I feel but I don't know what I feel

June 20, 2023 8:52 PM

My oldest brother, estranged for 20 years, for no real reason, I think, except our age gap, has died at age 66 after suffering from MS for 30 odd years. I feel ... something ... but being on the spectrum may be why I can't identify it or what to do with it. Help me to understand. CW: sexual abuse

I'm sad that anyone at all has to go through MS, and dying with it reads incredibly painful and distressing. However, my brother never saw me as more than a child (and a female one at that) so if there was a time when we were alone together, he'd say vaguely misogynist statements couched as compliments like I didn't know girls played chess. When there were other people around, I was designated gopher: go fetch cigarettes, coffee and by the way, I'm too wobbly to clean my bathroom, you do it. This, when I was the mother of two (that he never wanted to meet).

My 2nd oldest brother and I have been estranged about as long because he's a psychopath, and last year, I cut my two youngest brothers (and their families - because how to explain to fam) they had both sexually assaulted me.

My mother was a narcissist and when I set a boundary about a cruel joke she always made about me when family was around, I was "too sensitive" and I never saw her again. I did attend her funeral about 10 years ago, after no contact for 10 years and her insistence to my brothers that there was to be "no deathbed reconciliation".

So I found out about my brother's death from my only cousin who offered her condolences, in the group chat on FB I have with her and my uncle. My uncle came in later and said he thought brother 3 would no doubt contact me, which I replied to with a heart. I do not want to tell them that I'm not in contact with my two younger brothers because I don't want to answer their questions.

So my brother died. He was hardly a brother, just someone that I used to know. But I have intense feelings. I don't like them and I don't want them and they seem unnecessary and irrelevant.

I have just "fired" my long-time therapist as I have been doing so well. I know some of the things he would say about reframing my emotions and thoughts (you can't do time travel, it's not your fault that there was an estrangement, work on actions that are self-care etc).

Ok, sure, good. But I want to know why I even care. And on top of that, if you meet one arsehole in a day, you've met one arsehole. If the whole family fucks you over, maybe you're the arsehole. And what could I have done? I didn't know his location. I can't drive because of my neurodiversity.

I've gone through so much in the last 10 years with my ex going to jail for child sex crime, my kids (now in their 30s) still needing financial top-up's, moving 6 times, losing a beloved 18yo cat, hysterectomy, GI bleed, broken leg, black eye, (self-delivered by accident), dating while autistic, quitting alcohol, being diagnosed with emphysema and psioratic arthritos, and working a casual job - pays more per hour than most jobs, but no security bar my excellence and the goodwill of a client who will retire 5 years before I can.

Why on earth is this getting to me? What can I do to reboot?

posted by b33j to Human Relations (10 answers total)

One strong possibility - which I've experienced, and heard others report - is intense regret that what might under other circumstances have been an important, meaningful, enriching, joyful relationship, now 100% absolutely never ever will be. You missed out on something it seems successful people nearly all have; you may even feel intensely jealous of others with satisfying family connections; you may reflect on the effects such lack and sadness had on the trajectory of your life, on your own personality.

This is a bitter, bitter draught.

If that is it -- I don't know that this will help, but some people have that lack and also no children.
posted by amtho at 9:32 PM on June 20, 2023 [11 favorites]

Best answer: I think you’re sad because it’s sad. It’s sad he wasn’t a better sibling, it’s sad your other siblings weren’t better siblings, it’s sad your family has a lot of challenging people who did terrible things. It’s sad that they harmed you. It’s sad that a lot of this seems beyond repair. Lots of parts of this story are sad. It’s ok to be sad. It’s actually normal and healthy to be sad after all this has happened.

And it’s very clear that you’re definitely not the asshole here!!

I would say, just try to bide your time until it passes. Zone out on something you enjoy (for me this is puzzle video games, easy novels, and bingeing a tv series, and for some reason when I’m sad I gravitate to violent stories like Stephen King or Game of Thrones). Just wait and the feelings will dim with time.

