Nah, your interpretation is very close to mine. My parents were not abusive, either to us kids or toward each other, and they didn’t split up until I was 30.
Rather, Dad left raising us kids to Mom, and Mom was all about protecting us from all the horrors of the world. I picked up on this, and subconsciously tried to please my mom. Which meant never doing anything “risky”, always “playing it safe”. I was “the good child”. And while my mom was fussing over me, my younger sister took the opportunity to go out and cause trouble and sow her wild oats, and get it out of her system while she was a teenager. So here we are, all these years later, and my younger sister is more successful than I am, because she’s willing to take risks, and I’m still playing it safe.
And yes, I’m old enough that, by this point, it’s on me. But it’s hard to shake that childhood conditioning.