The Weight on my Chest

I don’t usually share personal family history publicly, but I’ve reached a point where silence is no longer serving me. As the saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and for most of my life, I kept these truths buried - largely to protect people who never protected me in the ways that mattered.

I’m not writing this out of anger. I’m writing it because I finally have the tools, clarity, and emotional capacity to name what actually happened. I’ve been in therapy for over fifteen years, and only now do I fully understand the patterns I grew up in and why they left such deep marks. For most of my life, I didn’t even have the vocabulary to talk about any of this. Now I do.

For anyone who doesn’t know the backstory: I grew up with a father whose parenting was authoritarian and punitive, and a mother whose behavior followed the patterns of covert narcissism - where her emotional needs, her ego, and her image always outweighed the needs of her children. While my parents provided for us materially, they never offered emotional safety, psychological support, or the developmental scaffolding a child needs to grow into a healthy adult. We were never taught how to regulate emotions because they themselves never learned how.

And crucially: If this were only about my childhood, I might still have a relationship with them today. But it wasn’t confined to childhood. The patterns continued - unchanged, unexamined, and unacknowledged - well into adulthood. My brother and I named these dynamics over and over for more than a decade. We asked for honesty. We asked for accountability. We asked for therapy.

Here is a structured list of specific examples that make the pattern unmistakable:

1. Chronic neglect around basic care

Starting in sixth grade, I was routinely the last kid picked up from school - often waiting hours - because showing up for me simply wasn’t a priority.

2. Emotional abandonment during formative trauma

When the girl I was dating started seeing someone else, I was devastated. Instead of helping me process it, my parents sent me to stay with my brother because they lacked the interest and emotional skill to support me during one of the most defining moments of adolescence.

3. Punitive cruelty instead of curiosity or care

When I was caught smoking pot behind the gym, they sent my brother to abuse me as punishment and barred me from attending the funeral of a classmate who had died by suicide, denying me community and closure.

4. Boundary violations and disrespect in adulthood

During a later attempt at reconciliation, my father made offensive remarks about my wife and her partner.
He was then observed looking at pornography on his phone while sitting on my couch in a shared living space - an act of profound disrespect and boundary collapse.

5. Reacting to accountability with defensiveness and victimhood

When I called my mother out for posting racist content on Facebook, she reframed it as me attacking her.
This was the main catalyst for her disengaging from me and ultimately disinheriting me.

6. A complete absence of empathy during my financial crisis

When I was laid off in 2023 and at risk of losing my home, they not only offered no support - my father made jokes about the possibility of me losing my house.

7. The ongoing protection of my mother’s ego above all else

When I accurately described the narcissistic abuse cycle, my father attacked me to preserve my mother’s ego.

8. Weaponizing misinterpretation to avoid accountability

A family member was diagnosed by a psychologist with “emotional incest syndrome” - a term about emotional enmeshment, not sexual conduct.
My mother spent the next decade telling people she had been wrongfully accused of sexual misconduct - once again positioning herself as the victim.
She did this because rejecting a false accusation is easier than confronting the true one.

9. A revealing moment about her underlying worldview

In front of my wife and me, my mother said she regretted adopting my disabled sister - someone I love deeply.

10. Treating accountability as persecution

Any time family brings up concerns or asked for honesty, she reframes it as betrayal, cruelty, or emotional violence.

11. Using therapy as justification for further disengagement

While she did attend therapy briefly, she used it as justification to withdraw further, framing “self-protection” as avoidance rather than repair.

12. Punishing me for speaking while weaponizing my silence

Whenever I have expressed my pain publicly, my words were screenshotted, circulated, and weaponized to cast them as the victims.
Meanwhile, my silence was expected - demanded - so they could continue constructing their narrative unchallenged.

13. The yearly reenactment of the narcissistic abuse cycle

Every year around Thanksgiving, the entire cycle plays out in miniature:
- It begins with hoovering and love bombing. - “Can we just have a nice call for Thanksgiving?”
- I respond consistently: “I am not willing to engage without accountability.”
- My mother interprets that boundary as a personal attack.
- I end up telling her to fuck off.
- She then casts herself as a martyr and shows her friends “how evil I am.”
- Bonus: Dad jumps in and attacks me for having the audacity to stand up for myself.
This annual ritual is a perfect snapshot of the larger lifelong pattern.

A Note on Scope

It’s important to say this clearly: These incidents are not isolated, nor are they comprehensive. They are simply the ones that stand out among a much deeper reservoir of pain and injustice I’ve carried for most of my life. They illustrate the pattern - but they do not define its full extent.

Which brings me to the final point:

The reason I am posting this - and why I have no intention of deleting it - is because I am no longer willing to let my silence be the foundation on which others construct their narrative. My silence has protected them at the expense of my truth for far too long.

This is the truth.