this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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me_irl
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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.
Empathy is a double edged sword, it's true. The difference that makes a difference is the emotional maturity of the parents.
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. It's a lot to ask from everybody - parents and kids alike. One reason why having strong social safety nets and robust public services can be the difference between families struggling through and falling apart.
That's when the depression sets in.
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.
Ok, still not sure I get you... hurt through empathy is still a good thing (kind of like pain due to exercise)
In the context of kids using their empathy to survive neglect and abuse... Agree to disagree?
Where is the abuse or neglect of a father being quiet during one dinner?
Again, I do think I know where this is coming from... but what is written in the post is NOT that.
This post is like describing a baseball butt slap as sexual abuse... yes, there is such a thing as sexual abuse but a friendly butt slap in baseball is basically in the baseball manual
They're not calling those specific things abuse, but if you've lived in an emotionally abusive home they're highly recognisable moments. It sounds like you're coming at this from a slightly too literal frame of mind.
maybe? but I am just reading the post.
I mean even if the start had been explicit about abusive parents I would have been OK with the post... but even the wording "a household where someone's mood shifts the atmosphere" come on!...
Anecdote time:
I love music and it is rare I am not playing some music when I am at home. When I have been out of town, my kids (grown already) had said the house felt sad because there was no music playing.
Similarly, when our cat of 20 years died, my mood was not very lively and I did not feel like listening to music... ergo, the house was indeed sadder than normal.
This anecdote fits the post to a T... yes I am taking it literally but there are LOTS of ways this could have been written more clearly and not cast a hurried mom (slamming cabinets) or a worried dad (quieter then usual at dinner) as abusive.
Finally, to clarify, this concerns me because TONS of kids read this stuff and swallow it entirely.
Now flip those emotions. Instead of them feeling sad when there is no music playing, they feel happy because music means you're not home.
why? we get along, we love each other
Again (not sure why this is hard) I UNDERSTAND what the post was going for, I am just complaining it is very poorly written.
If instead of starting with the vague "someone's mood shifts the atmosphere" (which is complete bullshit and can indeed be a completely benign thing) it had started with "an emotionally abusive household" I think the message would have come across a lot more clear. The way it's currently written would certainly cast loving parents in a healthy home as abusive
The post is wirrten by someone who has experienced this and is understood by those who do. For anyone who has grown up in this sort of abusive situation will immediately recognize what it's saying.
Are you aware of what walking on eggshells actually means? I realize it's been watered down much like the term gaslighting and calling people narcissists but to those whoever have experienced the trauma can feel those words.
And this is why I care… not everyone is super stable/smart/objective/capable of self reflection… this is the irresponsible shit going online that pushes those people the wrong way
This is not an "abusive household" community, the context is not implied
Yes, and for the umpteenth time, I understood the post. I am just complaining about how poorly written it is... which in my opinion, could be dangerous for some people
You're fine, I know how weirdly kids can misconstrue things.
Edit: I want to add that I had no part in the down votes ITT, I'm just trying to bridge the disconnect that we seemed to have. A lot of people are understandably upset though, it's a touchy subject!
No worries (I rarely even noticed up or down votes)
I am actually surprised how many people just won't read. I have said like 8 times I understood the post, I just find it poorly written and worry vulnerable people may misrepresent it, just to have a million people explaining the post to me.
The implicit presumption is that if someone is quietly fuming now, they'll become physically violent later. Or verbally abusive. Or neglectful to the point of harm (refusing to feed a hungry child or change a dirty diaper out of spite, hunkering down in front of the TV and leaving the kids to put themselves to bed, etc).
But the flip side of this is a child seeing a parent in distress and trying to accommodate/relieve their pain (as opposed to a child blissfully unconcerned/unaware of the parent's stress antagonizing them).
YMMV. It's very hard to discuss a real historical situations when you're working from a superficial description or hypothetical implication.
