not so much grief as a moral injury
September 28, 2024 10:08 PM Subscribe
How do you hold the moral injury/grief of a sibling not acknowledging what you went through was abuse? Dead father, big blowup, I-also-made-mistakes edition.
This story is long, and BIG CW/TW FOR ABUSE, so here's the crux: our dad died six months ago, and my brother and I had a big, awful fight about whether what I went through (and my sister, mom, and even HE went through) was abuse. I'm looking for help dealing with the big maw that's opened up in my heart about no longer trusting my brother, and the grief for the limitations of our relationship. How? Help?
More details: My father died somewhat suddenly the spring, although he was in his late seventies. My family (my older brother, my intellectually disabled and mentally ill (and lovely!) sister, and my mom) gathered for a walk to tell my sister in person, mostly to help my sister process the loss better. While walking, we discussed how we might all approach my father's death differently. I had been no contact with my dad and very open about being in trauma therapy for years (I'm 35 now) and I could not safely go down for the funeral. My sister could not go given extreme triggers and challenges in that setting too. My mom was ambivalent, and wanted to maybe support my brother if he went, but also my parents were divorced and she had gotten clear messages from his widow to stay away (my mom did not go). My brother, the eldest, and the one with an active relationship with my father, decided to go, to help write the obituary, and to speak at the service (he went). We agreed that we would all try to honor and respect the ways we wanted or did not want to engage with his death, although that was very difficult to honor in practice.
Things unraveled after the funeral and upon my brother's return. We read the obituary my brother had co-written, and some of the ways he shared about our father on social media (including linkedin.) It was tough. It was beamingly positive - and yes, I know an obituary isn't necessarily the place for us all to get into this. What was maybe hardest was my brother's framing in his additional comments - honoring this complex man who did his best and was a role model and inspiration as a man. In my mom's words, it just made her feel physically nauseous. Still, my brother put in the labor - he was the one to help the writer. He went down for the funeral. It was, as he relayed, a really bizarre and horrible experience. Nobody else spoke at the funeral. His uncles were cagey - in his words, they were all clearly traumatized from THEIR youth - they had all dealt with and perpetuated many directions of abuse (which many had carried on in horrifying ways. two of my uncles r*ped their daughters, for instance, and had "repaired" the family patriarchal arrangements later in life. fucking barf.) but, again, my brother had done his best to engage with this horrible event. it would have been incredibly, incredibly emotionally violating for me to be in that environment, and fuck those men, including my dad. still, in my initial responses to his texts, I tried to focus on empathizing with my brother more than immediately rejecting his stories.
but, I let my feelings slip out. I told him i felt weird reading that obituary. I told him I didn't recognize the person he had written about. and my brother flipped out. we started arguing over text. he told me, I didn't have a right to complain when we left him alone in that situation. and then he pivote suddnely. he started arguing against whether our dad was abusive at all. I got very angry very quickly (not my usual MO) and immediately called him. we had a long conversation, where we talked about a LOT of this stuff, and it was one of those conversations where when it ended I told my mom "oh we had a heart to heart, it was good." but then, later, when I settled with the conversation I realized how horrible it had been. I texted him, on almost no sleep, in the middle of the night, saying how clear-as-day what I experienced was abuse, how it was inarguable, and how he probably experienced it too. and that he should be careful about not seeing abuse and perpetuating the cycle. he got very mad at me for overstepping. a quick volley of texts that fucking gutted me. when I finally reread the texts a horrible sleep deprived day later, I realized that he actually hadn't reacted at all to my clarifications around my own abuse. rather, he focused on my claims that he experienced abuse and my implications he should examine his own behavior with his kids. I texted him and apologized for overstepping, because he was right in a way - I had really reached. I think both those things are true, by the way, but I don't think I can force him to see his own that way. it hurt me so so badly to know that in his mind and heart, he systematically dismissed the concerns of our sister and mom. by extension, I knew that he wasn't letting in what I was saying, either. he thought we were exaggerating, over-reacting, with our own motives, etc. and in his words, me saying I experienced abuse meant him agreeing that my dad was an abuser. he didn't think my dad was an abuser. so he wasn't going to accept what I said about my own experience. (.....)
one big piece of context: my brother is about 6 years older than me. he was very much at the end of high school when things started to get worse with my dad. back then, we had moved yet again, and my dad had started coming home drunk and picking fights with me and my mom. He would get drunk in the garage and show up in the front door, demanding, ready to start screaming. around that time, my sister started to have severe psychological breaks and issues. my brother was off to college, and I was at home as the parentified kid, helping my mom navigate situations like night driving to pick up my sister from another school she had been expelled from for fighting and/or mental health issues beyond what they "could take," my dad never helped - he was passed out drunk after work. but the worst days were the ones that he engaged us directly. it was this repetitive pattern of coming home, and demanding that we comfort him, and ask him about his day - or else he would punish us by screaming and swearing and withdrawing drunknely to his room, only to show up again, drunken-affectionate, caressing me uncomfortably, asking for forgiveness, that constituted the whirring motor of abuse. fear, soothe, forced ritual of forgiveness, weaponized praise. unwelcome touch. meanwhile my dad completely isolated our family, limited my ability of my mom to spend time with all but a few of my friends' moms, and hid hid hid the dysfunction. then, over my ages of 11-15, we moved twice, I fell into a bullying group of friends, I started taking drugs and cutting and attempted suicide and was hospitalized and missed most of 10th grade. I had a bad fucking go of it. my dad was there, never taking responsibility, checked out as I got older, only providing distant medical advice to treat my "bipolar type 2 + ADHD + OCD mental illness" diagnoses (hello early 2000s pedaitric mental health care) and not, yknow, acknowledging the injustice and complicity and the raging fucked up trauma shit (what I now clearly recognize as CPTSD). my sister developed CPTSD too, but also BPD, and had to deal with the horrible collision of trauma, mental illness, and intellectual disability. she often couldn't handle it, and she'd enter full psychosis. I'd visit her in hospitals. I was the responsible one, parentified to be there for my mom.
my brother still caught this all, but indirectly. he told me he used to have nightmares about his failures to protect me. and yet. my brother was angry - angry most of all at my mom, which has persisted into adulthood. he's mad at her for being weak, passive aggressive, taking bad care of herself. I try to meet him there, as his sibling, to some degree, laughing at our mom being ridiculous, which is sometimes true, although I also try to communicate she had to survive a long-term abusive relationship, and these are often the (frustrating, self-defeating) traits of a woman molding herself to a violent, unpredictable man. of course, I over-empathize, and he under-empathizes, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. but his pattern of empathy for our father, anger to the women, is really hard to take.
meanwhile, I've had my years (decades) of trauma therapy. and when my dad died, I dealt with it with a bit of a frame and a head start. I know in my heart of hearts what I've been dealing with. and I knew my experience wouldn't be exactly my brothers. intellectually. but what I didn't expect, six months after the fact, is that the most salient emotional residue of my father's death is this deep wounded feeling about my brother. it's the memory of me talking on the phone with one of my closest friends, telling him about how scared I was that my relationship with my brother would never be the same, and also how enraged I was that I'd been asked to defend myself to him. It's this feeling that my brother, always a bit of a difficult relationship but one I could navigate safely if I focused on our geeky interests and common ground, now felt like this this uncertain, violent force in my emotional life that recalled in no small part the feeling of my father (I know, transference, projection, and yet.)
I've avoided just directly quoting my brother in our phone conversation. but here's a bit of it. he said, well, you weren't raped were you? you were afraid of being raped, sure, and you interpreted his threat as sexual, but kids get things wrong all the time. if you were sexually penetrated, I'd believe you, but you weren't, so everything you're saying doesn't force me to accept your narrative. also, our dad was really stressed from work and must've been hard to deal with mom. we need to empathize with him. and also, he only visibly hit us or mom once or twice maybe (he beat me with his belt a couple of times, and woke me up screaming by pulling my hair), and our sister once (ONCE? ONCE hitting our severly disabled sister is tolerable? it's NOT.) he said: we must agree to disagree on this one. I do not accept that he was an abuser.
meanwhile, that systematic cycle of people-pleasing-or-emotional/sometimes physical/implicitly sexual violence, night after night, combined with the precarity of all of the moves and my sister's mental illness and witnessing the spousal verbal abuse on my mom just... profoundly changed my emotional and mental development. I'd spent a long time trying to empathize with my dad, to try to build a relationship with him, to fix myself. and then I found closure in going no contact. then he died, and that was its own rollercoaster. but again, the thing that is hardest to forgive, or even make sense of, is how my brother responded to me. it hurts so much. it's always hurting, inside me, a little bit. sometimes more than a little bit.
our aunt died a few months later, over this summer (not the easiest 2024, y'all!) and my mom brother and I traveled together. when I was with my brother, at a much different/more supportive funeral (it was on my mom's side), I expressed to my brother how hard it must have been do be in that awful, silent, full-of-trauma funeral setting on his own. in that moment, I felt for him, and I just wanted to acknowledge and make real the shitty thing he experienced. he seemed a little uncomfortable but grateful for the acknowledgment. I felt closer to him in that moment. that part was honest. and yet, it did require me going into pleaser/conflict solver/soother mode and forego what I felt for myself. i was shoving down the part of me that was (is) still deeply angry and hurt. that so badly wants him to apologize and see me. he didn't. he hasn't.
