Hi, I'm a 17-year-old Asian girl, and want to ask if I am being emotionally abused. My mother has always screamed at me and made me feel like crap since I was six. She has never beat me systematically. There have only been five instances where she has lashed out at me, slapping my face when she was driving and throwing a dictionary at me. She is morbidly obese and keeps on telling me that I'm fat and tells me "Oh my god, you look like you're pregnant." This happens nearly daily. About twice a week she will tell me I'm ugly. Almost every day, she will grab me, force her nose under my armpits and sniff them and tell me I stink and everybody will stay away from me. I find this very demeaning. She has never let me have the last word on any argument. She tells me that I'm lazy and spoiled just because I find 9 hours of afterschool a week and debate camp tiring. I am one of the top people in my class, with a 2370 SAT, 4.0, got 5's on all 12 APs, a top ranking participant in multiple academic teams, etc. and she still thinks I am lazy and spend all my time "playing" just for watching a couple of DVDs on the weekends. She always tells other people I have issues and says bad things about me to the rest of my family. I used to want to kill myself just so she could be "wrong" for once, and then I found out that if I did, she'd blame me entirely anyway. I told her about my suicide wish today, and she screamed that it'd be totally my fault five times at me. Twice, she threatened to kill herself, blames me for her high blood pressure and weight, and told me that she wanted to spit out blood because she was so angry. She is so arrogant that once I used sarcasm telling her how wonderful she was in the middle of a heated argument and she immediately cheered up and agreed. She also does not let me study what I want, go to the schools I want, and yells at my father. She tells me that she was the valedictorian of ELEVEN schools when she was young, and that she was so, so smart and obedient Her arguments with me are so severe that they gave my father a migraine. I have extremely low self-esteem that alternates with arrogance, to the point that I think I have bipolar disorder as well as OCD. I also think my mother has bipolar disorder and OCD.

Do you have plans to go away to college? Are your parents going to pay for it?

''once I used sarcasm telling her how wonderful she was in the middle of a heated argument and she immediately cheered up and agreed'' She is very likely miserable with herself and projecting her self image on you. Try reversing the negative attention off you more by redirecting to her with compliments. She may have been treated like this when she was growing up and doesn't know any thing else. She may be miserable that you are achieving something with your life while she gave up some dreams to have a family. Where is your dad in all this besides the migraines?