How do I get over the unfairness of being treated so differently to my siblings whilst growing up?

[oneplusone]

To try and cut a long story short, I grew up with a verbally and emotionally abusive dad and a mother who 'abandoned' me, not literally but in the sense she knew my dad was abusing me but she did nothing to stop him and protect me.

I have 2 younger sisters who my parents treated very, very differently. My dad didn't abuse them and my mother was very protective and close to them.

There have been huge consequences for me as a result of the abuse I suffered during childhood and as an adult until I stopped contact with my parents. I have come a long way in sorting myself out and becoming a healthy and whole person again after the mess my parents left me in.

But all the time I am confronted with the fact that my sisters weren't abused or abandoned like me and as a result every aspect of their life has been so much smoother for them. I have had to work so hard on myself and have struggled with so many problems, including severe health issues, all as a result of my childhood.

I am finding it so hard to accept that due to sheer bad luck and for no other reason, I was the only one singled out by my dad to be abused and the only one my mother effectively abandoned.

My sisters have no understanding of what i went through as a child (there is a big age gap between us so they were too young to remember or even notice how my dad was treating me nor the the fact that our mother was not interested in me) and we are not at all close. But my 2 sisters are very close to each other and constantly leave me out of things and treat me as an afterthought, like an outsider, not an equally valued sibling.

I don't know how to handle this situation. It hurts me everytime i have any sort of contact with my sisters as i am always reminded in some way of how different our childhood's were and as a consequence how different our lives as adults now are.

I have considered cutting ties with both my sisters as sometimes i feel that is the only way i can avoid the constant pain i feel whenever i speak to them or see them. But they are just having their own DC's and cutting ties with them would mean my DC's are deprived of a relationship with their 2 aunties/uncles/cousins.

I would really appreciate any advice/experiences from anybody who has gone through anything like this. I really don't know what to do.

FWIW I had a problem with my Dad... and when I got sick of arguing about it with him we stopped talking. I blame him entirely but I regret that we don't currently have any contact or any relationship.
If your sisters are not deliberately being mean, as you say, it was your parents responsibility to look after you - I would say - fight for your right to a relationship with them. Do not give up, do not cut them out. Have a break from them and give yourself a rest, but don't tell them anything too heartbreaking like you never want to see them again. I promise you'll regret it and miss them. I'm sorry to sound so bossy but I really think if you can build on your relationships with them one day they'll understand more, and be more of a support network to you. You need two loving sisters, if you could only write a letter to them explaining the support you need from them.

Planejane - "opposite side of the fence" was a figure of speech really. I was interested to read a post from someone who had been on the receiving end of being cut out of someone's life. Which is very sad for you, I know.

I think that we can say that you're dealing with a very different set of circumstances to OPO. Your sister does sound very damaged and unable to move on....

What does concern me is that people are handed tools and are given advice and help and still they cannot move on. See my point about "comfort zones" - it's a very true and valid point. Once that is confronted, moving on from a situation is more possible.....

I post this from the stance of being an eldest sibling, privy to understanding about and seeing a desperately sick parent, being pushed out in favour of my youngest sibling and being emotionally neglected..... but I've done an awful lot of work on myself over the years

I'm glad for you that you've found the strength to 'move on' Lemonylemon, I know it's not easy.

planejane, only you know truly whether you have indeed done things, perhaps entirely unintentionally that have deeply hurt and upset your older sister. If so, and if you do truly care about her and want her back in your life, could you not tell her you are sorry for hurting her, that you didn't mean to do it and that you would like to rebuild your broken relationship? If my sisters approached me in that way, i would certainly be amenable to talking and trying to resolve things.