one note about the cycle-of-abuse comment I made: i noticed in recent years my brother has developed some of the same traits as my dad in his home - most notably, creating these bizzare, almost theatrical situations where he tries to draw out sympathy from his family members when he doesnt' feel he's getting enough attention. He screams at them in similar ways too, I know from a voice mail butt dial. I can tell it makes his (very young) kids uncomfortable, and his partner. it's not violent or as teeth-bared in the same way, as far as I can see. but it's that same masculine bullshit of "I can't face my own emotional needs, so I'm going to provoke and prod my family members until they give it to me." that's why I said what I said in my initial half-asleep message exchange. I do hope he acknowledges my dad's abuse in no small part b/c I want to protect my nephews and nieces. I think this is the part where all of us risk perpetuating the cycle of abuse. excusing and rationalizing. but also, it's hard to judge from the outside. I don't have the full picture. I know I am at risk of judging my sibling too.
so there it all is. as you can likely tell, this is a deeply painful thing. I'm so sad my brother isn't willing to stand with me like so many other loved ones in my life and say in a simple way "what you experienced was wrong, and it was abuse, and I'm so sorry." I want to acknowledge he can have different needs than me, and remember this person differently, and hold that complexity.. but it is so, so hard for me to integrate what he's shown me and not feel like he's just in denial, that he's way too deep in advancing and protecting his image of a problematic yet honorable patriarch, that we (his sisters, mom, basically the femme folk of our family) are ultimately hysterical or untrustworthy or otherwise worth derision. I also acknowledge I may have missed a lot here. but this is how it feels.
so, do you have any insight from where you sit? how does one sit with this wound? does it get better? do I need to change it?
thank you <3
This story is long, and BIG CW/TW FOR ABUSE, so here's the crux: our dad died six months ago, and my brother and I had a big, awful fight about whether what I went through (and my sister, mom, and even HE went through) was abuse. I'm looking for help dealing with the big maw that's opened up in my heart about no longer trusting my brother, and the grief for the limitations of our relationship. How? Help?
More details: My father died somewhat suddenly the spring, although he was in his late seventies. My family (my older brother, my intellectually disabled and mentally ill (and lovely!) sister, and my mom) gathered for a walk to tell my sister in person, mostly to help my sister process the loss better. While walking, we discussed how we might all approach my father's death differently. I had been no contact with my dad and very open about being in trauma therapy for years (I'm 35 now) and I could not safely go down for the funeral. My sister could not go given extreme triggers and challenges in that setting too. My mom was ambivalent, and wanted to maybe support my brother if he went, but also my parents were divorced and she had gotten clear messages from his widow to stay away (my mom did not go). My brother, the eldest, and the one with an active relationship with my father, decided to go, to help write the obituary, and to speak at the service (he went). We agreed that we would all try to honor and respect the ways we wanted or did not want to engage with his death, although that was very difficult to honor in practice.
Things unraveled after the funeral and upon my brother's return. We read the obituary my brother had co-written, and some of the ways he shared about our father on social media (including linkedin.) It was tough. It was beamingly positive - and yes, I know an obituary isn't necessarily the place for us all to get into this. What was maybe hardest was my brother's framing in his additional comments - honoring this complex man who did his best and was a role model and inspiration as a man. In my mom's words, it just made her feel physically nauseous. Still, my brother put in the labor - he was the one to help the writer. He went down for the funeral. It was, as he relayed, a really bizarre and horrible experience. Nobody else spoke at the funeral. His uncles were cagey - in his words, they were all clearly traumatized from THEIR youth - they had all dealt with and perpetuated many directions of abuse (which many had carried on in horrifying ways. two of my uncles r*ped their daughters, for instance, and had "repaired" the family patriarchal arrangements later in life. fucking barf.) but, again, my brother had done his best to engage with this horrible event. it would have been incredibly, incredibly emotionally violating for me to be in that environment, and fuck those men, including my dad. still, in my initial responses to his texts, I tried to focus on empathizing with my brother more than immediately rejecting his stories.
but, I let my feelings slip out. I told him i felt weird reading that obituary. I told him I didn't recognize the person he had written about. and my brother flipped out. we started arguing over text. he told me, I didn't have a right to complain when we left him alone in that situation. and then he pivote suddnely. he started arguing against whether our dad was abusive at all. I got very angry very quickly (not my usual MO) and immediately called him. we had a long conversation, where we talked about a LOT of this stuff, and it was one of those conversations where when it ended I told my mom "oh we had a heart to heart, it was good." but then, later, when I settled with the conversation I realized how horrible it had been. I texted him, on almost no sleep, in the middle of the night, saying how clear-as-day what I experienced was abuse, how it was inarguable, and how he probably experienced it too. and that he should be careful about not seeing abuse and perpetuating the cycle. he got very mad at me for overstepping. a quick volley of texts that fucking gutted me. when I finally reread the texts a horrible sleep deprived day later, I realized that he actually hadn't reacted at all to my clarifications around my own abuse. rather, he focused on my claims that he experienced abuse and my implications he should examine his own behavior with his kids. I texted him and apologized for overstepping, because he was right in a way - I had really reached. I think both those things are true, by the way, but I don't think I can force him to see his own that way. it hurt me so so badly to know that in his mind and heart, he systematically dismissed the concerns of our sister and mom. by extension, I knew that he wasn't letting in what I was saying, either. he thought we were exaggerating, over-reacting, with our own motives, etc. and in his words, me saying I experienced abuse meant him agreeing that my dad was an abuser. he didn't think my dad was an abuser. so he wasn't going to accept what I said about my own experience. (.....)
one big piece of context: my brother is about 6 years older than me. he was very much at the end of high school when things started to get worse with my dad. back then, we had moved yet again, and my dad had started coming home drunk and picking fights with me and my mom. He would get drunk in the garage and show up in the front door, demanding, ready to start screaming. around that time, my sister started to have severe psychological breaks and issues. my brother was off to college, and I was at home as the parentified kid, helping my mom navigate situations like night driving to pick up my sister from another school she had been expelled from for fighting and/or mental health issues beyond what they "could take," my dad never helped - he was passed out drunk after work. but the worst days were the ones that he engaged us directly. it was this repetitive pattern of coming home, and demanding that we comfort him, and ask him about his day - or else he would punish us by screaming and swearing and withdrawing drunknely to his room, only to show up again, drunken-affectionate, caressing me uncomfortably, asking for forgiveness, that constituted the whirring motor of abuse. fear, soothe, forced ritual of forgiveness, weaponized praise. unwelcome touch. meanwhile my dad completely isolated our family, limited my ability of my mom to spend time with all but a few of my friends' moms, and hid hid hid the dysfunction. then, over my ages of 11-15, we moved twice, I fell into a bullying group of friends, I started taking drugs and cutting and attempted suicide and was hospitalized and missed most of 10th grade. I had a bad fucking go of it. my dad was there, never taking responsibility, checked out as I got older, only providing distant medical advice to treat my "bipolar type 2 + ADHD + OCD mental illness" diagnoses (hello early 2000s pedaitric mental health care) and not, yknow, acknowledging the injustice and complicity and the raging fucked up trauma shit (what I now clearly recognize as CPTSD). my sister developed CPTSD too, but also BPD, and had to deal with the horrible collision of trauma, mental illness, and intellectual disability. she often couldn't handle it, and she'd enter full psychosis. I'd visit her in hospitals. I was the responsible one, parentified to be there for my mom.
my brother still caught this all, but indirectly. he told me he used to have nightmares about his failures to protect me. and yet. my brother was angry - angry most of all at my mom, which has persisted into adulthood. he's mad at her for being weak, passive aggressive, taking bad care of herself. I try to meet him there, as his sibling, to some degree, laughing at our mom being ridiculous, which is sometimes true, although I also try to communicate she had to survive a long-term abusive relationship, and these are often the (frustrating, self-defeating) traits of a woman molding herself to a violent, unpredictable man. of course, I over-empathize, and he under-empathizes, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. but his pattern of empathy for our father, anger to the women, is really hard to take.
meanwhile, I've had my years (decades) of trauma therapy. and when my dad died, I dealt with it with a bit of a frame and a head start. I know in my heart of hearts what I've been dealing with. and I knew my experience wouldn't be exactly my brothers. intellectually. but what I didn't expect, six months after the fact, is that the most salient emotional residue of my father's death is this deep wounded feeling about my brother. it's the memory of me talking on the phone with one of my closest friends, telling him about how scared I was that my relationship with my brother would never be the same, and also how enraged I was that I'd been asked to defend myself to him. It's this feeling that my brother, always a bit of a difficult relationship but one I could navigate safely if I focused on our geeky interests and common ground, now felt like this this uncertain, violent force in my emotional life that recalled in no small part the feeling of my father (I know, transference, projection, and yet.)
