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My mom comes from a family like this, so I know what this is talking about. She has a lot of unhealthy behaviour that is a result of a pretty awful childhood.
OTOH, a certain amount of this is healthy. It's good to have empathy and notice that your dad isn't in the best mood. It's kind to try to cheer him up. IMO the difference is whether your behaviour is driven by empathy or fear.
The most confusing thing for me is I have memories of cuddling with mom and also memories of her yelling at me, and I feel like I randomly shift between two different universes.
Its like when I'm in the good moment, my brain temporarily forgets about the trauma... then when the bad moments come, I wonder if the good memories are even real or have I been daydreaming/hallucinating all this time.
I have intrusive thoughts all the time.
I imagine being like 8 years old and in my parents bed cuddling...
then the next scene is when I try to sleep in my room for some "timeout" cuz my energy is drained and I want some alone time, then I have this thought of like... What if my mom stabs me to death while I'm asleep
The juxtapostion of these two scenes is very weird... creates a very weird feeling within me...
both feeling very emotionally attached... and the simultaneous feeling of dread... of fear...
like y'all ever watched Rick and Morty... like it feel like that type of "vibe" of backstabbing...
The most confusing thing for me is I have memories of cuddling with mom and also memories of her yelling at me, and I feel like I randomly shift between two different universes.
Its like when I’m in the good moment, my brain temporarily forgets about the trauma… then when the bad moments come, I wonder if the good memories are even real or have I been daydreaming/hallucinating all this time.
State-based learning, if you're curious. For the same reason that studying in the same classroom as where you'll take the test means a better outcome, the memories you make when you're happy are easier to recall when you're happy, and the memories you make when you're sad are easier to recall when you're sad.
I know which door was opened and by who so I could be mentally prepared. I still know whose footsteps are whose (although that's easy when the options are twin, cat, or my husband who has cerebral palsy).
Not to make light of your trauma, but that cat must be a biggun. Pics please!
Aww haha, she can be loud but she's actually very polite! 
I still tiptoe around the house at night, and lightly close doors/cabinets so as not to incur the wrath of waking up my father. Left my parents household over 20 years ago. Some shit sticks with you.
Good practice to be careful to not wake anyone up. Fear of anger is a possible consequence of being loud but the real motive is being considerate.
I'm generally very quiet moving about the house, the downside is I regularly scare the living daylights out of my wife.
Same here - I am close to two meters in height and a heavy boy, but i can move so silently that i spook most people when they finally detect me. I actively try to make noise if i come up to someone unsuspecting.
My mother is a narcissistic, divorced, score catholic. Let her loose in an HOA and she’ll turn it into Palestine.
I learned to let her set her own fires, let them burn down her own domain, I hide in my dark cold basement she gets sunlight and a million problems she creates. I let her stew while avoiding her bullshit.
Curiously, this is something parents are often on the lookout for with their kids - especially younger and less verbal kids. Watching for physical and emotional queues is the difference between knowing when your kid is genuinely upset and just hungry or sleepy. The tenor of a wail can be the difference between "I've lost my ball under the couch" and "I've seriously injured myself, get me to a doctor asap". You'll also notice little kids adopting coping mechanisms - self-soothing by sucking on a hand or clucking a toy can indicate stress even if your child isn't crying. Flinching from a seemingly harmless object can indicate some kind of pain or trauma (recoiling from food because you've got a sore throat, flinging a book because it has a scary picture, etc).
Kids get older and they start learning how to read queues from their parents in turn. And that's a normal, healthy way to grow, even if what you're discovering about your family is that they're chronically stressed or ill-tempered.
"I noticed my mom was upset, so I tried to cheer her up" is an emotional development you should want to see in your children. Because you're going to be around people who are upset the older you get. And developing empathy is a good thing precisely because it means you're looking outside yourself and recognizing others as people like yourself.
