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.

Which of us 6 children advocate for themselves & which usually don't?

It splits half & half right down the middle. Myself, my little brother, & our little sister are vocal about our needs. Not without anxiety. There is a lot of self-doubt, but we know that we have to stand up for ourselves.

Our 3 older siblings though? Much less likely to stand up to unfairness, even when they are on the receiving end.

Ohhhhhhh.

It's actually easier in some circumstances to stand up for yourself if *you* have been punished for it vs. having mostly watched others be punished for it, isn't it?

Having experienced how much it sucks to be punished vs how much it sucks to just shut up & let shit happen, we'll choose the temporary pain of being punished over the long-term pain of being mistreated.

But perhaps if you only watch & think "couldn't be me," it's actually much harder to get the courage to push back.

That's the thing, isn't it? Having been in seemingly inescapable cycles of being rejected & mistreated by people causes a lot of damage, but it also raises your emotional pain tolerance & your motivation to figure out how to break out.

When you never had the option to be comfortable, discomfort is a lot less intimidating.

Oof. All of the above is a lot to process.

It's weird to see what you learned to blame yourself for & think "wait. What was happening there is not what I thought."

I'm terrified of skipping out on responsibility for harmful behavior, so I have never let myself off the hook for this stuff. While I was just trying to learn how to be a person, I was being punished for not being able to surrender myself to mistreatment.

I literally wasn't able, & I know this because I *tried* so very, very hard.

I tried not to care & not to react.

I tried & tried & tried, because the end result of reacting was to be punished twice, once by my parents & again by my siblings, & *every* time it happened, it cemented to everyone else that I was "over reactive," which meant I was even *less* likely to be listened to the next time.

It felt like an endless downward spiral. Every emotional reaction was yet another proof that no one should care what I felt.

You know what sucks?

When there just doesn't seem to be a point of your emotional distress that engages other people's sympathy.

A slight reaction showing minimal distress (like quietly crying) is treated as evidence that the thing is no big deal.

A big reaction like falling to the floor sobbing is treated as excessive & therefore fake.

There was no way to express the distress I felt that seemed to matter, which tended to intensify the distress further.

Since my emotional distress was not considered appropriate, it was to be ignored &/or punished out of me.

The trigger was often a sibling doing or saying something hurtful, that they *knew* would cause me distress.

My reaction was not so much to that individual thing as it was to how them doing that reminded me that they thought that how I felt was unimportant.

When you're screaming & crying because no one seems to care at all how you feel no matter how many times you let them know they are hurting you, being punished is only going to increase the intensity.

So much of my childhood distress was "why does no one care how I feel? Why doesn't it matter when I'm hurting?"

It just continually compounded. The more pain I showed, the more my pain was invalidated.

Yeah, it probably looks like an "overreaction" to start yelling at a sibling when they say some tiny little thing, but what if it's a thing they keep saying even though they *definitely* know by now that it really hurts you?

For me, none of this was separate. It was an endless cycle of screaming, yelling, crying, & begging for people to consider how I felt, & the more I did it, the more blamed I was.

I couldn't figure it out.

I couldn't figure out why they kept belittling me when it was *so obvious* it really hurt me.

But they learned it was ok to hurt me & that my pained reaction was *not* ok.

I kept just begging "please stop! It really hurts that you don't care how I feel," & I would get too loud or too angry, & that meant another punishment.

It really hurts when people don't care what you feel. That's when "small" things become very, very big.

The neverending accumulation of "small" things is an indicator of how unimportant you are to someone.

A person who loves you is supposed to not want to cause you pain. So if people cause you pain in the same ways constantly & don't make any effort to change, you're going to feel extremely unloved.