I’m 24 and I still think about what happened in my childhood. Was this abuse/trauma?

I’m 24 now, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood. I honestly don’t know if I’m overreacting or if what happened to me really affected me that much.

I have an older brother who is more than 10 years older than me. When I was a child, he used to hurt and beat me and my younger sister, who is 2 years younger than me. We were basically always scared of him.

We couldn’t really do normal kid things without being afraid. For example, if he found out that we were listening to music or playing games on the PC, he would hit us. We were constantly watching what we were doing because we knew he could get angry at any moment.

Even going to the beach became something stressful. My dad used to want to take us to the beach, but my brother wouldn’t let us go. And even when we did manage to go, we would be terrified about going home because he would inspect us when we came back. He would look for tan marks or any other signs that we had been swimming, basically trying to figure out whether we had gone into the water and what kind of swimsuit we had been wearing, like whether we were wearing a two-piece or not.

And the thing is, we were literally in primary school. We were just little kids.

Even during holidays, when we wanted to do something as simple as styling our hair, if he saw that we had done it, he would hit us.

I also remember him ripping/cutting my jeans because I was a little chubby. I was just a child.

The weirdest part is that my dad also seemed kind of pressured or intimidated by him. So it never really felt like there was an adult who could protect us from him.

I’m 24 now, but I still think about these things. Some memories are extremely vivid, and sometimes I wonder why things that happened so long ago still affect me.

I’m not even sure what I’m looking for by posting this. I guess I just want to hear from people who experienced something similar**.**

There’s a lot more I could talk about, but I’ll leave it here for now.

I’d really appreciate hearing your experiences. Please be kind, because I’m still trying to understand what happened to me.