In theory, it sets off a positive feedback loop. You're grumpy, and your parents notice, so they try to cheer you up. They're grumpy, and you notice, so you try to cheer them up. And the net result is less stress, more love, and a stronger bond between family members.
emotional queues
cues
Curiously, this is something parents are often on the lookout for with their kids - especially younger and less verbal kids.
... Not the kind of parents the OP image is talking about, no, they're not doing this much or at all.
They're too busy.
From their erractic, extreme emotional shifts.
They'd actually be more likely to mock and punish a child displaying those early coping mechanisms.
I am kind of amazed you managed to describe the opposite of what this image is saying.
What a truly blessed life you must have lived.
Its about a disregulated, unpredictable emotional environment at home, for young kids, causing various kinds of ultimately self-destructive coping mechanisms... as survival mechanisms.
The negative feedback loops.
This isn't about developing empathy, its about growing up in an environment that teaches you that other people's emotions are fundamentally time bombs that can go off, and cause very real problems, so you learn how to defuse them.
Empathy?
No no no, that never happens to or for a kid in this kind of environment, at least not within the household.
The household is an ongoing threat management training simulator, which bomb do I need to defuse now, and how, and if I can't, how do I brace for impact and aftermath... empathy might be a thing they experience and can then maybe eventually internally model, if they know other people and kids, from stable families, but its typically not fully experienced or developed untill years after they get out of that home, and manage to surround themselves with better examples of people.
And even still, the kid, now an adult, learned micro expressions and tone shifts and that kind of stuff as primarily a threat assesment paradigm.
Takes years and decades to unlearn all that CPTSD, retrain your brain, and it usually never fully goes away, you usually just end up with a set of stable coping mechanisms and an insistence on either boundaries and/or local environment control.
By the way, to anyone who actually grew up in an environment the OP describes:
Your entire comment reads as an obvious misdirection from the topic at hand, that's trying to sound neutral and cool, and intelligent, but is insincere, self-aggrandizing by way of obviously shifting the topic to ... whatever it is you wanted to talk about.
It's insulting, disrespectful, and triggering / re-traumatizing.
The abused person's lived experience?
Nah, not important, there's this other thing to talk about, blah blah blah blah blah blah, anyway, what were you talking about?
... Most of the other people who've been abused the way the OP image describes... well, they're too non-confrontational to tell you how they really feel.
Because that's been trained into them.
Because when they tell other people how their actions make them feel... bombs go off.
Empathy is a double edged sword, it's true. The difference that makes a difference is the emotional maturity of the parents.
Empathy is a double edged sword
No it isn't. I can't think of a drawback to empathy that is worse than anything caused by lack of empathy. Specially empathy towards loved ones
I think you mistake my meaning, I wasn't intending to stake the claim you're arguing against. I was only saying empathy can hurt sometimes.
That's normally where the kids learn it from.
What can be scary is when you get to grow up during the Good Times and develop that emotional maturity, then tip into the Bad Times (economic downturn, family drama/death, social upheaval) such that your parents can't hold shit together anymore. Anyone who has lived through the illness/death of a loved one or a divorce or an ugly recession gets to see the impact on their parents in real time.
Suddenly you're caught trying to understand why seemingly proper, happy parents can't manage themselves anymore.
That's when the depression sets in.
“I noticed my mom was upset, so I tried to cheer her up” can also mean "i have to cheer mom up because dad was mean to her".
"My siblings are upset, i have to cheer them up" - this is parentification.
I am still very empathic, sensing emotions and reading subtle cues really good - but my brain interprets a lot of stuff as threatening, because all of this sensing was mixed with unpredictability. If you always get the same response, you can learn to work with that - if the response is not predictable, you get fucked up like me.
In my case it meant "if I can't cheer them up, they'll hit me". They both did it, but my stepdad was worse about the random punishments. Turns out he had undiagnosed schizophrenia, and I was getting hit because he was having hallucinations about me doing/saying something.
