This is confusing as I’m just thinking about this
This just came in light, slowly: I don’t like my family members
I don’t know if I want to talk to them as I prefer being by myself and genuinely enjoy me time
I want to talk to them but I also don’t want to talk to them. I know I certainly don’t yearn conversations with them
It’s tough to talk about and opening up because I’m always thinking right and wrong. If I talk to them, there’s nothing in common. If I don’t, I worry about the culture even though I do better by not talking to them
I don’t think about things that’s out of control. I have my friends and circle, I don’t need them
It’s tough. I already moved on, they haven’t and won’t
Been there, done that, brother.
On one hand, your parents raised you, gave you a home, fed and clothed you, made a lot of sacrifices for you when you were a child. In their own way, they loved you, and perhaps even now, may still love you. On the other hand, you've "outgrown" them in many ways. In fact, it is primal social biology that we ALL move on and away from our family group. Further complicating the matter is the autism component where a life of miscommunications, misinterpretations, and emotional trauma, in one form or another, have created these wedges between us and our family. It's a weird thing to process this mental state of "I love them, but I don't particularly like them."
My parents taught me to be highly independent, even as a toddler, 2-3 years old, I can remember my parents saying to me "Get it yourself.", and without hesitation, I would, knowing I would have to push a kitchen chair up to the counter, climb up and get a cup, climb down, open the refrigerator, grab the heavy jug of juice, climb back up, carefully pour the juice, so on and so forth. If I spilled, which I did, I would have to grab a kitchen rag, clean it up, etc. So, it was with everything, transportation, money, learning, building, repair, etc. "Do it yourself." When I was 18, I had a lot of useful life skills to simply move on and never look back.
Years later, a wife and kids, I go back to visit my parents. The kids needed to know their grandparents. I thought this was important. Keep in mind, they lived several hours away, and my family would spend the night. Again, they were good hosts in terms of feeding us. They were good with the kids. However, for my wife and I, it was the same old dysfunctional social interactions, gaslighting, back stabbing, minimizing, and a long list of other little slights and insults that slipped out randomly during conversations that just put my wife and I on a stressful, emotional edge. It was emotionally exhausting every time we visited. When we got in the car to leave, the first 30 minutes was just a release of anger and frustration, a venting of "Your father said this, your mother said that". Of course, the kids were in the back seats listening to us in the front seats. As the kids got older, they were understanding the conversations and we likely put a wedge into their relationship with their grandparents.
It simply became too much stress. I would ask myself "Why am I doing this to myself and my family?" Love? Guilt? Then came Facebook. Well, that was several nails in the coffin. My family, behind the computer screen, would play out and post all sorts of things, private things, things that should never be out in public, but they treated Facebook like it was a private conversation between us. I am like, Ok, they're old, but I don't think they appreciated the fact that everyone else could see all this. My father was a natural at being an internet troll, like serious sociopathic type behavior. So this is what is going on in his head? He had these far-right political views, believed in all the conspiracy theories, believed everything on the internet, treated opinion like fact, it was horrifying. I blocked him, and not only on Facebook. I stopped interacting with my family, altogether. If he wanted to rant about me online for all to see, at least I wasn't going to see it and I wasn't going to react to it. I didn't need the stress in my life.
The guilt goes away real fast once that weight of family stress is lifted off of you.
