Curiously, this is something parents are often on the lookout for with their kids - especially younger and less verbal kids. Watching for physical and emotional queues is the difference between knowing when your kid is genuinely upset and just hungry or sleepy. The tenor of a wail can be the difference between “I’ve lost my ball under the couch” and “I’ve seriously injured myself, get me to a doctor asap”. You’ll also notice little kids adopting coping mechanisms - self-soothing by sucking on a hand or clucking a toy can indicate stress even if your child isn’t crying. Flinching from a seemingly harmless object can indicate some kind of pain or trauma (recoiling from food because you’ve got a sore throat, flinging a book because it has a scary picture, etc).

Kids get older and they start learning how to read queues from their parents in turn. And that’s a normal, healthy way to grow, even if what you’re discovering about your family is that they’re chronically stressed or ill-tempered.

“I noticed my mom was upset, so I tried to cheer her up” is an emotional development you should want to see in your children. Because you’re going to be around people who are upset the older you get. And developing empathy is a good thing precisely because it means you’re looking outside yourself and recognizing others as people like yourself.

In theory, it sets off a positive feedback loop. You’re grumpy, and your parents notice, so they try to cheer you up. They’re grumpy, and you notice, so you try to cheer them up. And the net result is less stress, more love, and a stronger bond between family members.

“I noticed my mom was upset, so I tried to cheer her up” can also mean “i have to cheer mom up because dad was mean to her”.

“My siblings are upset, i have to cheer them up” - this is parentification.

I am still very empathic, sensing emotions and reading subtle cues really good - but my brain interprets a lot of stuff as threatening, because all of this sensing was mixed with unpredictability. If you always get the same response, you can learn to work with that - if the response is not predictable, you get fucked up like me.

In my case it meant “if I can’t cheer them up, they’ll hit me”. They both did it, but my stepdad was worse about the random punishments. Turns out he had undiagnosed schizophrenia, and I was getting hit because he was having hallucinations about me doing/saying something.

Damn that’s hard, sorry you had to experience that. My mother was a teen who couldn’t fend for herself when she got me and my father was a drunkard, never hitting anyone but always shouting physical threats around. In the last years I’ve grown the suspicion that he had the same issues as i have, with no therapy. (He died stumbling while drunk hitting his head alone in his messy apartment, so i can’t ask him and i wouldn’t if he lived anyways)

AvPD is developed in the first few years of life (there is definitely a genetic component in play, but there is not much research on it, since we are not problematic for our surroundings and tend to not seek help because we don’t want to inconvenience anyone - any researcher will have a pretty hard time finding enough of us), so i can only make an educated guess what happened back then, which probably was the same stuff i experienced later.

I think i might have had a chance at a much better life if the first few years had been stable, just so that the core of my personality had enough time to form. I am missing the basic trust most people have that everything will turn out all right and that what people tell me in regard to my relationship with them is the truth. Like, people can tell me straight up they enjoy spending time with me and i don’t believe them.

I hope you have at least a bit of that basic trust going for you. If you have, hold onto it, it’s something precious.