I've avoided just directly quoting my brother in our phone conversation. but here's a bit of it. he said, well, you weren't raped were you? you were afraid of being raped, sure, and you interpreted his threat as sexual, but kids get things wrong all the time. if you were sexually penetrated, I'd believe you, but you weren't, so everything you're saying doesn't force me to accept your narrative. also, our dad was really stressed from work and must've been hard to deal with mom. we need to empathize with him. and also, he only visibly hit us or mom once or twice maybe (he beat me with his belt a couple of times, and woke me up screaming by pulling my hair), and our sister once (ONCE? ONCE hitting our severly disabled sister is tolerable? it's NOT.) he said: we must agree to disagree on this one. I do not accept that he was an abuser.
meanwhile, that systematic cycle of people-pleasing-or-emotional/sometimes physical/implicitly sexual violence, night after night, combined with the precarity of all of the moves and my sister's mental illness and witnessing the spousal verbal abuse on my mom just... profoundly changed my emotional and mental development. I'd spent a long time trying to empathize with my dad, to try to build a relationship with him, to fix myself. and then I found closure in going no contact. then he died, and that was its own rollercoaster. but again, the thing that is hardest to forgive, or even make sense of, is how my brother responded to me. it hurts so much. it's always hurting, inside me, a little bit. sometimes more than a little bit.
our aunt died a few months later, over this summer (not the easiest 2024, y'all!) and my mom brother and I traveled together. when I was with my brother, at a much different/more supportive funeral (it was on my mom's side), I expressed to my brother how hard it must have been do be in that awful, silent, full-of-trauma funeral setting on his own. in that moment, I felt for him, and I just wanted to acknowledge and make real the shitty thing he experienced. he seemed a little uncomfortable but grateful for the acknowledgment. I felt closer to him in that moment. that part was honest. and yet, it did require me going into pleaser/conflict solver/soother mode and forego what I felt for myself. i was shoving down the part of me that was (is) still deeply angry and hurt. that so badly wants him to apologize and see me. he didn't. he hasn't.
one note about the cycle-of-abuse comment I made: i noticed in recent years my brother has developed some of the same traits as my dad in his home - most notably, creating these bizzare, almost theatrical situations where he tries to draw out sympathy from his family members when he doesnt' feel he's getting enough attention. He screams at them in similar ways too, I know from a voice mail butt dial. I can tell it makes his (very young) kids uncomfortable, and his partner. it's not violent or as teeth-bared in the same way, as far as I can see. but it's that same masculine bullshit of "I can't face my own emotional needs, so I'm going to provoke and prod my family members until they give it to me." that's why I said what I said in my initial half-asleep message exchange. I do hope he acknowledges my dad's abuse in no small part b/c I want to protect my nephews and nieces. I think this is the part where all of us risk perpetuating the cycle of abuse. excusing and rationalizing. but also, it's hard to judge from the outside. I don't have the full picture. I know I am at risk of judging my sibling too.
so there it all is. as you can likely tell, this is a deeply painful thing. I'm so sad my brother isn't willing to stand with me like so many other loved ones in my life and say in a simple way "what you experienced was wrong, and it was abuse, and I'm so sorry." I want to acknowledge he can have different needs than me, and remember this person differently, and hold that complexity.. but it is so, so hard for me to integrate what he's shown me and not feel like he's just in denial, that he's way too deep in advancing and protecting his image of a problematic yet honorable patriarch, that we (his sisters, mom, basically the femme folk of our family) are ultimately hysterical or untrustworthy or otherwise worth derision. I also acknowledge I may have missed a lot here. but this is how it feels.
so, do you have any insight from where you sit? how does one sit with this wound? does it get better? do I need to change it?
thank you <3
Response by poster: @Tell Me No Lies - thank you so much for your reply. I won't threadsit, but just a quick follow-up that may help steer responses. When you say:
> Not that that makes it acceptable, but it might help to think that he’s not actively hostile towards you, he just can’t look himself in the mirror if he accepts your experience.
I have a lot of trouble understanding how to embody / take on that perspective. I don't know how to love someone who doesn't accept my experience. To me that feels like a self-abandonment. It feels like an active, raging threat every time it comes to mind. I'm not saying that my feelings are right here, it's just literally not a skill I've learned (and I've protected myself around a dimension of this as a trans person. lovingly agreeing-to-disagree about my identity isn't an option. so, my inner feeling goes, why should it be an option here?)
thanks!
posted by Sock Meets Body at 10:39 PM on September 28
> Not that that makes it acceptable, but it might help to think that he’s not actively hostile towards you, he just can’t look himself in the mirror if he accepts your experience.
I have a lot of trouble understanding how to embody / take on that perspective. I don't know how to love someone who doesn't accept my experience. To me that feels like a self-abandonment. It feels like an active, raging threat every time it comes to mind. I'm not saying that my feelings are right here, it's just literally not a skill I've learned (and I've protected myself around a dimension of this as a trans person. lovingly agreeing-to-disagree about my identity isn't an option. so, my inner feeling goes, why should it be an option here?)
thanks!
posted by Sock Meets Body at 10:39 PM on September 28
it hurt me so so badly to know that in his mind and heart, he systematically dismissed the concerns of our sister and mom.
This jumped out at me.
What your brother is doing, is a betrayal.
I think it's possible that you're still arguing with some part of yourself that's decided the best way to protect yourself, is to deny that your father was abusive. An aspect of yourself, that still behaves like a small, powerless child, and all it can do is use magical thinking "if I don't acknowledge it's real, then it's not real".
Adult you has bravely faced facts as they are, but your small-child-self is still trying to protect you with the only tools it has, denial.
Adult you needs your brother, one of the few people who shared your childhood world and can understand it like no one else, to affirm your memories of how things really were, so that you can lay to rest this internal struggle.
And instead he not only denies you that healing, he is perpetuating abuse in his own family.
With this kind of thing, it helps me to look clearly at what I can control, and what is beyond my control, painful as that acknowledgement is.
You can't control what your brother thinks or feels. It's not your responsibility to do that.
You can't control how he treats his family, or come up with a magical way of phrasing things so that he realises what he's doing is abuse. It is not your responsibility to do that.
There might be other, practical ways you can help his family directly, and not through trying to change him? But your options are probably limited there too.
Acknowledging the limits of your power is painful. Anxiety will whisper about your duties, urge you to keep trying.
Be kind and patient with yourself. Practice self compassion. Replace negative self talk with compassionate realism.
posted by Zumbador at 11:13 PM on September 28 [4 favorites]
This jumped out at me.
What your brother is doing, is a betrayal.
I think it's possible that you're still arguing with some part of yourself that's decided the best way to protect yourself, is to deny that your father was abusive. An aspect of yourself, that still behaves like a small, powerless child, and all it can do is use magical thinking "if I don't acknowledge it's real, then it's not real".
Adult you has bravely faced facts as they are, but your small-child-self is still trying to protect you with the only tools it has, denial.
Adult you needs your brother, one of the few people who shared your childhood world and can understand it like no one else, to affirm your memories of how things really were, so that you can lay to rest this internal struggle.
And instead he not only denies you that healing, he is perpetuating abuse in his own family.
With this kind of thing, it helps me to look clearly at what I can control, and what is beyond my control, painful as that acknowledgement is.
You can't control what your brother thinks or feels. It's not your responsibility to do that.
You can't control how he treats his family, or come up with a magical way of phrasing things so that he realises what he's doing is abuse. It is not your responsibility to do that.
There might be other, practical ways you can help his family directly, and not through trying to change him? But your options are probably limited there too.
Acknowledging the limits of your power is painful. Anxiety will whisper about your duties, urge you to keep trying.
Be kind and patient with yourself. Practice self compassion. Replace negative self talk with compassionate realism.
posted by Zumbador at 11:13 PM on September 28 [4 favorites]
You're both particularly fragile and stressed right now, completely understandably. There are limits to talking. One is that it often tends to leave people in static, fixed positions in your mind once you move on from the conversation. Your brother said some deeply fucked up stuff. But given the context, I would suggest that it is not necessarily who he is or a representation of his permanent, fixed position. It might be. But I can also see him feeling really defensive and put into a challenging, stressful position that creates a lot of guilt that he doesn't know how to handle. In other words, I think he's likely in crisis and that what he said may not reflect his more considered feelings or beliefs.
I also think you are acting from very strong emotion that may not represent how you feel in the long-term as you continue to process this. That doesn't mean you are wrong by any means. It just means that this all sounds like crisis to me, and crisis is temporary. Let it shake out and use your distress tolerance skills to get through this particularly bad period. You don't have to have answers for this and you don't have to find meaning in it. Just get through it until you're in a place that feels safer for you.
posted by knobknosher at 11:54 PM on September 28 [10 favorites]
I also think you are acting from very strong emotion that may not represent how you feel in the long-term as you continue to process this. That doesn't mean you are wrong by any means. It just means that this all sounds like crisis to me, and crisis is temporary. Let it shake out and use your distress tolerance skills to get through this particularly bad period. You don't have to have answers for this and you don't have to find meaning in it. Just get through it until you're in a place that feels safer for you.
posted by knobknosher at 11:54 PM on September 28 [10 favorites]
The childhood trauma such as you [and I] have experienced makes us prone to living our lives trying to make difficult people like us, see us, love us, give a shit about us.
Let that sink in. All that work trying to make a difficult person even see you.