As things stand at the moment, i have tried to talk to my sisters about things they have done which have deeply hurt me. But they simply don't care about my hurt feelings. Eg.I mentioned above about me feeling hurt because middle sister told me weeks after telling younger sister about falling pregnant, which was especially hurtful after she had turned to me many times in the past in preference to younger sister when she wanted to lean on me for support and help. I talked about it with my youngest sister and said i felt really hurt that middle sister told me so late on in her pregnancy, it made me feel like an outsider, not a part of the family, she told me at the same time as telling the rest of her friends etc and i felt she should have told me at the same time as telling our youngest sister. My youngest sister couldn't care less how hurt i was, she simply said it was up to middle sister to tell people when she wanted to and there was nothing i could do about it if she chose to tell me last, i just had to accept it. And when i asked middle sister why she told me so much later than youngest sister, she said it was because they lived closer to each other than she did to me which was of course just a pathetic excuse because even if i don't live near her she could of course have picked up the phone and told me the same day she told youngest sister.

Plainjane, you also mention about your estranged sister talking about presents as well. And you talk about different perceptions and nobody really knowing the truth about a situation. Well, i don't think that applies to me. It is not my perception that my sisters got each other wedding presents and not me, it is an indisputable fact and I don't think i am being oversensetive to be upset by that fact. I know of nothing i could have done for my sisters to be so thoughtless and uncaring towards me in that respect. And what i really cannot stand, particularly with my middle sister is that I am clearly not valued enough by her for her to get me a wedding present, but when she wants something from me or needs me for something because she can't get it from our other sister who is too busy to spend any time with middle sister, then she will suddenly discover the phone that she couldn't find when it came to telling me about falling pregnant, but when she got burgled earlier this year, she was calling me up every 5 minutes and demanding i call her back immediately so she could ask my advice on what to do about the burglery as she was in the process of selling her flat at the time it got burgled.

Dominique, thank you for your post. And I am sorry about the situation with your dad. I think you might have misread my post as I do think my sisters have, sometimes, been deliberately mean. The wedding present example is a good one i think. It was clearly a deliberate choice on their part not to get me any sort of present. And it was a deliberate choice on their part to buy each other presents when they both got married. That is just one example out of hundreds I could give you where they have treated me completely differently to how they treat each other. I feel like i am a step-sister or perhaps an adopted sister, i am always made to feel different and like i am not really a part of the family.

And i really truly do not think my sisters will be at all heartbroken if i tell them i do not want to see them again. I am not a loved and valued individual to them. Because if i was, why the wedding present situation? Why the pregnancy news situation? Why would they tell me they don't believe me or think i am lying or exaggerating about being abused by my dad and abandoned/neglected by my mum? If i was so important to my youngest sister, why did it take her months to come and visit me after she had her baby (of course i had visited her many times before i asked her to come to my place with the baby) saying the journey was too long, but she managed to fly to europe for a week's holiday with the same baby? If i was so important and valued to my middle sister why does she only call me when she needs a shoulder to cry on because youngest sister is too busy for her, but i am the last to know when she falls pregnant?

I could write a book about all the deliberately, nasty, cruel, selfish, thoughtless, careless and inconsiderate things my sisters have done to me. They have never once made me feel like they care about me, let alone love me, respect me, value me. They hardly phone or contact me, until recently it was me who was doing all the runnning, trying to keep the relationship going. But i have stopped now. It was a complete waste of time and energy. And that time and energy could be far better spent elsewhere on people who might not be my sisters by birth, but who nevertheless feel much more like sisters than my actual sisters and who treat me in the way i imagine a caring sister would treat me.

Life is too short to waste on people who make you unhappy and who clearly do not care about you, just because you share the same DNA. I am convinced that by closing the door on my sisters, i will give myself the opportunity to open the door to other far more sisterly relationships than the ones i currently have with my actual sisters.

