Total and Utter Disrespect. Ideas, Insight, Reaction,Opinion?

[susiestar]

I cannot stand the way things have happened this year. We scheduled a delayed celebration with my folks for today. Last night the poo hit the rotary oscillator. Wiz let us know that 2 celebrations were NOT the plan, but we would just find gfgbro there when we arrived. NO WARNING, NO REQUEST, NO DISCUSSION, NOTHING. For the last 6 weeks she has not been taking or returning my calls.

Jess heard this last night and had a panic attack. I came very close. My mom SWEARS she spoke to me about it. She did. LAST FEBRUARY. I told her that we could maybe discuss it closer to the holidays but it is not solely my decision and I would not push my kids into or out of it. That is the ONLY time we have discussed it. There is absolutely no way it would be a minor chat or a detail that I would forget, or something that I would agree to without talking to my kids.

I can get over the disrespect to me, it is what I have always had, what I was raised to tolerate. Jess had just begun to let her guard down more and to open herself up to her gma in the last few months, It may take years for her to try again to this degree. She didn't sleep more than 2 hours at a time last night with-o whimpering, crying or begging for him to stop hurting her and promising to be good and not tell. thank you didn't sleep well either but he tossed and turned and kept waking up all night - HIGHLY unusual for him He won't admit to having a problem wtih his uncle but it shows in dreams. mostly he wont admit it happened because he saw how J and T were treated when they spoke up, so he pretended it never happened. And on some level he saw all of that as normal so it doesn't register as a problem.

My mom told me that since it has been 2 years, Jess should be 'over' it. The tdocs have asked us why on Earth would e even CONSIDER allowing gfgbro to be in our lives, even on the very edge? By every therapist I mean at least 10 considering the tdocs all the way back to when I was in college and the various ones we saw while working on the conversion/epilepsy thing. Any mention of this sent my mother into a tizzy though she and gfgbro offered to 'take' me to a therapist to help figure things out so I wouldn't be so 'unhappy with my life'. I bit that hook years back and won't EVER again.

I guess 2 years is the magic number to be over something. Odd though. My mother sure wasn't over having panic attacks if she just drove onto the university streets without even turning onto any street that went near her old office or classrooms. Part of her breakdown a few years ago was triggered by things from her job and she sure as sugar could not even go onto the university for a lot longer than 2 years.

The reason my mom has NEVER seen J have a full blown panic attack is that j is certain and completely terrified that her grandma will hate her if she tells/shows how bad it is for her. Doesn't that just break your heart? Imagine dealing with not just the anxiety attacks and fear, but also the abuse and shame while always wondering if you were going to be hated by someone who is supposed to love you unconditionally if she finds out.

husband and thank you are going over tonight for dinner and presents. They are NOT going to upset anyone, or because they have forgiven and forgotten. They are goign for Wiz. They can mitigate the ugly things he says and they can go into another room to play a game togther and give him some refuge.

Insight, opinions, ideas are welcome. Thanks for letting me vent.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Susie, we are doing a thread in P.E. about the process of recovering from an abuser's decision to label us abusable, about what we learn and accept about ourselves from having been targeted and victimized. There is something there too about everything having been sealed in such contempt that we cannot touch or take strength from our cores without reinterpreting our core identities through confronting what they taught us about ourselves, about who we were and what we deserved.

I thought about that when you posted that you were used to disrespect from your family.

I am not familiar with the backstory for your family, Susiestar. I hear surprise and outrage in your post. Is it that the grandmother cancelled the Christmas celebration, which is one of the few times you gather as a whole family? And that the only other person who would be there would be the abuser? So, you are supposed to accept the abuser, pretend, along with him or her, that nothing bad happened?

I would be angry, too.

I am angry, for you.

How dare they discount you!

Rejection is a big thing in my family of origin, too. I concluded that, now that the power to physically hurt us is no longer an option, the abusers use whatever power they do have to hurt us. The thing I take away from this is that, like every abused child, I wish for what I never had with a fierceness that is heartbreaking. I wanted the holidays, I wanted someone to care about my pregnancies, about my children, about my cooking and my home and my feelings.

I want to be celebrated, I want to be cherished. If I could not have those things, I at least wanted and expected my children to be cherished. It hardly occurred to me that they would be victimized, that they would be toyed with and teased and rejected, as I had been. Had my abuser cherished my children, I would have seen it as a form of validation for myself. It was like admitting there had been something so wrong with me that their abuse or neglect was justified somehow, but that this badness, this thing that made me abusable, was not in my children. When I would see instead that same kind of game playing, that same rejection, happening to my children, I would be so furious...and yet, because I had not resolved my own issues, I was powerless to not want what I wanted from my family of origin. The only freedom from those feelings comes from stepping out of the circle entirely. We have to heal to the point that we truly do see the rot at the core of what happened to us and reject it for ourselves.

It is not okay that you were rejected by your parents. Not now, and not ever. That you are used to it is their pathology. It has nothing to do with you.

To me, it looks like your family of origin is playing the same hurtful game they played with you. They are hurting you again, and hurting you double, through your children.