You tried with your dad, and tried with your brother - another older man in the natal home, and who is now in his own house, masking over a generational experience of verbal and physical violence.
Trying to show your brother moments of sharing empathy hoping for a return, only makes a difficult person feel assuaged, not attendant to you, because they haven’t done the work in facing true things that were and are around them.
It seems you could only say the true things you feel when the relational veneer between your inner world and others was thinned by complicated grief, betrayal and exhaustion. I have been in that space where I finally said the things that had been brought to the surface through a precipitating life event. Same spiral of guilt [you went back and apologised, despite knowing that your brother is being abusive in his family] same spiralling anxiety about having ‘gone too far’ and same spiral of explanation, turning to others for reassurance about what was real.
Something to contemplate is that difficult people are in their own split systems.
Your brother has his own damage and can only partially relate to you when he is not challenged psychically about his own needed work. He was emotionally vulnerable when he told you the funeral was an exercise in community dishonesty, not only in him alone having to stand up and say things that were probably humiliating when confronted with all the relatives around him knowing the truth. To compound this dissonance, he put those words in writing even though it was amply evident to himself that his female relatives suffered enormously under his father’s rapacious temper.
Having one of these, his sister, tell him clearly that the siblings and mother felt betrayed, that he had plastered over an abusive system, that you all suffered, would have triggered what you experienced in that texting exchange. That distinct denial and minimising of your experiences because owning his betrayal would be too much shame to accept in front of you. [it is also deeply patriarchal thinking to regard only penetration as sexual abuse and to argue with a woman about whether a menacing sexual aggressor needs to violate in a particular way, ugh.]
The other injury is that your own feelings about what has happened with the death of your father has been sidetracked by this interaction. That you are having this iteration of the same kinds of grief and frustration you felt with your father is something to take to your therapy.
I don’t know if this will help, but as a person online who relates very much to your post - try to find amidst this anxiety and distrust of your relationship with your brother, a sense of pride in that child who spoke up about the real things around her. Feel pride that at 35 you said true things even if you have a psychic wobble from doing so. You made a difficult person hear you, even if so much of what was thrown back was dismissive and horrid. Try to think of how much work you have done and that you have said a true thing in telling your brother he needs to do that work too. Feeling anxiety and dread is a normal part of a person in your situation when a big psychic step as been taken.
posted by honey-barbara at 5:23 AM on September 29 [9 favorites]
Let that sink in. All that work trying to make a difficult person even see you.
You tried with your dad, and tried with your brother - another older man in the natal home, and who is now in his own house, masking over a generational experience of verbal and physical violence.
Trying to show your brother moments of sharing empathy hoping for a return, only makes a difficult person feel assuaged, not attendant to you, because they haven’t done the work in facing true things that were and are around them.
It seems you could only say the true things you feel when the relational veneer between your inner world and others was thinned by complicated grief, betrayal and exhaustion. I have been in that space where I finally said the things that had been brought to the surface through a precipitating life event. Same spiral of guilt [you went back and apologised, despite knowing that your brother is being abusive in his family] same spiralling anxiety about having ‘gone too far’ and same spiral of explanation, turning to others for reassurance about what was real.
Something to contemplate is that difficult people are in their own split systems.
Your brother has his own damage and can only partially relate to you when he is not challenged psychically about his own needed work. He was emotionally vulnerable when he told you the funeral was an exercise in community dishonesty, not only in him alone having to stand up and say things that were probably humiliating when confronted with all the relatives around him knowing the truth. To compound this dissonance, he put those words in writing even though it was amply evident to himself that his female relatives suffered enormously under his father’s rapacious temper.
Having one of these, his sister, tell him clearly that the siblings and mother felt betrayed, that he had plastered over an abusive system, that you all suffered, would have triggered what you experienced in that texting exchange. That distinct denial and minimising of your experiences because owning his betrayal would be too much shame to accept in front of you. [it is also deeply patriarchal thinking to regard only penetration as sexual abuse and to argue with a woman about whether a menacing sexual aggressor needs to violate in a particular way, ugh.]
The other injury is that your own feelings about what has happened with the death of your father has been sidetracked by this interaction. That you are having this iteration of the same kinds of grief and frustration you felt with your father is something to take to your therapy.
I don’t know if this will help, but as a person online who relates very much to your post - try to find amidst this anxiety and distrust of your relationship with your brother, a sense of pride in that child who spoke up about the real things around her. Feel pride that at 35 you said true things even if you have a psychic wobble from doing so. You made a difficult person hear you, even if so much of what was thrown back was dismissive and horrid. Try to think of how much work you have done and that you have said a true thing in telling your brother he needs to do that work too. Feeling anxiety and dread is a normal part of a person in your situation when a big psychic step as been taken.
posted by honey-barbara at 5:23 AM on September 29 [9 favorites]
I wonder if, to him, calling it abuse implies a level of intentionality that he doesn't believe existed. Maybe he feels like you're saying your father knew or should have known just how damaging his actions were to you, and could have chosen to act differently, but chose to keep on harming you instead. And maybe he feels that your father didn't fully understand how he was harming you and/or lacked the ability to change his behavior.
Are you more troubled about your brother minimizing or not seeing how much you suffered or about him minimizing how much your father was to blame for it? It sounds like he may actually be willing to understand and acknowledge your suffering and that the issue for him is more about labeling your father using words that feel too blaming.
posted by Redstart at 5:45 AM on September 29
Are you more troubled about your brother minimizing or not seeing how much you suffered or about him minimizing how much your father was to blame for it? It sounds like he may actually be willing to understand and acknowledge your suffering and that the issue for him is more about labeling your father using words that feel too blaming.
posted by Redstart at 5:45 AM on September 29
I think if your want to continue a relationship with your brother (you don’t have to, of course) you need to be open to him coming to terms with your father’s true self on his own timeline. If you’ve erred here, it was in addressing your concerns so soon after the funeral. Grief is weird, non-linear, and lasts much longer than we expect. Your brother’s complex feelings will probably take years for him to work through and I think it is unrealistic to expect him to immediately get to where you are after years of reflection and therapy. I don’t say this to defend your brother, his words and behaviors were hurtful, but the more you press on it to further he will retreat.
Unfortunately in this situation there is little you can say to heal the wound. You are secure in your understanding of your father and your brother knows how you feel. This point in time may signal a permanent change in your relationship with your brother or you may find you can reconcile at some future point, what you can’t do is speed run that process. Focusing on yourself and your health is the best thing you can do.
posted by scantee at 5:52 AM on September 29 [1 favorite]
Unfortunately in this situation there is little you can say to heal the wound. You are secure in your understanding of your father and your brother knows how you feel. This point in time may signal a permanent change in your relationship with your brother or you may find you can reconcile at some future point, what you can’t do is speed run that process. Focusing on yourself and your health is the best thing you can do.
posted by scantee at 5:52 AM on September 29 [1 favorite]
There are two conflicting realities happening here.
One is yours - your abusive dad, your parentified role in life, your pain, your self awareness, your separation from your dad, your revulsion for the family culture...
And the other is also yours - your desire for your brother to inhabit the roles you want him to, validating, caring, recovering from his own trauma, becoming a good person to his own family. You are perceiving potential good in your brother, you feel some connection to him, you don't have any surplus of functional people in your family, and in many ways he kind of is a functional person. You are drawn to the possibility he represents.
Is your brother a fellow trauma survivor, or someone who abandoned you? Is your brother in denial about what happened, or is he someone clinging to bonds and memories of a few fleeting early good experiences which help to ground him and give him a sense of self worth? Is your brother a selfish bastard, or someone who loves you? Is your brother a burden, or someone who can contribute? Is your brother helpful, or obstructive? And the answer to all of these questions is yes. Yes, your brother is a fellow trauma survivor, and yes your brother abandoned you. Yes, your brother is in denial, and yes, his experiences being different than you means that it's harder and likely currently impossible for him to write off your past and his father as entirely completely irrevocably bad.
It really doesn't matter which way your brother tilts, if he is 78% bad, but 12% worth having a relationship with. The thing that is relevant is that you are trying to deal with your own conflicting feelings here. You walked away from your dad, yet you want to still have your brother in your life. Your brother is wounding you by not providing you with the support you want and not reacting and behaving in the way you want. Yet your brother is not a character in your fantasies. You want to salvage something here, but the material you are working with is one that you have no control over. He's going to do what he's going to do.
Your starting point has to be that can't change your brother. Unfortunately wanting him to do what you want is an absurd thing to wish for. No matter how much you want him to validate you that's not happening, because if he was the kind of person who was that open and empathetic to you he would have already done so. He's not. He was never a surrogate replacement good dad for you. It's not going to happen now. He was never even a great brother. Nothing has changed.
So the question her is not whether he is bad for you or not - of course he is - or if he deserves your anger - you'll be angry at him after what you went through whether or not he deserved it, but it's all about you managing your own very strong, conflicted feelings. What to do when you feel this strongly?
You could split to black on him, cut all contact and tell everyone how awful he is. Then, by reiterating how bad he is you could likely get over the grief part and the desire to be in connection. Just build your rage up a bit more.