And yes, i know ultimately the fault for all of this lies with my parents as they definately caused the divide and lack of closeness between me and my sisters. But until my sisters repair the damage done to them by our parents, and became whole, healthy adults themselves, i cannot have a healthy relationship with them, because i have done a huge amount of work on myself, but they are not even at the stage of becoming aware that they have issues which they need to sort out. At the moment they are completely unaware that they have issues caused by our parents, they think the fault lies with me and i am to blame for everything, they simply cannot see themselves for who they really are nor their behaviour for what it really is. And the sad thing is that unless they do a lot of work on themselves, they will damage their own children and continue the cycle of abuse. Like amazinwoman said, she knows that she has broken the cycle within her own little family, but she can see that her siblings, who have not worked on themselves, are continuing the same patterns with their own children and damaging them in the same way they themselves have been damaged. And although my niece and nephew are far too young right now for me to see any signs of damage done to them, i know that it will be inevitable because my sisters are both completely lacking in any sort of self awareness and insight into themselves. And until such a time as they do begin to gain some self awareness, i really cannot see how i can have a relationship with them.

As amazinwoman said wrt her siblings, she thought that having children would change them as it had her, but it didn't. And i had the same naive thought with my youngest sister, i thought she would change after she had her first child over a year ago, but she hasn't and she may never change. And the same could apply to my middle sister, although it's too early to tell with her yet as her DS is only 2 weeks old.

How old were your sisters when your dad was abusive and would they have seen anything?

Did he do it openly or in secret? If it was in secret is this why they don't believe you?

I got the impression that your mum did see things that happened?

Sorry if I'm being too nosey!

OSAHM, when the worst abuse occurred, I was 10 and my sisters would have been 2 and 5 so unlikely to really notice/remember much. And during the particular incident that i am thinking of i remember clearly that neither of them were there, it was just me, my mum and of course my dad. My dad was openly abusive but i am not surprised that my sisters didn't notice or can't remember as they were just too young for them to understand the sort of things my dad was saying to me or remember it all. Of course it is clearly imprinted in my memory as it happened to me, but i would not expect my sisters to remember what i went through. My mum was there and definately should remember though. But she is weak, pathetic coward and also a liar, so it does not surprise me at all that she is now choosing not to remember things that I can clearly remember down to the last minute detail.

I think my sisters don't believe me simply because they have no personal experience of my parents behaving in the way they behaved towards me and they simply cannot imagine that our parents could treat me so badly, precisely because they themselves were not treated badly. The parents my sisters know are kind, loving, caring, nurturing parents and so they cannot understand or imagine or believe me when i tell them that the very same people were horribly abusive and neglectful towards me. So my sisters only option is to assume I am lying or exaggerating and making our parents out to be much worse than they actually were.

I can understand my sisters' difficulty in comprehending what i am telling them, but what hurts me is that they think I would make something like this up, that i would take the hugely drastic step of cutting off our parents if the truth was that they hadn't actually been horribly abusive towards me. It means they do not accept how much pain and suffering I have endured both as a child and as an adult both before and after cutting ties with my parents. To me it shows my sisters have no respect for me, my values, my morality, my integrity. I am not perfect but I am not a liar, I would never falsely accuse my parents of something so serious if it were not true. And anybody that knows me, knows me well enough to know I am an honest, decent person but my own sisters do not seem to think so. I married DH because i felt he and I shared the same values, perhaps a bit old fashioned today, but at least he seems to be able to see me, who i really am, despite all our problems, and have enough faith in me and trust and respect for me to stand by me throughout the hell of the last few years. He has shown he is more like family to me than my sisters, he has seen me at my worst and still loves me. I have done nothing to my sisters and yet they treat me so badly. It may be selfish but i have to look out for and look after myself, at least for the sake of my DC's as they deserve as undamaged a mother as i can manage to be.

Sorry didn't expect all that to come out just now, will sign off now.

Oneplusone - your story makes me very sad. I confess that I haven't read all of the thread but I was wondering if your dad is your "biological" dad as I am struggling to understand the complety diff treatment of younger ones.

Oneplusone- i didn't mean to be rude or insensitive with post above. Just struggling to understand your parents' actions.

