My father is a sociopath. I didn’t find this out until I was 14, when his almost decade long affair was uncovered on accident by me while we were on a family vacation. I read a text message on my dads phone aloud to my family and it turned out it was from a woman my mother had already caught him with previously. The following two years resulted in domestic violence, restraining orders, “finding religion”, and gas lighting. None of which I had experienced in my previous 13 years of life although my mother had been silently dealing with the gas lighting and blatant lies for most of her marriage. Most of this I’ve come to terms with, this is just who he is. We’ve moved to a place where we speak once a week. Which is him talking about things he likes and me trying to tell him stuff about my life and him semi pretending to care. And he would occasionally visit with his long time girlfriend (different woman from affair) who was way to good for him but I thought she was a very nice person. Anyway, after 9 years she FINALLY realized what type of person he was and broke up with him. I was sad to see her go, but she definitely deserved better. And not even a week later he was dating again and has found someone new. They’ve been dating for a whole month now and she’s coming with him to visit next month and it’s kind of brought up a whole basket of emotions I thought I had moved on from. I’m 25 now, married and expecting my first child. And here I am having an anxiety attack about meeting this woman because I’m having flashbacks of previous GF asking about my dad and me being honest and not being believed! My fathers ability to lie is astounding he’s so convincing if I had not been there myself I would definitely believe he is the victim. People never believed my mom the first time he cheated on her. And after they were divorced he went around telling people she cheated and abused him and we were manipulated by her to hate him. Nothing could be farther from the truth and it HURTS so bad that people believe him over the four other members of the family. It’s chalked up to the gold digging ex wife (they were broke for YEARS when they first got married but somehow she was a gold digger) and the stupid kids. Even though I was 14! I may have not been a full grown adult but a teenager is NOT stupid they know what’s going on and can clearly see a chair being broken over their mother’s head! And clearly remember you admitting that you cheated for ten years! And the thousand other things that went down. It just sucks, I thought maybe since his ex dumped him and he was completely alone maybe, JUST MAYBE, he would hit rock bottom and even if he couldn’t change he could try slightly harder in his relationship with us. This trip out to see us being the first major step of him trying to connect with us alone without a buffer and actually talk to us. But nope, this lady, who I’m sure is very nice and I’m told is “family oriented” is coming along. Who will think he’s the star of the show and anything I say to the contrary would just be a result of “being tainted by the mother” because I was just a dumb 14 year old. And it PISSES ME OFF. That no one believes us until he’s screwed them over (which he does to people in business all the time) or actually gets to know us and realizes his side doesn’t actually make much sense. I know I can’t do anything to change him or the peoples perception. It’s just so frustrating and I needed to write it out.