Smithfield, what a great post. You have said what I feel. Especially about feeling that if someone was upset that it must be my fault. I think I still do that now to an extent...old habits die hard I guess.
I think I have also been abusing my DH. I have been projecting my anger at my parents onto him and he has been inadvertently triggering me and I have got disproportionatly angry at him before realising i have been triggered. But I think he has been doing the same with me a bit as well. He has been bullying and threatening sometimes and using his position of relative power to control me and get what he wants from me. He has also exploited my need to be loved and also used that to try and control and manipulate me.
I have a feeling that to a certain extent this sort of thing goes on in a lot of relationships but without people realising how their subconscious and repressed feelings are driving their behaviour and reactions.
Smithfield, i also agree with what you said about you being responsible for your reactions and moods. I realise that I am triggered a lot of the time but only when it is too late and i have got overly angry in the present when it is actually my old repressed anger at past events that is being vented. I am also very sensetive again in the present day about certain things again relating to events from the past when i repressed my feelings.
Eg. I have posted on here about feeling upset that my middle sister told me about her pregnancy quite late on and weeks after she told our youngest sister. I spoke to youngest sister about this on the phone just now and all she did was defend middle sister. She also said some nasty things along the lines of me being overly sensetive and being wrong to want DH to speak to MIL about her bullying. It is obvious to me now that she is completely devoid of feeling any empathy for me. She thinks I am in the wrong, I am oversensetive and I should just accept being excluded from the little twosome her and middle sister have had going on for years. It is clear whenever I try and say something about being excluded I am told I am being overly sensetive and I shouldn't get upset over such things. There is no empathy or understanding for my feelings and I really feel I am reaching the point where i just want to cut my sisters out of my life.
They are not going to change, and every contact with them results in me being hurt and upset in some way with my sisters being supposedly unaware of the fact that I am being hurt and when i have pointed it out to them they become defensive and the fake niceness evaporates. We have a completely fake relationship and I don't know why I am nbothering.........I suppose it is for the sake of the DC's but I don't know if that reason enough anymore.
My youngest sister said she and middle sister are in touch on a daily basis and help each other out and i was thinking "What about me?". I told youngest sister she hardly bothers phoning me and keeping in touch which she denied. I have tried keeping them at arm's length but it just doesn't work for me. I think it has to be all or nothing. ie there is no contact at all or the relationship is one where they understand my feelings and care if I'm hurt. But the bottom line is that they don't care if I'm hurt which they have shown quite clearly wrt our parents. They don't seem to care at all about how much our parents have hurt me, they only seem to care about how much i am supposedly hurting our parents by cutting them out. Why am in continuing to put myself up for being hurt and disregarded over and over again by my sisters? If I am going to be excluded anyway I may as well exclude myself and cut them out of my life, it will be painful but hopefully it will be a one off feeling of pain rather than the constant ongoing cuts and digs that seem to go hand in hand with any sort of contact with either of them. I need to look after myself and I am not doing that by continuing to put myself in a position where they can hurt me, even if they are doing it unconsiously and without realising it.
One thing I have noticed with the toxic people in my life is how they push you and are nasty to you, but then when they can sense they may have gone too far and that you may perhaps just walk away meaning they cannot bully you anymore, they suddenly reel you back in by being nice to you, just enough so you get close enough and let your guard down enough so they can dig the knife in again. I have noticed it with DH a little, especially over the issue with his mother, I know my father did it, he alternated between being nice and nasty, although in his case he could have just been nasty and i wouldn't have gone anywhere as where can a 10 year old go if she has nowhere else but 'home' where she is 'welcome'?
Ultimately all these people are bullies. They are exploiting their power and your weakness to vent their repressed negative feelings onto. They are too scared and afraid to vent their anger onto the person who actually deserves it as that person is relatively more powerful than them and they are to a degree dependent on that person to meet many of their needs. So it is always a weaker person who will be the target for a bully who is a coward really as he/she is too scared to stand up to the person who they are actually afraid of and who has been hurting them.