Damn that's hard, sorry you had to experience that. My mother was a teen who couldn't fend for herself when she got me and my father was a drunkard, never hitting anyone but always shouting physical threats around. In the last years I've grown the suspicion that he had the same issues as i have, with no therapy. (He died stumbling while drunk hitting his head alone in his messy apartment, so i can't ask him and i wouldn't if he lived anyways)
AvPD is developed in the first few years of life (there is definitely a genetic component in play, but there is not much research on it, since we are not problematic for our surroundings and tend to not seek help because we don't want to inconvenience anyone - any researcher will have a pretty hard time finding enough of us), so i can only make an educated guess what happened back then, which probably was the same stuff i experienced later.
I think i might have had a chance at a much better life if the first few years had been stable, just so that the core of my personality had enough time to form. I am missing the basic trust most people have that everything will turn out all right and that what people tell me in regard to my relationship with them is the truth. Like, people can tell me straight up they enjoy spending time with me and i don't believe them.
I hope you have at least a bit of that basic trust going for you. If you have, hold onto it, it's something precious.
I have AvPD, and I am sure there is a genetic link, but it's hard to separate it from my mother's issues. She had schizo-affective bipolar and was an alcoholic on top of that.
I've found therapy to be a bit frustrating, because I am able to cope with my fears and recognize when I'm slipping into avoidance but still unable to form connections with people. I've been released from therapy but still don't have any friends or relationships because I still react to other people's unpredictable emotions with fawning and then cutting them out of my life lol
It's a very lonely disorder
Therapy is very frustrating, i agree with you. Progress is soooo slow, and there seems to be this barrier i simply cannot break through. But at least it helped with some of my most self-destructive impulses like my addiction to fentanyl painkillers, which is the reason i keep going there,
I am a bit of an outlier i think, because i have been in multiple relationships for the last 27 years (it's not that i had the courage to actually try for relationships, but it still happened, back then when i had a bit of social life in my early 20s), so i at least wasn't physically lonely (in the beginning), but emotionally i always withdrew after the "honeymoon" phase, trapping myself in a limbo where i lived with someone, but i couldn't do shit because i wasn't able to take the space for myself i would've needed to actually live, or even end the relationship out of fear of conflict.
I am actually going to live on my own for the first time now (starting with april or may), and I think it will be for the better. I do fear the loneliness, but it will probably beat being stuck in perpetuity in a long dead relationship.
It really is a lonely disorder, even when there are people.
I had a string of relationships in my 20s as well, but I don't think any of them were healthy and I developed my own drinking habit to cope before realizing I didn't want that misery for myself.
Dunno if you want any advice to consider, but I've lived alone for most of my 30s, and I have to say having a pet really helps. I have a cat and a dog, and the dog does provide more opportunities for conversations to happen just seeing the same people on the trails we walk every day. These are usually shallow conversations so it's easier to avoid feeling like I've upset anyone (it still happens lol "why did I say good morning that way??" but it's low stakes at least). But even having a plant to take care of helps with the loneliness, because you have this living thing that occupies the same space as you, and even if you can't leave the house today you can still share being alive and existing with this plant or creature.
Anyway, I wish you all the luck with your move and your new future
Edit: I just realized we've commented to each other before, I was on a different account though lol. I'm glad your move date is so close now :)
Yeah, mom was also a teen when she got pregnant, my bio dad isn't even listed on my birth certificate. She had a string of incredibly bad boyfriends and another baby before settling down with my stepdad, falling into the incredibly cult-y church he was in, and having one more baby. My youngest brother was always the favorite, because he's the only "legitimate" child out of us, and I was the oldest and only girl so a lot of parenting fell on me even when I was still in elementary school.
I think I got lucky with having my great-grandmother help raise me before the cult. Quite a lot of my personality mirrors hers, but she was a teen during the Great Depression, so I inherited some weirdly relevant worldviews there. These were further reinforced with living in a state that didn't believe in social safety nets like adequate food assistance, so I got roped into helping mom with finding edible food in the grocery store garbage, because I was small enough to fit into the dumpsters.
