Are you a student of NLP, Neuro Lingusitic Programming by any chance? What you describe is a classic rapport and calibration issue. And you are 100% correct.
Never heard of it. My parents were constantly doing the "you must accept two contradictory things at once" routine, which made me crazy, and I was always getting in trouble for demanding they pick one or find coherence or something, because for whatever reason I'm just highly tuned to that sort of thing. When I edit stories I'm most likely to catch stuff like the fact that the blonde on page five is suddenly a brunette on page 247, even if there's been no mention of hair color in the pages in between...
The screwy way shame-based families communicate (or work at not communicating) is discussed in a couple of Jeff VanVondern's books I've read; he may be bouncing off that system, I dunno. But I latched onto those concepts the minute I saw them, because I'd been dealing with them so long and he laid them out so well.