The dirty buggers.

It isn't even a matter of "Oh, to heck with them." It truly is a matter of seeing their pathologies so clearly that we no longer believe anything they taught us about who we are, about who we have the right to be.

Until we do that, until we know in our deepest hearts that our families of origin have chosen, and are choosing, again and again, to indulge their sicknesses instead of doing the hard work of healing, we are vulnerable to them because we think they want the same things we do.

They don't, susiestar.

They are dangerous to you, because you love and are vulnerable to them.

Cedar

 

[BusynMember]

Susie, your replies are always so great to me that I wanted to respond, but I don't remember your backstory either. However, I am sorry you feel disrespected. I know how that is and have made a conscious decision to split from most of my DNA relatives (the ones who I'm supposed to love and they me simply because we have similar DNA).

Life is much more peaceful and calm now and I refuse to hang with anyone, no matter who it is, who abuses me and tries to twist it to make me the abuser. I have a son we adopted at age six and I only explain that because I can't believe he'd feel this way about us if we had had him since birth...he is forever trying to talk me into thinking I am an abuser. I wrote him letters when I was grieving because he would not speak to me over a few mistakes I made that would not normally break up a family. He would disagree, but...that is his right. He scanned them into his computer.

My therapist, who only sees adoptive families, explained that he keeps them to be able to justify remaining angry and won't think about the good things I have done for him and the love that he had. He has convinced his wife of this. He could have told her I was very good to him, but allowed her to go so far as for her to be scared of me, yet she doesn't know me. I have never hurt him, broken the law to hurt anyone, even spanked him...but he allows her to be afraid of me. For what, I have no idea. Only he knows and only he knows why he didn't refute her fear by assuring her that I am a good person and have always been a loving mother. Why? (shrug)

It isn't his fault. He has attachment issues. But in his mind, he thinks he was abused. So be it. After the grieving ended, about five years later, I decided not to allow him to try to tag me as an abuser anymore. I can't control what he thinks, but I can decide not to listen to it. Nobody else on earth has called me abusive so...yet he is very insistent that it is my fault...whatever "it" is. I'm not even sure. The letters?

At any rate, I am sorry for your hurting heart. Please know that you should not even listen to that. Whether it is our parents or our children or other loved ones, it always hurts, but with the right therapy we can learn to live with it and even feel sorry for them. They seem to distort reality.

 

[susiestar]

The backstory is complicated and long. Gfgbro is 2 yrs older than I am and has always felt that he had the absolute right to do anything he wanted to me. He started getting into real trouble in school by age 10 and after 6th grade he was sent to a private school that did not believe that grades 7 and 8 were needed, so the boys (all boy school) went from grade 6 to 9 over a summer. He took city buses home and was skilled at getting winos to buy him booze and porno mags. His porno/sex obsession was scary and my folks ignored it. THey ignored or were not aware of a lot. His abuse of me was mostly physical and verbal/emotional, but many people think he is the most wonderful great guy around. He used to hold the aggression in for months to take it out on me whenever he came home.

Anything he does is okay, and if he does something wrong, as soon as he gives one of his apologies it is to be instantly forgiven and everything is supposed to go on as if it never happened. That isn't reality, but it is what has been demanded of me by my family for my entire life. However, it is just fine to get angry over something I did as far back as age four even now. As in my father stormed off from dinner one night about a year ago in anger over something I did at age four. But if I am unwilling to bring my daughter to be around bro because she has panic attacks at the THOUGHT of seeing him, well, we are bieng unreasonable. Oh, his apologies? "I am sorry you are so oversensitive." "I am sorry you cannot take a joke."

I spent YEARS hearing from him after every family gathering about how upset he and my mom were, how my mom cried as she cleaned up the 'destruction' of her house that my kids caused, etc... For a long time I heard that every word out of my mouth was bitter and grudge holding and mean, so I spent an entire year saying absolutely NOTHING that was not super cheery, but even that was apparently not happy. It is bizarre to me.

One of gfgbro's favorite things is to wait outside the main bathroom, which is separated from the rooms we usually spend time in, and he catches you leaving the bathroom to 'correct' you which is of course reinforced by poking or pinching your side hard enough to leave bruises. If my mom sees the bruises, he convinces her that Wiz has caused them all. at one point I followed Wiz during several gatherings so that he had zero chance to do this, and J and T still came home with bruises.

2 and a half years ago my folks took Wiz to Europe for a couple of weeks. Chris was asked to feed their cats and had notes to do things like not leave one cat outside and to always leave one faucet drippign for him. This cat would NOT drink from a bowl of water and had serious kidney problems. During that trip our pump died, so did our air conditioning, and so did our cat. We have always buried pets in my folks yard, and Wiz would be heartbroken if we changed that. So we went and showered at my folks and buried the cat. Bro had a FIT because we left a 'mess'. Which consisted of 2 kernels of unpopped popcorn and one neatly folded shirt on the table. oh, the biggest sin? We did not dry the water out of the shower after we were done. WHO DOES THAT? Not my parents, sure as sugar not my husband. I don't know guys who do that. My parents' door is a lock that we have always had a key to and they are adamant about that and always have been. Heck, my dad's bro has always keyed his house locks to open with the same key - ALWAYS. My brother changed the lock on my parents' home while they were gone and told me it was because my children, husband and self were such hideous people who did NOTHING but destroy other people's things and my parents' home and he had to protect htem from us.