Talk to a friend, journal, or do therapy

Try to eat some healthy stuff, drink some water, go easy on substances and go for a walk every day

Most importantly, get tons of sleep, so your brain can clear out the stress chemicals from being sad.

This sounds like a really hard time, sending you peace.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 9:42 PM on June 20, 2023 [23 favorites]

One potential factor could be the finality of death. Now it’s confirmed that this is how their life turned out, there is now no chance for a turn in the trajectory, they and their life will now never change, nor their relationship with you. Of course, that was likely true for a long time before they died, but there was a theoretical chance, however small, that is now gone. Any remnant of hope or wishful thinking, even unconsciously held, is now quashed. For me, this disillusionment has been painful.
posted by meijusa at 9:46 PM on June 20, 2023 [8 favorites]

Best answer: You're feeling mad about having deep and complicated feelings about it that you can't control.

They're painful ones and you don't see the benefit of engaging with them, so you would like to choose not to, but they are existing in spite of your efforts. They are connected to old trauma, small and large, over an extended period of time. It creates a complex fucking mess of feelings that can get buried and forgotten about for years, but that churns up again when big relevant things happen. Your brother's death is a big relevant thing.


I think that booking again with your therapist could be good to talk through this, if that's something you feel able to do. Booking with a different therapist is also a good option.

And booking again **does not** mean you aren't doing well. Talking through unwanted emotions with therapists is part of ongoing care for self, and giving care for self (including the parts that you wish weren't there) is part of doing well.
posted by dragon garlanding at 11:03 PM on June 20, 2023 [8 favorites]

Best answer: Holy smokes, you have dealt with a LOT in the last ten years as well as in your growing-up years. If you're like me, then you don't want to hear about resilience --blah blah blah-- but maybe just step back for a second to reflect that you have done good work in handling all that.

And so now on top of all that, you've learned about this death in an unexpected, convoluted way (FB chat) and it's someone for whom your feelings and experiences are complicated. It makes sense that you are *feeling* complicated, as a result. If your feelings seem out of proportion, then that might be an indicator that some old wounds have been triggered. That would make sense too, given your history.

I wager it'll take a bit of time for this feeling to settle. As your therapist might tell you, allow your feelings to simply be, try not to fight them. Allowing your feelings to exist, will also allow them to dissipate. Treat yourself gently for a while, like you might treat a sick child.
posted by (F)utility at 12:19 AM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Maybe your heart has been telling you that as long as your brother was alive, there was a chance that maybe he could turn a little bit into the kind of brother you needed him to be; now there is no more chance of that ever happening. That's sad.

Also, there's a difference between the sadness you feel when you're told something sad and disappointing is going to happen, and the sadness you feel when it does finally happen. You're sad when you learn a friend has a terminal illness and has only 2 months to live - and you're sad again, for different reasons, two months later when they do actually pass away. They're both losses, they're just different kinds. There's a great line from Sense and Sensibility about this - one character had been hoping for a romantic connection with a guy, but then she finds out that he'd already been engaged to someone else and decided he couldn't go back on that, so he breaks things off. Then a few weeks later there's news that the wedding has gone ahead; someone asks her how she is, and she says "There is a painful difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event and its final certainty."

You've just experienced that final certainty. It's sad for its own reasons.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:22 AM on June 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

Best answer: I volunteer doing some grief counseling, and here's a couple of things I often talk about with people:

- It is disruptive to our general sense of continuity when someone dies. It doesn't really matter if you even knew them personally, or did but didn't have an ongoing relationship, it's just that they were here and somehow a part of your inner landscape and now they're not. That's messed up, that someone - anyone! everyone! - can just be there and then not there. It seems like there should be rules preventing this? Are we all just going to stand around while people just go non-existent??

- It can be even more intense when that someone is more or less a peer. It turns out we're all going to die after all, even me, even us, even all my people. This could happen again at any moment.

