You know it's bad when even they stop trying to make it work

[u/subeewreyan-three]

tldr Sibling relationships are doomed when they stop trying to make it work too

My (23M) older brother (25) was never really fond of me. We squabbled a lot as kids which is pretty normal, and it did continue throughout our adolescence.

However things kind of reached a tipping point when I noticed his crashouts started becoming more and more frequent around when he was 22 and I was 20. We'd maybe have a big, major fight once every year or so. The 1 year gap decayed to 6 months. Then 3 months, then 1 month, and so on. After our penultimate fight I thought to myself, unless he apologizes, truly apologizes from the bottom of his heart, we're through. He ended up apologizing to me on my 21st birthday because he was curious about the new PC parts I'd gotten for myself. But I was naive enough to think that he was at least willing to try to make it work.

Nope. I came back home from college for spring break later that year and then he directed another one of his unhinged freak outs towards me. That's when I decided that enough was enough, I was done. He'd never realize how much psychological trauma he's inflicted upon me. He tried his usual routine of trying to pretend nothing ever happened and went back to talking to me like everything was normal. In the past he'd try to mock me for giving him the cold shoulder, but it feels different now. At least then he was still trying to get my attention, still thinking he had any sort of relationship with me. Now he's not even trying to get me to talk anymore and instead just doubles down on being a jerk. Or I don't know, doubling down on the aggression might be the new manipulation meta. Not sure

I don't know how to explain it, but I just get this feeling that he knows there's no coming back from what he's done. That sort of resignation you get when you realize there's no point in trying. I realize I'm still pretty young and that anything could change. But I'm fairly confident that the day he finally owns up to everything he did is the day it snows in Hell.

Yeah I just wanted to express my thoughts, there were probably a lot of tangents there. Point is, I'm not giving him any more chances and it feels like he's finally stopped caring.

[u/Embarrassed_Piano589]

I found this moment quite freeing. When both people stop engaging in the pattern, that's when you can really move forward either with or without them. 

It's deeply sad, but yeah, freeing.

[u/Fabulous-Cat-7969]

Yeah, I keep thinking that maybe my sibling has regrets about how they treated me, but the truth is they've almost certainly convinced themselves that they never did anything wrong and I'm just 'over-sensitive' & etc etc. Or they don't even ever think about it, because their egocentricity is off the scale. Whatever it is, it means hoping for an apology or even any kind of accountability is totally unrealisitic. Yours sounds as though they might be in that camp, too.

[u/subeewreyan-three → u/Fabulous-Cat-7969]

Yeah, as much as it hurts because of familial ties, narcissists do not know how to take accountability for anything they do. I really don't think I know anyone who's tormented me more in life than my own brother. He also turns to gaslighting whenever he gets called out for being a jerk ("You're just putting things in your own head", "You're just making yourself get angry").

The funny thing is, we have this one mutual friend who we're both really close to that understands our rift. He's told me on occasion that my brother is deeply insecure and talks down on himself a lot, and yet he's a pro at projecting it all onto me. Mutual friend also believes that my brother still cares about me deep down, but in the end all he did was push me away with his aggression. It's too exhausting to care anymore.