I think where OP's narrative goes wrong is in describing tense moments in the house as a parental failure without looking beyond the immediate tension. Relationships aren't some morality play or ethical binary, with a Good Parent and a Bad Child or visa versa. Sometimes you've just got an overwhelmed parent and a child thrust into more responsibility than they're prepared to handle, as a consequence. Or a sick parent being cared for by a child. Or a grieving parent who is being comforted by a child who doesn't really understand what is going on.
A friend of mine just had his father-in-law pass away, and - of course - his wife was devastated. He had to take over all the household affairs while she worked through her grief. His kids, in turn, had to cope with a mom who was emotionally unresponsive and a dad who was juggling twice the workload. I've gotten a few curious anecdotes about how they've been processing the trauma. A lot of it has them replicating the care their parents showed them back onto their parents (as best a 2 year old and 4 year old can).
I think even that is too specific. I'm more reading it like someone describing a response to the Jaws soundtrack. Are you excited or intrigued or terrified or all of the above? Kinda depends on how you feel about seeing a big shark.
That is a gigantic leap... 100% of the population would have many healthy reasons for being quieter than they normally are and the vast majority do not blow up in a violent rage afterwards.
This is exactly my issue with this post.
Once again, not the point. We can talk hypotheticals all you want but if we are to make a point, it would be best to make a clear one
Exactly... I don't think it's fair to paint these parents as abusive. Moreover, I do not think there is anything wrong (in this scenario) with kids noticing and trying to help. But this post would paint them as abusive and the child's natural empathy as a toxic defense mechanism
Indeed it was too specific, but so was the post... a cabinet slam and/or a father being quiet is a far cry from symptoms of an abusive household
From the narrative, sure. But that's the cliche they're leaning on.
I agree. Like I said, "Jaws Music". The post is supposed to imply a lot more than they're willing to make explicit.
The point of the post is to simulate the feeling of looming dread, then use the emotional response to build empathy with the kid in the story.
This is all allegorical. "These parents" aren't anyone specific. The implication is that the kid in the story is staving off abuse. But, as we've both noted, it's also possible the kid in question is comforting parents who are - themselves - the victims of abuse or neglect.
"Walking on eggshells" implies a consequence if you don't. The consequence could be a parent flying into a rage. It could also be a parent breaking into tears or falling into a fugue state. "I'm trying to avoid getting beaten by my parents" tells a very different story than "I'm trying to prevent my mom/dad from breaking down into a puddle of tears".
Implies a high degree of tension.
Emotionally abusive parents is what is described, you become very sensitive to nonverbal clues of your parent(s).
It's not exaggerating, you really get to live around their personal tripwires. And then assume everybody else has those, which makes it hard to trust people.
How is a quieter than usual Dad an abusive parent? it is an absolute exaggeration.
Let me explain: a ranging alcoholic, violent father, would trigger all emotional alerts on a kid. As soon as said father arrives home, the kid would be on edge.
So, in a post like this, they basically skipped over the entire context of the raging alcoholism... instead they said it's a red flag when parents arrive and open the door.
I understand the context is supposed to be implied; but the post is just very poorly written. It would be like me saying "you learn quickly to protect your face from a bite as soon as a dog barks"... dogs bark all the time, very few would eat people's faces. In this example, a simple slam of a cabinet or a quieter then usual dad could mean 100000 benign things. OP should have been clear that this was already an abusive environment or at least select better examples of "alerting" behaviour
I agree it could be worded more clearly. Yet for everyone who has lived with this it is clear. Like with depression people always assume its the grand things that hold the sadness, or the madness. It leads people who haven't experienced it to say 'Just do something fun'.
Your example of raging alcoholism is a good example. You would say 'just avoid your parents when they are drunk', which is good advice, but emotionally abusive people are very adept at making amends and smoothing stuff out when they have recovered. They will be super sweet and attentive but -which is the brutal part- always switch to full drama mode when you least expect it. So you learn to pick up minute cues you can use to shield yourself from incoming emotional blows, but sometimes they still manage to surprise you when you've got your guard down.
