Family rift

[Lorijune]

10 years ago there was a big rift in my family. My mum met a toy boy and it caused a stir. I’d just spilt up with my husband too and my brother got divorced. Lots going on lots of judgement from one member to the next. For years my brother and sister didn’t speak to me and my mum. I’ve never had an explanation for it. I know my brother and sister felt my mum wasn’t as loving etc as she could have been and was neglectful when we were young. Also my sister was abused by a family friend’s child and blames my mum for letting this happen. After 10 years of not being close to them and the hope of reconciliation fading, I feel angry that we are all on civil speaking terms but that my children have missed 10 years of family support and I was/am essentially abandoned by them. My mum’s toy boy who caused a stir is still on the scene and is like my big brother to me now. Brother and sister aren’t the type to sit and discuss this stuff to gain understanding. Maybe I have something to learn, apologise for or deny/explain. After 10 years of finding no calm or comfort in the status quo, I feel tempted to write a letter to get everything I have to say off my chest. How I felt abandoned, rejected, isolated, confused. How I needed them as a single mum of two. How they have vilified me for leaving my husband and failed to be there when my best friend died, my house was broken into etc. I feel it will be the final nail in the coffin of our relationships, but I’m done carrying all this. Thoughts?

What is to be gained by it? If you genuinely believe you will feel better for it, do it, but I don't think that will be the outcome and I don't think they will agree they've behaved badly.

Write the letter by all means but don't post it. You might just feel better getting all the emotions out. I think if you do send it it's going to upset everything again 😔

If your sister was abused as a child and blames your mum for letting it happen then it is likely she has struggled with this all of her life.

It sounds like it all came to a head at a difficult time for everyone - it is hard to offer emotional support to others in your family when you are going through the mill yourself.

The letter might help you, but sending it would probably just open up old wounds. You also run the risk that they might respond to you and ask what you did to support them? Your sister in particular must have found it hard.

Also my sister was abused by a family friend’s child and blames my mum for letting this happen.
If this is true and you side with your mum and think you and she are the 'victims'in this, am not surprised there's a rift!

For context my brother and sister are much older than me. My sister did say if I wanted to spend time with my mum she wouldn’t want to see me around 17 years ago. Seemed unfair to make me choose and I didn’t take that as seriously as I should have. Yes my sister blames my mum and has projected all her anger on her. My mum to this day has no idea about it. I imagine it’s been hard for my sister and I wouldn’t have been a good support growing up as I was so much younger. However is it all my mums fault? I have children and protect them as much as I can but I can’t imagine them blaming me for something I didn’t do and had no idea about. It’s very complicated and I’ve not mentioned the word victim once. How can anyone see another’s point of view if they don’t discuss it!?

just to reiterate my mum wasn’t abusive. It was a child who she was playing with who did that. My mum had no idea and still doesn’t. It’s been difficult for her and I think she’d be happy if the whole family didn’t speak to my mum including me. She maybe finds it hard to blame the child and rather blames the adults around the situation? I love my mum to bits. The concept of siding seems very infantile. I want a relationship with all my family members. I’ve never told my mum even though she wonders why things have gone wrong as it’s not my place.

You seem to be minimising your sisters abuse and making this all poor me. Seems like none of you are capable of being open and talking.
Does your mum know about the abuse?

Why doesn't your mum know about this? Your sister isn't speaking to her because she didn't prevent/ deal with abuse but your mum doesn't know about it??
Either she does know about it, or your sister has strong reasons for not telling her. I think you all need to start being honest.
Can you speak to your sister?

Not sure why I’m minimising it? The fact that I’ve recognised that is probably at the root means I’ve very much recognised its importance. Are people saying I should stop talking to my mum to show support? I’m totally there to listen to my sister and I actually work with victims of SA in my work. It still doesn’t make it possible to fix a whole family system that is broken.

Based on the additional information supplied I now see why you want to write a letter: your family is incapable of effective communication. You've said your family system is broken but you are a part of that. The things you want to say should have been said years ago. Saying them now won't bring either reconciliation or closure.

I understand your hurt, @Lorijune, but writing a very angry letter now that you’re reconciling sounds counterproductive unless you want to alienate your brother and sister again. Your feelings are totally valid but they’re better vented elsewhere, surely?

As to your sister’s anger with your mum: of course a child can be angry with a parent in these circumstances. Perhaps your mum could have prevented the abuse happening in the first place - or she could have stopped it going any further. Or behaved in such a way that your sister felt able to tell her about it afterwards and perhaps take action. But she did none of those things. If your siblings are so much older than you then your mum may well have been a more mature and reliable mother to you than she was to your siblings.

To clarify further I wouldn’t send an angry letter but it would be truthful and it would welcome a response. The abuse happened in the early 70s and was by another girl a couple of years older around 10. I don’t think this would even have been on my mum’s radar that a girl would do that to another girl. I assume my sister spent years wondering if it wasn’t important or that bad, but realised as an adult what happened and how it made her feel. That’s why she didn’t pass it on at the time.

It is a very very normal reaction to SA to blame the adults who were responsible for keeping you safe.

Without knowing the circumstances we don't know if it was possible for your mum to keep your sister safe. The fact the you describe your mum as neglectful tends to suggest your sister has a point.

If your sister has at some point said to you that you need to choose between your mum and her that suggests that she has discussed all this with your mum and has felt the need to go no contact.

This might be because your mum minimised it, or maybe it turned out that your mum did know and did nothing. Again, not unusual.

I think this is not a family rift you can heal. I also think that you feeling abandoned in this may well be because your sister sees you as still in contact with and to some extent supporting someone who was at least partially responsible for her SA.

Bluntly, this isn't about you and you should have supported your sister more. Your mum is almost certainly complicit in abuse.