Or you could accept the fact that he is a fellow trauma victim, carries burdens that would make you buckle, is another suffering human being and embark on trying to be a support to him... Which would mean swallowing your own feelings and enabling him, so I hope you won't choose to do this and get enmeshed with him.
Alternatively you could keep seeking a relationship with him, and keep trying to make him understand and accept your point of view and to help you manage your emotions. That would result in your continuing to feel bitterly hurt and resentful, because he's not going to understand you better no matter how you phrase it, nor will he accept your point of view. There is no person on this earth who can help you manage your emotions unless it's a good therapist who never, ever enters into them with you, but who reflects them back at you until you can see them with ice cold, soul penetrating clarity. At best your brother could say some comforting things and make some apologies, and for a few deep and meaningful moments make you feel loved and validated... but then that feeling will soon evaporate because your trauma ain't going anywhere. When the pain comes back this could lead you into a very unhealthy loop of needing to come back to him constantly for validation, over and over.
So no, your brother is no use for you in handling your emotions. What's left is the option of... accepting that not only do you have to live with a towering rage at your father, but you have to live with towering rage at your brother. Some of that rage is now probably redirected from your father towards him, because it has an appealing freshness and relevancy to be furious at someone for what they are doing now, compared to being furious at someone for what they did thirty years ago, who is dead anyway so can never be punished or repent.
All that anger you are stuck with is justified. Your father abused you, your mother was too weak to save you, your sister was born and sucked resources out of family and made you have to carry her too, your brother escaped and abandoned you. Pain and fury are rational responses to what you have gone through, as well as being physiologically inescapable for you. You got trauma, your trauma was bad. Nobody rescued you when you were a child, nobody stepped up and carried a share of the weight as you grew up.
There isn't really any help for it, because those emotions are going to ricochet through you until your physiology dampens down, and it will likely never dampen down a whole lot, because the anger at your brother now is part of the over all anger. Things will distract you sometimes, good feelings may occur when you have a nice meal, but then you'll get sick with the flu and feel crummy and then everything will come thundering back to an unbearable burden of hurt fury. You'll get busy, do something strenuous physically and be concentrating on that, and realise hey, that pain rage has abated someone... But after what you went through it's going to be there to some degree for the rest of your life. It's the same like if you had lost a leg, or have lungs permanently scarred by asthma from bad childhood experiences. You're going to spend the rest of your life working around the fact that you bear a burden of pain and rage.
And there is no point trying to get your brother to mitigate some of that pain and rage, as you can see. He didn't make you feel better just now. There are no reconciliation and redemption now that dad isn't exerting his malign influence. It's just you and that pain and rage.
The only I approach I know of to deal with huge bad emotions is to stagger through it, using your executive functioning. You feel like crap. How can you have a day that is a (relatively) good day, even without not ever escaping from feeling like crap? What can you do with today that will make sure that at bedtime you haven't gone deeper into the rage spirals so you feel even worse? How can you take care of yourself? If your brother were a good ideal imaginary brother what would he do now? Okay, then how do you do that for yourself? If you want his hug, wrap yourself in something heavy. If you want his consoling words, say themself to yourself. If you want him to go back and change the past... nope, no ideal imaginary brother can go back and change the past. If that's what you need then you can only immerse yourself in magic fantasy temporarily, escapism in alternate reality, perhaps writing a story about how your brother took you with him when he left home. But when your emotions are a burden there is only one way to handle it: Self care. It always boils down to that. Say what you need to hear to yourself. Look after your mental health. Look after your physical health. You need someone to be kind to you, so be kind to yourself.
That's not fair when you have so much to deal with and it's all pain that other people caused. But there still is nothing except drawing on your inner resources and showering yourself with self care and internal validation.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:53 AM on September 29 [4 favorites]
One is yours - your abusive dad, your parentified role in life, your pain, your self awareness, your separation from your dad, your revulsion for the family culture...
And the other is also yours - your desire for your brother to inhabit the roles you want him to, validating, caring, recovering from his own trauma, becoming a good person to his own family. You are perceiving potential good in your brother, you feel some connection to him, you don't have any surplus of functional people in your family, and in many ways he kind of is a functional person. You are drawn to the possibility he represents.
Is your brother a fellow trauma survivor, or someone who abandoned you? Is your brother in denial about what happened, or is he someone clinging to bonds and memories of a few fleeting early good experiences which help to ground him and give him a sense of self worth? Is your brother a selfish bastard, or someone who loves you? Is your brother a burden, or someone who can contribute? Is your brother helpful, or obstructive? And the answer to all of these questions is yes. Yes, your brother is a fellow trauma survivor, and yes your brother abandoned you. Yes, your brother is in denial, and yes, his experiences being different than you means that it's harder and likely currently impossible for him to write off your past and his father as entirely completely irrevocably bad.
It really doesn't matter which way your brother tilts, if he is 78% bad, but 12% worth having a relationship with. The thing that is relevant is that you are trying to deal with your own conflicting feelings here. You walked away from your dad, yet you want to still have your brother in your life. Your brother is wounding you by not providing you with the support you want and not reacting and behaving in the way you want. Yet your brother is not a character in your fantasies. You want to salvage something here, but the material you are working with is one that you have no control over. He's going to do what he's going to do.
Your starting point has to be that can't change your brother. Unfortunately wanting him to do what you want is an absurd thing to wish for. No matter how much you want him to validate you that's not happening, because if he was the kind of person who was that open and empathetic to you he would have already done so. He's not. He was never a surrogate replacement good dad for you. It's not going to happen now. He was never even a great brother. Nothing has changed.
So the question her is not whether he is bad for you or not - of course he is - or if he deserves your anger - you'll be angry at him after what you went through whether or not he deserved it, but it's all about you managing your own very strong, conflicted feelings. What to do when you feel this strongly?
You could split to black on him, cut all contact and tell everyone how awful he is. Then, by reiterating how bad he is you could likely get over the grief part and the desire to be in connection. Just build your rage up a bit more.
Or you could accept the fact that he is a fellow trauma victim, carries burdens that would make you buckle, is another suffering human being and embark on trying to be a support to him... Which would mean swallowing your own feelings and enabling him, so I hope you won't choose to do this and get enmeshed with him.
Alternatively you could keep seeking a relationship with him, and keep trying to make him understand and accept your point of view and to help you manage your emotions. That would result in your continuing to feel bitterly hurt and resentful, because he's not going to understand you better no matter how you phrase it, nor will he accept your point of view. There is no person on this earth who can help you manage your emotions unless it's a good therapist who never, ever enters into them with you, but who reflects them back at you until you can see them with ice cold, soul penetrating clarity. At best your brother could say some comforting things and make some apologies, and for a few deep and meaningful moments make you feel loved and validated... but then that feeling will soon evaporate because your trauma ain't going anywhere. When the pain comes back this could lead you into a very unhealthy loop of needing to come back to him constantly for validation, over and over.
So no, your brother is no use for you in handling your emotions. What's left is the option of... accepting that not only do you have to live with a towering rage at your father, but you have to live with towering rage at your brother. Some of that rage is now probably redirected from your father towards him, because it has an appealing freshness and relevancy to be furious at someone for what they are doing now, compared to being furious at someone for what they did thirty years ago, who is dead anyway so can never be punished or repent.
All that anger you are stuck with is justified. Your father abused you, your mother was too weak to save you, your sister was born and sucked resources out of family and made you have to carry her too, your brother escaped and abandoned you. Pain and fury are rational responses to what you have gone through, as well as being physiologically inescapable for you. You got trauma, your trauma was bad. Nobody rescued you when you were a child, nobody stepped up and carried a share of the weight as you grew up.
There isn't really any help for it, because those emotions are going to ricochet through you until your physiology dampens down, and it will likely never dampen down a whole lot, because the anger at your brother now is part of the over all anger. Things will distract you sometimes, good feelings may occur when you have a nice meal, but then you'll get sick with the flu and feel crummy and then everything will come thundering back to an unbearable burden of hurt fury. You'll get busy, do something strenuous physically and be concentrating on that, and realise hey, that pain rage has abated someone... But after what you went through it's going to be there to some degree for the rest of your life. It's the same like if you had lost a leg, or have lungs permanently scarred by asthma from bad childhood experiences. You're going to spend the rest of your life working around the fact that you bear a burden of pain and rage.
And there is no point trying to get your brother to mitigate some of that pain and rage, as you can see. He didn't make you feel better just now. There are no reconciliation and redemption now that dad isn't exerting his malign influence. It's just you and that pain and rage.
The only I approach I know of to deal with huge bad emotions is to stagger through it, using your executive functioning. You feel like crap. How can you have a day that is a (relatively) good day, even without not ever escaping from feeling like crap? What can you do with today that will make sure that at bedtime you haven't gone deeper into the rage spirals so you feel even worse? How can you take care of yourself? If your brother were a good ideal imaginary brother what would he do now? Okay, then how do you do that for yourself? If you want his hug, wrap yourself in something heavy. If you want his consoling words, say themself to yourself. If you want him to go back and change the past... nope, no ideal imaginary brother can go back and change the past. If that's what you need then you can only immerse yourself in magic fantasy temporarily, escapism in alternate reality, perhaps writing a story about how your brother took you with him when he left home. But when your emotions are a burden there is only one way to handle it: Self care. It always boils down to that. Say what you need to hear to yourself. Look after your mental health. Look after your physical health. You need someone to be kind to you, so be kind to yourself.
