I recently ran across this post online and found it surprisingly validating. While the whole thing has parallels to The Susan Incident, this paragraph really caught my attention:
“You are not overreacting, and FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK [Susan] for this behavior and fuck family members for enabling it by acting like your reactions to bad stuff [are out of line].”
All I could think was, wow, I wish I’d had this advice and the ability to respond like this 6+ years ago. For example, I wish I’d been able to say this:
Hey, I don’t want this to be forever, but until I can trust that this won’t ever happen again, until I trust that y’all understand how serious this is, and until y’all stop treating me like I’m the one doing something wrong, this is how it’s going to be.”
“Until you get a real apology and whatever else you need to put this behind you, as long as other family members keep pressuring you on her behalf, Keep. Naming. What. She. Did.”
(Well, I kind of did do that, after I found out that Joe & Susan lied about it all to everyone else. It’s just that no one wanted to listen.)
For her: “Susan, do you understand why I am mad? It’s not just for having a conversation. It’s because when I simply asked you to go elsewhere to have it, and it was clear that it was upsetting to me, you refused to do that one thing. It’s ’cause you could have said you were sorry but you didn’t. It’s ’cause you raged at me when I brought it up to Joe. It’s because you both lied about that rage attack to everyone else, and told them it was all my fault, that I picked that fight. It’s because your fauxpology came with a side of blame, like me being pissed off and upset about this is “overreacting”.”
For other family members: “She stood there laughing and chatting with the hospice nurse, while I was trying to cope with my beloved father’s death. When I politely asked them to take their conversation somewhere else, she refused to doso and continued her behavior. The next day she flew into a rage, literally yelling in my face when I tried to talk to Joe about it. They both lied to everyone else about who started that fight. When I got understandably upset, they tried to blame me for “overreacting”.
If you want to work on someone about this, go talk to Susan about her behaviors instead of trying to police my feelings.”
For everyone/both: “You want me to come back and visit, and put this all behind us? I’d like that, too, someday, so, show me that I can trust this won’t happen again by taking the time it did happen seriously. Show me that you’ve learned from this.
At minimum, going forward, you can’t continue to treat me like the problem person all the time. You can’t treat my opinions or feelings or life choices as though they are WRONG or inconvenient for you or a sign that I’m irrational.
You don’t have to agree with me or understand it in order to do it. Not negotiable. ”
Not that it would have made any difference to the outcome — I highly doubt anyone would have listened any more than they did(n’t).
I just wish *I* had had the ability, the groundedness to see it that clearly, and communicate it that succinctly. I wish I’d realized sooner that I had spent my whole life fighting a losing battle whose outcome had been decided probably even before I was born. I wish I’d been able to understand that that boundary was needed — even though these people were supposed to be my “family” — and to set it a long time ago. It would have saved me a lot of time, pain, and work.
“…I am a lifelong sufferer from depressive illness. I have spent many years trying to work out why, and I have come up with many possible explanations. To date the most convincing one I can find is that my mother unwittingly “gave” it to me… through the tragedy of her own postnatal depression.
“My mother’s depression was a closely held secret. In fact, none of my family could remember Jean, my mother, having it. Perhaps there just wasn’t a name for it then. But when she died, more than 30 years after my birth – she killed herself after a depressive episode – and I checked, many years later, on her medical records, there it was in black and white.
“The note comes in July 1956, six months after my birth. It reads: “It would appear that her present relapse has been going on since the birth of her first child.” She was prescribed potassium bromide – an anticonvulsive and sedative, a precursor of modern antidepressants. Later, until 1959, there were prescriptions of phenobarbitone and Largactil. Phenobarbitone is another tranquilliser, Largactil is a “phenothiazine for treating schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, particularly paranoid symptoms”.
“So for the first three years of my life – at least – my mother would have been suffering some form of psychosis. What I was faced with for the first few years of my life was a mother whose emotional spectrum, presumably, was limited, and registered at the dark end.
“I suspect I would not have often looked up to see a delighted, smiling face.”
“I cannot say with certainty how causally tied [my own depressive episodes] are to my experience as a newborn of my mother’s depression. But more than one developmental psychologist has explained to me how profoundly sensitive babies are to their mother’s facial expressions. As I understand it, the unresponsiveness of a depressive mother who cannot mirror her baby can lead to the development of a depressive child. The report rightly recognises this, noting the effect “over decades on their children’s prospects, both in terms of development in the womb and during the crucial early years”.
