The ripped fabric of my brother’s shirt felt like a surrender flag in the wreckage of our fight. What started as a dispute over chocolate had spiraled into a full-blown war of petty retaliations, culminating in him hitting me and me tearing his shirt. Now, everyone in the house, especially my mom, blamed me for escalating “over a chocolate.” But for me, it was never about the candy; it was about the principle of him withholding what was rightfully mine. I felt unjustly targeted, my brother’s physical aggression overlooked, and I was left wondering if I was the asshole for my final, destructive act.
The silence in the house after the fight was thick with unspoken judgment. My brother was fuming, my mom was giving me the cold shoulder, and I was still reeling from the shock of being hit, and my own retaliatory act. The chocolate was long forgotten, replaced by a deep fissure in our usually close relationship. I kept replaying the events, convinced that his initial betrayal – withholding my share – and then his escalation to physical violence, justified my actions. But the universal condemnation from my family gnawed at me.
A few days later, my dad, usually quiet and distant, approached me as I was sitting alone in my room. He sat on the edge of my bed, his gaze heavy. “We need to talk about what happened,” he said, his voice surprisingly gentle.
I braced myself for another lecture about blowing things out of proportion. “It wasn’t just about the chocolate, Dad,” I started, defensively. “He hit me.”
My dad nodded slowly. “I know. And that was wrong. Completely wrong. But there’s something else at play here, something I haven’t told you kids. And it’s not an excuse for his actions, or yours, but… it’s context.”
He paused, taking a deep breath. “Your brother… he was diagnosed with a very rare, specific form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) when he was much younger, around six or seven. We kept it quiet, on the advice of the doctors, because we didn’t want him to be labeled, or for it to affect his social development. They said it often presents differently in children, sometimes manifesting as extreme rigidity, an intense need for fairness and adherence to perceived rules, and an almost pathological inability to deviate from what he perceives as ‘correct’ or ‘fair’.”
My mind reeled. OCD? My brother’s stubbornness, his tantrums as a child, his insistence on “fairness” – it all started to make a terrifying, unexpected kind of sense.
“Specifically,” my dad continued, his voice softer, “his OCD manifests strongly around ‘sharing’ and ‘ownership’ of items, especially things that are consumable or divisible. For him, if something is agreed to be shared, like that chocolate, the act of sharing, the ritual of dividing it, becomes a deeply ingrained, almost sacred rule. If that rule is broken, or if he feels like his ‘fair share’ is being threatened, it triggers an immense, uncontrollable anxiety. He struggles to adapt when those patterns are disrupted. His brain tells him that if he doesn’t enforce that rule, something terrible will happen, or he will lose control entirely. And when you took his tablet, then his money, it wasn’t just ‘messing with his stuff’ to him. It was a complete violation of his deeply held need for order and control over his possessions, triggering an intense, almost primal, panic response. It’s not an excuse for hitting you, ever, but his aggression stems from a place of extreme, dysregulated anxiety, not just simple anger.”
He looked at me, his eyes filled with a profound sadness. “And your mom… she favors him because she sees his struggles, even if she doesn’t articulate them. She’s been conditioned to manage his triggers, to avoid setting off those intense reactions, because she’s terrified of what happens when he loses control. She intervenes differently with you because she perceives your ‘passive’ methods as less immediately volatile, even though they clearly escalate things for him.”
The ripped shirt, the chocolate, the tablet, the money – it wasn’t a series of petty retaliations. It was a devastating dance between two siblings, one grappling with an undiagnosed, and therefore misunderstood, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder that rigidly demanded adherence to ‘fairness’ and ‘order,’ and the other, me, unwittingly triggering those deep-seated anxieties with every “passive” retaliation. The physical fight wasn’t just about anger; it was the terrifying explosion of my brother’s uncontrolled panic, a desperate attempt to regain control of his perceived order. The AITA question, once a clear binary of right and wrong, dissolved into a complex, heart-wrenching understanding of a family trapped in a cycle of misunderstandings, fueled by an invisible mental health struggle that had silently dictated our entire lives.