My parents have a lot of sympathy and my mother is always sending these signals of "I feel sorry for you". And it's so painful for me to feel that and I don't know why.
I feel guilty because I just wanna stay away from that. She has always had a lot of fear and anxiety so there hasn't been much safety coming from her and I feel I need to protect her, but that means I can never be myself. I can never be open because it hurts and there is a lot of shame feeling when I talk to her or my father . I have no idea where all that shame is coming from but it's making me sick.
So yeah, your sympathy theory makes sense in a way to me. I feel they can never understand me empathetically and that sympathy/ pity feeling is suffocating me.
But I also feel guilty because of all this...I don't know.