Our 6th visit to the Stately Home.....

[oneplusone]

Hi all, took the liberty of starting a new thread. Keep on posting!

I would find it SO hard not to be believed. I'm sorry you have to cope with this Spiky and WTSAfresh. I can see that siblings treated differently (better) would find it very hard to accept how their parents treated other siblings badly because it's an inbuilt thing to want to love your parents and think they are good and they don't want to feel they have 'lost' their parents by thinking they are not the parents they thought they were.

So, yes, I can see why siblings react with disbelief, but I can also see why their disbelief is hard for the siblings who were treated worse to accept.

I realise how lucky I am that my brother believes me and also admits to and apologises for the bad way he treated me. Him doing this is a big part of why I feel a lot better than before I think. My parents haven't said they believe me but haven't said they disbelieve me either.

I sometimes feel very strange when the way they act/things they say gives me the impression they think I should be doing more for my brother and that they think he is good when they KNOW about most of what he did! On one hand I want them to forgive him and love him and treat him positively but when they give me this impression that I should do more I feel like they have totally dismissed what happened to me and how he made me feel. It doesn't make me feel of much importance. I know they have put it out of their minds because they can't handle it, but it feels like they don't care anything about how I feel/felt but do care about him even after all he has done. I have done nothing wrong and they don't seem to care about me as much! But maybe I act so much like I'm ok that they think there is nothing to worry about. I always did act normal and they always did think there was nothing to worry about.

Well I learnt to act normal partly because my brother treated me worse if I didn't and partly because my parents, themselves, taught me to by not expressing any emotion, not allowing us to either, and acting normal themselves no matter what happened which made you feel you should accept everything as normal and not be a drip.

This is illustrated well by something I've written about before. I went on a 'family' prison visit with them once and after the visit, the prison staff had to move the prisoners from the visiting area back to their cell block. They went first, while the visitors were waiting in a 'holding area'. As they walked accross to their building where sex offenders live, the prisoners in another block who were not sex offenders were shouting from their windows. They sounded full of rage and like they wanted to murder them. They were using foul language and threats. It seemed like their walls were only just restraining their rage and their urge to burst out and kill them! Their rage was something you could really feel and it is hard to describe the strength of that feeling. I hadn't quite realised how important it was to keep them separate before. After the prisoners had been moved it was the visitors turn and the non sex offenders shouted at us in the same manner as though we were just as bad as them. I felt shaken and upset for myself and for my brother. Some of the visitors shouted back! Most of them were either talking about it after or looking upset. I felt like I could cry. My parents just walked calmly accross and acted like nothing out of the ordinary was happening! They are extremely good at denial.

When my brother was first convicted and my mum asked me about what I had read in some newspapers and seen on local news programs (because my dad tried to stop her seeing any of this but she wanted to know), I told her some of it and told her how bad people had said he was and she scoffed and didn't think what he had done was that bad, and she thought the media was being overdramatic. My dad had said previously that he envisaged that he would go to an open prison for a short time. Well the media has been known to sensationalise but my parents' reactions show how they like to seriously play down anything bad. They might not have judged his crimes to be as bad as they were but a judge gave him 9 years custodial with an additional 6 years on licence and on the sex offender register for life. The probation people are classing him as very high risk to the public.

I can see why my parents use denial - because they find the truth too hard, but it has not been helpful to us as their children. Maybe if my brother hadn't felt that the things that happened to him as a child were normal (and therefore not horrifically bad if you do it to someone else) he wouldn't have committed the crimes? Maybe if I hadn't thought that some of the things that happened to me were normal I would have dealt with my feelings about them sooner instead of telling myself not to be a drip and I wouldn't have had all the emotional problems I had for such a long time. Maybe I wouldn't have so easily ACCEPTED people doing bad things to me and LET them if I hadn't thought what they were doing was normal.

These are damaging effects that my parents ways contributed to, even though they didn't directly do anything bad and didn't have any bad intentions towards us.