Oneplus

Someone I am very close to is in exactly the same position as you are, and seems to have worked it through in a way I find admirable, so I'll try and tell you how he sees things in case it can help you.

He says that he has come to realise that his family cannot see him in any way - they only see a cardboard cutout of him which fills their 'bad guy' slot which they need filling. He said that the most liberating thing that happened to him was to realise that that person was their need and not his. He is not that person, but was being forced into that role by their need to have someone to blame for everything (most notably all his father's issues, which are very significant).

He says he has developed pity for all of them, because their lives are so limited by their inability to see things as they really are - particularly to see the father as the rather nasty piece of work he is.

He is now happy, and has a family of his own, who know what a wonderful person he is. He therefore no longer needs his parents and siblings to validate him as a human being - he knows he is worthwhile.

He has decided that the best thing for him is to treat his family nicely enough, but without in any way putting himself out for him. He tried for years to 'make it up' to them for his supposed ills, but achieved nothing (because it was not about him, it was about theri need!). He feels that cutting them off would be playing into the cardboard cutout, in that they would then be able to accuse him of doing it to hurt them.

So he has casual social contact, maintains a basic relationship for his son with the family but doesn't put in a particular effort. Whenever he feels them doing their judgey/accusing/excluding thing he reminds himself that it is not him that they are interacting with, but the cardboard cutout. And as he keeps saying, 'they can't make me be that person without my consent, and I refuse to give my consent' - so he doesn't engage with them when they do that.

I have to say he is a pretty amazing person to be able to do this, and I am filled with admiration, I don't think I'd be able to after all that he has been through. But he feels this is what he needs to do in order to make his peace with them and not think when they are dead that 'if only he'd done xy or z things could have been different'.

This way, if they ever by some miracle come to an epiphany and realise how awful they have been, they can always rebuild the relationship (one can but hope....)

Ib, what an amazing post! And how amazing your friend(?) is! I think what you wrote could be useful for lots of people.

yes Ib; there is much to admire and learn from your friend's approach. Can be applied to other relationships as well.

TDiddy, i am not offended in the slightest. The only way I can try and explain it is comparing my situation to the one in the news not so long ago. It was a horrific case. It was where the father, I think it was in Austria, kept one of his daughters, I think he had about 4 children altogther, locked in an underground cave and abused her for about 20 years without the rest of the famiily knowing. He seemed to have singled out only one child to abuse and was a perfectly 'normal' father to the rest of his children. Well, I would say that is my experience. My father for reasons known only to him, singled me out to abuse and managed to be a fairly 'normal' and nonabusive father to my sisters. It was nothing that I did or anything about me that caused him to single me out, he had his own reasons which i am sure were to do with his own personal issues.

I think being the eldest child was definately a big factor in being singled out. I have read so many books about this which all state that it is very commonly the eldest child who bears the brunt of the parents' issues which are taken out on the child. And the worst thing is that precisely because my dad was able to take his issues out on me, he was then able to be a goodish dad to my sisters, making it very hard for them to believe or imagine him being so nasty like he was to me. A classic Jekyll and Hyde character perhaps.

ib THANK YOU. And I agree with OSAHM, what an amazing post. And your friend's cardboard cut out analogy is perfect. And what he says about his family being unable to see the real him at all is exactly how i feel about my family. They simply do not see me at all, I am just an empty shell to them, and they have 'given' me a set of characteristics and traits which simply do not belong to me. LIke your friend, my dad is the chief culprit in all this, and like your friend's dad, he has huge unresolved issues of his own. He accused me not that long ago of hacking into his email account and deleting some of his emails. And anybody that knows me even slightly, would know that that just is not the sort of thing i would or even could do. Initially i felt very hurt at the accusation, as it obviously meant my own dad thought i was a devious, manipulative, dishonest, 'operator' type of person. (And i am by no means perfect, but i am simply not a manipulative type of person, in fact i am the opposite, i never think things through and often act on impulse, which cannot surely be manipulative?) But the more i thought about it, the more i realised that my dad simply was unable to see me at all, when he looked at me or thought about me, he saw somebody else entirely and all my life, he has been seeing this other person and thinking i am that other person and treating me as if i was that other person. And the person he seems to see is a manipulator, devious, dishonest, selfish, user. And worst of all, my sisters seem to believe my dad's version of me, although i can tell that they feel confused as although my dad is convinced i am this devious operator, they can see for themselves by the way i treat them, that i am not such a person, but unless and until they realise my dad is essentially brainwashing them, they will never be able to see the real me.

