Right, this is a bit confusing - OPO, I wrote all the following out before I saw your latest post, so it's a bit out of date now but I'm going to post it anyway! Some of it probably really isn't relevant to you but maybe some of it might be useful, you never know. Really glad to hear you had a lovely day after all and a very happy birthday to you from me too, at the snakes and ladders!
"OPO, I don't think you?ll have the chance to read this before you go away - but it'll still be here when you get back anyway... anyway, I'm just so, so sorry. I've been wanting to respond since your last big post about your sisters but now I absolutely have to. Sorry for ignoring other posts, just got to get this out. I hadn't realised just how much this exclusion of you was engineered by your parents, and actively promoted, eg by taking your sisters to classes together but not taking you. My heart is broken for you. Everything you've said about your sisters being in this tight little unit from which you are excluded - how much pain is there? To be the odd one out, the only one on your own... It's a kind of living hell. I'm drying up, I feel so passionately about this for you and I want to tell you how much on your side I am but I can't find the words! This is horrible stuff. And of course it continues into the present.
Like I've said before I think there are parallels with my own situation in terms of being the only one and the others all pulling together but to have TWO sisters and they both join against you must be so, so hard. Like you say, they make you feel like a distant cousin - and it sounds like in some way your parents totally wanted that and made that happen, didn't you say before that they used to forget your birthday for example? it sounds like the whole family dynamic made it as if you weren't a fully paid up member of the family, you were alwasy the outsider, without the same rights and entitlements and benefits as the "real" family members. That was certainly the case in my family too. I always felt as a child that my dead "sister" would have been treated like a real family member, I always felt like she was the real daughter (although now I think my parents wouldn't have been any better with her - they just didn't have any more love to give, just about enough for my brother and that was it).
OPO, we are similar too in that our families haven't imploded without us around - they just keep on going like some unstoppable machine. That is hard too. To feel so utterly dispensable. To your family. I think we both - and maybe a lot of people on here - grew up with that weird thing where you've got a family in theory; in theory we each have two parents and you have two sisters and I have a brother - but we have no real experience of actually having or living in those relationships, those bonds. I dont' really have a brother. Never felt like I had one except as a negative aspect of my life, the bully to be feared and escaped from. I tried very hard as an adult to build a relationship with him, especially when his DCs were young and I wanted to be involved in their lives; and for a while it seemed to work; but it was always at the cost of my self respect, always meant holding my tongue when he had yet another of his violent outbursts and blamed everything on his DCs, always meant treading on eggshells around him and working myself up into such a state about whether he would explode or not when I saw them all, and what I would do if he did? It was always clear that he would never be my ally, always be my parents' son first and foremost, and I couldn't cope with his continuing appalling behaviour or his rejection of the truth about our family any more than you can cope with your sisters' exclusion of you and their rewriting of events.
Like you, I think maybe there's some level where where because they were "good enough" parents to him - and he's done very well in life (with the exception of one very awful thing that happened which is another huge post in itself) - he can't understand why I'm so angry at them and why I think they were such bad parents. But then one of the ways they were so bad was in failing to protect me from him - HE didn't have a vile, older and much bigger brother treating him like a little piece of shit the whole time! And unlike me, he DID have someone helpless and powerless to vent all his rage on and all the other family crap that came his way, which made things a lot healthier for him, and a lot worse for me. Likewise, your sisters had each other to make things easier for them, and they had you to project the crap onto, so their experience of the family would have been much more postitive than yours.
But having said that I still think that if there were any real honesty or awareness, he WOULD be able to see that things were different for me and awful for me, and I think the same is true for your sisters. There is some level where there's a deliberate denial - well, I don't know if it's deliberate or just so habitual and long standing they really think it?s the truth - but there is certainly no intention there to really look at things from any other perspective other than the one they were brought up to have.
There is no real love or care there at all. and I am so sorry that you are in such a horrible place wrt your relationship with them in the present. You really are between a rock and a hard place. As you say, if you keep trying, you keep getting hurt; but if you cut them out, you get hurt too. Personally, I think your analogy of banging your head against a brick wall is an entirely accurate one, and I for one hope that you can find a way to stop doing it sometime soon. I do not think they will start to see things from your perspective, certainly not any time soon. The horrible, hard, cruel, heartbreaking truth is it sounds like they really don't need you - like my family really don't need me. They can do without you, and God knows, I know how wretchedly painful that is, but I still think that's a pain that can be felt and healed and is finite; whereas the pain of banging your head against that brick wall can go on forever.