I can still vividly remember the second visit to my therapist, to whom I had just started telling the whole tangled story, and who had given me the assignment of trying to define any “beliefs” in my FOO. I had come up with “Mom is never wrong” and “Susan is never to blame.”
I voiced those two phrases and then I looked at her and asked, “Are those the same thing?” And she instantly got the biggest, widest smile on her face, a genuine, happy smile of approval.
And I suddenly REALLY wanted to see that again.
Immediately, viscerally, desperately, I wanted – NEEDED – to make her smile at me like that again.
The feeling was so strong, and unexpected, that I immediately did my best to hide it, and I didn’t mention it to her, ever.
In hindsight, it is more accurate to say that, while at the time my THOUGHT was to “make” her smile at me — what I really wanted was simply “for her to smile at me like that again” — without the part about me having to make her do it.
Because of course a baby doesn’t usually have to “do” anything to make a mother smile at her. Sometimes the mother just smiles, I expect. But in my case, I think it shows that I didn’t get that kind of smile — the smile that says, I love you, for no reason other than that you are here — and deep in my mind, it became established that I had to do something to make it happen. I wasn’t going to get it for just being me. Not from her, anyway.
And the pattern continues into the years that follow. Maybe my siblings picked up on her dysfunction, through things as subtle as a smile that didn’t happen, and mirrored HER. Maybe they were trying to gain her acceptance and approval as well, I don’t know. Maybe this is why I have never been able to make my sister laugh.
I do know that I wasn’t ever “really” a part of the family in some eyes, and for years I tried so hard to “make” them smile at me and accept me — when acceptance should have been automatic — but because of my mother’s illness, it wasn’t.
But the one place that I did get those kind of smiles was from my dad. Not quite the same as from a mother, I am sure, but I got something, enough to keep me from being a complete lifelong depressive mess.
In fact, I may have been saved by the factor written about in this article, which was what led me to the one that inspired this post. My guess is that with my birth and my sister’s, my father wasn’t depressed. I heard stories from my mother about how he insisted on giving my sister her first bath. And while at the time of my birth, he may have been under stress from the move and the new job, and confused or even angry about how my mother ran a household, and how she reacted to my birth – I’m going to say he probably wasn’t depressed.
“The report, like many modern social care reports, focuses on the economic cost of such illnesses, which strikes me as odd. It is the human cost that is primary – the agony of mental illness, which is very often avoidable with treatment, being passed from mother to child.
“… For me and thousands of others, the long-term costs are, 50 years later, being pinned to a bed by your own mind unable to think anything but the blackest thoughts… I haven’t suffered postnatal depression – but I have suffered from it.
Around the holiday season, one tends to think of one’s FOO, whether one wants to or not. It happens less and less as the years pass, but it still happens sometimes. In my case, I think I ruminate on all the bullshit that happened because I am reminding myself exactly WHY they are not in my life any longer.
One phrase I learned while shoveling through it all was this:
And so it was with this year.
My sister has four kids, two girls and two boys. The first boy was a handful. I happen to think a lot of what he pulled off was because he was smarter than her – or at least, more creative. The best one I know about was when he used the attic access in the boys’ bedroom to create a pot-smoking den in the attic. Freakin’ genius. The kid only got caught when one day he thought the house was empty, but one of my older brothers was visiting, and the uncle was still in the house and heard him overhead in the attic.
Anyway. So by the time he was a teen, my sister was at her wits’ end I suppose, but her proposed solution was that she wanted her husband to teach the kid a lesson – a physical lesson. I don’t know the exact details, as of course I heard all this second-hand. But she definitely wanted her husband to physically attack the boy in some way, in order to discipline him.
God, that is so cringey even to type out.
Well, my BIL wouldn’t do it.
So my sister’s next idea was to BRING IN HER TWO BROTHERS TO DO THE JOB.
Again, this is all second-hand, but I guess she was ready to have our two oldest brothers fly in for the express purpose of doing some kind of physical discipline to the kid.
I don’t know what else they might have tried before this idea showed up.
I do know that this idea is not going to work.
I have a suspicion that family therapy, or anything like that, even if they tried it, would not be too effective, because CLEARLY the problem here is the KID, and CERTAINLY NOT MY SISTER.