I can understand how your friend is maintaining a relationship with his family, whilst protecting himself from their 'projections', but i think for me, wrt my parents, it is too late for that now. I know there is no hope of them ever changing. But wrt my sisters, i think there may possibly be a chance they could one day gain some self awareness and insight both into themselves and our dad, but there is no guarantee of this. So perhaps it is worth me keeping some sort of relationship with them, but like your friend does, not making any effort or pinning any hope on it ever becoming what i would like it to be. I can relate to your friend feeling pity for his family. I am beginning to feel pity for my sisters, even if they were not abused themselves, growing up in our family would have left them with loads of issues which i know they are not even close to resolving.

ib Has your friend seen this thread? If he has I hope he finds it comforting to know he is not alone; I find it very comforting to know somebody out there knows what i am going through.

He hasn't, but I will send it to him. He deserves to know he's not alone and that the (very hard!) work he has done on himself may be of help to others.

Just a bit more. I think the reason my dad is so convincing to my sisters about who I am, according to him, is because he himself is totally unaware that he is not seeing the real me and only seeing the person he wants or needs to see. So he is totally convinced i am actually the person he has got in his head, and therefore his version of me is totally credible to my sisters. But, at the same time, my sisters have to take into account their own personal experience of knowing me, which does not match up at all with my dad's version of me. And so my sisters are confused and this comes over so clearly in the things they say and do. I can tell sometimes they are seeing and reacting to the real me and at other times, my dad's version of me.

And it must be even more confusing as for a long time i was not being myself but being the person my dad was seeing me as, ie living up to his image of me, until i started gaining some insight and self awareness, after which i have gradually become the real me. So my sisters have grown up with the idea (from my dad) that i am person 'Z', but whenever they spend time with me or talk to me, especially more so recently, I know I come across as person 'A' which is the real me. But my sisters will have to work out for themselves why there are conflicting versions of me and they may never work it out.

ib I'm glad to hear you are going to show him this thread and I hope he finds it comforting. He might also want to take a look at the Stately Homes threads in Relationships for the same reason.

I think that happens to my friend too. We've talked about it loads, as his siblings are almost bizarre in their changes of attitude towards him depending on how much they've been exposed to their parents, which has in the past really thrown him off.

He thinks that they need to keep the pretense of who his father says he is in order to avoid confronting just how 'out there' their parents really are. The line is something along the lines of 'well, they're not like that with us so it must be something you do' - even if that something is completely at odds with everything they know about him.

To show you an example of how extreme this can get, one of the family myths is that he is selfish and mean. Now this is someone who has gone as far as buying his younger siblings cars , given ridiculously OTT gifts to his parents, you name it. Possibly partly because he was trying to counteract the family myth, but also because he genuinely is a generous guy who loves to give (he is like that outside his family too). The younger siblings of course know this, but will still parrot the 'selfish, mean' line when they've been talking to his parents - even though they are happy to receive his gifts.

He feels that confronting how fucked up his parents are would require his siblings to recognise that it has had an impact on them too (and it really has), and that they are not quite ready to confront their own issues, so they have to pretend their parents are normal - and that he isn't.

Me, I just think they are a couple of spoilt brats, but then I'm nothing like as nice a person as him. And I recognise the world would be a better place if more of us were like him than like me .

