This taught my siblings that as long as they didn't cross certain lines, I was always to blame for being "oversensitive." They didn't need to be considerate of me. I needed to learn not to react emotionally to anything they did.

They learned that I did not deserve consideration & that I would be punished for expecting it.

Meanwhile, I didn't even want them punished or shamed for their behavior! I just wanted them to stop saying hurtful things or bossing me around & to apologize when they did.

For the most part it's not that it was extremely severe bullying. It was almost entirely little things that stayed under the radar & didn't cross certain lines.

They basically had the right to hurt me as long as they did it in small ways. They certainly learned they did not have to consider how I would feel about something. I would either go along with them or be punished for not doing so.

I've never given much thought to how my parents choices in punishing me impacted how my siblings perceived me & what they learned to consider acceptable, but I can see now that my parents punishing me for meltdowns & emotional reactions came back around to teach them that what they were doing was ok.

If it wasn't ok, then why was I being punished for being upset about it?

Still, I've carried a lot of pain with me & struggled through horrible self-esteem issues, but I wouldn't trade places with them for the world!

I would not wish to have "learned" the lesson they did, that consideration for the feelings of others is inconsequential.

My parents did them a great disservice by teaching them that. I'd much rather be me. That sucked, but knowing the pain of not receiving consideration & kindness helped me become someone who offers them freely to others.

Suffering is NOT necessary to teach kindness, so I shouldn't have had to experience that to learn to be considerate, but given the two outcomes in that scenario (learning it's ok to be careless of others or experiencing the pain of not being treated with consideration), I would choose the same outcome for me again.

Not because I deserve to suffer: I don't now & I didn't then. I'm just happy to have at least learned that I didn't want to be the cause of other people's suffering.

I had not realized how much license to be unkind they were given by the ways I was punished, but that's a big part of what happened.

This does explain some of what happened with my sister. I was always so frustrated by her lack of empathy, but my parents reinforced to her without even realizing it that one doesn't need to care how another person feels, at least if they are lower in the hierarchy.

I've wondered how she became that way, but that makes a ton of sense.

Now we are adults & guess which one of us has found/created emotionally fulfilling & supportive relationships & which one does not connect with other people much at all.

Seriously, I am angry over the treatment I didn't deserve, but I would not swap places with my sister for *anything*.

[Caveat: making friends can be hard for a multitude of reasons. Not having friends is not proof you are unkind, but unkind people often struggle to make friends, especially good ones, for obvious reasons].

I'm glad that I'm starting to untangle these knots, but there is just so much here to process.

My sister's lack of empathy for me is not a totally separate thing from my parents' choices. I've been wondering what shaped her to be that way, & I didn't look at what she learned through what happened to me & how that was adjudicated.

It's always felt a little odd because I would say that in general—abusive religion aside—our parents were quite tender & loving with us.

My mom & dad are not indifferent to how their actions affect others in the way my sister seems to be (as evidenced by the fact that they have APOLOGIZED for some of this shit), but my sister wasn't looking just at their behavior.

She was learning how to think & behave from the things they punished as parents vs. those they encouraged.

My parents didn't mean to, but they taught my older siblings a lot of quite antisocial things through how they parented *me*.

It's not isolated. It wasn't just my experience. My siblings watched & learned. They learned that being unkind is ok, but it's not ok for someone to complain of it.

I would have to guess that they didn't just learn not to worry about being considerate but that they also didn't learn to object when they are the ones not receiving consideration. It's a trap.