That's not fair when you have so much to deal with and it's all pain that other people caused. But there still is nothing except drawing on your inner resources and showering yourself with self care and internal validation.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:53 AM on September 29 [4 favorites]
I am so very sorry for what you have experienced. What you describe is, unquestionably, abuse. But I do not think you are going to get anywhere trying to change your brother’s mind about any of this. The damage he experienced within your family has led him to deal with all of this in his own way that is directly clashing with your way, and that’s deep, deep stuff and the work of lifetimes to resolve.
I strongly suggest you focus on taking care of yourself, continuing your own work with whatever your care team and coping mechanisms looks like. At some point that may involve a decision about whether you can have your brother in your life on ”we will never see this in the same way but let’s agree to cordon that off and be in each other’s lives in other ways” terms, but you don’t have to make that decision right now.
posted by Stacey at 6:28 AM on September 29
I strongly suggest you focus on taking care of yourself, continuing your own work with whatever your care team and coping mechanisms looks like. At some point that may involve a decision about whether you can have your brother in your life on ”we will never see this in the same way but let’s agree to cordon that off and be in each other’s lives in other ways” terms, but you don’t have to make that decision right now.
posted by Stacey at 6:28 AM on September 29
I only the read the bit above the fold but the answer to most questions like this is to start meditating about three years ago. If you didn't start then, then start now. When you've got the basic routine down then add some philosophy. Buddhist, Stoic and Taoist will all work pretty well but Buddhism has good tie-ins to meditation and the best instructions. Stick with philosophy, not religion.
Meditation is about being in THIS moment. Not the one where you were abused or where your sibling didn't do what you wanted them to do, but THIS moment. The ones where you're probably just fine if you would only let yourself see that. Meditation is about learning what goes on inside your mind and learning to pay attention. As you learn you'll see that you tell yourself a LOT of stories. Most of these stories assume you know what's happening in someone else's head, or they assume other knowledge that you don't really have. So you learn that you're mind is full of crap and generally making stuff up and you learn to let go of the stories and just deal with what you actually know. Which is generally not much but it's enough to get by and you'll find that learning not to pay attention to the stories your brain makes up leaves you a lot happier and gives you more time to enjoy THIS moment.
Seriously. You can't change the past, you can't control other people, you can't even really control yourself. Pay more attention to now and less attention to then. The process is maddening because your brain is in the habit of thinking about then and it will keep doing it over and over and what you have to learn is to keep letting go over and over. But letting go is not pushing away, it's acknowledging that the thought is there, it's letting the thought be, but not pursuing it.
It takes time to train your brain, which is why three years ago is the best time to start, but in the short term it can still give you little moments of relaxation as you just sit in THIS moment for five minutes here or 10 minutes there. Or 30 seconds in line at the grocery store.
posted by Awfki at 6:29 AM on September 29 [1 favorite]
Meditation is about being in THIS moment. Not the one where you were abused or where your sibling didn't do what you wanted them to do, but THIS moment. The ones where you're probably just fine if you would only let yourself see that. Meditation is about learning what goes on inside your mind and learning to pay attention. As you learn you'll see that you tell yourself a LOT of stories. Most of these stories assume you know what's happening in someone else's head, or they assume other knowledge that you don't really have. So you learn that you're mind is full of crap and generally making stuff up and you learn to let go of the stories and just deal with what you actually know. Which is generally not much but it's enough to get by and you'll find that learning not to pay attention to the stories your brain makes up leaves you a lot happier and gives you more time to enjoy THIS moment.
Seriously. You can't change the past, you can't control other people, you can't even really control yourself. Pay more attention to now and less attention to then. The process is maddening because your brain is in the habit of thinking about then and it will keep doing it over and over and what you have to learn is to keep letting go over and over. But letting go is not pushing away, it's acknowledging that the thought is there, it's letting the thought be, but not pursuing it.
It takes time to train your brain, which is why three years ago is the best time to start, but in the short term it can still give you little moments of relaxation as you just sit in THIS moment for five minutes here or 10 minutes there. Or 30 seconds in line at the grocery store.
posted by Awfki at 6:29 AM on September 29 [1 favorite]
Lots of great advice here. The main thing is that both you and your brother are going through some major stuff right now, and while there are some common elements, you are different people with different ways of processing. You don’t need to fix this right now.
Instead, focus on yourself and what you need to take care of yourself in this difficult time. That might involve taking a step back from your brother in order to honour your own experiences and feelings, at least for a while. And you might also reach a point where you want to be closer to him, but with certain boundaries around what you talk about and how you discuss things.
The bottom line is that the only person you are responsible for is yourself, and you need to take excellent care of this wonderful person. Your brother’s attitudes may be permanent, or not, but either way, it doesn’t change who you are and what you know.
posted by rpfields at 7:53 AM on September 29 [3 favorites]
Instead, focus on yourself and what you need to take care of yourself in this difficult time. That might involve taking a step back from your brother in order to honour your own experiences and feelings, at least for a while. And you might also reach a point where you want to be closer to him, but with certain boundaries around what you talk about and how you discuss things.
The bottom line is that the only person you are responsible for is yourself, and you need to take excellent care of this wonderful person. Your brother’s attitudes may be permanent, or not, but either way, it doesn’t change who you are and what you know.
posted by rpfields at 7:53 AM on September 29 [3 favorites]
Because of differences in age, personality, family circumstances, and (often) gender or sexual identity, every child in an abusive household is living in a different abusive household, at least to some degree. This can complicate sibling relationships, in both childhood and adulthood, on top of the natural tensions and frictions of siblinghood. Forgive me if I'm overreading, but, from your follow-up comments, I suspect that you and I have something in common: having been subject to injustice as a child that no one did anything about and been obliged to essentially rescue ourselves, we feel that to not fight our own corner at every moment is to abandon ourselves, to give up on the idea that there should be some form of justice. That can make it hard to allow ourselves to feel compassion for others in life who are perpetrators as well as victims, which it sounds like your brother may well be. That can cut us off from understanding them, but also deeply entrench us in awful feelings that make us miserable. To oversimplify somewhat, you are not wrong to expect or even need some things from your brother, but your brother may be too damaged to give you what you need. Not everybody makes it out.
This tension can be so hard to live with, and you're both still dealing with fresh and complicated grief, meaning neither of you is dealing with the other at their best and most generous. I agree with the comments above that it's better not to make any permanent decisions at this time. How you deal with him on an ongoing basis should depend, I think, on how connection with him makes you feel at any given time. That could range from cutting him off completely to going to therapy with him, and you don't have to build a hardened border at any of those points. But you were asking about the "moral injury/grief," and I think in the long run the way to go is to reach for the understanding that one of the things your upbringing did was damage your brother deeply so that he can't do what a healthy human being can do. Which is a tragedy. It doesn't mean you need to subject yourself to his bad behavior, it doesn't mean you should expect him to change, it doesn't even mean you need to forgive him for anything. But it's really sad, for you and him both. If you can reach the point where you can view him with compassion even if you choose to go no/low contact or have only a limited relationship with him or even act to provide some form of safe harbor for his kids as they get older, I think you might be able to simultaneously honor your own disappointment and even disapproval while feeling less further disappointment, less fury, less internal devastation.
posted by praemunire at 9:45 AM on September 29 [3 favorites]
This tension can be so hard to live with, and you're both still dealing with fresh and complicated grief, meaning neither of you is dealing with the other at their best and most generous. I agree with the comments above that it's better not to make any permanent decisions at this time. How you deal with him on an ongoing basis should depend, I think, on how connection with him makes you feel at any given time. That could range from cutting him off completely to going to therapy with him, and you don't have to build a hardened border at any of those points. But you were asking about the "moral injury/grief," and I think in the long run the way to go is to reach for the understanding that one of the things your upbringing did was damage your brother deeply so that he can't do what a healthy human being can do. Which is a tragedy. It doesn't mean you need to subject yourself to his bad behavior, it doesn't mean you should expect him to change, it doesn't even mean you need to forgive him for anything. But it's really sad, for you and him both. If you can reach the point where you can view him with compassion even if you choose to go no/low contact or have only a limited relationship with him or even act to provide some form of safe harbor for his kids as they get older, I think you might be able to simultaneously honor your own disappointment and even disapproval while feeling less further disappointment, less fury, less internal devastation.
posted by praemunire at 9:45 AM on September 29 [3 favorites]
This is certainly just plain difficult, and that is part of the reason this is difficult. It just sucks, it's just hard. It's triggering and you are having a trauma response.
But I suspect that there is great complexity coming from the fact that your brother, having not done the extensive trauma work you have done yet, likely is saying the same things you used to tell yourself. He is voicing the old tapes in your head. He is voicing the same early-stage justifications our culture always starts with before actually confronting a wrong, the "well, it wasn't really wrong exactly because" stage.
