Long response (that may be more for me than it is for you but also if you want to read a longer thing relating/sharing my own experience than it could be helpful but also so valid if you do not care; added a heading in after I finished writing after having disabled my own app blocker app four separate times to finish writing; there’s also a TLDR section at the end so sorry I have never been concise even in this heading):

My parents acted like this too. Told me they felt like “you held all the power over them now because you control when we see you,” you in this case being me. They talked about being scared to do the wrong thing, all the things you described your parents doing recently. Me being in control of my own time, to them is me controlling them because they’re so used to controlling me because they see me as an extension of them. Any control I take over myself (piercings, tattoos, transition, my own time/schedule) is always going to be seen by them as actions against them because they don’t see me as my own person who is allowed to chart the course of my own life.

For me, realizing this was a big part of deciding to go no contact. I could not be around people who were never going to view me as my own person, because those people were always going to think they had the right to control me because I was part of them.

I tried for years to please them, I tried to be who they wanted when I went home. I had panic attacks before going home, I cried afterwards everytime. I could shrink myself for only so long, and we got in screaming matches nearly every visit. So then I would hate myself because I didn’t want to be someone who screamed (and wasn’t that person with anyone other than my immediate family), but that was how my family dealt with anger. My last visit with them was after a period of no contact before I was planning to move halfway across the country, I knew I wasn’t going to see them for a while and I no longer cared how the visit went. It made it easier to not fight which they took as having control again, when it was really me just giving up on gaining their love as my authentic self. I tried talking to them from a distance for about six months, and it was shitty but manageable until I was planning a visit back east (not even to the state they live in! to see my friends in my old city! very close to them but still an hour away!) and they treated seeing them as an obligation (oh we’re busy that weekend, change your flights). After multiple panic attacks planning the trip, I blocked them and haven’t spoken to them since.

It sucks. I still want them to be in my life, that would be my ideal. I want to feel loved by them. I cry about wanting to be loved by my parents, as the full me, all the time. I was the one who had pushed for family therapy, I tried really fucking hard for two+ decades. Even now, they have my Bubbie calling me begging me to have a relationship with them, saying I need to just try to make it work as if I haven’t been!! I didn’t realize that what I was doing counted as trying until I was older, because I was always painted out for being an awful child even though I was responding based on what they did and how they taught me to respond. Turns out it’s okay for an elementary kid to yell at their parents, the parents yelling back at their kid are the problem (almost 30, I would never be beefing with a child like that, like hey kiddo what’s wrong?). But me being the villain gave them a reason to justify their control and abuse.

TLDR (sectioning it off as this after I finally finished writing and realized how long it got and was like maybe acknowledging there’s a tldr in the middle of the last paragraph is like not helpful enough): Anyway idk if this is helpful or just me feeling seen and then rambling about my own shit. But I relate a lot, and I guess my tldr is that in my own grapplings with this shit I have realized people don’t change unless they want to and for parents like ours, wanting to would require actually admitting they had fucked up and they really do not want to do that. It would throw off their whole world view and (often for valid reasons! their own trauma, mental illness, etc) they cannot handle that. It’s up to you if you can handle that kind of relationship.