I’m posting because I’m feeling particularly sad and isolated at the moment because of family estrangement, and I wondered whether anyone else has experienced something similar, or has any words of wisdom.
I’m estranged/very low contact with my half-brother and half-sister, and although I know there are good reasons for it, I still find the loss of family incredibly painful.
My brother and sister are significantly older than me — 15 and 13 years older respectively. They were raised by my biological father from their teenage years, and they had left home by the time I was about five. From what they have told me, my father was a very strict, cold and difficult stepfather to them. They have described him as physically abusive on occasions (gave my sister a black eye and pushed my brother’s face into a hot plate of food) and have told me that they hoped our mother would eventually leave him. Instead, she became pregnant with me, and I have been told that my existence was resented from the beginning.
I have some difficult memories of my brother when I was growing up. He could be quite unpleasant towards me — for example, tickling me to the point where I was distressed and felt I couldn’t breathe, telling me that I wouldn’t be able to pursue the career I wanted because I’d irritate people, and making comments about my skin and weight when I was a teenager.
My relationship with my sister became particularly complicated when I was around 12. She took me on holiday with her family and told me a great deal about how awful her childhood had been and how abusive my father had been towards her. I was still a child myself, and it was a lot to take in.
When I went to university at 18, my sister came to visit me with a new boyfriend. He subsequently turned out to be a very dangerous and abusive man, and she was later raped by him. During his visit to my student house, however, he behaved extremely inappropriately towards me too. He suggested that my sister and I have a threesome with him, got very drunk and ran around naked into my housemates’ rooms. On another occasion when I visited my sister, he put on animal pornography and the two of them became very sexual/intimate in front of me. I found the whole situation deeply uncomfortable and disturbing.
As I got older, got married and had children, the relationship with my siblings became increasingly difficult. There was a lot of resentment around the fact that they felt I had received more support from our parents than they had, particularly financially, but also practically.
There is some truth in that. My father did help me considerably more financially than he helped them, but I don’t think there was one simple reason for this. I think part of it was because I am his biological child, whereas my brother and sister are his stepchildren. Part of it was because he had had a terrible relationship with my brother since my brother was a young adult and, by his own admission, didn’t want to help him. And I think my father was also concerned about me because I had married someone who struggled to keep a job and provide financially, whereas he perceived my sister as having landed on her feet quite well. She was then married to a successful man, lived in a five-bedroom detached house and drove a new Range Rover, for example.
So although I can understand why my siblings felt there was an inequality in the support we received, I also don’t feel that I caused or chose that inequality. These were decisions my father made based on his own relationships and perceptions of our respective circumstances.
Alongside that, my sister increasingly made snide or unpleasant comments towards me. It wasn’t necessarily one huge incident, but a constant drip of little digs and petty behaviour which gradually made me feel uncomfortable around her.
One example involved my adult nephew. I had continued buying him birthday and Christmas presents for years, despite the fact that he rarely acknowledged them and could barely be bothered to speak to me at family gatherings. Eventually I decided to stop buying presents. My sister was furious about this. After that, she gave my two-year-old a second-hand teddy bear as a present. Obviously there is absolutely nothing wrong with giving a child a second-hand toy in itself, and I wouldn’t normally think twice about it. But my sister is very materialistic and never buys second-hand things, so in the context of what had just happened, it felt very much like a deliberate little dig at me.
There were other things too. She would make comments that felt designed to undermine me, and on occasions she deliberately excluded my husband and me from her New Year’s Eve parties. Over time, I found myself constantly second-guessing what I’d said or done and feeling as though I was walking on eggshells around her.
With my brother, the final nail in the coffin for me was when he disclosed to me that he had cheated on his wife, including with young prostitutes in Thailand. I know people will have different views about that, but hearing this made me realise that he simply isn’t someone I want in my life. He also took valuables from the family home on the day my dad died and tried to snatch my mum’s handbag out of her hands because he was searching for cash he had seen in the house previously.
Unfortunately, when my mother was living with dementia, she disclosed to my siblings that dad had helped me with a house deposit. This occurred at a family party that I had driven 4 hours to attend with my children. That led to a very difficult family gathering and was the beginning of the end in terms of sibling relationships. I no longer felt comfortable or emotionally safe around either of my siblings.
I’ve tried at various points to maintain some sort of relationship, particularly with my sister, but I increasingly felt as though I was walking on eggshells.
So here I am now, with very little contact with either of them. And this is where I find myself questioning myself.
I’m divorced now, so it’s essentially me and my teenage children. I haven’t lived in my current area for very long, so most of the friendships I have here are relatively new. I do have friends, but I don’t have that deep, longstanding network around me that some people seem to have.
Sometimes I feel incredibly alone and I find myself wondering whether I am the problem.
My father had always been very emotionally closed off, and my mother was extremely volatile even before she developed dementia. I think I’ve probably always struggled with interpersonal relationships as a result of growing up in that environment. There have certainly been times when I’ve accepted treatment from friends that wasn’t particularly good, probably because it felt familiar or because I wanted to keep the friendship. And there have also been friendships that I’ve eventually walked away from or effectively burned bridges with because I felt they weren’t working anymore.
When I look at the history of my family, I afeel that it was always going to be difficult to have a straightforward, close relationship with my siblings. They were much older than me, had a completely different childhood experience of our father, and apparently resented my existence from the beginning.
I’ve lost the family I thought I would have. I’ve lost the possibility of an ordinary sibling relationship. My children don’t really have relationships with their cousins. And because my mum has dementia, I’ve also lost a lot of the relationship I once had with her, even though she’s still here.
I’m divorced, my children are getting older and becoming more independent, and I’m very aware that my social circle isn’t as established as I’d like it to be.
Sometimes I feel as though everyone else has these big, families and longstanding friendship groups and I’m standing outside of mine.
Has anyone else experienced family estrangement and the loneliness that comes with it?
How did you come to terms with the fact that your family wasn’t going to be the family you’d hoped for?
And has anyone else struggled with wondering whether they are the common denominator?
I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who’s been through something similar, particularly if you’ve eventually managed to build a happy and connected life outside of your family of origin.