I’m a 25 year old male and my 27 year old brother still treats me like I’m 5.

We’re both fully grown male adults and we both work at our family business run by our parents. I’ll give you a perfect example of my day so far. I stop what I’m doing in the middle of my task to give him a hand only for him to get mad at me for not doing it his way. Ok whatever, I shut my mouth and continue helping. So we get the job done, great, we walk back to the front office. As he follows me he kicks my feet to try and trip me. Now me because I’ve always been one to avoid confrontation, which is a huge weakness of mine, I try and be the respectful one. I hold the door open for him but he continues to try and trip me. Like we are in kindergarten. I don’t know why he feels the need to do this. I have confronted him in the past but 2 reasons have made me stop trying. 1) he usually just laughs at me and tells me to calm down 2) he’s physically bigger than me so I’m in no way a physical threat and couldn’t do anything if I wanted to. He’s done this my whole life. Always giving me jabs to get a reaction out of me.

Through my life I’ve learned the only way to deal with him and people like him is to simply ignore him and spend as little time with him as possible. It’s tough when it’s family and I care for him so I still do what I can to be nice. It would just be nice to get that respect in return.

As I’ve read about this there are a couple approaches. Either change your mindset because maybe you’re the issue. If not there’s probably nothing you can do. You can’t change someone. You can come up with a revenge plan or try to teach them a lesson but some people will never learn. They just are who they are and you need to accept that. I’m sure some personal trauma has been a factor and who knows what else is going though their minds but you should only focus on what you can control and most of the time it’s just being the better person and continue to show kindness.