I must remind myself that they have gone through a lot though with all that has happened so they haven't 'got away with' being crap, and I have told them what I think in several pages of detail when I wrote my long letters. The thought of this lessens the anger a lot. I suppose I must still feel it a bit or I wouldn't write all this on here! Sorry.

I dont think its unusual for the victim to be isolated within the family unit. Divide and conquor is the order of the day.
I do think age gaps heighten the feeling of isolation as well.
There is 10 years between myself and younger db and ds and 6 years between me and middle db. I always felt alone and isolated, as if i was a seperate entity entirely. I could have been a step sister. I did grow up believing that it was the age gap that made me feel so alone within my family unit.
I do think there was definately an element of what you said OSAHM of once db and ds came along (they were twins) and my mum had 3 children under 5. Something had to give and it was any relationship or time spent on or with me. I felt as though I didnt exist and as I moved into my teens I became very angry and resentful and my mother hated this because she was all about control and getting 'her' needs met.
Knowing all this doesnt help me because (abuse aside) I still felt from the beginning, even when it was just her and me, my mother didnt bond with me or feel for me the way a mother normally would.
I dont remember physical contact with her. I felt as though she didnt like me and that I was a huge disapointment to her, because I could not fulfil her need to be what she needed me to be.
I realise now that was the 'true' seperation from my siblings.
I totally relate to what you say wtsa with regard to your father projecting on to you. I think maybe somewhere deep down my mother did feel guilty for not having those feelings toward me. She needed to see me as a bad seed to justify her feelings.
The problem with having such young siblings is that at the age 'our' siblings (wtsa) were when the abuse occurred they would have been very impressionable and still forming their personalities.
Children do copy and absorb their parents behaviour and so if very young siblings see their mother or father snarling and disrespecting another sibling. Or treating them as the 'family issue or problem' why would they question the accuracy of that image later in life. It becomes cemented and they follow suit.
The difficulty then is when as an adult you are desperately trying to salvage your self esteem but your old family still want/ need you to be the 'bad seed'.
It is difficult when 'any' contact with siblings means you are being forced back into old patterns and into an old damaging role.

TRsmithfield, thank you so much for your post. You have said everything i would have liked to have said but couldn't because it was all such a jumble in my head. You have absolutely precisely described my situation, every single word rings true with me.

One thing that has been on my mind recently has been the fact that, given the severe weather conditions we have currently, and given my sisters know I am very alone where we live ie no family close by, neither of them has even sent a short text asking how i am and if i'm ok. I could also be accused of not thinking about them in the same way, but the fact is i am not overly concerned about them as they live near each other and also near my parents and in laws and so have plenty of help and support on hand nearby if necessary.

And my sisters' lack of thought and concern for me is highlighted all the more when I do have 'mere' friends checking if i'm ok. And this is not the first time i have felt like this, in fact i have felt this way ever since we moved here, away from any family. They have always been aware i have no family nearby and not many friends initially given we moved to a completely new area to us and yet neither of them ever texted me even once, to ask if i was ok, bearing in mind also i had 2 young children to look after mostly alone as DH was out at work all day.

TRSmithfield, like you say, whilst my sisters were growing up, they must have subconsiously absorbed the message being given out by my parents that wtsafresh was to be taken no notice of, or thought about or shown any care or concern and that message seems to have been 'cemented' into their brains and governs their behaviour, without them ever stopping to think about how they are behaving and how it might make me feel.

I have decided not to text my sister to say i need a break as i don't think she deserves even that small courtesy. I am totally sure she will most certainly not be stewing at home wondering why i haven't responded to her, feeling anxious and worried about whether i am annoyed with her etc etc. I am sure she will not give me a second thought. My youngest sister told me not so long ago that she and middle sister talk on the phone all the time, that they always look out for each other and help each other out if needs be, see each other regularly etc etc. She said all this without giving a second's thought as to how it would make me feel, as her sister, that I was not somebody they called regularly, looked out for, helped out etc etc. Afaic, i deserve to be treated far better by them; when i was still part of our false family, despite what i felt about our parents, i genuinely cared about my sisters and always did my best to look out for them, be there for them, look after them etc etc. And i think i deserve to be treated with respect, courtesy and consideration by them; i haven't done anything to prove that I do not deserve to be treated well.

