Sister or partner. Who is behind her unpleasant behaviour to me. + red flag query

[unchangedname]

Hi guys.

Sorry I started writing this about red flags but it has become about my relationship with my sister, and whether she is instigating her attitude towards me (and my parents) or whether it is indeed her partner.

Here are my old threads:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/relationships/2169105-Is-generally-not-believing-always-double-checking-a-red-flag

A bit more background:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/2153440-Dont-get-on-with-future-BIL-Will-it-get-better

(Please don't reply to the latter thread though as I'm hoping it will stay buried due to some identifying details! I think traffic is higher in chat and am paranoid )

What might be a red flag sometimes only occurs to me days or even weeks later.

The latest that I would like some advice on is that they have moved into new rental accommodation for 6 months while their house purchase is going through. They moved about a month ago.

My sister is refusing to give us the landline number. This is very out of character for the old sister I used to know.

Basically, whenever he answered the phone to us in the old house it was a 'oh, you again' tone. From my sister, if we called during dinner (which was not at a fixed time so we weren't to know) we would get summarily and crossly chastised and rung off. If we accidentally called during their favourite TV show she would either answer angrily or they would simply not answer the phone.
[Old sister pre-relationship if rung during her dinner would happily have a quick chat, or very civilly we'd arrange to chat later, or just natter while she ate. Also I would always ring her landline and she would ring mine and there were no problems].

We have all been trained off the landline now and only call her mobile as a result.

She texted the new address. I replied asking for the landline and received no reply. I've never not received a text reply from her, ever. A few days later I texted to ask again and nothing. When we next spoke I asked for the landline and she said 'we've decided not to give it to anyone'. When pressed for a reason, she said 'it came free with the broadband and we didn't really want it'. I said I thought it would be good if we had it for safety reasons - we would only call it if we couldn't reach them by mobile for an alarming amount of time. She came up with a number of reasons which one by one she admitted weren't valid, and eventually got in a huff with me so I dropped it.

After an incident where she called as I was serving a dinner that I'd been cooking for my parents for 2.5h, about a pretty trivial organisational matter, and called back four times in immediate succession, which called each of us away from the table in turn for 5-10 minutes at a time, then chastised me in an email for being mean in not wanting to sort it out there and then, I was minded of what happens when we call her when they are eating dinner.

I am now confused as to whether, actually, her dislike and disrespect of me is authored by him or her. As I say in my long thread, her sense of humour became very cruel and dismissive when they got together romantically, and she lets him act however he wants around us, and has got to taking on his criticisms of us as her own, starting to corner me about things I do wrong or unlikeable traits I have, or my bad taste in TV, or how shallow and materialistic I am, or whatever. I am trying to untangle whether she has always basically looked down on us (me and my parents) a bit and his presence just sharpens it, or whether he is the author. I don't know anymore.

Our whole lives, she has pretty much made out she is the saviour sister that has put up with me, and that I have consistently been a needy, selfish, emotionally bloodsucking, errant person. I have consistently been told for the past 15 years (probably implied further back than that, as well) that I do nothing for her, am incredibly selfish and self centred, am a let-down and a worry, untrustworthy, irresponsible, self-centred etc.
She treats me more like a pet that can be wheeled out for amusement, as I suppose I am quite eccentric, a bit young-at-heart, used to have an interesting/unusual career and lead a slightly odd life. This makes me a good auntie as I can be very silly with her baby and possibly a good topic of conversation with her friends? ...I have no idea what she gets out of having me around when I reflect on how she treats me.

In a personal review of my life over the past week, I have realised she is the only one who has really had this message towards/about me and I never thought to question it.

Her partner treats me like this but his style is different - eye-rolling and passive aggressive. She is direct and rude, or analyses me under the guise of psychology, telling me my faults: 'it's actually really sad, because you're so selfish you can't see that...' 'i'm really sad, because I feel like I can't trust you to be there for me... ' etc. This latter is because six years ago she had(?) to go to the pub for drinks with a group of people, one of which was the best friend of a man she had been dating for a few months, and wanted me to go with her for emotional support. I was in a pretty bad place, hadn't left my house for months, but even so would have gone had I realised what a big deal it was to her and that it'd be brought up every few months for the next several years ('see, I know I can't rely on you, and that makes me sad...')

