My dad’s narcissistic and abusive with severe hoarding and animal hoarding issues

I always dread the holiday season because it means visiting my family. My mom has major issues with anxiety and controlling her emotions due to her trauma, my sister is on the autism spectrum and has similar issues, and both will yell or scream or go from 0 to 100 at the drop of a hat. It‘s not their fault and they both have self awareness, so I have empathy for them, but my dad is the bigger issue.

My mom worked full time while my dad was our reluctant primary caretaker growing up. He had issues with explosive rage in my early childhood, he wouldn’t hit us kids but he hit my mom a few times (not witnessed) and would break things and scream. I have witnessed his rage outbursts and they are unhinged and frightening even as an adolescent (second to last one I saw) or as an adult (last one I saw). My mom told me for years she was afraid he would kill her one day. He also used us as weapons in his verbal and financial abuse against my mom. He would treat her like shit in general and make her the butt of every joke, and he ran up tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, usually for his hoarding interests but on holidays he’d buy us too many toys and he used us as an excuse when he started his animal hoarding.

His hoarding has become more and more severe, it was bad growing up and part of the reason we had no family friends or visitors to our home but now he lives in filth and abject despair with 15 dogs and 7 cats. One of the dogs was mauled to death by another a couple years back while he was away from home. He treats them like his children which is to say with cooing saccharine affection but in severe neglect (piles and piles of things stacked from floor to ceiling and covering every counter or table, curtains drawn closed making it as dark as possible, leaving them alone for many hours at a time) and all interspersed with outbursts of rage when he can’t control them. He identifies with their having perfect unconditional love for him. His house reeks of dried urine because half of them aren’t trained and just piss wherever they like, then he wipes down the spot or leaves the piss soaked rug outside over the fence to dry (there are dozens of them). He also neglects the exterior — his house is in a normal middle class neighborhood but the outside is filthy and overgrown and his yard is a mud pit with moldy mossy garbage on his porch and in his driveway.

He also has delusions of grandeur and this bizarre identity as a live music connoisseur. He goes to 70-100 concerts and broadway shows each year — previously with money borrowed from my mom‘s parents or his parents under false pretenses, then with credit cards paid off by my mom, and finally these days with the inheritance after his very frugal parents both passed, since my grandfather had an upper middle class income. He used to send me texts and pictures and go on and on about his shows and sort of put on this performance for me. He also brings one of his dogs as a mental health support animal with him to these shows and uses the dogs to ingratiate himself with performers signing autographs after shows, then he shows me pictures he took with the performers and calls them his “friends” and says things like “she’s a nice person” (with actresses he’d go on about how “pretty” or “hot” they are). He also did this growing up, running off to concerts after throwing chicken nuggets in the oven for us for “dinner”. He never cooked or cleaned (my mom did all that) and he never gave us any kind of guidance or emotional support growing up, stay at home dad meant pretty much just that — he was there, he kept us from going outside, he slept on the couch, and he told us how horrible life was and how ”life sucks and then you die”. But we didn’t exist and our feelings didn’t exist. We only existed insofar as he could use us for his own gain.

I still don’t know what to do about any of this and it hurts every year. I visit him in his hoarding nest when I visit my mom and sister for the holidays, mostly out of inertia and just to go through the motions and not deal with the drama of complete estrangement. I used to stay with my mom — she divorced my dad when I went to college and sold the childhood home a few years afterward. But her new partner is an alcoholic who gets drunk every night that I’m there (a whole other can of worms) and there is no space so I had to sleep on a cot in the dining or living room. This year I am staying at an Airbnb after much resistance from my mom. I sometimes think about how much better off I would be if I never spoke to or saw my mom, my sister, or my dad again. I couldn’t do that to my mom or my sister, but it is exhausting to feel this way. I feel like all they do is take from me and drain me and use me as an emotional dumping ground, and I’m tired.

Was inspired by another post on here about someone else’s dad and just wanted to vent to someone other than my therapist.