I [35 M] had a severe falling out with brother [28 M] due to a sudden personality change where he is insulting and using personal attacks and can't be in the same room with this person anymore, how do you handle family gatherings where you will encounter this person?

For years I had been hanging out with my brother once a week and it seemed like we had a decent relationship. However recently every time we met we started getting into very long arguments over such trivial things that people would be surprised that we could argue about for hours. Arguments would escalate to where he would resort to personal attacks, accusing me of being ignorant, not being on the right political side, etc. I did not make personal attacks on my end and all the hostility and personal attacks are coming from his end. I am an introverted person who prefers to avoid confrontation and like to avoid arguments whenever possible but I find myself getting into these arguments with him despite my attempts to change the subject or keep it civil. At one point I told him he was being argumentative and don't really enjoy talking about politics and he blew up and said he was only arguing about politics because I have such few interests in life that politics is one of the few things we can talk about and that he has no problem with arguing and that I should grow a thicker skin.

After a few weeks of silence and not meeting up, I had called him to see what is going on, and he basically said the entire relationship all this time was never that good and never lived up to his standards, and gave a list of all the things he found wrong with the relationship listing all the negative things he thought about me. He said I have few interests, am socially inexperienced, have poor social skills, compared me to people who have much better social skills than me who he feels much more comfortable and fun hanging with, tells me he can talk to his friends about pop culture but can't talk to me about it because I don't know anything about pop culture, tells me I am making poor decisions in life, kept badgering me and asking me what possible interesting thing I had to talk about and when I gave him some topics I enjoyed talking about he would challenge it and say he is not interested in talking about those things or would say there's not much to talk about there. I am introverted and these personality traits I had all my life and didn't seem stop us from continuing to hang out and seeming to have a good time nonetheless. So I don't know how something that I was my whole life and didn't seem to bother him in the past is suddenly something that he realized he had a huge problem with. There are many things I can work on in my life and improvements I can make, but it didn't seem like he was offering constructive criticism. It seemed like he was tallying up all my defects and weaponizing them to use to personally attack me. In the past, I thought maybe he knew all my flaws and accepted me for who I was. He never even mentioned my lack of social skills or introversion even once in the past. I never knew he had such a problem with me personally until now all of a sudden he mentions his frustrations out of the blue. If he had such a problem with it why did he not let me know or just stop hanging out with me? The odd thing is, he also claims to be introverted at some level too and he also doesn't talk much in social situations so I don't really know why he such a problem with my introversion and lack of social skills when he himself has much of that in common with me.

I would've accepted that things changed and maybe we should not hang out as much or at all anymore, but I was taken aback at suddenly how personal he made this and how he suddenly realized how he never enjoyed hanging out with me in the first place. The relationship from my perspective went from being okay and hanging out every week to complete silence and becoming completely dysfunctional within just a few weeks. But he seems to be telling me that it was never that good in the first place and he just suddenly realized it now.

I don't know if all this is actually all about me as he claims it is, or he is having a tough time in life and he irrationally is taking it out on me, if he some mental issue, abusing drugs, etc. All I know is there seems to have been a very sudden personality change I am only finding out about now that is making it very uncomfortable for me to even be in the same room with this person and I am really hesitant to go to family gatherings where I would encounter him.

Is telling other family members about this unfair in the sense that it is spreading rumors and dysfunction around when it is private matter between the two people? Or is such a significant change in personality possibly a front for a deeper issue such as mental illness, drug abuse, or some other significant issue that maybe the entire family should know about?

If I do not let family members know and just not attend family gatherings, many of them would feel like I am acting distant and that I don't want to hang out with them anymore when it is because of this one person that I have a problem with. They would think that I am avoiding them and that I am the problem. Although I could attend the family gathering, they would notice that I never talk to him anymore, avoid him, and it would be very awkward and mentally taxing for me just being there. If I do let them know what happened, it could work out, but on the other hand they could think I am spreading rumors and trying to cause division and forcing them to pick sides. I tend to avoid drama and am surprised to find myself in this awkward situation that I don't know how to get out of.

TLDR: Brother's personality suddenly changed recently and relationship went from being fun and wanting to hang out, to being hostile and his wanting to severely limit interactions or ending it for some reason because he has severe problems with my introverted personality and lack of social experience. Not sure if it is really that he reached a boiling point with me, or if there a different unrelated issue that caused this sudden change in his temperament. Not sure how to handle future family gatherings and wanting to avoid family gatherings to avoid confrontation, however don't want other family members to think I am avoiding them or being distant when I am just trying to avoid him.

Submitted February 08, 2020 at 01:51PM by matthew3325s https://ift.tt/2UANA5C