The result is I can never do enough for her. Nothing I do is good enough, no amount of gestures can convince her that I am not terminally selfish, I am scared to talk to her in case I 'slip up' and 'reveal my selfishness' - accused of turning the conversation back to me, not asking about her enough. (As per my long thread, I looked after the baby day and night for four days and got accused of being 'the most selfish person in the world', and told I was only looking after him because I wanted to). I have just realised it and I am really tired of it.

I will say I have massively moved on from my old thread - I can't believe how unsure of myself I was at the start. Rereading it is what made me start to question the dynamic with my sister.

The advice I received was like water in a desert of confusion, so as I cannot discuss this with anyone in real life, nor seem to get any perspective no matter how hard I try and think it though, I would appreciate any other points of view, even if I have to be told off or visit my own culpability in this situation.

You come across as way too over invested in your sister's life. I'm not excusing her behaviour but I think you need to focus on building more of your own life, taking the focus off of her indifference to you.

I notice you say 'us' a lot, is that including your parents? Have you cut the apron strings yet? Perhaps your sister's life affects you so much because you appear to still be in the child at home role?

I agree with going NC quietly. That's the way I did it with my dad and it was years before anyone (including him!) even noticed. It was not some traumatic event or moment in time where the NC started, so there was no engagement about it. You are never going to "win" with her. Just fade away and focus on your own life. Make your own life interesting.

I had a very kind and loving mother, but I still ended up with unfair labels which I internalized, so I presume this happens in all family relationships.

Eg. I always used to lose things, all the time, and had it firmly in my head that that was who I was because that was what the family said until I realised with my own dd that all children need help to find things, something I was never given.

I'm not minimizing, just trying to explain the dynamics.

It is amazing what we will take from family, isn't it?

I do hope you can limit your contact with your sister and unlearn everything she has taught you about yourself, because she sounds vile.

Your sister sounds vile . It also sounds like yours is the sort of family where steps are taken to avoid confrontation at all costs. This is ideal for a person like your sister as they will exploit it. Your sisters behaviour isn't normal and you should look at that. However your reactions to her abuse aren't healthy either . You need to look at why your willing to keep someone in your life who treats you so badly. You don't deserve it and its not about you.

I also think your parents are being incredibly unfair by getting so stressed out by the prospect of any falling out between you and your sister. They are grown ups and should be able to see what's going on. There's no reason for you to tolerate abuse simply to keep your parents happy. Unfortunately in these type of situations the problem is often a family problem. It sounds like your parents enable her behaviour and encourage you to accept it for their own selfish reasons.

I would read about npd. Whether she's got it or not doesn't matter but the advice on how to deal with this sort of behaviour will help you. Sorting out your feelings about this will take some time , but in the meantime I would go low contact.

She sounds so unpleasant. Would she go to see a counselor with you if she thinks you have so many problems? A good one won't take her comments at face value, especially if you keep your cool. Obviously you should not stand for the unpleasantness but it's terribly difficult when she's so clever. I'm not so concerned about her unpleasantness though, but the way it's poisoning the rest of your headspace by eating away at you. I doubt you'll ever change her mind and I doubt you can carry on like this when you're so angry and upset. In your shoes, I might write her a letter saying you feel she is sometimes demeaning and judgmental. You don't want her to make remarks of a personal nature about your personality or character - but you do value the relationship you have with her. Then, when she doesn't change, you can explain that you've already said that you're not prepared to take that from her - and step away from the relationship until things are better. I would see a counselor during that whole period to get validation on your perspective and for help in being assertive. Regarding your parents - it's a pity that they will be hurting, but you're not responsible for them. Certainly, you owe it to yourself and to them to look after yourself - and it sounds like that awful woman is toxic.

Split into 2 posts as it is too long

Hi all and thank you a million times over for your posts.
And to those who shared stories of their sisters.

I want to be as honest as I can and if that makes you reevaluate the picture so be it.

Full Disclosure (1) to some eagle-eyed posters

Yes, since my life sort of fell apart I have been living back at home with my parents. More of this below.
This may lead to me being (i) more sensitive to her behaviour or (ii) culpable for it and I would like to disentangle these two facets.