And I think it's therapy-worthy if you're still seeing a therapist, to take this to unpack: I don't know how to love someone who doesn't accept my experience. Because you seem really resistant to what goes at the end of that sentence "because it would mean accepting his own." And you must know, if you've had quality trauma therapy anyway, that there's no force on earth stronger than the story we tell ourselves to survive and the denial we construct in order to get through the day without snapping and running through the streets howling.
I also think that you-the-younger-sibling is still looking to him-the-older-sibling as an Authority. As if he can't possibly be currently more fucked-up/less-progressed-along-the-path than you because he's the Big Brother, and probably the Protector in your personal configuration of the sick system you grew up in, therefore he only speaks truth, but his truth is fucking incorrect and that's cognitive dissonance. You need him to validate you and he can't and you can't seem to understand why even though it's pretty obvious.
the TLDR here is: have you tried feeling sorry for him?
If he really was (for you or for everyone) in the Protector role, it's bang on target that his narrative can't start falling apart until the threat is dead. I am using the term Protector though it gets called a lot of different things in research and literature, but like it's almost a cliche that this is the sibling that goes to the funeral, writes the glowing reviews, plays the Good Child. And THEN the preciously-preserved narrative starts to decay. Exactly like it's playing out here.
You really shouldn't be asking him to validate you right now, and he's probably not the person you need to process with at this time. Poor bastard needs your help, if you're able to give it, but at the very least you can't lean on him right now because he can't bear your weight.
If you can find it in yourself to do this, I recommend you go back to him with something like this. "Hey, it's a complicated situation and I'm on my healing path and you're on yours and they aren't going to automatically sync up. We will not be debating whether or not I was abused, I was, that is the truth. It's not your fault and you don't need to defend yourself or anybody else. But I don't need you to solve that or figure it out or explain it away for me, I just want us to be there for each other in support in whatever ways work. We just may not always be able to process together because we had different experiences."
And then you work privately to find ways to love your brother even though his pain and trauma are different than yours.
It may be time for you to delve further into sibling dynamics in dysfunctional families, sibling coalitions, dysfunctional family roles.
posted by Lyn Never at 10:11 AM on September 29 [5 favorites]
But I suspect that there is great complexity coming from the fact that your brother, having not done the extensive trauma work you have done yet, likely is saying the same things you used to tell yourself. He is voicing the old tapes in your head. He is voicing the same early-stage justifications our culture always starts with before actually confronting a wrong, the "well, it wasn't really wrong exactly because" stage.
And I think it's therapy-worthy if you're still seeing a therapist, to take this to unpack: I don't know how to love someone who doesn't accept my experience. Because you seem really resistant to what goes at the end of that sentence "because it would mean accepting his own." And you must know, if you've had quality trauma therapy anyway, that there's no force on earth stronger than the story we tell ourselves to survive and the denial we construct in order to get through the day without snapping and running through the streets howling.
I also think that you-the-younger-sibling is still looking to him-the-older-sibling as an Authority. As if he can't possibly be currently more fucked-up/less-progressed-along-the-path than you because he's the Big Brother, and probably the Protector in your personal configuration of the sick system you grew up in, therefore he only speaks truth, but his truth is fucking incorrect and that's cognitive dissonance. You need him to validate you and he can't and you can't seem to understand why even though it's pretty obvious.
the TLDR here is: have you tried feeling sorry for him?
If he really was (for you or for everyone) in the Protector role, it's bang on target that his narrative can't start falling apart until the threat is dead. I am using the term Protector though it gets called a lot of different things in research and literature, but like it's almost a cliche that this is the sibling that goes to the funeral, writes the glowing reviews, plays the Good Child. And THEN the preciously-preserved narrative starts to decay. Exactly like it's playing out here.
You really shouldn't be asking him to validate you right now, and he's probably not the person you need to process with at this time. Poor bastard needs your help, if you're able to give it, but at the very least you can't lean on him right now because he can't bear your weight.
If you can find it in yourself to do this, I recommend you go back to him with something like this. "Hey, it's a complicated situation and I'm on my healing path and you're on yours and they aren't going to automatically sync up. We will not be debating whether or not I was abused, I was, that is the truth. It's not your fault and you don't need to defend yourself or anybody else. But I don't need you to solve that or figure it out or explain it away for me, I just want us to be there for each other in support in whatever ways work. We just may not always be able to process together because we had different experiences."
And then you work privately to find ways to love your brother even though his pain and trauma are different than yours.
It may be time for you to delve further into sibling dynamics in dysfunctional families, sibling coalitions, dysfunctional family roles.
posted by Lyn Never at 10:11 AM on September 29 [5 favorites]
There are so many layers of fuckedupness in what you describe. What your dad did was abuse. What your brother is doing is abuse. Just because they deny it doesn't make it less true.
I think a good first step here would be spending time around better, safer people. Think of someone(s) you feel good around, or even just not as bad around. Go spend some time in the same room as them. You don't have to talk about this particular issue, just spend time around them. Maybe have tea together. This is co-regulation. Time near a nervous system that is bigger, more spacious than yours is at the moment.
After that, you could start figuring out how to deal with your brother going forward, or if you even want to.
In the words of Janae Elisabeth (Trauma Geek):
1. There’s no problem to fix (inside us, there’s plenty of problems out there)
Your body and its stress responses are not a problem. These parts of ourselves need compassion, not judgment. We cannot control our body or our stress responses - the idea that we can or should is a lie from dominance culture (hyper-individualist, capitalist, patriarchal, supremacist culture)
2. Intentional co-regulation is the most impactful somatic practice.
Most people didn’t get enough co-regulation in childhood and this created a neuro-developmental delay which makes the body more likely to get stuck in stress responses. Maturation of the nervous system through co-regulation can happen at any point in life if we have access to regular and consistent co-regulation (many hours per week). Co-regulation can be with animals and other elements of nature as well as with “safe enough” people (people who are in a coherent flow state).
posted by danceswithlight at 1:34 PM on September 29 [1 favorite]
I think a good first step here would be spending time around better, safer people. Think of someone(s) you feel good around, or even just not as bad around. Go spend some time in the same room as them. You don't have to talk about this particular issue, just spend time around them. Maybe have tea together. This is co-regulation. Time near a nervous system that is bigger, more spacious than yours is at the moment.
After that, you could start figuring out how to deal with your brother going forward, or if you even want to.
In the words of Janae Elisabeth (Trauma Geek):
1. There’s no problem to fix (inside us, there’s plenty of problems out there)
Your body and its stress responses are not a problem. These parts of ourselves need compassion, not judgment. We cannot control our body or our stress responses - the idea that we can or should is a lie from dominance culture (hyper-individualist, capitalist, patriarchal, supremacist culture)
2. Intentional co-regulation is the most impactful somatic practice.
Most people didn’t get enough co-regulation in childhood and this created a neuro-developmental delay which makes the body more likely to get stuck in stress responses. Maturation of the nervous system through co-regulation can happen at any point in life if we have access to regular and consistent co-regulation (many hours per week). Co-regulation can be with animals and other elements of nature as well as with “safe enough” people (people who are in a coherent flow state).
posted by danceswithlight at 1:34 PM on September 29 [1 favorite]
I don't know how to love someone who doesn't accept my experience.
As per Rainer Maria Rilke:
"[E]ven between the closest human beings infinite distances continue[...]"
What that means to me is that everyone is living in their own bubble and there is never a true meeting of minds. Accepting that does *not* mean accepting anything about somebody's particular view, it just means that even in the best situation the other person will remain them and you will remain you, and never the twain shall meet.
It may be best for you to keep your distance from your brother and his hurtful ways, but that doesn't mean you can't love him.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:31 AM on October 1
As per Rainer Maria Rilke:
"[E]ven between the closest human beings infinite distances continue[...]"
What that means to me is that everyone is living in their own bubble and there is never a true meeting of minds. Accepting that does *not* mean accepting anything about somebody's particular view, it just means that even in the best situation the other person will remain them and you will remain you, and never the twain shall meet.
It may be best for you to keep your distance from your brother and his hurtful ways, but that doesn't mean you can't love him.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:31 AM on October 1
Fwiw you described the challenge of your family situation very well... as in I realize it's not helpful to say I can relate, but some details sure are close so here goes.
do you have any insight from where you sit? how does one sit with this wound? does it get better? do I need to change it?
Having danced through and barely survived my own version of this... I recommend you sit with this wound for as long as it requires you to and possibly shorten that time commitment by grieving the idea of the family you thought you had.
This advice is intended to be pragmatic. Your body is dealing with multiple levels of loss which you are still absorbing on a biological level, and you won't be getting back the buoyancy from this attachment relationship against the internal darkness anytime soon. At some point, when you're ready, you're going to have to regrow your attachment resources in order to compensate for this because the future space where the "good" version of your brother was meant to occupy will need to be addressed and refilled with something meaningful. The sooner you can be investing in that, the better off you will be even 2 years from now.
