💭 What Does It Mean When Someone You Live With:

Draws symbols on the door before leaving
Places paper on the toilet seat
Writes in codes in diaries
Calls all of it “superstition”
And won’t leave the house — or even a room — without the symbol!

It means you’re sharing a space with someone who is building a private world inside a public one.
A world governed not by logic or shared agreement, but by ritual, fear, and control.

It means that their reality — their fears, their rules, their compulsions — quietly take up all the air in the room.
And the people around them?
They either adapt, tiptoe, laugh it off… or quietly dissociate.

Because what else can you do when a parent, partner, or family member is being consumed by a pattern no one dares name?

🌪️ The Emotional Climate of Living With Someone Like This

Here’s what often comes with it:

1. Unspoken Fear in the House

Even if no one ever said, “This is dangerous”, your body likely felt it. The tension. The repetition. The strange obsession with certain objects, spaces, or routines. The way everyone just knew not to disturb him. That’s a form of emotional unpredictability — and it registers in the nervous system as danger, even if no one is physically violent.

2. Hypervigilance in Those Around Him

If you lived with this man — especially as a child — your body likely became trained to:

Watch him constantly for cues
Anticipate his moods
Stay quiet when his rituals took over
Keep things secret
That’s not “living.” That’s surviving.

3. Humor as a Coping Mechanism

When his children laughed about it, it wasn’t because it was truly funny. It was their nervous system’s way of releasing the pressure. Humor becomes a pressure valve in systems where the truth is too heavy to name outright.

4. Reality Distortion

You start to question: Is this normal? Is it me? Is it really that strange?
That’s what happens when you live inside someone else’s unspoken mental health issues. Your reality bends to accommodate theirs. And after enough time, you might not even trust your own sense of what’s real anymore.

🧠 What Might Be Going On For Him?

Without diagnosing — because that wouldn’t be ethical — it’s fair to say this sounds like more than superstition. It likely falls into one or more of the following:

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) with intense rituals to prevent imagined harm
Paranoid or delusional thinking, especially if the codes and symbols are believed to hold supernatural or protective power
Agoraphobia or severe anxiety, making it feel unsafe to leave the house or even certain rooms
Possibly personality disorder traits, such as extreme rigidity, control, and fear of contamination or chaos

And yet… he called it “superstition.”
That word becomes a shield. A minimizer.
It allows the behavior to seem harmless, when in truth, it may have controlled the entire emotional weather of the household.

💔 And What Does That Do to You?

Living under this kind of silent psychological rulebook can have long-lasting effects, especially if no one ever helped you name what was happening.

You may have grown up feeling:

Unsafe in your own home — even if no one ever physically hurt you
Responsible for someone else’s state of mind
Confused about what “normal” actually looks like
Ashamed of your own fear or discomfort, because others laughed it off
Deeply intuitive, but unsure whether you can trust your own instincts

These are invisible wounds — the kind that linger not because someone screamed, but because someone whispered strange things into the fabric of your daily life, until reality felt warped.

🌱 You Were Right to Feel Unsettled

Your body picked up on something your mind didn’t yet have words for.
It wasn’t just strange. It was unspoken instability. It was emotional distortion. It was a person consumed by fear, and everyone around them having to pretend it was fine.

You didn’t imagine it.
You weren’t being dramatic.
You were simply awake — in an environment where others had shut down.

🌿 You Can Reclaim Reality

If this was your father, your partner, your sibling, your housemate — and you’re now unpacking the effects of living under their “superstition” — it’s okay to grieve what that experience did to you. To your sense of safety. To your body. To your trust.

And you can begin to name it now.

To say:

“It wasn’t just superstition. It was control. It was fear. It was mental illness left unspoken. And it shaped me.”

And from there, you can begin to come home to yourself.
To build your own reality — one rooted in clarity, calm, and truth.