anxiety and the abuser wins when they make you think you are alone in all of this, which is so far from the truth.