You know your situation better than anyone so feel free to ignore this if I’m way off base.
But I’m guessing two things here:
Your parents were able to provide you with things you needed as a child. Perhaps things like college and clothes on your back were the things you needed to grow into a fulfilled and happy person. But maybe your brother needed your mom to control her emotions better during an episode. Maybe he needed your dad to be predictable and consistent when he was instead drinking behaving in ways that were irritating or unpredictable from a child’s perspective.
You might not be fully acknowledging some of the things they did (or didn’t do) that made you feel bad when you were little. It doesn’t have to be physical abuse for it to have an impact on you. We know now that children form attachment styles at least partially based on how their parents responded to their cries during infancy. Kids can be amazingly resilient, but also incredibly delicate.
Also, the odds that they treated you differently based on birth order, their age when they had each of you, gender, your personalities, etc. is very high.
You should ask your brother what really bothers him deep down. I’ll bet you get some tears and probably some very deep, very impactful memories/feelings about your parents.
If you asked my younger, more relaxed brother about our parents, he would say, “Yeah man dad’s a dick for drinking and bailing on us, and mom likes to guilt trip us but oh well.”
I would be the one to explain how their constant fighting, dad’s drinking/drugging, mom’s emotional manipulation and authoritarian parenting, etc. made me feel deeply unsafe and insecure as a child. I felt bad about myself and my life. I wished I could get a letter from Hogwarts more than anything. And when our father got so into drugs that he became absent completely, I felt lonely and abandoned. Took me many years to make peace with it and realize he was really sick and struggling.
The thing is, I suspect that I’ve actually come a lot further in my healing than my brother has. I don’t think he’s aware of some of the things he does or why he does them. Any chance your brother is actually onto something here?
Yeah, what you say is pretty reasonable. I just know from talking to my brother that he has sort of invented many of the negative things that happened to him in our house growing up. He has a tendency to describe things that actually happened but then to impart motives or thoughts in our parents’ heads and to be angry about these rather than the events - when of course he can’t really know their motives or thoughts.
One example: our father was a professor and when my brother was in graduate school he was giving a lecture and our dad came to watch him. My brother feels that he was there because he was worried that my brother would do a bad job and embarrass him - when in fact my father has never done or said anything to suggest that he would think in that way. I know from talking to my father that he is just straight up very proud that my brother has gone on to be a professor like him.
You know your situation better than anyone so feel free to ignore this if I’m way off base.
But I’m guessing two things here:
Your parents were able to provide you with things you needed as a child. Perhaps things like college and clothes on your back were the things you needed to grow into a fulfilled and happy person. But maybe your brother needed your mom to control her emotions better during an episode. Maybe he needed your dad to be predictable and consistent when he was instead drinking behaving in ways that were irritating or unpredictable from a child’s perspective.
You might not be fully acknowledging some of the things they did (or didn’t do) that made you feel bad when you were little. It doesn’t have to be physical abuse for it to have an impact on you. We know now that children form attachment styles at least partially based on how their parents responded to their cries during infancy. Kids can be amazingly resilient, but also incredibly delicate.
Also, the odds that they treated you differently based on birth order, their age when they had each of you, gender, your personalities, etc. is very high.
You should ask your brother what really bothers him deep down. I’ll bet you get some tears and probably some very deep, very impactful memories/feelings about your parents.
If you asked my younger, more relaxed brother about our parents, he would say, “Yeah man dad’s a dick for drinking and bailing on us, and mom likes to guilt trip us but oh well.”
I would be the one to explain how their constant fighting, dad’s drinking/drugging, mom’s emotional manipulation and authoritarian parenting, etc. made me feel deeply unsafe and insecure as a child. I felt bad about myself and my life. I wished I could get a letter from Hogwarts more than anything. And when our father got so into drugs that he became absent completely, I felt lonely and abandoned. Took me many years to make peace with it and realize he was really sick and struggling.
The thing is, I suspect that I’ve actually come a lot further in my healing than my brother has. I don’t think he’s aware of some of the things he does or why he does them. Any chance your brother is actually onto something here?
Yeah, what you say is pretty reasonable. I just know from talking to my brother that he has sort of invented many of the negative things that happened to him in our house growing up. He has a tendency to describe things that actually happened but then to impart motives or thoughts in our parents’ heads and to be angry about these rather than the events - when of course he can’t really know their motives or thoughts.
One example: our father was a professor and when my brother was in graduate school he was giving a lecture and our dad came to watch him. My brother feels that he was there because he was worried that my brother would do a bad job and embarrass him - when in fact my father has never done or said anything to suggest that he would think in that way. I know from talking to my father that he is just straight up very proud that my brother has gone on to be a professor like him.