Ib's post reminds me of my friend. Her siblings have phases of getting back in contact with her and when they see her they get along well and are seeing the real her. Then it seems like the rest of the family get at them for seeing her (they seem to want to stop anyone seeing her) and give them such a hard time that they cut off from her again. I think they are telling them lots of horrible things about her which are their version of her that they have made up in their heads!

She went to see a dying relative in hospital and they were all there. She decided to keep quiet and just be polite and try to avoid a scene so that she could get along with them enough to visit him. But they started arguing and shouting with each other about her being there. She didn't join in, just kept quiet, but the next time they accused her of mouthing off and causing a scene on purpose the time before! But she hadn't said anything!

It has gradually become clear what they are doing. They feel guilty for abandoning my friend at birth but keeping 5 other siblings. They can't face up to their guilt so they would rather not have my friend in their lives at all, even through knowing any member of the family is in contact with her, because it reminds them of what they did and their guilt. So they bad mouth her and say she is a nasty troublemaker and use this made up personality as their excuse for not having anything to do with her.

OPO, maybe your dad feels guilty for ways that he treated you when he had a breakdown (is that right? Just trying to remember from previous posts). Maybe instead of facing up to the guilt he tries to make it your fault by making an excuse for his behaviour - the excuse that you are a bad and horrible person and this 'drove him to it'?

Do your parents actually bad mouth you to your sisters?

I CAN see how parents might treat one child differently to the others because of their own issues because I had a similar problem with my DD before I went to see a therapist.

I felt intense rage when little things she did triggered it. I didn't feel this about DS even when he did similar things to her. I really hope that I suppressed it enough for her not to feel too much difference in my behaviour towards her.

The rage wasn't to do with her but to do with who I was seeing her as, not who she really was, but who she symbolised to me. Because of my past experiences I saw older siblings as being evil and a threat to their younger siblings. My feelings from my past experiences had been repressed but my brain was 'trying' to get them out onto a person who symbolised the person I should have been angry with. I'm very glad I realised my feelings were too intense to be 'real' and went and got help. I no longer have this rage towards my DD. Some people may not even realise that their bad feelings are not 'real' (in the sense that they are not really that person's fault but someone else who they symbolise to them).

I used to be kind of fixated on explaining over and over to DH why DD made me feel so angry and trying to 'make him see' all the bad things about her . I think I was trying to justify my negative feelings to myself because they seemed too extreme so I was looking for bad things in DD to explain it. I also wanted DH to think that I wasn't really bad for feeling the way I did and that there were reasons why DD was bad which made me feel that way. So I can see how the bad feelings which are felt from past issues, when triggered by something a certain person does, can make you think they must have things really wrong with them, even though they don't! It IS someone else who is being seen in place of that person - a different person who made you feel bad things in the past but you never processed the feelings about them properly so they are waiting to be vented out onto someone else who somehow symbolises that person to your brain - a scapegoat.

ib What you said here is so true "The line is something along the lines of 'well, they're not like that with us so it must be something you do' - even if that something is completely at odds with everything they know about him." My dad used to point out, in front of my sisters, that I was always quite hostile towards him and my mum whilst my sisters were generally quite pleasant towards them. He would always make it seem as if I was somehow the problem, that I had no reason to be hostile, it was just me, I was nasty, ungrateful, and horrible. He would do it in a subtle way, but it was clearly designed to make sure my sisters got the message that my dad was the good guy, who was being treated badly by me, for no reason. At that time my sisters knew nothing of the abuse that had taken place years earlier so my dad's plan worked like a dream. As far as my sisters were concerned, I had no reason to be so hostile towards our parents and my dad was indeed the innocent victim of my bad personality and my sisters were not even aware that they were being brainwashed and still have no such awareness.