I know in the below post I am going to seem very overinvolved but - well - maybe I am actually.
It is useful to me to pour it all out and see what is what, with me too.

I went away to think about your posts thinking a picture would emerge more clearly but it just gets more complicated the more I allow myself to go into it.

I am so used to how she acts I am having real trouble disentangling what is normal from what is abnormal.

I have really been thinking hard about why my sister is like this to me (and my parents, to be honest) and trying to see myself from her perspective.

To those who mentioned it, yes she is very charming to others, to everyone in fact to their faces, and has a wide circle of friends.
She is only deeply unpleasant to me and my parents.
She privately has a superior attitude to the 'hoi polloi'.

Behind closed doors she will get a bee in her bonnet about something we have done or said, corner one, two or three of us, rant at us for about an hour, sometimes more, and slamming the door and some tears will be involved at some point. If she cannot get the result she wants she will leave the house and slam the door and drive off, often coming back about 20 minutes later. Of course we are all terrified that she is angry enough to have an accident and that it is our fault she has left, until she returns.
She is in her late 30s and still does this, it will happen a few times on every visit. I don't think it has ever not happened.
She will start picking on one of us and have us cornered.
There is a different strategy for each one of us.
For my dad, whose strategy is to keep quiet and say the minimum till released, she will just shout at him and hector him with rhetorical questions, badgering him into yes or no answers, then she may have a cry, get herself a glass of water, and eventually my dad will be released pleading needing the loo or suchlike, and disappear to another part of the house.
Topics include: how my dad manages his money, his health, his retirement plans or his own inheritance (from his parents).

She will get my mum when she is watching tv and will sit next to her and start accusing. My mum will engage initially until she realise she is being dragged into a fight she cannot win and then shut down and look sullenly at the TV. My sister will mute the TV and keep on at her. She will only let my mum leave if she agrees with her, which she will eventually do to end the rant. If not resolved to her satisfaction and my mum tries to leave she will just follow her, shouting that she does not care about her and often crying at that point.
On the phone to my mum she will almost always end up shouting at her - this happens on 4 out of 5 Skype sessions with the baby.
She will list some problems the baby has had that day. If my mum doesn't address them she is accused of not caring. If she does, she is accused of telling her what to do and unflatteringly compared to the underinvolved mum of her partner.
For my mum's in-person topics, she will pick on my mum's extended family saying quite rude and denigrating things about them to goad her into defending them, her management of her health, her failure to live up to my sister's expectations (not travelling 200 miles a week to provide free childcare for her as well as hold down a job and ill health), the way my mum has phrased things and the intent behind them, the tone of voice my mum has used.

For me, on phone:
Suddenly in the middle of the conversation she will do like an 'aha', and I know I have failed whatever test she had quietly set me - it will be followed by something like 'I knew you wouldn't ask me [insert a particular question] about that. You've just switched off and started talking about yourself again. [sad chuckle] never mind I'm used to it. Go on' or after I have finished telling her something a pause and then 'is that it. You're not going to ask me about my day then. Fine'. Sometimes I get, randomly in the middle of the conversation, a long sigh. I say 'what?' She says '...nothing' in an eyerolling voice.

