My dad is manipulative. How do I help myself?

My dad, who is now 56, can be pretty manipulative. I’d go as far to say he’s always been that way. I’m going to be 20 in a few months and still have major problems with it.

A little backstory: My mom got married to my dad, a trucker who already had 2 kids he abandoned in a different state. She was going to nursing school and didn’t want kids. Despite that, she got pregnant and became a stay at home mom while my dad worked as a truck driver. She was 30 when she had my older brother, 33 with me and 35 with my younger brother. I have very early memories (starting around a year old) and I don’t have any memories of my dad from an early age. My mom has told me stories and my dad will tell me the same one, but say he was the one in the memory, not my mom. He always said I was a mean baby but my mom has never known why he claims that, because I wasn’t an angry baby.

There have been numerous times when me and my brothers have busted our heads (just playing like normal) and my mom would have to wait an hour for one of my aunts to take us to the ER because my dad had the car.

Moving forward, I had moved about 17 different times by the age of 11. My dad would never keep a job and it caused us to always be moving. We were poor too. My mom was a seamstress and would get paid a quarter for every letter she stitched on a jersey. We heavily relied on my dad to bring money home. At 11 years old, things got a little rough in my home. My dad became pretty angry. He punched me in the face for asking my parents to talk at once so I could hear them. He threw my brother down the hallway by his backpack once. My mom then told my dad she wanted a divorce. She told me that she was taking me and we moved to my grandmas. Eventually, my brothers moved with us too.

Now, at 19, I live my mom and my step dad, who I’ve known for 7 years now. My brothers live with us too. We live more than 1,000 miles away from my dad and see him once a year, for about a day or two. He has always put the weight of his problems on to us. He always tells us about how he doesn’t have money, how his kids don’t talk to him anymore, how is step daughter is a leach, etc. He also has a problem with black people, yet tries to say he’s not racist. He wouldn’t even let me go to a certain school because there were too many black people. Keep in mind, my boyfriend is black and I will most definitely put him in his place if he ever makes an ignorant comment. (I have in the past so I’ll do it again.) The worst burden yet, is how he constantly tells us how he’s going to die. He always says “I won’t be around forever,” “I’m already 56, I’m not going to be around much longer,” “My kids never call me. What happens when I’m gone?”

This wouldn’t be a problem if it came from a loving place, but it’s not. He tries to make us feel bad all of the time about his problems, so in turn, we call him more because we feel bad. Who uses death as a fear factor toward their children? Now, I talk to him even less because I can’t stand sitting on the phone just listening to his burdens and talk about death.

My dad barely knows anything about me anymore. I love my dad but he just is kind of a distant figure in my life. My step dad has been there for me more than my actual dad. To this day, my dad doesn’t know I was raped when I was 16. My dad doesn’t know I was molested by my brother when I was 6 and my cousin taught me how to masturbate and would make out with me at the same age. I’m disgusted by those things because I thought they were normal then. It’s all I knew. I brain blocked it out of my life so much that I didn’t remember it happened until a few months ago. I now have panic disorder and my dad thinks I’m just dramatic. I’m deaf in one ear and told an ENT that I just have selective hearing.

How do I tell him that I can’t talk to him? How do I tell me that he’s manipulative and hurtful? I just don’t know. I constantly think about death and dying because I have panic disorder because of it. I just don’t know anymore. How do you choose a relationship with a parent?