Guys I need support and ideas.
I have been dealing with my personal/family trauma and a recent divorce. My sister has helped me a lot after, (I've had months of panic attacks and depression) she's studying psychology, I truly appreciate her help. A few weeks back I stopped messaging her, and I had a weird feeling. I didn't feel genuine and I still feel I can't trust her.
In the past she had been like a bully to me and overall we never had a good relationship. My parents have narcissistic tendencies and past family trauma as well. These past days I've been trying to be genuine with her, but the past has cast a big shadow. There were many times I felt betrayed by her and we have never brought up the things she's done, at all. She mostly talks about how she was wronged by our parents (and I believe her experiences) but in the past she's also refused to admit any wrongdoing on her part. She was pretty rebellious and as I'm the youngest I got a lot of hate from my older siblings because my mother played favorites since my siblings were so unruly. She got pregnant early in her life and brought my nephew to live with us and part of the responsibility to raise him and be a free babysitter fell on me(she didn't pay bills or paid anything else. Bonus, I got robbed of part of my childhood). Years after it passed, she resented my mom for not paying a more expensive university for her degree despite my mom receiving her and her child back home and taking care of my nephew (all for free, she didn't work to pay bills or babysitting) while she was studying in another city. She says she was stigmatized by my mom for having a child and resents that I got my career paid for in a more expensive university, which I think is unfair and entitled, given the circumstances.
I had so much anxiety about it these past days that I decided to write a letter to her, asking her to talk about these issues, making a list of the things I remember(obviously with the things I remember she did to me specifically, except the university thing) and letting her know that to have a genuine relationship with her and to let these things go, we need to address this, and that I've struggled with pretending it simply didn't happen. In my experience she had always been fondling a trigger and then blaming the shot she got afterwards, or doing something nice for me and then hanging it over my head when something didn't go as she wanted, but never acknowledging she provoked things to happen, among other stuff.
I wrote said letter outlining the things that have hurt me that she did to me specifically, and the positions we as a family were put in when she came back to live with us among other stuff... I still haven't sent that letter, I'm afraid of doing it, and at the same time I feel I can't keep pretending we're best friends while I still have all of these things raging in my chest. It seems she has changed and she's a different person, but I still distrust her after all our past history.
In your opinion how should I address this without burning bridges? Do you think this will end our relationship for good? I have nobody to trust with this, I'm not in therapy at the moment and I'm having a lot of anxiety about this, I'm extremely conflicted. Please, help me, any opinions you can give me will be greatly appreciated.
Posted Aug 22, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC
I completely understand and relate to your feelings of not being able to continue without addressing this. It seems healthy and fair and good to talk to her about the past. Not saying anything is self-erasure, which is very painful.
If the letter is similar to what you've written here, she might be offended or react defensively to the parts about her causing her own problems. Better to simplify it and stick to the things that she actually did directly to you that hurt you. Try to leave out the other judgments about her decisions. Keep it about you and how you felt and feel, not about her or thoughts about how her past choices affected her.
Communication workshops teach using I- statements for confrontations like this. "I feel..." or "I felt..." "When you did X (or when Y happened), I felt Z." "When you left your son with us and I had to babysit without anyone asking me first, I felt unimportant, overlooked and used. I missed out on my own childhood." As opposed to something like, "You didn't take responsibility for your own child, so I had to do it."
A trick for distinguishing feelings from judgments is if "that" or "like" follows the I feel. "I feel like you made bad decisions" is a judgment, not really an I-statement; you made bad decisions that made your life harder, you were playing with fire, you shot yourself in the foot and blamed the gun etc. aren't feelings, like invisible, frustrated, alone, overburdened, or whatever you felt at the time.
If you focus on your feelings, then you will express yourself and your pain without attacking her at all, and that greatly reduces the likelihood of defensiveness on her part and increases the chance of her understanding and empathizing with you, and even apologizing.
Since your sister is studying psychology, hopefully she will have learned something about how best to respond to you expressing how she has hurt you.
I think a letter is a good way to go because it is less confrontational than a conversation and she can't interrupt you or cut you off. Even if she never responds or responds badly, you will feel better having yourself acknowledge and state your pain and anger.
I also remember thinking for a long time that my older sister frequently made decisions that made her life harder, like deciding to go back to school full-time, while also working, and have a second baby at the exact same time, when she easily could have put either of those off just a few months and had an easier time overall with both. I judged her.
However, I understand now that her way of operating, making things harder than they need to be, is also a trauma response...needing chaos, difficulty and challenges because that is what she is familiar with. We sometimes create crises because not having a crisis would be so damn new and strange and much more uncomfortable than the familiar discomfort of an active crisis.
She also took pride in being independent and feeling like she could handle anything; her sense of self-worth was tied up in handling so much, doing everything in her family, so not having a crisis to manage would have brought her face to face with her lack of self-worth and caused a loss of identity. She used the external environment to make herself feel important because she didn't feel important from within herself while just existing.
Good luck! This stuff is not easy.
Thank you so, so much for responding. Only today I started writing because my anxiety about the issue raised to bad levels, almost to a panic attack and if I didn't write about it, it'd slowly kill me inside. Though talking about it and thinking of sending this letter literally terrorizes me because she's been used to going nuclear and lecture me dad style by talking over me, raising her voice, interrupting and thinking she knows me better than I know myself, patronizing and condescension (that's why I chose the letter). Hopefully things have changed her, crossing my fingers.
I will make sure all the things you said here are covered, though I'm glad to read I'm not a complete dumbass cause some of the things you mentioned were already in what I wrote, so that's a relief.
I tried to make sure to say that what I wrote was my perspective on the things that happened, that things for her might have a different perspective than mine and that by no means was this supposed to be accusatory, but I still needed to talk about them because they were truly hurtful and I never understood why she seemed to feel joy while hurting me. I stated factual cases that I remember vividly. Your story gives me hope that maybe I will be able to understand why things happened and maybe have a genuine relationship from now on with my sister after decades of it being broken because I felt I had to run away from her n order to have peace of mind.
You have no idea how much relief it gives me to read your response, I always feel so insecure and lack assertiveness when it comes to these things because I always beat myself up over other people's reactions to what I say (yay, abuse response), so having a checklist of how to frame this helps me immensely to try to avoid mistakes.
Again, thank you, thank you so much, this is really valuable to me. Much love and I wish you well in your journey to recovery. You're a badass. <3
You're very welcome.
And you're not a dumbass at all. I had to do a workshop for customer service at work last year, and it turned out to be all about communication, empathy, effective confrontation, etc. and all that has been super useful in my personal life.
I will say, I tried this with my dad who also has narcissistic traits...and it did not go well at all. He attacked and insulted me. I had kept it so, so simple, didn't go into details about every event over my lifetime, only said I was hurt when he left me and hurt when he ignored me, and even started out saying I wasn't judging and wanted to forgive him. His response was pretty vicious. That hurt.
I do feel better in the end for at least trying it. That experience was important for me in letting go. I've tried to have that conversation with him so many times over the years, and if I could even follow proven steps for healthy, non-judgmental confrontation, and he still attacked me and still refused to apologize...there is just no hope of being able to have any other kind of communication with him that isn't incredibly painful for me.
With most people, these confrontation "techniques" work well about 80% of the time. It isn't guaranteed your sister won't react badly, but your feelings are valid and important regardless of how people respond to them. Since she is already talking with you about trauma and parental abuse and studying psychology, the chances are better it might go okay. Like, I might not recommend bothering to try this with your parents, but with her there's a chance of reconciling and having a good relationship going forward.
I'm with you completely on not being able to continue talking with her about anything else without getting this off your chest first.