I was bullied by my middle sister and whilst my youngest sister joined in a little she was not the initiater. I was 'marked' as the target by my dad who bullied me. My mother was supposed to protect me from these people but she did nothing as she was scared that she would then become the target instead of me. My little sister witnessed all of this so now, as adults, she is unable to 'process' my standing up for myself and refusing to just accept the treatment that has been dished out to me for as long as she can remember. From her pov, it is me who is being oversensetive and unreasonable, I should just continue to accept being treated shabbily as that is and always has been my 'role' and i should not try and step out of it. Even though our parents are no longer part of the equation I can see that as far as my sisters are concerned, I am still in the role of scapegoat/troublemaker/bolshy/confrontational one and that is where they want me to stay. However much I try and break out of that role in my relationship with them they will always try and keep me in my place.
I can see now I made the mistake of thinking that having cut our parents out of my life, there would be a change of dynamic between me and my sisters and I would not still be cast in my old role within the family, but in actual fact, even without my parents, my sisters are still making me play the role I always played. Only I am not willing to play that role anymore and my sisters are clearly unable to 'process' or accept my new role which is one I have chosen for myself rather tthan having it imposed on me.
The only way that they will be able to accept my new role is if they realise what roles they are playing and gain some insight and self awareness. But there is no incentive for them to do that as they are not really suffering in any way as far as i can tell within the existing arrangement/dynamic that exists between them and my parents. I don't believe they are truly happy and truly love our parents, but ultimately my sisters were never abused like I was by our dad and our mother did not abandon and neglect them like she did me. So I can see how they are able to continue in the way they are doing, still seeing our parents and maintaining the illusion of a family, because for them the illusion is not so far from reality that it causes huge internal tension like it did for me. For me the internal tension reach breaking point and that is when i snapped and cut off my parents, but i can see for my sisters that the internal tension whilst it does exist, is simply not bad enough for them to reach breaking point like me. They can live with it; I could not.
So no matter what i do now, there will always be a divide between me and my sisters that nothing can ever close. It is only if we had had far more similarity in our childhood experiences of our parents that we could possibly hope to be close today in the way i would like us to be. But i can see now that that is completely impossible as we cannot change our pasts. And the only thing for me to do is to accept this sad fact.
I feel silly because i feel like i keep going over this again and again every few months and every time i come to the same conclusion and every time i feel i have finally come to accept that there will never be a close relationship with my sisters, but very time it seems i have been deluding myself because i have not really and truly been able to accept that we were treated so differently and that even now as adults, many years later, our relationships are still exactly as they were when i was a child. My sisters in their cosy, close little twosome and me on the outside, looking in, feeling hurt and lonely at being excluded. The slight difference between now and then is that as a child I never said anything about how i felt, but now I am speaking out but my words seem to be falling on deaf ears. My sisters do not want to hear me, they are happy in their little twosome and they do not want to include me. I suppose again wrongly i always thought that once they realised how hurt and left out they were making me feel they would want to include me and not make me feel left out and secondary to them, but it seems they don't care. They don't care if i feel left out and hurt, they are happy the way they are and i should just accept it. They do not feel bad that however inadvertently they have hurt me by excluding me and making me feel left out and different to them, that is how they want it to be so of course they will strongly resist any attempts on my part to break into their little twosome with all their might.
Now that i have worked this out it makes so much sense and i feel so silly for thinking my sisters would want to include me. Of course they don't. They never have and they never will. I should stop trying to always break into their little huddle as i am clearly hitting my head against a brick wall and it will be my head that breaks first rather than their protective wall which i think they have built around themselves as protection from our parents. It just reinforces my constant feeling from childhood of being alone within our family and of having no secure attachment to any member of the family. I think my sisters formed an attachment to each other in the absense of an available parent to whom a secure attachment could be formed. And i can see the attachment is very strong and there is no way i will be allowed in as that would bmean breaking the existing attachment and creating a new one which included me and that is never going to happen as it would be far too scary for my sisters to break the existing attachment between them.
So once again, another loss for me to come to terms with, to cry over and grieve over. At least in the face of our parents' abuse and neglect my sisters could and did cling to each other for safety and reassurance, i was on my own and had only myself to rely on. What a sad place for a little girl to be in. I think about DD and try and imagine her in my shoes but i simply cannot, it's too painful to even contemplate for a few seconds, but for me as a child it was my reality, not just a terrible nightmare from from which i would awake.
Once again I am sorry to ramble on, no doubt incoherently about my own situation, but it really is only by getting it out in writing that i am able to work these things out for myself. There is no need to respond, just the act of writing is so helpful to me.