I have fallen out w my brother & would love some help processing it all ... or just some perspectives. It’s long and complicated will try to summarise:
Mum & dad divorced due to dad’s affair when I was 10, brother was 8.
Dad was relatively unreliable, odd girlfriends, ill-advised wife’s. Both my brother and I struggled with him growing up.
Dad was also a bit creepy with women, sometimes I felt that extended to me. No touching but inappropriate comments.
When my brother got married age 26 he essentially rejected my dad, my dads side of the family and my dads daughter (our half sister, who I am very close to - almost a mother-daughter relationship, she’s much younger than me). Much hurt all round.
Brother got himself in a lot of debt over the years for different reasons and now owes family (my mum, dad, uncle and step sibling) around £200k total. He’s also a spendthrift, buying art a lot, which is irritating to the people he owes.
He becomes a stay at home dad to his kids. He also becomes a dictatorial, angry, opinionated man. His personality evolves from once fun to reactive, angry, lecturing. It’s known in the family that you could never raise an issue with him and talk it through calmly, he would get very agitated and aggressive, so nothing is ever really said.
He’s now addicted to Bitcoin and Crypto. He’s awful to his wife and kids, shouting at them and ignoring for hours on his phone looking at crypto.
He has started being more open to seeing dad but has also told me stuff like he won’t really be too bothered when he dies. I’m closer to dad these days as he helped me emotionally thru divorce and simply because time has healed a lot.
My brother contacts me this summer asking to borrow money. He says he can’t tell his wife because they got another £50k in debt over the summer and if she finds this out she’ll divorce him. He also says he feels “numb”. I thought he sounded in a very bad place (and have long thought he’s not very well mentally). I told my half sister about the request for money and that I was worried about him. She told the rest of our family. Turned out he actually owed a loan shark 4times what he’d asked me for. My mum paid it. Lord to my step dad about it and asked my brother not to do it again (!).
My brother is now not talking to me, or my sister - but totally fine with my dad ?? He said we are abusive cunts and that he’s really drawn the shit straw having us for a family.
I don’t think I care too much about him not talking to me - any ‘conversation’ over the last 10 hrs has been him lecturing me about one of his latest obsessions - house prices, private education, the fact that dad fucked us over by not providing us with enough money... Bitcoin. Whatever. And it’s easier not to see him yell at his wife and kids and feel disgusted by him.
But how can I make peace with it? I feel he is such an awful person yet it’s ME that’s been sidelined. I fear the ne t time I see him will be at my dads funeral and he’ll be devastated and want to be the centre of everything despite rejecting my dad for years and bleeding him for cash.... and I als feel that my dad was a problem in the past and so I wonder if my brothers actions are a bit founded and maybe I should be more supportive of my brother. He feels we have abused him???
Does anyone have any insight?