Do you understand fully what complicit means? It means my mum was involved in an activity with others that was unlawful or immoral. This clearly isn’t the case.

It seems anyone suggesting your sister may have a point is met with anger and defensive of your mother? Is this what the letter would be too?

Of course she has a point (although she’s never mentioned this I’m just filling in gaps.) However we all have a point. And my point is how can we move forward!?

Your mum abused your sister by neglecting her
The abuse your sister endured from your mother made her a vulnerable individual and increased her risk of SA
Your sister was SA in part due to the neglect she endured from her mother
When you became an adult and could have supported your sister, your sister made it clear she felt unable to have a relationship with you if were friendly with one of her abusers
You chose one of her abusers (your mother) over her
Your sister has had endured a lot of trauma
You now want to contact her, not to support her, but for selfish reasons in relation to your own family

To move forward, a sensible first step would be to have you counselling to explore your own feelings but also the potential viewpointsof your siblings

I agree to writing the letter to get it off your chest and don’t send it. Either keep it, rip it to shreds or burn it.

I had therapy and found that writing things down stopped it running around my head causing havoc with my mental health.

Get some counselling if you can afford it.

Counselling is there to validate the viewpoints of the client. To listen without judging and hold space. While it’s possible to challenge the client it’s always recommended to step into the clients frame of reference. Therefore I don’t think counselling (which I have actually had) would bring me perspective. As much as I don’t agree with some viewpoints in this thread it is useful to hear differing views potentially from people who have themselves experienced abuse. It has made me realise that a potential reconciliation is impossible at least while my mum is alive and more than likely after. I couldn’t/wouldn’t cut ties with my elderly mum who has cancer and who I am close to. No parents are perfect and her gaps in parenting were down to being a single mum working hard to make ends meet among other things, in my opinion. I think I am entitled to mourn the loss of a family system that supports each other and celebrates Christmas together etc. While I don’t agree that my mum is herself an abuser I can absolutely validate my sisters feelings and understand them if she feels it could have been prevented. I would love for my feelings to also be validated by her but what I’m hearing from some people is that her experience makes everything else pale into insignificance and I should not question some of her actions (which I haven’t specified here and which have been harmful to myself and others.) I personally don’t agree with this notion but perhaps she isn’t robust enough to hear that she herself is causing pain. Should experiencing SA give you a free pass to pass hurt on to others? Where does the cycle end?

@Octavia64 Bluntly, this isn't about you and you should have supported your sister more. Your mum is almost certainly complicit in abuse.

Massive leap here. Pre teen girl abused pre teen girl in abuser's home. Abused girl doesn't tell anyone until she is older (and possibly never told the mother at all) and you think the mother is complicit? Jesus. It's always the mother's fault. 🙄

Where was your father in all of this OP seeing that everyone is so keen to dump the blame of SA on your mother
It's always blamed on the mother isn't it

To move forwards you should contact your sister and ask her not what happened but why she has cut your mum off.

If she answers along the lines of:

Well, mum sent us to an after school babysitter who sexually assaulted me. I told mum I was sexually assaulted and she accused me of lying and made me keep going back there for months while I was abused

Then that's a different proposition to

A friend of mine came back after school one day and abused me. I never told anyone at the time. When I spoke to mum about it recently she got all defensive.

(To be clear, in neither of these does you mum come out well but one is clearly worse than the other, and a lot of people would limit contact in the first scenario)

Get the information from your sister.

@Octavia64 you've missed the actual scenario

Sister was abused by preteen when she was preteen. She didn't tell mother. She's never told mother. Mother hasn't a clue it happened.

But sister blames mother

Here's my perspective on it from a similar situation.

I had to go no contact with my dad and stepmum, it was very much a last resort after decades of problems but one final incident that was the straw that broke the camels back, my stepsister however was lovely and nothing but nice to me, but in the end I cut the whole lot out of my life.

the root cause of these problems goes back to traumatic things that happened in my childhood that I had no control over and now as an adult I find that I compartmentalise things to protect myself, If I had kept in contact with my stepsister, it would be a constant reminder of the all the problems that I finally broke away from, and for my own sake and to be able to get over things that have happened in the past and move on with my life I had to make a clean break from it all. By not having to acknowledge any of the horrible things that happened I literally don't even think about them, just removed all trace of them from my life, I'm sure it's not healthy but I see it as a necessity to lead a happy balanced existence, you can't change the past, but you can sure as shit leave it behind you and forget about it.

I think you were collateral damage, like my stepsister was, they weren't asking you to choose between her and them, they just, for whatever reason, needed to move on from the past and unfortunately they had to leave you behind to do that, trust me when I say that decision was probably not taken lightly.

It sounds like you could do with a good talk with them to get all this out in the open, but if you go into it purely to tell them off about how all this has effected you, then you may as well not bother, it won't help resolve anything, because they sound like victims of this as just as much as you are. If you want to come to some sort of understanding, you need to be able to talk about what happened and be able to see each others point of view without judgement or derision and with no expectation of it changing anything going forward.

This is the NSPCCs definition of neglect:

Neglect is the ongoing failure to meet a child's basic needs and the most common form of child abuse.A child might be left hungry or dirty, or without proper clothing, shelter, supervision or health care. This can put children and young people in danger. And it can also have long term effects on their physical and mental wellbeing.

At the start of the thread you clearly stated your mum neglected her children. Now a few posters have discussed how your mum was a child abuser you are jumping to her defence and stating ‘I don’t agree that my mum is herself an abuser’. It’s doubtful a reconciliation will ever be achieved if, rather than accepting what happened, you keep jumping to defend the abusive behaviour of your mother.

You are free to mourn the loss of the relationships you hoped to have just like your brother and sister are free to mourn the relationships they hoped to have with you.