So I currently live at home and my younger sisters aren’t mean people per se but are very tough love kinda people I think. I am someone who is very emotional and emotionally in tune with my emotions while they are the types to not talk about their feelings and find it “cringe” to do so. Whenever I bring up that they have hurt me they call me a crybaby, dramatic, and overly sensitive and dismiss my feelings. So I’ve stopped doing that. It makes me upset because I would never treat them the way they treat me, and the only way I can not be resentful when they are “mean” to me is by being mean back, but I don’t want to be mean; that’s not me. I want us to be nice and cordial with and helpful to each other. When I’m doing better I can brush it off when they are mean and not take it personally, and even be “mean” back, which they don’t have an issue with, but when I’m struggling more w my mental health (which they know i do) i find it harder and i take things to heart / personally more easily. How do I deal with this? I don’t want to be resentful and angry and I don’t want to be mean either. One of my sisters (22) has all these ridiculous rules I have to follow when I enter her room, and assumes I know them and am purposefully breaking them and yells and shames me for that, but 1) i legitimately have memory problems and she knows this and 2) her rules are constantly changing and so irrational that i honestly don’t respect them. I don’t mean to sound like a victim, and perhaps maybe she’s entitled to enforce boundaries if i enter her room, but it’s just baffling to me. if i don’t talk to them, they won’t talk to me and will just be friendly with each other. recently one of them (16) was fighting with the other (22) and became closer to me and cried about how she wanted to kill herself because the other one was being so mean to her then, and i comforted her, but now they’ve made up and i feel left in the dust. i know i’m older, but do i really have to be that much of the bigger person? i’m a human being with feelings too and it constantly feels like they don’t care about me, meanwhile i am always helping them and being nice to them. i give more grace to the 16 year old because she’s literally a teenager, but the one who’s 22 i find harder to have sympathy for. i don’t know what to do—i don’t want to be mean back, and i don’t want to be angry and resentful, and they won’t hold space for any kind of mature conversation about how i feel and their behaviour because i am immediately belittled and dismissed. do i just learn to suck it up and get over it?
tldr: my sisters are mean and dismiss me any time i bring up how i feel and their actions and i am wondering how to deal with anger and resentment when the only thing that works to relieve it is me being mean back when i don’t want to do that as it takes a lot of effort and doesn’t come naturally to me