In person, I cannot be allowed to have an opinion or point of view - she will almost reflexively start to pick holes in it, recite to me all the arguments for and against to demonstrate how primitive my thoughts are, very very often she will tut and say 'I see people like you every day in my work - organic flowery woolly people and you are dangerously ignorant' - Reflecting on this this is another thing that has really affected my self-image - she is very scientific [so am I if you look at my qualifications!] but have no confidence in this anymore - even if I present journals and studies to her she will totally dismiss me out of hand and I feel like some divining daily mail cancer headline believing astrologer.
I even know on some rational level, like the incident that caused me to start this thread in the first place, that her counter arguments are bullshit, and in a later conversation she'll take the exact opposite stance and I'll be left totally confused and spinning. If I call her up on it she weaves her way out of it and makes me the idiot again.
Very recent example - there's a [?lowbrow - I don't care, as I love it] TV show I love. She started me watching it - she was on the exercise bike (all these egs. are in our parents' house) and watching it on TV in the next room and told me how she was totally sucked in even though it was lowbrow and some heartwarming things about it.
A year on, she would sit next to me repeatedly telling me how shit it was and how stupid I was to be interested in it, getting herself into such a frenzy she told me to switch it over and if I wanted to continue watching it to get out of the room. I did
A year after that it was on when I visited her house and was watching it while they were discussing furnishings in their new house, while he continually muttered underhand comments about how shit it was and things about the type of people that watched it, but in a much more roundabout way than she would.
Two weeks ago, she was again sitting with my mum and I telling us how shit it was and how thick the people on it were, 'only x/y of them went to college' (why does that even matter!) and I said, actually, some of them are too young to have made that decision yet - and then she regaled me with the exact ages of them, and detailed their careers so far and planned, to win her point. I said 'I thought you hated them and they were shit - how do you know so much about them?!' She turned it around on me, saying anyone who kept up to date with the news would know, and because I was so ignorant and wasn't a normal person and didn't read the news, I was not only wrong but abnormal. No conversation is 'winnable

That is if I can even get her attention in the first place, as mentioned before.
I think actually sometimes what I say/think challenges her on some level and she has the bit between her teeth and will not let go until she has beaten me down.
If she ever calls my attention to something she wants to show me (either a news story, something her partner has sent her - cats on youtube etc, or one of her friend's babies on Facebook) and I for any reason dare decline to look/hear the story I get 'it's so frustrating. I can't tell you anything. You're so funny about things, you won't even look at a simple news story. It's so sad, I feel like I can't tell you anything [shakes head].'

Anything i show interest in is trivial, materialistic, the sighs and eyerolling I get whenever I show her something I have been doing or something I like or am interested in, is utterly consistent and doesn't deviate. That is if I can get her eye direction off her iPhone, which she makes a show of being absorbed in. Many of you asked the question WHY WOULD ANY SANE BEING GO BACK FOR MORE I have no idea. But I do. did. God this sounds stupid. But no matter what I do she makes an art of showing how trivial and uninteresting it is, that is if she can be roused from her phone and hear her name, and subsequently hear the question without 'completely missing it'. why do i keep going back for her approval like a whipped puppy God I have no idea. I have no idea. It is a fight I'm never going to win is it? Arrrrrgh this is sticky stuff. Better out than in I suppose.

Thank you for what you said about EA. Joining the dots.
You know I bought the Lundy Bancroft and Pat Craven books looking for clues to her partner, but saw them in her and it freaked me out.
Maybe it can explain why I'm so irrationally pathetic around her.

I particularly shared the imagery of being the colostomy bag - the rudeness, shouting and denigration my parents and I get is something I have never witnessed her do with anyone else.

She is very superior in what she reveals to me about her attitude to others. She frequently says 'I'm not like other women' in an almost weirdly misogynistic way - the most recent example is that she is planning her wedding, and was proudly telling me how most other women 'have had wedding scrapbooks since they were 2 but I'm not like that'. Implication - she has an innate and natural tendency to focus on less frivolous things. We went to a wedding show and she was proudly telling me that of the 100 tiaras in front of her, she couldn't tell the difference - they all looked the same to her. She was also denigrating the other women in her baby's playgroup for having personalised numberplates. 'It's funny - I've just never wanted one'. This is just from the past month or so.
This is also aimed at me - she knows I'm very into aesthetic detail and the eye-rolls and dismissiveness at anything I'm interested in are commensurate with that attitude.

I wondered whether living at home is why my sister has so little respect for me. But the truth is she has always treated me like this.
When I had my career, which was quite 'glamorous' I suppose to an outsider and hard to get into, she took pleasure in having a '' for a sister and liked her friends' reactions. Then my eccentricities were exotic and of use. But privately she still acted the same towards me and my parents.
This has an echo with an anecdote she repeatedly tells me - when I was tiny she and all her friends would just get me to repeat words because they found it so cute when I said them. I still sort of feel in that role. Like that's the service I can provide for her if I can get my life to fit what she wants it to be. I'm just typing here, probably making little sense, just feeling better out than it.