My sisters do appear to want a relationship with me, but again like you have said TRsmithfield only if i play the role of the 'bad seed' which is the only role they see me in. I cannot be myself and be truthful about how i feel, and i simply don't want a relationship with them on those terms. spiky, I think this is where you and i are different as you are prepared to accept your DB's stance of not believing you are justified in how you feel about your parents and yes your DB would have to make a major shift in his view of your parents in order to accomodate your experience of them.

However hard this may be it is possible. A parallel can be drawn with my DH and his mother, my MIL. She has treated me very badly over the years and as a consequence i have formed a very low opinion of her. However she has been a good enough mother to DH and he has not really seen the nasty side to her that i have experienced. After a long and difficult struggle for both of us, DH now has accepted that his mother has got a very ugly and unpleasant side which he had not seen before (or had chosen to ignore, only he knows the answer to that) and DH has adjusted his view of her accordingly. It doesn't mean he hates her, he still loves her and i respect that, but it seems he is now really seeing her with all her facets, not just a select few. I told him about all the nasty things she had said and done over the years and it must have been hard for him to hear. But he knows i am not a liar or exaggerator, he knows i was telling the truth. And he believed me. Like i said he still loves his mother but he is no longer blind to her and that is what I require from my sisters wrt our parents. It's hard, yes, but not impossible, as DH has demonstrated.

Just wanted to add something. In your post TRSmithfield you said "....why would they question the accuracy of that image later in life...." when talking about my sisters' not questioning whether they knew or saw the 'real' me or not once we were adults. I think you are absolutely right in that my sisters are not questioning at all the accuracy of their image of me as painted for them by our parents.

I think what could possibly lead to them questioning the accuracy of their image of me is if they start to realise that they themselves have been acting out the role assigned by our parents and have not been able to be themselves. Because of they start to realise this, once they work through their 'onion' layers, at some point they may also realise that I was also playing a role within the family that was not an accurate portrayal of the real me. If that ever happens, that is the point at which i feel my sisters and I might be able to begin building a proper 'sisterly' relationship. But as things stand at the moment, my sisters have no awareness at all of the existence of 'roles' within the family, let alone which role they are playing. Spiky this is what i meant when i said my sisters had no self awareness, they think all our 'roles' within our family are actually real, they have not the slightest inkling that none of us were being ourselves within our family. Nor did i until i 'stepped out' of our 'family drama' and started to see it from the outside.

This is interesting.

In all honesty, I don't know exactly what my brother thinks because, as I said before, we haven't discussed the past. We have discussed our parents present behaviour and he did shift his view, after talking to me, to realise that they have behaved unreasonably in recent years.

I think what is important, and what smithfield highlighted, is that I know my brother respects me as a person. He has been open in his admiration of me as a parent and also in my professional capacity. I know that he likes and respects me as a person, and he treats me with respect. What is in the past is in the past, and I don't wish to revisit it with him.
What is important to me is how I relate to people and how they relate to me NOW. Which is why I have boundaries set with my brother and my mother. My brother knows he has to respect/accept that I want a restricted relationship with my mother and not to interfere with this. My mother knows that she cannot speak to me on certain subjects or in a certain way. I have asserted myself and made sure they understood these boundaries. I have not passively waited for them to realise certain things, I have done the difficult thing and talked to them about it.

I had a big chat with my mother a few years ago about how she treated me as a child, and she did apologise for some but not all. But what is important is that I was acknowledged and heard. I don't need an apology from her, I just needed to be able to assert myself, say my piece, and create an adult relationship with set boundaries.

I do agree with smithfield wholeheartedly that family members might want to relate to you in the same way you did as a child, so may keep you in the same box. However, what I think is critical is how the person reacts to that. Because of course we can't change how other people think or act, but we can change how we act to them.

