Feelings are never right or wrong. You feel however you feel, and nobody knows it except you. It would be stupid to argue with somebody about how they feel, or should feel. And let me for sure validate what you're saying. I have had a problem recently with my brother who, no matter what I said and how many people agreed with me, would challenge or debate my position. I say up, he says down. I say black, he says white. I'm not the only one who's noticed his tendency to do that. In fact, my daughter points out that you can say the same thing word for word that my brother just said yesterday, and he'll jump in to refute it. He's being contrary on purpose. So yeah, speaking up and stating an opinion around him is quite a challenge. After a while, when you don't want everything you say turning into a lengthy formal debate, you start keeping your mouth shut.

The tendency not to ask for what you need follows from there. I am diabetic. Once when money was extremely tight, I went a month without taking insulin because I didn't want to ask my husband to pay for having it refilled. I put my own needs on the back burner because I felt that what everyone else needed was more important. I ended up in urgent care, with my glucose reading in outer space. It would have been a lot less trouble and expense to just speak up about what I needed. An ounce of prevention, and all that.

Tying both of those two paragraphs in together, that same brother discouraged me from going to the doctor when I had a serious flu and couldn't even hold water down. He thought I was too dependent on doctors, and should learn to just tough it out and take care of these things myself. By the time my sister drove me to the emergency room, I was so dehydrated that my blood pressure was in the basement. Top number in the low 70's, bottom number undetectable. I didn't even have to do the waiting room thing. They just took me right in. As a nursing assistant, I did see blood pressure readings that low a few times--always on a resident who was getting ready to leave us. I had waited until the very last minute to seek medical care. I don't recommend that anyone else do the same.