On car drives for as long as I can remember she would start belligerently ranting at us all for some topic or another and would not stop for the whole car journey.
She still does this if in the car with either me or my parents or both.
About three times in our lives (when she's driving with just me and her) she has stopped on the side of the road and told me to get out of her car, and I have walked or taken the nearest train or bus home
Equally when she has failed to get the desired result from an argument and my parents have been driving, she would demand they stop and let her walk/train home or just jump out at a traffic light and storm off. So of course we would all be petrified with worry.

Obviously I still have a room in my parents' house (the smallest).
But she has demanded a bedroom for herself, with all her belongings in the closets, shelves and drawers. She still has her old house, which she rents out as a buy-to-let now, and is in the process of buying her new one.

In addition, the largest bedroom (my parents sleep in separate rooms for health reasons) which used to be my dad's, she has taken over for the baby, and his cot is permanently assembled in it, and she sleeps in the large bed when she is here with him.
She visits with the baby about once every two months.
If we reorganise anything or leave any evidence whatsoever of having used the room (including moving the baby's creams and changing things from one surface to another), she goes ballistic when she gets here. If we have left anything of our own in there she starts throwing the things out into the corridor or roughly throwing them into the room of the offender.
If we leave the curtains open we are shouted at because it is too hot for him, if we leave them shut we are shouted at because it is too cold.
My dad has moved into the original (small) room my sister had claimed for herself, and has a tiny desk to put his books on. He is too scared to move back into his room in case she goes ballistic at us.

I was thinking about whether she thinks it unfair that I live in my parents' house and is trying to settle the score.
My parents have contributed tens of thousands of pounds to the purchase, renovation and furnishing of her first house; bought her two cars; put her through undergraduate and various postgraduate and professional qualifications (fees and accommodation); paid for travel, accommodation and expenses for a round the world gap year.
I've got up to undergraduate level and they also bought me a car. But none of the rest of the above. And of course I still live with them to be fair!

Quite a few years ago (ten?) now my parents loaned a large amount of money (large percentage of their savings) to a relative who has yet to pay it back. They sort of knew the risk and decided that the relationship was more important than the money, and they sort of knew they might not get it back but decided to lend it anyway. They still have a good relationship with the relative and don't regret it. I believe he did an awful lot for the family many years ago.

When they did this my sister gave them hell. She brings it up frequently. She will just corner one or the other of them in the room and rant at them for about an hour, not letting them leave. On her most recent visit, she was doing this when it slipped from one parent that they had earmarked some of the money to pay for our weddings. (This shocked me as I honestly don't think I'd accept money from them for a wedding, I'd much rather they spent it on a round the world trip or something, that is just me though!).
Well she really let rip and was furious.

I said she had been a truly loving, supportive sister. Examples?
Four:
i) She stayed up with me the night before some major school exams and helped me get through them
ii) I called her at 4am from University in a kind of crisis and she was really lovely and calmed me down and told me not to worry
iii) A stranger was very rude to me and she went after him and shouted at him (very unlike her to do to anyone apart from me and mum and dad - I thought it proof that she must really love me!)
iv) leads to

Disclosure (2)

I've recently been able to make some sense of my life by realising I might fit an ASD diagnosis. Maybe, maybe not. (have been over to SN chat under pseudonym). Anyway I had a long chat with her about this recently and she was really lovely that evening. But then she instantly went back to her old self and has been, since

So I've always felt I 'owe' her for the above. I'm the energy-sucker to be tolerated that provides nothing, not even the interestingness or cuteness I once did. I actually told her about the ASD possibility as I hoped she might excuse me for being so awful a person and cut me a break, that all my intrinsically awful traits she's been reiterating to me all these years mightn't be my fault.

Also and this is quite bizarre.

I was always boisterous growing up and she was quite - self-contained.

My parents have always told us I was noisy and I have heard my mum say that if I was the 1st child she wouldn't have had another. She didn't mean it badly, she is a lovely mum, but that stuff stays with you when you hear it young.

So I feel like maybe I 'ruined' my sister, made her bad, because I'm bad?

I had some trouble with 'transitions', obsessions and some sensory things too which led to me being teary and shouty quite a lot with my mum as a child, but because I did very well academically it sort of went unnoticed.