I don't know if it's PTSD, AvPD, or what, but I do have a hard time connecting with people who haven't been through similar trauma before. I find that too many people are insulated in a comfortable bubble and don't want to believe these things can happen, so I always feel like everybody thinks I'm a liar, and I just get so angry and stop talking to them.
I've been with my partner for the past 16 years tho, because they've got similar trauma and they understand.
I don't know if i can actually connect with people who have the same issues I have, although i know me and the other person would have to be locked in the same room so we can keep in touch - two people who don't call each other might get along, but it's not really a relationship isn't it lol
I also have two younger siblings, but our mother slowly got her act together over the years, so i took the brunt of the instability at home - i might have acted as a stabilizing factor for my siblings too, at least i hope i did. I know they both do a lot better than I do.
The culty stuff reads awful; weirdly enough i stumbled across this piece where lots of US troops got told by their superiors the war against Iran is so that Jesus can return (and they have the sick idea Trump is anointed) - this sounds very much like the same thing, or at least very adjacent.
I have the luck to live in central Europe, with a useful social safety net - i was declared unfit for work after i had a nervous breakdown because i couldn't withstand the stress of regular work. it's actually the way i get a little apartment for me if all works out... 36m² isn't large, but enough for me and my 2 cats, and i can afford it with my little pension. I just wanted to write that i do not know what would have happened if i lived in the US, but that's not true: reality is that i would be a crazy homeless person or dead.
It's good to read you have such a stable relationship and hope you are happy in it. Wish you all the best!
Your are correct, however you are describing empathy here when the post is about how children become emotional regulators for abusive/absentee parents which becomes a lifelong and debilitating psychological issue for them as adults.
Empathy is best nurtured in a reciprocal manner especially during childhood development and it starts between the child and their caregiver(s).
I live on my own now and I can't possibly go back to living with someone who I have to walk on eggshells like that with.
Yep! And the worst part is in addition to fucking you up, it instills habits with which you can accidentally hurt people you care about. Having a trauma response to legitimate criticism makes your partner uncomfortable bringing up issues they're facing. Most of the issues I've had in my marriage have stemmed from behaviors I learned to protect myself growing up. It's taken a lot of work over the years to improve on these issues, and a lot of communication to ensure that what I'm still struggling with doesn't hurt the relationship.
This has made me appreciate that thos wasn't part of my childhood
That's me - I've been diagnosed with Avoidant Personality Disorder because of situations described above.
I try to be invisible whenever possible. I try to not stand in the way in the subway even if there is enough space to go around. I always try to stand close to a wall - if I cannot see part of a room i get anxious. The worst experience is being in a mess hall or large waiting room, because in addition to the above my brain cannot filter the noise of so many people to find out if there are threatening voices somewhere in the mix.
That also means that I cannot keep social contacts alive. If you call or message me, my brain fears that i did something wrong and i cannot answer. I also can not reach out, because I feel that i will trigger someone to be angry at me. Even if I am simply talking with someone, i suspect that i am a burden in some way, because "just keeping up the conversation" is what i would do to prevent repercussions.
People, don't shout at your kids - verbal aggression is aggression too.
I've been in therapy for a substantial part of my life and at least my autoaggressive behavior has been reduced (not stopped, but it's a lot better than before), but my therapist has told me that i have to dampen my expectations - i will live my life with this until the day i die, i can only learn to compensate after living through this shit.
I think the biggest thing that I try to do with my kiddos around this topic is emotional predictably. I think as others have stated learning abilities to deal with other people's emotions a good ability to have.
My parents were never consistent with their emotions and I am not talking between the two I am talking about them as individuals.. I could get yelled at by my Dad about the same thing twice and the reactions be completely different.
If I am having a bad day and do fly off the handle a bit more than normal I make sure to apologize to my kiddos and explain to them why I reacted the way I did. Now I'm trying to get my babies mama on board.
I think a lot of parents out there forget that thier kids are people too.
The predictability and clearly communicated rules are worth a lot and very important, it instills a sense of security. in my opinion there's nothing worse than instability for a kid,