So when it comes to my mother and our new (but limited) relationship, I will absolutely not accept her treating me as she did when I was a child, teenager or even in my early twenties. But neither do I act like a child with her myself. I treat her with respect. I modify my reactions so I don't respond emotionally. And I won't take any shit from anyone, especially my family. They have accepted this, because I have made my boundaries and expectations clear and constructive. I do firmly believe that as adults we have a responsibility to ourselves to act like adults, not like helpless victims, and not lashing out or game playing. Can't say I have always followed this of course! But I am working on it.

I don't think, wtsa, that a parallel can be drawn with your DH. Because what you asked of him was to view his mother, through his ADULT eyes, as how she is in the present. You are not asking him to retrospectively change his view of how she was as a parent to him or his siblings. However, IMO, if you want your sisters to view your parents as to how they behave NOW, when you are all adults and not in the parent-child dynamic, then it is IMO reasonable for them to take your view into account. That is what has happened with my brother.

OSAHM, thank you for sharing your experiences wrt your brother being imprisoned. Your parents do sound as if they are experts at denying the truth of what your brother did. Perhaps they feel secretly to blame for your brother's actions, ie he did what he did because they failed in their duty as parents (which is not so far from the truth) and they do not want to see themselves as failures so they try and deny the seriousness of what he did which in turn would mean they could see themselves as not complete failures or were somehow lesser failures.

Does that make any sense? Probably not. I get a sense that my parents are the same. They try and deny the truth that absolutely cannot be denied eg that their child wtsafresh has eczema because admitting the truth, to them, means admitting they are failures as parents. They simply cannot bear to feel as if they are failures and so they simply deny what is blatantly true. It is not the sort of 'logic' 'normal' people would use but it is most certainly the sort of 'logic' my parents would use in their dysfunctional world.

Yes WTSAfresh it does make sense, and is quite obvious when you say it, although I hadn't looked at it from that exact angle before. I had thought of it as them not being able to handle the emotion of situations or the embarassment. I hadn't thought of them feeling less 'blameworthy' if they ould make themselves believe things were less bad.

I sometimes think that having children, especially adopted ones, was harder for them than they had imagined and they had maybe ignored their own feelings about how they would rather have had their own (but couldn't) and kidded themselves that everything would be ok. They were determined for it to be ok and when it wasn't they still acted like it was. They didn't want to feel they had failed. But this could be bollocks, it is just me imagining what might have been in their heads when I can't possibly know. I so wish I did know but they just will not talk about anything like this.

'But what is important is that I was acknowledged and heard.'

I couldnt agree more. If my mother would just give me this one thing I feel it would be the biggest gift she could give me.

It would certainly give me a foundation to build a new relationship, as you say 'an adult relationship with set boundaries.'

She will not give me this because she must have 'all' of the power at 'all' costs. Even at the cost of my relationship with her.

My deep down view, which may be controversial and I'm sorry if I offend anyone, is that adoptive parents can not totally replace birtparents and repair the damage done when the baby is taken from the mother and the bond is broken. Even though adopted people can't remember being a newborn baby I believe long term damage is done and things change in the baby's brain.

This sort of thinking might make adoptive parents feel inferior to birthparents which some, especially people like my dad, would find difficult to accept. Someone like him would want to be determined that everything was fine even if it wasn't because he would want to feel just as good as 'the real thing'.

Knowing how I feel, if I was to adopt a baby now (which DH and I decided against because we didn't feel totally up to the job), I would want to accept that the child would have some problems because of being adopted which were part of my job to help him/her with and I would feel important because of the importance of that job. I would try to focus on that more than a feeling that I could never totally replace the 'real thing'.

I think my parents would have found parenting their own blood children (if they could have had them) difficult. I don't think they were emotionally equipped to cope with adopted children with attachment issues.

I can see that it must be hard for anyone not just them. DH and I decided we weren't up to the job ourselves. So maybe I can't condemn my parents completely.

"But what is important is that I was acknowledged and heard."

This has also made me think. When I wrote my long letters I wrote at the end that I didn't care what they had to say about it but that I did require them to let me know that they had read it.