Just like when I went to therapists, some think that “proves” I was the problem, and everyone expected it to “fix” me. Which is often the case, that the people who need to do the changing don’t think they can possibly be the problem.
Well, my sister’s plan never came to fruition, AFAIK. I think my BIL found out about it and put the kibosh on it.
But in revisiting it this year, I realized that this story is another confirmation that my sister is my mother all over again.
Because remember how, when my dad used to be gone all week, traveling for work — my mother used to keep a tally of what the boys had done wrong all week, and when Dad got home on Friday he had to physically punish them?
No, actually, because I’ve only alluded to this a couple of times here and there, and never really spelled it out. Well, I can remember Mom doing this to the two younger boys, and I have no doubt she did it with the older ones too.
I can remember standing in my parents’ bedroom, near the closet, watching the proceedings. I probably had to be in the room because I was certainly no more than 5, if my mom was still there, and presumably I was not to be left alone in another room. (Which doesn’t make a lot of sense coming from a parent who let me sit outside on the sidewalk for hours, and sent me to walk to school by myself, so maybe I just wanted to be near my Dad when he returned from being gone all week. Or maybe Dad was the one who realized I should not be left unsupervised. I don’t know. But I do know I was in the room.)
The punishing involved both parents: Mom reading from her scribbled list on the back of an envelope, or something, and Dad swatting the boys on the behind with a belt as they lay on the bed.
This is straight authoritarian parenting, the “strict father” family model.
I now wonder if maybe Mom was angry at Dad because he DIDN’T PLAY HIS ROLE PROPERLY. He was supposed to be the head of the household and make all the decisions (and therefore take all the blame). With him gone all week (to earn the money, but that apparently isn’t a good enough excuse) — those responsibilities fell on her and she couldn’t deal with them.
Further, since she had to do HIS job, maybe she decided, consciously or unconsciously, therefore she wouldn’t do HER job — which was to cook and clean and launder and maybe even nurture. She passed most of THOSE responsibilities to her oldest daughter.
Who in turn, years later, decided that physical punishment from a man (preferably a relative of some kind, after all this is FAMILY) was the thing that had to be done to a kid. Like mother, like daughter.
If you’d told me, back in that horrible year of 2012-13, that in less than five years, I’d be positively GLAD to be shed of my siblings — I’d have said you were nuts.
But, the American political landscape being what it has been since 2016 or so — I really am. I’m super-glad I haven’t had the experiences of many of my friends, who can’t spend time on Facebook any more, or dread going to family events, because they can’t stand to see people they love and care about spouting conservative ugliness, and they know if THEY dare to speak up, it will become a fight (and they will probably be seen as the ones who started it).
It’s something I’ve continually wondered about, why conservatives automatically assume they get to say whatever they feel like saying, while opposing viewpoints are not even suffered to be spoken aloud – as was my experience in that group of siblings and which came blurting out of my mouth in a moment of truth in one of my first therapy sessions (“Oh, I can have [my own opinions], I just can’t say them out loud.”).
For a while I thought it was because they tend to assume they are in the right because they are the historical default, as well as they tend to believe they have God on their side. But that didn’t explain why they have to be so loud, and usually angry, about it.
Now I tend to think it’s not really anger but more that they are afraid: afraid that if they allow another opinion to be heard, it could be a disaster for them and their stolid mindset. It could require a lot of work to overcome the cognitive dissonance that will occur if it turns out that the other guy has a decent, logical argument – which progressives usually do, because that’s how we form our positions – and they can’t form an equally coherent argument back.
Reading this from Bertrand Russell cemented that for me. If you get angry, it’s because you are aware that you don’t have a sound basis for your opinion.
What it boils down to is, I’m glad I got it over with prior to the American political shitshow of the past 2+ years, because if I hadn’t done it then, I would sure as hell have done it sometime after Chump’s election, probably in a fight — and then I would have worried that I was doing it for the wrong reasons.
But the divisiveness in the culture is real, just like the divide in my FOO is real. There are two lists in the book, two ways to look at life, two ways to approach anything new or different: one is with interest and curiosity, one is with fear. You can say either yes or no. It’s that simple (at the same time being as complicated as human beings can be).
