Sorry for the long post, I added a TL;DR at the end 😄
I’m a Gen X woman trying to make sense of something that has followed me for most of my life, and I’d really appreciate outside perspective.
I think one of the deepest wounds in my family is that I grew up feeling like the second-choice child.
My younger brother was, in many ways, the golden child. Whether anyone in my family would admit that or not, that was the emotional reality I grew up with. He was the one people protected, excused, or centered. I was the one expected to cope, be “strong,” not make a fuss, and absorb things. If I reacted, I was often treated as dramatic rather than hurt.
I also think my parents were emotionally immature. To the outside world, we looked like a very solid, even affluent family: my father worked hard to provide, my mother held down the fort at home, we had nice clothes, good food, lovely family vacations, music lessons, all of that. From the outside, it looked stable, privileged, and perfectly fine. But emotionally, it felt very different. A lot wasn’t seen, named, or protected.
There was also no open fighting between my parents. No dramatic scenes, no obvious chaos. But everybody knew there was “stuff” going on underneath. It was all unspoken, buried, absorbed into the atmosphere.
I’m also not the only one who sees the family dysfunction. I have an older sister, also Gen X, and we openly talk about the fact that she was constantly parentified. She was the older, sensible, good girl one, always getting good grades, putting enormous pressure on herself. She developed anorexia as a teenager. She has also been through years of therapy, and she still carries grief and anger about our family. So this is not just me being uniquely oversensitive or rewriting history.
A big part of my role in the family was also being made responsible for my younger brother in ways that were never appropriate. My parents kept trying to push me into a parental role whenever he did something stupid. For example, when we were teenagers, he got drunk at a family gathering and ended up puking in the family car. He was 13, I was 17. I had already told my parents he was drinking alcohol, and their response was basically, “Tell him to stop.” They did nothing else. That dynamic was incredibly common: he acted out, and somehow I was supposed to manage him, contain him, or be responsible for the fallout.
My younger brother could be openly disrespectful to me, and nobody really stopped him. One example that has stayed with me for years: at my wedding, he gave an unasked-for speech and made a “joke” about how the family could basically write me off as a financial total loss. I was the bride. I was 24. I remember hearing it, feeling humiliated, and also feeling weirdly numb, because by then I was already so used to his cruelty being treated as humor. As far as I know, nobody called him out.
There were lots of smaller things too, and in some ways those are what stick. I remember one specific incident where my father and my younger brother ruined something in my room that was very important to me — something “stupid,” just a poster of my favorite band on my bedroom wall. But it was never really about the poster. It was about the disrespect toward me, toward something that mattered to me, in my own room. When I got upset, they laughed and told me to stop being dramatic. It was “just a joke.” That kind of thing happened a lot.
As a teenager, other family members besides my mother also made openly rude jokes about my boyfriends. By then I was already at a point where I barely even responded, because I was so done with being treated like I was overreacting every time something hurt me.
Years later, after a long period of no contact, my younger brother came back into the family and was exactly the same. No growth, no reflection, no change. After his return, he tried to continue communicating with me in the same disrespectful way as before. That was why I sent him a clear message telling him I would no longer accept that kind of communication and that I wanted normal, respectful contact. He read it and never replied.
He has since died, shortly after my father died, and now there is this strange glorification of him that makes everything even harder. I’m left with grief, anger, unfinished business, and this old childhood wish that someone in my family would finally say, “Yes. He was unfair to you. Yes. What happened to you was real.” But I know I’m probably never going to get that.
And honestly, even the way his life unfolded seemed to fit the pattern of people excusing him. He had several children with two different women. He didn’t even tell the family about his first child until two weeks before the baby was born, and from what I understood, only because his girlfriend forced him to. He was with that woman for about ten years, then cheated on her with another woman, ended up marrying the other woman, and had more children. He later claimed that his ex “wouldn’t let him” see the first kids, which wasn’t true at all. What actually happened was that his new wife didn’t want him to see them, and he obeyed. That tells me a lot about his character, and yet he still somehow remains the tragic, beloved one in the family story.
There’s more to it, too. I have body image issues that go way back, and they didn’t appear out of nowhere. My grandmother and father both left deep marks there. Comments, criticism, the feeling that my body was being watched, judged, and found lacking. So it’s not just sibling pain — it’s this whole family atmosphere of not feeling emotionally safe, not feeling chosen, and not feeling protected.
The painful thing is that I don’t even know anymore whether what I carry is a “belief” or just an emotional reality that formed because of how I was treated. I know people love to say, “Maybe they didn’t mean it that way,” but I’m at a point where I don’t want to keep doing that for them. Whatever their intentions were, this was my reality as a child. I felt secondary, emotionally alone, and unprotected. That matters.
I’m no longer even asking whether they loved me. I think they probably did, in their way. But it didn’t reach me in the way a child actually needs love to reach them. And that distinction has been devastating.
I’ve also been through years of psychotherapy — not only for this family issue, but also for GAD, CPTSD, and work-related problems — and honestly, it still feels like I haven’t been able to get to the core of this. Intellectually I understand a lot. Emotionally, I still feel stuck in the same wound.
Has anyone else dealt with a family where one child was subtly or not-so-subtly favored, while you were cast as the resilient one, the difficult one, or the one who was just expected to take it? How do you let go when you know you’re never going to get a clear acknowledgment from the people involved?
TL;DR: I’m a Gen X woman from a family that looked good from the outside — financially stable, nice home, vacations, music lessons — but was emotionally immature underneath. My older sister was parentified into the “good girl” role, and I grew up feeling like the second-choice child while my younger brother was the golden child. My parents often made me responsible for him, while protecting or excusing him, and he was repeatedly disrespectful to me well into adulthood. He has since died and is now being glorified by the family, which makes my old pain even worse. I’ve done years of therapy for this and other issues, but I still feel stuck with the grief, anger, and lack of acknowledgment.