Waking Up to emotional abuse

Has anyone had a delayed realization or a delay in how you respond to an abuser?

I am 39 years old. I recently got married and have a great marriage. After 10 years of therapy, I learned to trust and be vulnerable in a relationship.

Throughout my childhood, my dad never seemed happy with my brothers and I. He would often
yell at us (and for trivial things). All my energy got directed to school and I tried hard to do well to please him, but it was never enough. I remember his yelling about pens missing from our kitchen (usually just to use for our homework ). It was a home of constantly walking on eggshells so as not to upset him.

Throughout my adult life, I have limited my interactions with him because he can be overbearing.
My last few interactions with him have been bad and the last one I had had enough of his yelling and yelled into the phone and hung up on him (I can't think of any other time I have done that). It was almost as if I woke up and decided not to cry and reduce myself to a puddle. (In childhood he would yell at me more to "stop my blubbering )

The story- my husband had told my parents to invite his parents over for Christmas. His parents invited my parents for Thanksgiving, but because they thought they had been over there more than his parents had been to their place they felt funny accepting unless his parents came for Christmas. My husband told them that they were celebrating Christmas on January 2nd (one of his brothers lives out of town and would be back then) and thought that they were free. My mom called my husband's mom and she declined because she was going to my husband 's other brother's house. (We both thought his brother was going to his in-laws). So my dad calls me yelling that they declined and that what my husband told them was misleading. After giving him two answers that he didn't accept "we didn't know " - wasn't good enough for him....I exploded on the phone yelling at the top of my lungs over him "we didnt know! !!!!" And I hung up. Since then both of my parents are ignoring us......I don't understand why this is something for my dad to get so pissed about ( but typical of him)......anyhow, this was the first time I really talked back.

What I meant to ask in a nutshell is: Why now?

Has anyone else had this realization so much later? I mean I realized my house had a lot of yelling.
I put all my effort into school - didn't drink, didn't do drugs, was responsible , an overachiever. It is as if I realized something was off and that my dad would fly off the handle ( usually for trivial things )
. Maybe I suppressed these emotions? Just wondering. ...

Why now? Great question.

I have been here for a while. Arrived as an angry Hamster and then they made me Blue so had to calm down.

In that time I have seen lots of stories similar to yours about how between 25-35 the person has a light globe moment.

Our Christmas's were always very tense with my mother doing what she could to sabotage it and blame the chaos and hostility on my father. The bigger the Christmas the more she primed it.

When my boys were are 5 & 2 my family came over. First time we had them over for Christmas. My wife and I went to great pains to make this special for my boys who were both very excited, especially the five year old.

My mother had primed it so, she ticked off my brother who angrily replied, she then turned that against my father who verbally defended himself, my brother ramped up again (he has hyper arousal -so priming him is pretty easy, actually not upsetting him is hard)), mum verbally attacked my dad. my brother stormed out, my mother verbally attacked my father blaming him, and then stormed out, Dad said sorry and then left. I remember my oldest son about 1 1/5 standing there with his new care bear, with his mouth open, totally puzzled. "so this is Christmas? "

My wife and I were financially quite challenged then, and that was a lot of food that went to waste.

Funny thing was, this was my normal, I was not really upset. It took a while to realise that my normal was abnormal.

After you see enough normal, you work out yours is not. Then you start to look for the why.