👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 What it means to have grown up with parents who had conflicts with both sides of the family
Growing up with family conflicts on all sides meant your extended family became a political minefield where rifts, feuds, and conflicts created complicated webs of loyalty and tension that you had to navigate as a child.
You may have had to navigate adult grudges and politics, learning which relatives couldn't be in the same room or even mentioned to each other. You became the family's emotional thermostat, constantly adjusting yourself to keep everyone else comfortable and reflexively mediating conflicts before they exploded—a role you never chose but can't quit. You learned to sense tension before it erupted and became incredibly skilled at smoothing over problems and managing everyone's feelings.
You may have learned that loyalty feels complicated—you worry about betraying one person by being close to another, echoing the divided loyalties of your family experience. To this day, family gatherings still feel loaded with undercurrents that others miss because you're tuned to the subtle tensions in family dynamics. You assume all families are minefields where love comes with invisible accounting and hidden ledgers, and you expect love to come with strings attached because in your family, it always did.