So I feel she became who she is because of me. I ruined her. I made her argumentative when I was a kid as we used to argue, and maybe I spoiled the relationship she had with my mum and dad, and she has been fighting to reclaim her patch ever since.

I found myself saying this to my dad 2 nights ago. He was so sweet - he said something along the lines of don't be silly, people are going to be who they're going to be, that's nonsense, don't blame yourself.

I don't know why I'm writing all this.

Am I majorly overinvolved - clearly

Is my self esteem unusually linked to my sister's acceptance - yes it is

But I am seeing all this for the first time

Maybe it's a first step

Also and this is very important

I was reading about PND and my sister has alluded to it a couple of times now when she has been very angry with me

I really don't want to miss that if it is there somewhere. If it is, I don't know how to bring it up or what to do to help or address it

It is possible she has been even worse with us since the baby arrived

It is stupid of me to keep posting but cathartic so I will add.

The thing about tiaras and bridal scrapbooks - when it came up (very recently) she was as I said, to be honest, preening about how she was above all that. I did say something about how I could see the differences in tiaras and loved aesthetic detail and didn't think it was something to look down on but maybe a positive trait some people had, and then she completely switched on me and started crying and shouting at me that the world valued people who visually discriminate well, and that I was basically telling her she was inferior, and she stormed off and slammed the door.

It was so plainly illogical that for pretty much the first time in my life I felt no emotional reaction to the 'argument' whatsoever, and just carried on with my life.

But now that's got me worrying about the PND as for her to temporally cluster such diametric statements is unusually poorly thought through on her behalf.

God I feel so guilty having posted this. Like I've betrayed her somehow

FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) is often felt by those who are on the receiving end of such toxic behaviour and they do feel that they have betrayed the guilty party.

Any such feelings you have are totally misplaced. Truly.

You have never been responsible for your sister's behaviour. None of it can be directly attributed to you. She's simply made you the scapegoat for all her particular ills.

Your sister made her own self the person she is with a fair bit of input from her own enabler parents as well. You played no role in that.

Also you really owe her nothing.

Your sister is likely to be narcissistic in terms of personality and your parents for their own reasons have enabled her to the hilt at the expense of you all.

I feel so very sorry for what you are going through. I think what shines through from this is that you are in an abusive relationship and you can't recognise that because it's your sister and not your boyfriend. The same goes for your parents who are being controlled and dominated in their own homes. None of you can see the wood for the trees as you are all so badly damaged by her.

Every single interaction you have with her results in her emotionally abusing you and beating you down. If this was your husband, we'd be screaming LTB. If you parents were any older we'd be telling you to contact social services due to elder abuse. It's good that you've read Lundy and Craven to diagnose her partner but started to diagnose her.

It's not you, it's her. Read the advice here on dealing with an emotionally abusive partner and apply it to your own situation.

I only have a couple of minutes to post, but I just wanted to add something to the thread.

Firstly, I'm sorry that you have had - and your parents too - such a dreadful time.

I think that you have a sociopath in the family. It is a fairly common condition sadly. I have some experience as I was married to one

You can't change them, you can't reason with them. They are what they are. They don't have any empathy for others any small shred of kindness is a tool used to keep you in place.

The decision is yours. You can maintain contact, but it will mean more and more of the same. They dont have true feelings for you, other than possibly contempt. My advice would be to cut her out, but that is very easy for me to say but not easy to do.

I got away and it took a long time to recover but I did with counselling and having no contact at all, ever.

Good luck.

Hi guys

Many many many thanks for your lovely posts.

It is funny, I am here switching between seeing it for what it is, and then I think of a hug with her and how lovely she smells (!) [I mean in that nostalgic, sisterly way] and how lovely it is to have a hug from her.

It is so confusing as her tirades are sometimes in the guise of concern. Like she is trying to get us all to be better people. With her as the model of the better person! So it seems on the one hand logical that if she puts this much time and emotional energy trying to get us to improve ourselves she must care about us? i mean she really seems to get upset about it!

I am sure she thinks of herself in some way in the role of caretaker of me/us?? Like, I haven't met her standards yet, but I always imagined some far-off day when I did/do, and she would be proud of me and like me, if only I could get life right.

