How to deal with it.

I'm a junior in highschool. My parents have been divorced for around five years.
Just a little background information.

My older brother is five years older than me. He is the source of the problem. I don't know know how to deal with him anymore. He tries to act as if he is my father, and I am honestly tired with it. Whatever I do, good or bad, he criticizes it. Whenever i do what he asks, i do and yet, he always tries to undermine everything i do. It really pisses me off.

I might be just a brat, i can take it if it is the case. But i just felt the need to vent.

What to do?

Well this is fairly common in families afflicted by divorce with multiple children. Any time the alpha male of a group leaves, the next strongest one is automatically going to assume the leadership role. Apparently that was your brother. The beta male is generally going to do one of three things. He'll either man up and challenge his older brother for the alpha spot and take it(not likely in your case, no offense), man up and challenge the older brother and fail, or you could man up and try talking to him and letting him know that although he may have assumed the leadership role in the household in his own mind, it's not his place to tell you anything because he isn't your father.

(I don't always give good advice though.)

My brother and I have never gotten along. We fight like we're still kids(he's turning 25 this year, and I'm just around the corner from 21). Hell, the day he got out of boot camp and talked some crazy shit to me, I personally drove myself 50 miles just to beat his ass.

My best advice would be to A) ignore him or choose option 1 of Wolford and make sure you can beat him. Nothing between my brother and I have changed since I fought him the last time, but now we're not down each others throats all the time, and hell if either of us needed help from the other we'd give it, but probably still not enjoy each others company. I really agree with DJ on this, this just seems to be the way older brothers handle little brothers

Communicate. Let your brother know that you are a growing young man and more than capable of making your own decisions. If your brother is still living at home it may be time for him to get out. You say you are a junior so I assume your brother is at least 20 or 21. He may feel partially responsible for the divorce, causing him to overcompensate and may be harsh on you because he felt he wasn't harsh enough on himself back then. If worse comes to worse, talk to your mom and/or dad. Explain the situation and see if they notice the same things or feel it is a problem.

Many times siblings will not get along, especially in broken families. My older brother and myself are closer now than ever but I barely knew him growing up. My best friend had a similar relationship but he and his brother have fought on multiple occasions. Not as brothers but as enemies, leading to hospital visits and so on.

My family has been broken since I was 14. My brother and I alternated alpha male position, I guess, and now (we both still live at home to help our mother, who would, quite frankly, lose her head wtihout us) each have our own sub-sets of problems we help our little sisters with. We contribute income to the house (he pays more, as he tends to... eh, shall we say, endeavor in less than legal activities), but we also cover all our own expenses - ie, food, insurances, cell phone, what have you.

As much as my sisters may not agree with how we handle things, there is a lack of an authoratative male figure when we're not around. I lived in New York on my own for a year, and in that time, one of them started, ah, partaking in the same proclivities as my older brother, and eventually attempted suicide.

As far as I'm concenred, nothing I do is to harm my sisters in any way. I try to help them as much as possible - be it with boys, homework, or trouble with school, plays, socializing, dropping them off at Lacrosse and picking them up, shuttling my grandmother around (although that is more of a house-helping thing). Even if they don't like the way things are being handled, I do the best I can.

Needless to say, there are a shitload of daddy issues floating around the house. When my father left, my brother turned to drugs a year after, and my sisters fell into horrible depressions. I had anger issues that eventually sorted themselves out, and I was able to displace myself emotionally from the household and see how it was being run, and the fundamental problems that a jaded, single mother can bring into the mix.

In any case, I highly doubt he's deliberatley trying to harm you, based on my own experiences. After my dad left, I would frequently get into fights with my mother over the way she would talk about my father. It was a form of psychological abuse that everyone was oblivous to, and eventually, I did take a beat-down from my brother for my 'insubordination' with a rolled up Vogue magazine until I blacked out.

I think I lost the message I was trying to convey somewhere in this post, because my brother and I are very good friends now and on occasion run in the same social circles.

I guess, if it's ball-dickery for the sake of ball-dickery, kick his ass. If you can see, potentially, why he's doing the things he's doing and it's to help you develop, talk it out.