- Death of Opportunity. It can often be a massive blow when an abuser dies because even if you knew there was only a 0.00001% chance it could happen, now there's definitely never going to be any kind of restitution or tidy resolution. A chapter has ended for you, permanently.

- It is also, in those situations, a massive shift in your worldview. Just like there's now no chance it's going to be made right, there's also no longer any need to worry it will get worse. That can be unsettling even if it's a plus on paper. You had the situation sufficiently-defined and more or less under control, now you have to rework the whole thing to accommodate a new situation.

- Most humans have a deeply-wired DO SOMETHING response in the face of a big change. The brain loathes an unsolved puzzle, an unresolved ending, an uncontrollable change. Again, someone existed and then they didn't and what the hell kind of resolution is THAT? Fix it! Do something! But you can't. There's nothing that fixes it. There's no ritual or procedure that will fix it, you can't time travel and fix it, you can't go explain to some authority that there's been a mistake. It is super normal to be experiencing the emotions "don't know what to do" and/or "I have to do something!". Treat this as feelings rather than instructions.

These feelings don't stay this intense for long, most of them are responses to the shock (and I mean shock mostly in the sense of "things were this way and now they're that way" but also just, you know, the surprise of finding out). It is totally fine to not know what to do, it's very normal. It is a reasonable response both emotionally and neurologically to be knocked off-kilter by this for a bit. We have a strong instinct to process when we experience trauma, it's extremely normal to walk around for at least a few days on the verge of blurting out "my brother died" every time a cashier asks us if we found everything okay, or if a customer service rep asks if there's anything else they can do for you today.

We are best wired to process verbally, so if you know someone you can call or meet up with to just ramble at them about it, that can help reduce the pressure. Generally completing the stress cycle can help, but recognize this is a stress that will recycle itself for a while so you may have to make a practice of completing it regularly for a few days or weeks (or off and on for years or the rest of your life - grief isn't linear and we routinely re-contextualize our losses long after the fact as we get older and have more perspective.

I am sorry for your loss, it is still significant even if it is complicated. Family, as a thing we all experience in various ways, is a really primitive concept; it's one of the first constructs our brains recognize as identity. Losing a member, no matter how distant or terrible or disconnected, is still a fundamental change to our wireframe of Self. It's a blow. It's an intense stress to your nervous system.

Take care of yourself more or less as if you are recovering from a nasty flu (extra rest, hydrate, try to eat a vegetable or two, try to reduce other stressors for a bit if you can), trust that the unsettlement will fade, allow yourself to have whatever feelings show up even if they are difficult to define. Don't feel obligated to feel any one thing, don't feel guilty if you feel some "disrespectful" things, know that most of them will self-resolve because you are mid-processing.
posted by Lyn Never at 5:24 AM on June 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

Best answer: Writing questions on AskMe, writing letters to past you or future you, doing a diary - these are all means of unpacking and unpicking what has happened and what you feel.

Keep doing those sort of things - because the downside of therapy, is that you are choosing the words to speak for the therapist, which may not be the most useful or important words - whereas those sort of things are for yourself, and you can use the words that help you the most, which may well be strings of four letter words.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 11:08 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

If the only reason you left therapy is that you were doing well enough that you didn't feel like you needed it anymore, I'm sure your old therapist would understand if you called and said, "hey, I know I left therapy recently, but my brother just died, and I'd like to come in for a couple of sessions to process that."

I'm sorry you're going through this. Sometimes the death of someone we had a complicated relationship with can be hard in its own way, even harder, than losing someone we loved unconditionally.
posted by decathecting at 4:41 PM on June 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you, everyone. You've helped me get through an unexpected hump with your wise words, your compassion and your sympathy. It's exactly what I expected from Metafilter family, and you didn't let me down.

I'm doing much better at accepting and feeling the feelings, and have already come to a kind of peace with what's happening inside my head. I best-answered what was most applicable to me, but all the answers were great.
posted by b33j at 7:13 PM on June 25, 2023