Part of me is wondering, is she just spoilt and can it be fixed.

And then the other bit of me is thinking about the Lundy and Pat books - the realisation that underlying the abusive romantic partner's actions are beliefs about what women are/are for, and the behaviour is just symptomatic of that.

So underlying her behaviour is the fact she thinks very little of me. (And to be honest of our parents. She is very contemptuous, scolding and patronising to them, to their faces and behind their backs).

But then I think, because we are three people, she may have just cause with her beliefs about us (for example, I can see how they could be credible - dad is not brilliant [not bad though] with money; mum's a little lax re her health); so if we could be better, she would change;

Would they? I know you will tell me no, but I can't quite see the why yet!

You know, I always wanted her to be around when we did stuff, as I felt she must be the only competent one of us so we need her.

I am just adding more things again here -

about two years ago we went to a Safari Park and she was driving. She got utterly boilingly furious with something tiny, I think the way my mum gave directions, or maybe my mum said to drive carefully, something like that, and she started driving like a total nutcase in that effing safari park, on one of the lead up or connecting bits with no animals, to where I thought we were going to fall off a sheer-ish drop at the side.

Lord, she sounds vile.

I have an aunt who is a bit like this and my mother still has scars to this day - she's in her 60s.

As pps have said, all you can do is go low contact and get counselling for yourself. There's nothing you can do that's ever going to make her be nice to you (aside from the occasional moment when she's feeling magnanimous).

It's hard when it's your birth family. If it's a boyfriend, there's always the hope that you can dump him and get someone nicer, but you've only got one sister. I can hear the longing for love in your posts. But you're not going to get that need met by someone who isn't capable of meeting it, no matter how much you hope.

I married a very abusive man and when the fog started to lift, I started seeing him for what he really was, saw beyond the charm, I had a moment of clarity: 'I've been here before!' I knew it was my sister, everything lined up. It took me a lot of therapy to lodge that in my brain; because at the time of the revelation I had never before considered it, it was a completely alien concept. People had tried to warn me in the past and, although I'd heard them and recognised that what they were saying was true, I was still under the spell/denial. It's so hard to separate out the truth when it's your own beloved sister.

In my travels ie trying to make sense of this, I found some good info on sibling abuse . Google it, see what comes up - I found some good support sites.

(To this day I bridle at the term 'sibling rivalry', as though it's innocuous, just one of those things... laughable in a way )

Btw the ASD dx may not be accurate. You can get quite literal if your formative years were filled to the brim with the toxicity that comes off people like this.

I just always thought that this is what all older sisters are like

It sounds so stupid, but can someone tell me what an older sister is like that they have, age gap around five years

Thank you springy, I will look that up. I do not want to repeat the pattern so that is a good shake-up call.

Like in my long thread when someone came along and said your baby nephew will grow up to treat you like his parents do - that was a whoah moment

Thank you very much for the insight re. the dx. I keep going back and forth with it - finding evidence, then finding counter evidence. I may have clutched at it a little as it gave me momentary relief from my sister for all the 'faults' that she harangues me for - I genuinely thought it might mark a turning point in the relationship where she could see me compassionately as someone not evil and malign but genuinely trying to do their best. But she clicked straight back to normal more or less immediately

When you say 'You can get quite literal' do you mean, sort of taking your childhood apart and feeling overly culpable for some things, hence being more likely to retrospectively clump them as symptoms within a category?

Thank you biblio

I assume you have spoken to your parents about some/all of this stuff. What happens when you talk about the fact that you are all scared to move her stuff or use the rooms she has bagged for her and the baby? Do your parents want things to change?

Do they realise that they enable her behaviour by continually letting her dictate to them like that?

You really have two choices, reduce contact or continue to suffer this abuse from her. I say you meaning you and your parents. For you personally there is another choice, which is to move out of your parent's home (if this is possible) and then reduce or stop contact, whilst letting them make their own choice as to whether they continue contact or not.

Becoming "literal" as a child and looking like you have ASD is a result of abuse - people with ASD are born unable to make neural connections in social relationships - however, certain environments can create ASD like traits in people who are not neurologically impaired.

