Confused About Parents' Reaction to Disagreement

[LycheeMangoPineapple]

This argument happened last summer and I am still trying to wrap my head around it I guess. I know my behavior was bad at the time and I wouldn't act that way again. However, I'm still trying to understand if my immediate family's actions were appropriate or what they meant exactly.

So last summer I was staying at my parents' house a lot because I was on break from college. One night they and my sister decided to have a campfire and wanted me to join. I was feeling tired of socializing because my aunt had just visited earlier that day, but my mom encouraged me to go so I sat by the fire with them.

I was feeling irritable because I was tired. My dad started talking about my aunt, and saying that she was talking about where she wanted to move when she retired, and he didn't get why she wanted to move there. My sister agreed, and he said she always changed her mind about what she wanted to do when she retired and it was always silly to him, like wanting to own horses.

This made me mad to hear, because she was just there visiting us, and I felt like it was disrespectful.

Next my dad and sister started making fun of my mom a bit because she spilled something. It wasn't mean explicitly but I was still upset about what my dad said earlier and I felt like my mom always got made fun of by him in a way she doesn't do to him. I wanted to defend her from being disrespected.

I was angry but also really anxious and I blurted out something out of nerves, which was maybe not the best way to describe what I was trying to say. I said to my dad, "Don't make fun of people."

My family was quiet for a second. Then my dad said he was going to go inside for the night and started to get up and leave in a huff. This made me mad because if he was mad I would prefer him to talk to me instead of acting like a victim and a baby. It was incredibly annoying to me.

In reaction to this, I was so angry it was like I was possessed, I got up and started screaming at him that I was tired of people in this family being mean. I went up to my room.

The next morning, my mom was passive-aggressively telling me she could drive me home. I could have fought her and say I wanted to stay, but I was obviously tired of staying at my parents', so I agreed that I would go home that day. The thing that upset me the most was she and my sister dropped me off before going to our old house for the last time, and I had really wanted to go and see it one last time before we sold it.

Before I left my sister was bugging me about how I needed to apologize to my mom and dad. I apologized to my dad but not my mom. Then I got into a text argument with my sister because she had been an ass to me a lot that summer and I didn't want her advice, and I saw her and my mom sitting together in the backyard on her phone thinking of what to text to argue with that.

Anyway I went home and for like a week I was kind of shunned by my parents, they didn't text that much. And then after that they acted like it never happened lol.

I'm not sure why they acted like that in reaction to my words exactly. Can anyone relate or shed any light?

[Rebel13]

Hi again LycheeMangoPineapple,

This is a tough situation you are describing. This: "This made me mad to hear, because she was just there visiting us, and I felt like it was disrespectful." brought back some vivid memories of my mother and grandmother trashing a relative of my grandmother's who always spent the holidays with them. After the relative left, my grandmother would go on and on, talking about what a terrible houseguest the relative was, etc. When I was a kid and teen, this just seemed normal to me. How weird. The fact that this is uncomfortable and unacceptable to you makes perfect sense!

With that said, again, in my experience, many people don't like to hear criticism, or don't have the skills to respond to it in a healthy way. Something I do, when I'm trying to figure out difficult situations, is turn the situation around. How would you have felt if someone said to you what you said to your dad? How do you think you would have responded? I'm not saying you shouldn't have said anything -- just that, in the best of circumstances, a comment like that might be difficult for many people to process and respond to.

Something that I observe from what you've written here is that you might be feeling pretty angry in general about your family dynamics, and your ability to keep quiet about things you disagree with might be lessening. Do you think that's true?  If so, there's nothing wrong with that! In my experience, that happens when someone starts to recognize that a situation isn't good for them. Family systems can also be kind of entrenched, and when one person starts changing, other people often behave in ways they hope (maybe unconsciously) will reverse the changes and return the dynamics to their previous state. So that could explain the reaction of your mom and sister to the incident with your dad.

Congratulations on apologizing! That can be really difficult, and doing so proves you are a good person with a good heart who wants to treat others well. Sometimes the bad behaviors of others can push us over the edge. But if this continues to happen, it can make us feel pretty bad about ourselves. So I encourage you to check out the Toolbox articles. You might like to start with the one about boundaries, in What To Do, and also the one about JADE, in What Not To Do. It's really hard sometimes, but the only way to help ourselves is to figure out what WE can do differently. Trying to make other people change or, in a lot of cases, even see the error of their ways usually doesn't end very well, as you found out.

Wishing you all the best, and please take the best care of yourself that you can.