My dad didn't say much at all about it, which annoys me in one way even though it is what I expected, but he did say "I have read your letter and taken note". When I think about it I actually feel better that he didn't say much else because that didn't give him a chance to come out with a load of excuses or denials. He did say "I didn't know about any of it but I guess you would think that I should have". I don't think that is a denial?

That one sentence he said, about reading it, does make me feel better, because to me that IS saying 'I have heard you and acknowledged what you said'.

(I am trying to see the positive bits of the situation as well as the negative because I want to make a sound judgement of things. I often find it hard to trust my judgement, but I think I'll trust it more if I know I have thought about both sides.)

My mum didn't tell me she had read it until 3 months later, which made me angry, and then she did come out with a load of excuses for herself. I have a lot less respect for her response than for his.

osahm- it is difficult because when you grow up never having feelings acknowledged or validated then you end up as an adult who feels they have no right or entitlement to their own feelings.
This makes things even more tricky because when you start to confront what happened you end up still questioning any feeling that comes up as a result. I feel anger...should I? I feel jelousy...should I? As BA so rightly said the natural ability to trust in your own instincts is destroyed.
This is probably one of the most damaging things my mother did to me. That my mother denied any of my feelings and encouraged my siblings and any other members of the family to do the same. So for example my middle db could tell me in fron of my mother to F off and then proceed to throw my belongins accross the room (he was in his twenties btw). But it was 'not' ok for me to react or show any kind of response or emotion.
Its incredibly painful to have to stuff your own feelings down all the time in order to accomodate everyone else.

TRSmithfield, do you know what made your brother the way he was? And why did your parents tolerate his behaviour?

spiky, thanks for your post, and yes this is an interesting issue. I note that your brother, in the present day shows you respect and admiration for things he thinks you do well. My sisters have never treated me with respect let alone admiration. They have always been mocking and condescending towards me as well being quite nasty and thoughtless at times. Like TRSmithfield said they basically followed my parents' example on how to treat me and i do not blame them for their behaviour whilst we were all a lot younger. But I do blame them for continuing to treat me in that way, now that we are 32, 34 and 39 respectively (I am the eldest).

So our situations are very different even though there may have appeared to be some similarities at first.

You are right in that I cannot change my sisters' behaviour towards me, only my response to them. But quite frankly I just cannot be bothered with them. I don't like them and with good reason as they continue to treat me in the present day with discourtesy and disrespect just as they did in the past. And whereas once upon a time my self confidence and self esteem was so low that i didn't think i deserved to be treated as a worthwhile and valued person and sibling, and never objected to being treated badly, now I realise that I am worth something, i am a decent person and i deserve to be treated with respect and consideration by everyone, just as i should treat those around me with courtesy and respect. I have always treated my sisters in this way, but they clearly are not able or willing to afford me the same treatment and i have decided they are simply not worth me wasting any more of my time or effort on.

OSAHM- I just wrote a response to that and deleted it.
I changed my mind half way through because as I was writing something came to my mind which negated a little of what I'd written.
The thing that came to mind was that my sister told me a few years back that younger db would go in to her bedroom and pin her up against a wall and punch her. Often .
So I dont want to make it all about me because it wasnt. I think I was previously explaining in those terms.
I do belive strongly that a lot of what children learn is from what they see and not what they are told. My brothers followed my fathers lead, and threw their weight around.
My parents were too self absorbed to notice, stop it.
Men probably find it harder to suppress unvalidated emotions without it spilling into explosive anger and sometimes violence. This is just my take on things of course.
I guess because I am the eldest I remember them as sweet babies, and loving boys. That all got sqashed by our screwed up family dynamic.

wanttostartafresh - that was my point, that our situations probably are different because I generally have a good relationship with my brother. And I know he also thinks I've been a good sister because he said so when talking about my DD being a good big sister to my DS

It is a shame you feel your sisters have never respected you in any way or treated you nicely. My other point was about how to react when someone doesn't treat you as you wish- have you calmly told them that you don't appreciate being spoken to like that?

smithfield - I'm really sorry your mum won't even listen to you. I am fortunate in that respect. My parents stopped talking to me after I confronted my mother of having abused me. My mother refused to discuss it with anyone, even at the time I confronted her. My parents stopped speaking to me. Then DD was born. My mum wanted contact. I said not until she and I talked through things. So after four years of not talking, we met for a big discussion. It was very difficult, but the big turning point for me. Because I was able to put the past to rest a little; my inner child had stood up for herself finally. So asserting myself calmly to other people after then was very easy - because I'd tackled the hard one. I used to be so worried about upsetting my parents. I always thought first about what they would think about something. I am so pleased to have them out of my head to that extent, and to have rejected their crap.