This is referred to as an "impoverished environment", the most extreme would be the Romanian and Chinese orphans who are tied to beds and only have their physical needs tended to - they grow up unable to interact emotionally and socially because they don't know how - they never had someone respond to them and emotionally care for them so they appear to be emotionally closed off. Emotional responses actually have to be learned - a baby has to realise that when they cry their mum generally turns up and may feed them or play with them.

You appear to have learned that whatever emotional response you have it is worthless compared to your sister's emotional life, so your emotional life is hers - you have not learned to be an autonomous emotional being.

What is happening now is you are learning what most people learn when they are very young - about your own feelings and how to fit into the social world. You also have no guidance - your family has abandoned your emotional life to favour your sister. She was either born a monster and became worse or she was created by her family environment. Either way you are both damaged - she is probably beyond any help as she has lost the ability to view anything in the world other than herself. You can still regain your emotional life because you are actively questioning your environment right now.

You can't reason your sister's behaviour, even a qualified professional would struggle to identify with your sister's thought processes or help her in any way. She certainly will never be able to influence her as she clearly sees you as less than human and there only to service her needs.

You do need to detach from her - your whole life and thought process appears to revolve around her.

What about your life?
You have a terrible family dynamic - your parents hear as much blame as your sister.
Stop making excuses for them. If someone shoots themselves in the foot, it will hurt, you don't have to shoot yourself in the foot in a sympathy bid.

Leave them all behind and find a new path. you also really need some new friends who can help you gain perspective.

Sometimes you have to give yourself permission to move on.

Just wanted to add that I've now read your other threads and I'm open-mouthed at your sister's claim that you were being selfish when you looked after her baby for three days and nights. Her behaviour was deeply, deeply unacceptable. I agree with Miggsie that your parents bear responsibility for never teaching her that.

Hi Agatha

I think they are very wary of discussing her with me or being critical of her as she has in the past viciously accused them of 'siding' with me.

Regarding how she makes me feel, and all the sort of silent gaslighting-type situations - I had never got it out of my system enough to even see it, let alone talk about it till these threads. I couldn't mention it to them, don't know why but I just don't feel I could.

I feel though that things have started to crank open slightly as she is pretty relentless now; she is just sharp and gets very nasty very quickly all the time now, whereas before she would just be authoritative, patronising and bossy which we'd all take, interspersed with the explosions, but now she not only explodes but is viciously and very personally rude to my parents now as much as she is to me with a high frequency.

That is why I wondered about PND, not that people with PND would characteristically do this! But that it has escalated and her impulse control has reduced, with no other visible trigger.

Actually, there could be one - she put the baby with a childminder at about 6 months to complete a project before she went back to work, and the childminder wasn't that great, and also she hasn't been getting anything done on the project I think for procrastination reasons (that word not taken lightly, i know there are all sorts of fear-based causes for it) but possibly him being with this childminder while she hasn't been able to make progress - well she may feel a little less in control of her life and, to be frank, is taking it out on us

I mentioned to my dad about a week ago re. moving back into his room. I feel so sorry for him. I pointed out a few logical reasons why he could go back there and then we could tidy everything away for when she comes and she wouldn't even know. He said it'd be too much hassle for everyone involved and didn't want to discuss it. He stole in there this morning to take his chequebook out of a drawer and immediately left. She probably won't be back for another month!

You are right re my boiled down choices. I need to let the information marinate and figure out what to do.

You also have no guidance - your family has abandoned your emotional life to favour your sister. She was either born a monster and became worse or she was created by her family environment. Totally agree with Miggsie on this.

She may have PND but has she had that all her life?! She wasn't with her partner since birth was she? Stop making excuses for her.
It is absolutely ridiculous that she dictates how your parents set out their house when she doesn't even live there! How would she think that acceptable, unless gifted the role of Queen of your family?

Your parents have let you down and your sister is selfish, cruel and abusive.
I do not see what good will come from this continued contact.

Sisters can argue and disagree but hector, lecture and say things like 'no one likes you' when an adult? No. That is not normal or usual.
My heart breaks for you that you think you might be being unfair to her. She is ruining your confidence and your parents have let her do this. If they don't like you lessening contact or going no contact, well, to be blunt, sod 'em. They have allowed you to be abused in the family home, you can't go on like this.