Know that giving your brother space at this juncture can still be love. Not hurting each other worse still be love. Not taking out rage from unknown causes which you are only beginning to understand, let alone unravel, can still be love. Not trying to preach, but gently cautioning this level of conflict could still get so much worse*. As much as you want to, unless there's a certain amount of meaningful and lasting introspection on your brother's part, you can't change or fix what you didn't see happen to him. The damage is already done, and it was always waiting to surface. You didn't cause it. You didn't create it. The little comment about the obituary would have been some other little comment that would have inevitably set the powder keg off. Why? Because that's how these things work. That's how abusers work. They compartmentalize their shortcomings, usually picking a container in which to deposit and attribute the existence of their shortcomings, and then use that outlet to effectively self-regulate in order to present a composed appearance to the external world. Of course I'm sure you've covered some of this over the course of your therapy. As we start to unpeel the layers, it's quite horrifying to realize how well compartmentalization works.
Speaking from the perspective of having a a 6y-younger brother (and 3y-younger sister from a not-exactly-the-same-but-similar alcoholic experience), I'm going to suggest that developmentally this age gap is too great for you two to have shared as siblings what happened after your brother finished high school (and presumably left the family home). You weren't old enough to really see what he was surviving. You don't know how much of what kind of abuse he was absorbing before the transference for an outlet passed over to you. As an oldest child who has long suffered the wrath of embittered siblings post parental death, I can affirm that your father was already unloading (if not at least downloading) some of the crazy to your brother that no one gave him help for. Your brother dealt with it alone, just as you did. Being a boy did not protect him. Your ridiculous mother also did not protect him from the monstrous neediness lurking in your father. What your father did was compartmentalize it. Your father was probably the most stable with the coping mechanisms he was gleaming off your brother, and then suffered a downgrade so to speak when your brother left and your father didn't consciously understand himself, hence you were literally the next in line for targeting. You didn't do anything specific to deserve it; you were simply next. I can affirm this pattern. This was my sister's story and justification for subsequent hatred of me and our mother. This was also my brother's story and justification for his subsequent hatred of me and my sister. And of course, these fantastic family truths tend to come out in anger, so what can you do?
*Personally, I was stupid and stayed too long thinking I could fix any of it. I had to fight off an attempted assault and then ended up homeless, unemployed, and friendless because everyone invested in the fairytale about the abuser took their side over mine... Even friends from my "before life" gave up on me because I couldn't explain the crazy... I couldn't explain what was bad about what they did because I didn't know what chemical submission was. Besides, it's not like they got to rape me, so no harm, no foul, right? I didn't know what I was facing, so I didn't know how to prepare for it when it happened and it still hurts me to this day. >10 years later, that cluster of losses still eats at me inside. I can't get over how unfair it is. My brother and his helper still come at me for sport, and our ridiculous mother still does nothing, like those f**king bird species that don't intervene to stop their chicks from eating each other.
it would have been incredibly, incredibly emotionally violating for me to be in that environment
Last word of caution: Don't assume that nothing happened to your brother, because maybe it was actually incredibly emotionally violating for your brother to have gone and taken care of that. I'm saying this as the oldest sister who thought I did protect them, but apparently not. Apparently not. Apparently that's what can only be made right by more family-based rape. Which makes sense since as a society we don't exactly support men to admit when they're violated by rapists, but boy we sure expect them to protect us from rapists in ways we never protect them... apparently. Apparently my brother found someone who understands his rape story better than selfish me, so no wonder the hate. No one will ever research it because sustaining this is basically what keeps capitalism-based economies afloat, but I strongly suspect family disintegration after an abuser dies is much more common than we're ready to acknowledge yet. The cycles of lateral violence have nowhere left to go once that capitalist power throne is vacant except outward, moving through subjugated parties indentured via attachment to the abuser likes waves on a lake.
TLDR; If you focus on yourself and the loved ones you share supportive relationships with, it will get better. But if you try too hard to change the fact of it, or coerce your brother's process in any direction whatsoever, it can still get much worse. Change how you're going to approach your role in the new family constellation moving forward, and as far as the thread tugging on your brother goes, allow it to distance with love. Not hurting each other more, and therefore not inadvertently advancing the abuser's work, can still be love.
posted by human ecologist at 7:41 PM on October 2 [1 favorite]
do you have any insight from where you sit? how does one sit with this wound? does it get better? do I need to change it?
Having danced through and barely survived my own version of this... I recommend you sit with this wound for as long as it requires you to and possibly shorten that time commitment by grieving the idea of the family you thought you had.
This advice is intended to be pragmatic. Your body is dealing with multiple levels of loss which you are still absorbing on a biological level, and you won't be getting back the buoyancy from this attachment relationship against the internal darkness anytime soon. At some point, when you're ready, you're going to have to regrow your attachment resources in order to compensate for this because the future space where the "good" version of your brother was meant to occupy will need to be addressed and refilled with something meaningful. The sooner you can be investing in that, the better off you will be even 2 years from now.
Know that giving your brother space at this juncture can still be love. Not hurting each other worse still be love. Not taking out rage from unknown causes which you are only beginning to understand, let alone unravel, can still be love. Not trying to preach, but gently cautioning this level of conflict could still get so much worse*. As much as you want to, unless there's a certain amount of meaningful and lasting introspection on your brother's part, you can't change or fix what you didn't see happen to him. The damage is already done, and it was always waiting to surface. You didn't cause it. You didn't create it. The little comment about the obituary would have been some other little comment that would have inevitably set the powder keg off. Why? Because that's how these things work. That's how abusers work. They compartmentalize their shortcomings, usually picking a container in which to deposit and attribute the existence of their shortcomings, and then use that outlet to effectively self-regulate in order to present a composed appearance to the external world. Of course I'm sure you've covered some of this over the course of your therapy. As we start to unpeel the layers, it's quite horrifying to realize how well compartmentalization works.
Speaking from the perspective of having a a 6y-younger brother (and 3y-younger sister from a not-exactly-the-same-but-similar alcoholic experience), I'm going to suggest that developmentally this age gap is too great for you two to have shared as siblings what happened after your brother finished high school (and presumably left the family home). You weren't old enough to really see what he was surviving. You don't know how much of what kind of abuse he was absorbing before the transference for an outlet passed over to you. As an oldest child who has long suffered the wrath of embittered siblings post parental death, I can affirm that your father was already unloading (if not at least downloading) some of the crazy to your brother that no one gave him help for. Your brother dealt with it alone, just as you did. Being a boy did not protect him. Your ridiculous mother also did not protect him from the monstrous neediness lurking in your father. What your father did was compartmentalize it. Your father was probably the most stable with the coping mechanisms he was gleaming off your brother, and then suffered a downgrade so to speak when your brother left and your father didn't consciously understand himself, hence you were literally the next in line for targeting. You didn't do anything specific to deserve it; you were simply next. I can affirm this pattern. This was my sister's story and justification for subsequent hatred of me and our mother. This was also my brother's story and justification for his subsequent hatred of me and my sister. And of course, these fantastic family truths tend to come out in anger, so what can you do?
*Personally, I was stupid and stayed too long thinking I could fix any of it. I had to fight off an attempted assault and then ended up homeless, unemployed, and friendless because everyone invested in the fairytale about the abuser took their side over mine... Even friends from my "before life" gave up on me because I couldn't explain the crazy... I couldn't explain what was bad about what they did because I didn't know what chemical submission was. Besides, it's not like they got to rape me, so no harm, no foul, right? I didn't know what I was facing, so I didn't know how to prepare for it when it happened and it still hurts me to this day. >10 years later, that cluster of losses still eats at me inside. I can't get over how unfair it is. My brother and his helper still come at me for sport, and our ridiculous mother still does nothing, like those f**king bird species that don't intervene to stop their chicks from eating each other.
it would have been incredibly, incredibly emotionally violating for me to be in that environment
Last word of caution: Don't assume that nothing happened to your brother, because maybe it was actually incredibly emotionally violating for your brother to have gone and taken care of that. I'm saying this as the oldest sister who thought I did protect them, but apparently not. Apparently not. Apparently that's what can only be made right by more family-based rape. Which makes sense since as a society we don't exactly support men to admit when they're violated by rapists, but boy we sure expect them to protect us from rapists in ways we never protect them... apparently. Apparently my brother found someone who understands his rape story better than selfish me, so no wonder the hate. No one will ever research it because sustaining this is basically what keeps capitalism-based economies afloat, but I strongly suspect family disintegration after an abuser dies is much more common than we're ready to acknowledge yet. The cycles of lateral violence have nowhere left to go once that capitalist power throne is vacant except outward, moving through subjugated parties indentured via attachment to the abuser likes waves on a lake.
TLDR; If you focus on yourself and the loved ones you share supportive relationships with, it will get better. But if you try too hard to change the fact of it, or coerce your brother's process in any direction whatsoever, it can still get much worse. Change how you're going to approach your role in the new family constellation moving forward, and as far as the thread tugging on your brother goes, allow it to distance with love. Not hurting each other more, and therefore not inadvertently advancing the abuser's work, can still be love.
posted by human ecologist at 7:41 PM on October 2 [1 favorite]
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That’s his jam. I don’t think it has anything to do with you or the rest of your family. All of the downplaying is just him talking himself into being okay with the way he is behaving.
I’m not sure how you should deal with that, but I think you should probably take his attitude less personally. From this vantage his goal is not to hurt you, it’s to prop himself up. Not that that makes it acceptable, but it might help to think that he’s not actively hostile towards you, he just can’t look himself in the mirror if he accepts your experience.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:30 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]