Do you think you mum had a different view of boys than girls? And she let her sons throw their weight around because subconsciously she believed that boys/men could do what they liked, as the 'ruling' sex? And that women needed to be subservient to them? I know that part of the reason my mother treated me differently to my brother is because of our gender. When serving dinner, she would always (even on my birthday) serve my father first, then my younger brother, then me. She saw women's role as serving men and being the support to them. She saw women as doing all the hard graft and revolving everything round men.

SAHM - sorry if it's too intrusive to ask, but did your brother commit sex crimes then? I think you're brave and compassionate to continue to visit and support him. I have to admit, if my brother was convicted of serious offences, I would probably stop all contact.

spiky- You are very brave to confront your parents. I can totally relate to what you are saying wrt to facing your main demon. That would indeed require and supply you with incredible strength.
Ive never confronted my parents together, I would be far to fearful for that.
It has been two years since I spoke to my mother. She desperately would like to see my dc's, especially my dd but has never asked to meet with me. That would be giving me too much power I think.
She did ring me after dd was born but only to state that I was wicked and she had a right to see her gc's wether I wanted a relationship with her or not.
The problem is that my mother continued to be emotionally abusive to me even as an adult. I guess this is the only way I can stand up for my inner child now, and that has been very healing.

So what about your father spiky what part did he play? Do you speak to him now?

I think my mother was playing out the drama from her own family, it mirrored our own in that there were four children. Girl, boy, girl boy. The eldest girl a scapegoat the second born boy the golden child. The only difference was that the second boy in mothers family did not survive.
I think she was repressed by my father, she wanted a career, he didnt want her to work at all etc.
She never acted subserviant in the way you describe. There was a lot of anger especially toward me and my father. I think she saw me as him most of the time.

Why do you think she singled you out for the abuse? Was she deeply angry at being subserviant to your father but felt safer directing that anger at you being the only other female in the dynamic?

TRSmithfield, thank you also for what you said about not trusting your instincts because your parents made you feel you shouldn't feel what you felt all the time. This is also one of those things I think is really obvious when someone says it but I hadn't really seen it myself before! I think someone might have said it before but I had forgotten. Anyway it makes me feel not quite so 'stupid' for finding it difficult to trust my judgements because I can see that there is a good reason/excuse for that.

TRS, I can see what Spiky is saying about some women seeing men as the ones women should be subservient to, and my mum had this ingrained in her by her horrible bad tempered (and pervert) father, but I still find it really hard to understand why parents allow someone physically stronger and bigger to use their strength against a more vulnerable sibling against their will. Why can they not see how wrong this is? I wonder if they were scared in some way to do anything about it? It never occurred to me til quite recently that I shouldn't have idolised my brother's strength for so long because what sort of inadquate person 'proves' their strength by subduing (sp?) people much smaller and/or of the 'weaker sex'? Why did I not feel disgusted by this long before? I guess I was not taught to by my parents. I wonder if your parents reasons were similar to mine and I wish I could see into their minds and understand it fully.

I agree that men are more likely to lose it and let their anger spill out into physical acts, (although I know I'm being sexist and apologise for offending anyone), because I think it is harder for them to release their feelings by talking the way women do. Other men don't seem to accept talking to each other about emotional stuff and want to appear 'tough'. Doesn't this make them more likely to build their feelings up to bursting point inside? This is what happened to my brother when he committed his crimes. It was a time of huge stress in his life with loads of different aspects of his life going wrong and not having much control over things. He didn't find an appropriate outlet for the stress and all the accumulated shite from his whole life seemed to come out like it couldn't be contained anymore. I always felt he was going to do something extreme one day and I was right.