That's why you can never feel safe around them, there might be a hair trigger going off any moment that you didn't know existed. And whilst you can easily advice people in a realtionship like that to just stay clear of those people, it most likely happens when you are a child and simply unable to just distance yourself. But even grown people still fall into the spiral of just wanting their parents to be proud of them even though they should rationally know it will never happen.
The text is very clear for those who have experienced that. It's very hard to fathom for those who haven't, and those are blessed for it.
Certainly... but for people who are vulnerable in many other ways, it may paint a rushed mom or a worried dad as abusive when they are not. This is not posted in an "abusive household" community where the context is implied.
I would NOT say that.
Overall you are arguing the wrong things with me. I understood the post and agree that catering to abusive parent's emotions creates bad emotional responses... my point is that the post does not, in anyway, make it clear this is an emotionally abusive household (they almost make a point not to) and then paint completely normal empathetic reactions as defense/survival mechanisms.
A clear post would not use the vague wording "someone's mood changes the atmosphere". If I am your best friend, my dog just died but I still make an effort to go to your birthday party because you are my best friend. My mood is not quite right and you, being my best friend, notice, ask me about it and I cry telling you "Fluffy" just died. My sad mood will absolutely (if temporarily) kill the atmosphere of your party... I guess I am an abusive friend for trying to not bail on your birthday and you are somehow on survival mode because you had empathy for me?
I am using this example "on the other edge" of the spectrum just to show how poorly written the post was and how it can easily fit the most benign scenario
And this is why I care... not everyone is super stable/smart/objective/capable of self reflection... this is the irresponsible shit going online that pushes those people the wrong way
... 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.
Seconding this reply, because that was the most blatantly tonedeaf comment I've read in ages. Checked moderation history to see whether they were being intentionally dense as it was approaching gaslighting territory and whaddaya know? lmao
If I had to guess, people like this crave empathy to abuse so no surprise to see them advocate for it.
While I am hesitant to 'diagnose' this from just the comment I replied to alone...
Yes, that's narcissism you're describing.
Narcissists tend to be incapable of validating themselves, so they do things to garner attention and validation from others, which can lead to many other chains of behaviors, mechanisms, feedback loops.
This would also explain the ... entirely abstract explanation of empathy, while simultaneously totally failing to excercise any actual empathy:
Its a theoretical concept to a narcissist.
Also, its just immensely ironic to give a lecture about empathy, while failing to exercise any.
Low self-awareness.
... and that's coming from me, an Autist, a kind of person who is generally maligned and stereotyped as having "low eq" and not understanding interpersonal social dynamics.
No, no, I understand them better than most, its just that normies (neurotypicals) have a much higher default threshold for tolerating narcissistic behavior, and are also much more blind to it, so then the normies will think that calling out narcissistic behavior is 'overreacting', unless the narcissistic behavior is comically extreme, megalomaniacal.
On a larger scale, that's how you end up with the overconfident leading the blind.
cues
*breaks down and cries in street from error*
“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 and treatment of me. 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!
Yeah, US politics has been hugely distressing for me, it's such a direct continuation of my childhood trauma sometimes, with added new threats to worry about.
It also helps to recognize the areas of my life where I did get lucky breaks. My belief in the cult broke when I was 19, and I was so convinced my stepdad would literally murder me that I ran away from home and started couch surfing with strangers I met on the internet. I knew it might be human trafficking, I knew that these people could rape me and dump my body in a ditch, but between this rock and that hard place, there was a small glimmer of hope.
I got lucky. They helped me establish my residency in a new state, going so far as to notarize an affidavit that I was living at their address, so I could get a state ID and start looking for work. I was able to find a job, and get a cheap dorm-style apartment with shared bathrooms and kitchen/commons, find love.
Then the bottom fell out of the market in the '08 crash.
I got so very lucky.
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).