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Akimbo75 yeah i've had a few people tell me i need some counselling on how to form boundaries. I don't know how to set them and I panic a bit when I try and set any. I put it down in quite a big part to my upbringing. My had has BPD level insecurities, married a woman with this extreme form of ASD who was extremely antisocial, micromanaged everything, which seemed to, in a dysfunctional way, perfectly line up with his victim complex. My mother passed on an even severer form of ASD to my brother. I didn't even understand any of this as a child.
the earliest issue this caused that i remember would have been when I was around 8 when we'd play board games as a family. My ASD brother couldn't tolerate a single wrong move that could cause him to eventually lose, and if he did he'd huff and puff until he was allowed to go again. When he subsequently won every time he'd mock the rest of us. Which of course, I challenged. And my dad would say to me, at age 8, something he should have said to my brother "you ruin the whole family with your attitude".
This letting him win would turn into letting him do whatever he wanted. And my dad would say either "he learned it from you", or "i cant begin with him until ive finished with you" and he'd make up endless rules to follow and impose endless restrictions. They'd both creep as quietly as they could to my room every other day, trying to catch me out breaking a rule. They'd be having me in bed lights out at 8pm, whilst my ASD brother -who was younger than me- was allowed up past midnight with music. And even though i was forced to be in bed at 8, somehow my brother apparently learned to stay up past midnight from me, and so my brother breaking the rules counted as me breaking the rules.
He'd be disrespectful at the dinner table, and my dad would then look at me and complain about "you boys". He'd then accuse me of treating my mum "like a slave" doing the cooking and not seeing friends, yet whenever i offered to help she'd get all flustered because simply existing around her triggered her ASD hypersensitivities, as did interacting outside of the family hence she never saw any friends.
There's so much more to unpack, but yeah how your parents treat you growing up has a huge impact on your brain development and it can be hard to ever overcome certain things, or to learn to do certain things in adulthood after that.