They will keep seeing you as the problem, and not your parents, or any of their own behaviour, because it's quite simply EASIER for them that way. No doubt they were affected by your toxic parents too but not in such a way as to make it imperative for them to challenge the way they were brought up, and this is the crucial difference. They have each other, they have a good enough relationship with your parents ? there is no apparent gain in their eyes worth rocking that fairly comfortable boat for; on the contrary, there is a lot to lose. Why would they want to acknowledge that their parents had this repulsive side to them, and risk losing all the benefits of their extended family, their normal role in society etc?
I feel that way about my brother. He has things pretty much the way he wants them. There is no reason for him to jeopardise what he has; a relationship with me and my family simply doesn?t count for that much with him. And most of all I feel that with my mother. She is the one who has made some half hearted moves towards reconciling, she is the one the separation hurts the most probably; but I know that she will never face up to the reality of who my father is, who my brother is, and who she herself is. However much she thinks she wants to have me back in her life (and even that would only be to make HER feel better, not to make things better or happier for me!), she wants to maintain the status quo much, much more. Looking at things from my perspective would mean re-appraising her whole life, her marriage, her image of herself as a mother, her relationship with her son ? it would be really, really hard work, and basically, why should she bother? She has enough to keep her going, with my father and my brother and his family ? they are enough to give her that veneer of a nice normal life, which is what she craves at the end of the day. Estrangement from daughter and daughter?s family can be managed within that context. Plus she?s in her 70?s and so pretty unlikely to be capable of any degree of genuine change.
It is so EASY to gang up on one person and make her the source of the problem, and easy to continue doing it when that?s what?s always been done. I am realising that more and more now. Once that ?personality? is established, once you have had that role shoved on you within the family, it becomes the apparent truth to those involved, however far from the truth is actually is, and the longer it goes on, the more solid it becomes. It is so HARD to forge a new path to uncover the truth and face whatever painful realities that involves, and because it is so hard, I think it is nigh on impossible to expect the people who benefit from that initial lie to ever change. Certainly not voluntarily.
The only thing we can do is to keep on trying to challenge the denial within ourselves. This to me ? I?m sure I?ve said this before! ? is the crux of everything. Promoting the nurturing, loving voice within that challenges the voice of denial, the voice that is the internalised version of abusive parents/callous siblings/ any and all who have hurt us. Because it only really hurts ? hurts desperately ? as long as in some part of our mind we are in agreement with them. This is the work that goes on and on, though, as far as I?m concerned. You can intellectually ?get? that your parents were in the wrong, that you weren?t to blame, and so on ? but these things took years and years and years to build up, and they can?t be reconstructed in a day. If you were in a really bad car crash or got physically very, very badly beaten up, it would take time to physically recover: you may need multiple operations and/or months or even years of physiotherapy. You may never regain full movement or capacity in a limb, for example; or one or more of your senses may be permanently affected. Surely there is a parallel with emotional abuse. If you sustain emotional abuse on a regular basis over a period of years and years, then the damage will go very, very deep and will require a great deal of intervention to put right. The worst part of emotional abuse in many ways is that a natural, inevitable result of it is that you identify with your abuser(s) on an unconscious level ? in order to escape from the pain of what?s being done to you, you internally ?become? the person or people who is/are doing it. They call it Stockholm syndrome, I think. So you carry the voice of that punishing/judgemental/cruel/sadistic/unloving person within you, potentially replicating the patterns indefinitely.
Anyway, OPO, what I?m trying to say in my usual very roundabout way is that you probably can?t reach your sisters by talking to them, but you can try and work with the ?inner sisters? that you carry within you. And it may or may not lead to shifts in their behaviour, you can?t control that, but it will make life much less painful for you if you can reach that inner voice that agrees with them that it is you who are over-sensitive and you who are the problem, and correct it. That voice is essentially a hurt child who has been taught to hate herself; you can show her she deserves love and teach her how to receive it.
I?m not surprised that it being your birthday has been so painful for you. It must bring up so much hurt. I hope that you will have managed to have a better evening, enjoying some of the good stuff in the present ? I do think from what you say that there is a lot to be optimistic about in the present, and that it is primarily the past which is so toxic and pain-riddled ? and send you a (probably belated by now!) happy birthday wish along with the others on here?.
Btw, I hope it doesn?t sound as if I?m telling you what I think you should do, or telling you you should be doing such and such ? obviously I have an opinion (which you can probably guess!) but I totally respect that you must do what feels right to you, and also that at the end of the day you can only do what you have critical mass to do. I just want to say that I see how hard the position you?re in is, and you have my support.
Take care x"