Spiky, my brother committed a string of sexual assaults on women. I feel it is useful to know how other people think they would react to that if it was their brother (in my quest for learning about what is normal and what is not). His wife left him and his friends stopped contact. Only a handful of people have contact. I sometimes wonder if there is something wrong in my head that I never considered cutting contact. I didn't even feel shock when he told me what he had done until years later. I didn't realise it was as shocking/serious as it was taken to be by the law and society. The actual physical act of what he did happened to me when I was 15 (not by him) and I didn't think of it as being really serious, just knew that it had contributed to my lack of self esteem. I felt shocked when my therapist reacted with shock to me telling him, and shocked by the words he used for it. My brain must have convinced myself that it was normal. This is what makes me think that sex offenders have probably all been abused themselves (and my brother was (outside the home)). Maybe one of the things which makes them allow themselves to do what they do, when most people would find it unthinkable and couldn't even make themselves contemplate it, is that they don't realise how shocking it is. Their brain has convinced them, as a coping strategy, that what happened to them was normal and ok, and this makes it feel more ok to them to do the same to someone else.

I wonder if people think that I am bad for supporting my brother and that I am condoning what he did. I am not condoning what he did and I believe, as does he, that he deserves his punishment. I do feel an intense bond with him which would be very hard to break. We went through a lot of the same things as children which nobody understands exactly like we understand each other's experiences and feelings about them. He has always tried to talk to me about how it was for him, although hadn't been able to explain as a child so that I knew exactly what was going on, the snippets of all that he said throughout his life makes me understand how it was for him. I appreciate how difficult his life was and the things that happened to him. Another reason I understand him is that I experienced a load of the same things that were done to him when he copied what was done to him and did it to me. I know this is twisted because I should hate him for what he did to me and yet what he did makes me understand him really well. I understand the rage he felt. I understand how it all happened and feel enough sympathy for him not to abandon him. So basically I feel sorry for him for what he went through and I can empathise strongly with him which makes me feel too much for him to abandon him. How can I abandon him when abandonment is the first thing in his life that contributed to his problems, and when I know what this feels like. I must stress that I understand why he did what he did but I do NOT think it is right or ok.

I project what I would have wanted from people and life, and knew I should have deserved, onto him. It may be similar to the way I have been with friends at different times - it feels easier to fight their causes and help them than to help myself. I subconsciously try to help myself by proxy, by helping them. I worry that I may not be deserving enough to have help or for anyone to want to help me (my parents didn't want to help me and it seemed to me that I wasn't important enough for them to do so) but it feels satisfying to 'fight' for what I felt I deserved, for other people. Getting help from Therapist was a step towards feeling I deserved help and higher self esteem. Him saying I deserved help really helped and that I should help myself.

So I feel sorry for my brother and feel strongly about what he should have had but didn't, and wish I could give some of this to him. I know realistically that I can't be his mother though and am learning not to tie myself up in knots trying to help him in ways he can't be helped eg. I tried to contact people and persuade them to stay in contact with him when he first went to prison but I can't realistically make them do that! I tried to influence his wife positively towards him (which I now recognise as not being fair of me if I made her feel pressured when she was going through so much). I contacted his lawyer thinking I could do something about his prison sentence but of course I couldn't.

I wanted to protect him from everyone who now seemed to be hating him and abandoning him and I wanted to be with him, helping him through it, like a mother, but I felt so helpless. His own parents seemed/seem so inadequate and weren't doing/don't do all that I felt he needed. I felt a mad desperation and heartbreaking-ness. Then he was talking about suicide for a while, after having already tried in a gruesome way, in between being arrested and actually being imprisoned, but he was forcibly saved by the emergency services. I felt I would get a phone call any minute saying he had killed himself and I had been able to do nothing about it. I tried saying anything I could think of to influence him not to do it. I asked the prison he was in then to put him back on suicide watch. I don't feel he is going to do it now as he has gradually become more stable but the stress back then felt huge. I've had times when I've wished he had succeeded in killing himself because of the amount of anger and hate I feel towards the person he was when he hurt me as a child. This conflicts with the amount of love I feel for him as the person he is now. This often feels difficult but I am gradually learning to cope with it. I wonder if Therapist would say it is not really HIM I am feeling the positive feelings for, it is MYSELF, but I am doing it by proxy through him and projecting all my feelings onto him, because I find it easier than focussing totally on my own feelings.

