You said you'd never become your parents. You became a different version of the same wound.

You swore on everything that you would never be like them.

And you're not. Technically.

They yelled. You go cold.

They smothered. You withdraw.

They demanded perfection. You demand nothing and call it freedom.

You built the opposite blueprint and felt safe.

Until your child looked at you the way you once looked at them.

That look pierced every defense you'd built.

It said: you're hurting me. In a different language. But the same sentence.

You didn't copy the wound. You rotated it.

Silence is the flip side of volume. Both leave the same kind of scar.

Absence is the flip side of control. Both leave a child guessing.

You spent so much energy running from your parents' methods that you forgot to examine the pattern underneath.

The pattern is unprocessed pain expressing itself through parenting.

Your parents expressed theirs through anger. You express yours through distance.

Same engine. Different exhaust.

Your child doesn't care about the method. They care about the impact.

And the impact feels eerily familiar.

Not to you. To them.

You became the opposite of your parents. But the opposite of poison is still a reaction to poison. Not a cure.