me_irl

Yes! I think that gets lost a lot in this type of discourse. A lot of the time the real underlying issue is that our actions are being driven by fear rather than concious, measured choice.

I think that's a big concern which holds a lot of people who've been through this sort of thing back, the fear of "I don't want to come off as callous", without realizing that most people who experience this have inherent empathy that won't be erased so easily if you simply begin prioritizing yourself. It sucks, because you know exactly what it feels like to be around the type of people who only prioritize themselves and you think "Well I don't wanna be like that, I have to care more about how other people are feeling" without realizing how often you bulldoze your own emotions in the process. As my own therapist put it, "You have a right to prioritize and care for yourself, and that doesn't make you at all lacking in empathy."

I think there's also the additional aspect we learn of "taking care of our caretakers" at such a young age when it should have been the other way around and the adults should have been hypersensitive to the needs of their children, who instead were never allowed to be moody and irrational like they should have been at that age because they were too busy emotionally taking care of the adults in their lives. There's actually a word for this in psychology called Enmeshment, and it's a deep developmental trauma.

Bit of both I imagine. You love him and fear him