I called Germany and apologized in absolute HYSTERICS to my father. He was confused and IRATE. If he had been in town, I don't think my bro would have escaped with-o hospitalization. My mom is another story. She thinks I should just ignore him, but SHE doesn't. He will tell you something over and over until it seems like the truth. After you have heard something a hundred or more times, it is easy to believe it. Over the years he has tried six times to get me to join him to take control of their lives away on the pretext that they are senile (not even close), and gone to my mother after I refuse to tell her that I went to a lawyer and am filing papers and he wants to rescue them from me. They have to provide a house for him because otherwise he will be homeless with their granddau. Supposedly he was to get through grad school in 2-2 1/2 years, and into the last half of the second year they sold the property that he was living at. He had a full year rent free to stay there, and another year at rent of about $200 or less per year including half an acre of land, 3br trailer, large 3 car shop building and another outbuilding. They found some other land and bought it and it has a trailer, and my dad tried to not let him move there but my mother had a fit.

Nothing he does is ever bad enough to take a stand for my mom. There is always an excuse. family is always forgiven as long as it isn't me. At least that is how it looks to me and to tdocs who have worked with us. Bruising her grandkids and giving them weeks of nightmares and panic attacks? We must forgive him and allow him to continue because he needs help not punishment. Just ask her. I have panic attacks? I need to get over them. She has them? Everyone needs to make the world the way she wants it. She developed them around her job and left on disability (she has a lot of physical health problems and forcing herself to make it to work when very ill did a real number on her). It took her over five YEARS to be able to drive near the university yet we should get over our problems in a few months or less.

This keeps on keeping on, and I cuold post years of backstory that would take up the entire forum. The only real thread is that he is golden no matter what he does not accomplish, like NEVER holding a regular job in his entire life is just fine and dandy, as is being a parent 3.5 days a week where my folks have his daughter overnight at least once in that time because it is soooo hard to be a single parent when you have 3 days off a week. husband and I never get a day off from parenting, but when we wanted babysitting? nope, have to schedule it weeks in advance and get cancelled on because gfgbro has a crisis. Want a sitter to go see a therapist? fine, but ONLY if we tell her everything we will discuss with therapist, what therapist says, and she gets to send a letter in with her version of what we need help with and how messed up she thinks we are. I wish that was a joke. At one point she sent a history to Wiz' therapist and it was bizarre, things like not allowing him to eat veggies, only allowing him to eat boxed mac and cheese for a year, and all sorts of other things that did not happen. Now Wiz did have strong food issues, but they were NOT imposed by us or encouraged by us and my mom dang well knew it.

This is the type of thing I have always dealt with.

 

[InsaneCdn]

My mom told me that since it has been 2 years, Jess should be 'over' it.

Suzie, it seems to me that there are multiple layers to the problem - part of it going back a long ways and involving multiple people, and part of it involving a specific incident two years ago. I don't know what that incident was, but obviously it wasn't something trivial.

Totally agree with you protecting Jess by not going. Beyond that, no advice...

 

[BusynMember]

Susie, your brother sounds like a sociopath. I think I know what you mean by his aggression. If so, it is heinous that your family did nothing, yet it is typical in VERY abusive families to turn the other cheek and allow the abuser to do what he may. Your family is atypical yet not so atypical as they should be. Many abused kids were blamed as the bad guy...not sure why. It's best to lose them as completely as you can. None of your kids should have to suffer at their hands. Nor should you.

I assume we're not just talking about your brother beating you up sometimes here. in my opinion it's time to move on completely. They don't deserve a kind person like you in their lives. I mean none of them do.

Hugs.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Anger releases the energy we need to blast through dysfunctional family patterns and see just how sick what we've learned to accept or adjust to is, susiestar. Given the nastiness of the visible patterns, the toxicity going on under the radar must be unimaginable.

You posted that things like this have always happened in your family of origin. The difference this time is that you are healthy enough to react to the wrongness in the way it has always been with real anger and receive feedback from those who know you well here on the site.

That's a giant leap forward.

Soon, you will be strong enough to be angry for yourself, not just for your children. And then, once you can really see the wrongness in it, once you can see how pointless the hurt they deal out is, you will change the pattern.

Cedar

 

[AnnieO]

I did not read any of the responses, because after the original post I want to hop in the car, drive down there and beat the SNOT outta your parents for even considering it.

 

[Liahona]

The abuse in my family of origin is not as significant as yours, but the patterns are the same; blame the abused, abuser can do no wrong, parents not understanding and very hurt that we won't be around abuser. I don't talk about my brother with my family. We live very far away from him. If he is invited to family functions we won't go and have told my mom so; which she was very sad about. It would be very difficult if he lived close enough to be able to surprise us.