OSAHM, I am grateful for your post as i know it's hard to admit to thinking and feeling bad things about your DD which you now realise were not about her at all and she was in fact triggering you. I had exactly the same situation with my DD, she seemed to arouse the strongest rage and fury in me and I was also convinced it was her fault and not due to my own unresolved issues. And I am absolutely sure this was the situation with me and my dad. I think I must have been triggering him and innocently causing his rages, and he was totally convinced that it was me who was the problem. My rages at DD have completely stopped now because i have released the pent up feelings from my past, but my dad never did that and so he truly and honestly beleived that i was the problem and he hated me. I know that in the past, i have felt like i hated DD and i remember once i felt so angry at her i had to stop myself from picking her up and flinging her across the room. I was once in DD's shoes, i bore the brunt of my dad's rages and terrible verbal and psychological abuse and i have no doubt my DD would have suffered in the same way had i not managed to somehow develop some insight and self awareness, enough to realise that DD was totally innocent and that it was my past that was causing my rages.

And like you OSAHM, I only ever felt this overpowering rage in relation to DD. With DS i was like a different person, NEVER cross or angry no matter what he did, endlessly patient, enormously loving, caring, nurturing and so therefore I too can see how my parents were able to be so different with me and my sisters. I very nearly re-enacted my past on my 2 DC's and continued the cycle into the next generation.

I think the key is in what you and OSAHM have said and done - not passing it on.

My friend has come to terms with the fact that he will never get rid of the effects of what he went through in himself. He will never get rid of the feelings of self-doubt, guilt and rage that were planted in him since he was a baby, although he has done a lot of work on that and is much better than he was when younger.

Success for him is in not passing it on to his son. That means he is breaking the cycle, and that is, he feels, the best he can hope for.

That is why he is doing everything he is doing, and his relationship with his son could not be more different than the one he had with his father.

In recognising that the feelings you have had towards your dds are to do with your issues and not with them you are both doing the same. And that is progress, imho.

OSAHM - your introspection and openness sounds very helpful.

ib - Your posts are also very inciteful.

ib, I think what you said here is key "My friend has come to terms with the fact that he will never get rid of the effects of what he went through in himself". I think reaching this point allows you to finally continually stop looking backwards and to start living in the present and also looking forward positively.

I don't think I am quite there yet, although this thread has helped me move on quite a bit. I think I was 'stuck' (which I suppose is why I started the thread) as I didn't seem able to come to terms with the fact that only I had been singled out by my parents to be treated badly whilst they were clearly capable and were adequate, even good enough parents to my sisters. I could not come to terms with the unfairness of it all. With the fact that the abuse had affected every single aspect of my life and effectively robbed me of many years of childhood and also many years of my adult life. I found it very hard to accept that whilst I have suffered enormously because of my parents, and for no reason other than i was the eldest child, my sisters have had a relatively smooth ride through life. I have had to work so hard just to get to where my sisters already are, without them having to put in any effort at all.

But since starting this thread, somehow knowing that I am not alone and that somebody else has struggled in the same way i have, has helped me come to terms with the unfairness between me and my sisters.

I totally agree with your friend. I think, like amazinwoman said, I will always have scars from the abuse and abandonment, no matter how hard i try to heal myself and recover from the damage done to me, but, I do feel my greatest achievment lies in breaking the cycle and not continuing the abuse into the next generation. I feel quite proud of myself for achieving that much at least, it was more than my parents did.

Wrt my sisters, I think I will adopt your friend's approach. I will not cut ties altogether, but I will keep a large distance between me and them and use my energy in building other relationships with healthy people.

I'm really glad this thread has helped - I've told my friend about it and he was very happy. He's always running around and doesn't get round to sitting and reading things at the computer very often, but I'll save it for him so that when things quieten down he can read it.

I think it helps him too to know that others are in the same situation, even though he's usually unable to talk about his feelings with more than about 3 people in the whole world. I'm lucky enough to be one of them!

I'm going away for the rest of this week so sorry if I don't respond to posts - I'll check in on the thread when I'm back next week.

And TDiddy - thanks for your kind comment, but I can't take credit for most of these insights!