I do feel I have dealt with the anger towards my brother a lot. I have watched all that he has gone through and at the same time as feeling sorry for him, I have felt a sense of revenge for everything he put me through. People may think I'm evil for saying that and people think that revenge is distasteful, but allowing myself to feel this has really helped with the anger and hatred that I felt. He has been through so much pain and misery and self hatred since he was imprisoned and lost everything from his old life and then near the end of last year some other bad stuff happened and since then I feel a sense of that's it, that is enough, he has paid the price now, he has suffered enough to make up for it all, he doesn't need to be punished any more. He has taken his punishment and admitted all his wrongness and accepted how bad he was and felt as shit about himself as he should to the point of thinking he shouldn't live anymore, and has made huge efforts to learn about himself and what made him the way he was/is and is putting a lot of time and effort into learning how to be a better person and live harmoniously with the people around him. He tries to say things that might help me and people around him to cope better with their feelings. He is using what he has learnt to try to do good. I can't see that there is anything more he can do to make amends.

TRSmithfield, your father stopped your mother from having a career. I wonder if she resented you having what she didn't and took her resentment out on you? I wonder if she tried to make you feel you were as crap as she felt?

OSAHM- I feel you have an extraordinairy sense of who you are and what you feel. What you lack (like myself) is trust in those feelings.
I think it 'is' normal to have a mixture of different feelings toward your brother. As I often say on hear nothing is black and white especially when it comes to our emotions.
It shows strength and a huge amount of emotional intelligence to state as, you have, what those feelings are and how your actions are coloured by them.
I dont think it is anybody elses business but your own as to wether you keep in touch with your bro or cut him off.
You would have a better understanding of him than anyone else.
Yes, the boundaries were skewed but you have recognised that and altered them accordingly.
What will you do when your brother is released? How much contact will you allow with him then?

Also, as a child do you think your brother was emulating your father? After all your parents would have provided a model of a woman submitting to the man (just as he expected you to submit to him). It appears your fathers needs were seen as being of more importance than anyone elses inculding the children.
he was being 'shown' this was how to get his needs met. Like any child they will do anything to achieve just that.

Wrt my mother I think she did feel a huge amount of resentment, because she had worked hard to qualify in her profession and was just starting out when my father announced he was leaving her for someone else.
She and her brother were the first in the family gain access to higher education.
After a year they got back together but it was on the premise that they moved back to London and she gave up work.
This is my mothers version however and my mother is very manipulative and will bend the truth to meet her needs.
Someon wrote on another thread about people staying in certain situations or patterns as an excuse, and I think my mother did this subconciously. As a perfectionist it was easier for her to bail out and blame my dad than face her biggest fear.
Like me she would do 'anything' rather than be seen to fail.
People think of perfectionists as high achievers, but there is the other end of the spectrum where the anxiety and panic over not being able to do things perfectly paralyze you.
I

'I wonder if she tried to make you feel you were as crap as she felt?'

Yes, I think you are spot on osahm

QD- Do you feel that Mr X could have become Mr forever if things had been different?
Is he your genuinely lovely bloke whom you are also attracted to.
Im curious and I half know what you are feeling, because I feel I did the same wrt to dh. There was never a Mr X, I only ever seem to get hooked on the absentees or narcissists.

Also you dont have to stay in a relationship if deep down you are not happy.
You deserve happiness QD you are entitled to your feelings, and to act on them.
Not everybody lives happily ever after, and that is ok.

I meant that there is an alternative to following MR X to NY.
You could still leave if you feel that is right for you.