Okay then

He has to maintain a good relationship with them at all cost.

If they are human beings, maybe. Mine were not. Hence my advice ... if it can even be called that. A suggestion, maybe.

> He should seek independence and be independent in order to rely less on them but never break relation with the only 2 ppl who truly care about you in your life.

Again -- your experience is not even remotely what mine was. I've met plenty of people who are / were horrified that I could say what I'm saying, let alone, implement it in real life. But my father got left in the dust, when I was about 15. He took my mother's ultra-abusive shit, until he was ready to kill her, and no one in the household had any doubt "she was dead" if she stayed. But that's after a dozen years of him being lied to and lied about, and forced into places like mental hospitals, when she gas-lighted the cops into believing her projections of her abuse was shit HE was pulling, not SHE had been doing to him. She was putting shit like Thorazine in his food, and drugging him up so he wasn't acting like a mentally normal person, and then, calling the cops on him, to pretend she's in fear for her life, and they need to get him away from his own family. Then she was doing shit like selling the house he bought, at a loss, and trying to flee with the money. He took that for over a full decade, before the authorities finally noticed that when he was around, bills got paid and things were going okay enough, in some ways, for his kids. When he was forced into lock-up, all hell broke loose -- because she was in complete charge. He finally started taking two or three weeks off, away from her, to stretch out the "bad periods, where she was in charge" to make his point, with the assholes that kept locking HIM up.

Frankly, how he managed to NOT kill her, was miraculous.

As it turned out, he finally got some peace and quiet, when we all left in the middle of the night, after he finally lost it, and told her, in front of all of his kids, "They will never find your body".

I never saw him again, after that, in person. When he died, it was something like five years before I even knew. There's some money he left for us, still sitting in unclaimed accounts. One sister and I decided to leave it there, for fear that the other siblings, all drug-addicted, would overdose if they had it. So we sacrificed our own selves getting any of it, to keep it away from people that would immediately harm themselves if they had it.

As for my mother: I went "no contact" with her, ages before any of that. As did every other one of her kids. And we HAD to. Period. Watch the scene in Good Will Hunting, where Robin Williams says, ten times in a row, "It's not your fault" or words much like it. Some of us quit trusting human beings, decades ago. And we have ample reason to have done exactly that.

I would suggest that some people read Pete Walker's book about "Complex PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving" if any of what I'm saying, resonates. It's one of the only psychology or self-help books I've seen, that admits some people are going to be so messed up, from their past abuse histories, that they simply do not and cannot trust human beings. I'm one of them that's arguably about 80% to 90% there. It is what it is. I trust most people to fuck up everything they touch or are involved in. Beyond that, I trust most people pretty much not at all.

Regarding talks like this: true professionals, with empathy and compassion, would likely agree with me that it does no good for others, who weren't there, to second guess this. It's called "emotional invalidation," and that's abuse -- by the standards of many female-written books, anyway. Also, it would count as "invalidation of lived experiences". I won't accept that. Ever. If I horrify you, in saying all this, I'm truly sorry. But it's my life. I gotta play the hand I was dealt, with reasonable caution. And what's reasonable to someone with my history, may not seem at all reasonable to someone with radically different history.

With people who bring you into the world, for their own selfish purposes, and then treat the situation from birth on like it's a game as to what day they take you back out of it -- fuck 'em.

My insane and tremendously abusive mother, for instance, refused mental health help for decades. Fought it, with all of her might. As near as I can tell: due to her choices, she died, totally alone, in a locked part of what may as well have been a mental institution. Tons of opportunity over many decades, for her to admit she had serious problems, and for her to accept professional help. Instead, she did everything except that.

There's a sign I have, that I really like. It says, "Sometimes you just have to accept that some people are shitty human beings, and stop trying to see the good that is not there".

Or to put it another way: military history buffs told me that fighter pilots in (or around the time of) World War Two were trained to think this way, about ejecting or not ejecting from the aircraft they were in, when things got bad in combat. "Is it worse inside the aircraft? Or is it worse outside the aircraft?" If it was definitely, objectively worse inside than outside, the men in these fighter planes were taught to quit giving it any more thought, and to tuck their knees in, tight (so as not to smash them on the canopy or the fuselage, as they exited the plane) and to reach up, and to pull the ejection handle. Just do it. And hope for the best, while keeping training in mind, after that.

Hard thing to go "no contact" with parents that are not ever going to be their own friends, let alone yours, but sometimes, shit is shit, and you have to quit trying to polish a turd.

Same goes for siblings: sucks to have to "abandon" them, but if it means you'll die if you don't, get the bleep away from them. I made that decision with a younger brother when I woke up with a razor sharp knife slit in my pillow in our shared apartment, when I was trying to get him off of drugs. I left. I never saw him again. That was about 30 years ago. A sister did much the same, more recently. She's 100% out of my life, too.

Based on what you've said: you're on one end of the "healthy relationship" spectrum, and guys like me are on the other. We are at extreme ends. And that's just how it is. Guys like me exist, and it's not our fault that things were what they were. I didn't ask to be born to a mother that mental health pro's could not or would not deal with, for more than two hours, total, in their entire lives. I dealt with her for 23 years before I joined the military, and after that, I never looked back. She tried her damnedest to pretend all the trips to the hospital she sent her own children to, had not happened, and it was just our imagination. We stuck to reality. We spoke our truths. And much like a female book author, who wrote "Understanding the Borderline Mother" says about what she calls the Medean Witch (spelling?) sub-type of a BPD mother, even if you tell your truths, as you experienced them, to others, they go into firm denial that any such thing could even be possible. But, it is.

I don't say this stuff that I'm saying, now, meaning it in a rude or an argumentative way. I'm not trying to be "right" with this, or to "win". I'm offering a different viewpoint. That's all.

If it feels better to you, I'll retract my earlier "advice" or re-word it this way: If he truly needs to, then, yes: cut the cord, parent-wise, without any guilt for failing to bend the knee. But I'll readily admit that not everyone has a true, bona-fide need to. In some cases, a relationship can be saved. But not all cases. Only the person, their own unique self, knows which is which.