Every time I'm happy my dad seems to immediately ruin it on purpose, and it's starting to make me depressed.

I'm 14 and I live with my dad. Overall he's a pretty good dad, especially cause he's raised me without any help (he doesn't have much family who could help out and my mother went AWOL 10 years ago) so I'm trying to cut him some slack. But lately I've been getting really depressed over this and I don't really know how to talk to him cause when I try to explain that he's bumming me out he just doesn't seem to understand what I'm talking about.

Basically every time I'm happy in front of him or enjoy something, he says something to ruin it. Like some negative thought always comes to his mind and he always says it. As an example a few days ago someone walked a husky past our house while I was in the front yard and I patted it, and then he said "people shouldn't have huskies here, it's too hot, I bet that dog is miserable every summer".

And he does that with every single thing that makes me happy in front of him. I was excited when he got me a new phone and he said it was probably made in a sweatshop by abused children. I was laughing about a video I saw online and he said it was definitely staged and pointed out all the reasons he thought it was staged. If we're watching a movie he likes to point out any of the actors who've done crappy things and say it's a shame someone like that made so much money from the movie.

I try to avoid smiling or laughing about anything when he's around because most of the time he'll find something negative to say about whatever is making me happy and it ruins my mood. I've noticed it's affecting me other times too. Even if he's not around if I'm enjoying something, a negative thought about it will sometimes pop into my head. I just feel less happy in general, even my friends are noticing I don't seem as happy as I used to be. When I'm coming home from school I started trying to waste as much time as possible cause I've started to kinda dread being home.

I've tried to talk to my dad about it but he just doesn't get what I mean. He says he just says what comes to mind and it's usually positive, and he thinks I'm just focusing too much on the negative things. I'm completely sure it's always negative comments, I even gave him the examples of the last few times he made comments about something I was enjoying and they were all negative but he disagrees and says I just don't remember the other comments, but he just got annoyed when I asked for examples of other comments he made. He also says he's only telling the truth, so when he thinks something negative about something he won't censor himself.

I know this sounds like a silly thing to post about and like it's not a big deal, but it's really making me depressed and I hate feeling so miserable all the time. I don't know how to get my dad to understand that he's actually making me depressed and even though I don't feel good asking him to censor himself, I also don't like constantly feeling unhappy

Tldr: every time something makes me happy or makes me laugh when I'm in front of my dad he says something to ruin it, and when I tell him to stop he says he doesn't want to censor himself. It's making me more and more miserable.

Submitted October 07, 2021 at 01:10AM by throwRA_3910 https://ift.tt/3oHhT9Q