I know a lot of conservatives like to say that “Obama divided the country!” Not true: Obama’s ELECTION divided the country. Obama, or more accurately his election to POTUS, was the catalyst, but he didn’t do the dividing. People divided themselves onto one side or the other, all their own choice and doing. People decided they were against Obama, rather than deciding they were Americans. And the crucial point here is, they did it for a NOT GOOD REASON. They did it for the color of his skin.
I choose to divide myself from Chump’s “Great Again” America for a lot of really good reasons. Racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia, what is in someone else’s pants or what they choose to do with their body — I don’t have the time or energy for that kind of judginess, especially when it’s aimed at me and my gender half the time.
I always want to say to conservatives, Hey, why not just TRY it? Try spending a day NOT being automatically, knee-jerk critical of everyone you see who looks different, or speaks differently. At the end of the day, I guarantee you’ll be a lot less angry and have more energy. Minding your own business is a huge time- and anger-saver.
Caveat: however, you may then have to spend some time figuring out what you are REALLY angry about, and that may take some work. But you should still do it, because otherwise you are just transmitting your pain to others, and that’s not fair or healthy.
In fact, that choice to not be automatically critical was — ha ha — critical in my own awakening: the day in 2008 that I got a link from my FIL to a website that was “funny pictures of cats with captions” was a turning point in my personal growth, and key to my future happiness.
I clicked the link, I spent a little time reading things, and I came very VERY close to turning my nose up, writing some nasty comment about how stupid this all was, and flouncing off in a superior huff.
I am eternally grateful that I did not. Because on that site is where I started to figure out that my so-called family wasn’t really very nice to me — and it was because these people WERE nice to me.
I wrote a lot more about it here, but the short version is, I still remember how I was reluctant to post on there that my husband and I were going to New Zealand. It was his first earned sabbatical from his job, and we had planned a huge 3-week trip. No one in my family cared about it, of course.
And when I did finally post about it — because there were people from NZ that I wanted to meet if I could — I was expecting a fair amount of “Oh, sure, nice for some people” and “It’s dangerous to meet people from the internet!” and so on. Because of course, that’s what I would get from my siblings.
What I got instead – to my delighted surprise – was interest, excitement, encouragement, and exhortations to “post pictures, please!”
In contrast, at the next reunion, we lugged along the laptop which had all our pictures on it from the trip. Not one person expressed any interest in seeing them, nor asked anything about the trip. NOT ONE. We mentioned it ourselves a couple of times, but no one cared. We made bids and got nothing.
And that was how I started to realize that the people who were supposed to “love” me were actually not all that nice to me. Which started me asking why, and led to the horrible 2012 reunion, and so on and so forth.
It’s been a tough road, but I am glad I went down it then, and did the work, and transformed the pain. I’m glad I am where I am today, confident in my opinions and beliefs and values, because they have been built on that work and are a solid foundation.
My Twitter bio says, “Spent 60% of my life to date as an angry conservative and 40% as a happy progressive . It’s so much better on this side of the fence.”
Speaking of speaking: I am certain that some siblings are beside themselves in horror at Beto O’Rourke saying, “I’m so fucking proud of you!” to his campaign people last night, in a moment of overwhelming emotion.
I’m reminded of the time I sent an email to my oldest brother about the Susan Incident. I pointed out the unfairness in how Susan’s thoughtless behavior was excused away because “Susan was very upset at Dad’s death”. Yet my supposedly unseemly behavior was not given the same benefit, and I wrote, “What the fuck was I, do you suppose?”
Said brother’s reply focused almost exclusively on my use of the word “fuck”.
I now realize that was indicative of an inability to deal with the problem — specifically, an inability to deal with emotion, especially strong emotion — and more specifically, a complete inability to deal with strong and appropriate anger coming from a WOMAN who happens to be his “little sister” – and who also happens to be FUCKING RIGHT about what she is angry about.
And I’ll take “fucking proud” over racist, sexist, exclusionary bullshit any day of the fucking year.
Oh, and he also remembered to include us atheists. Love it.
Once again, the political stage is mirroring things I went through on a personal level 5 years ago. This article was particularly poignant, the way certain sentences read to my eyes.
Anger is a useful emotion for people who are in unbearable pain.
“… it is painful to try to convince someone that you matter. “Please care about me,” is a hard argument to make without shame, because the fact that you’re making it means two things are true: they don’t care about you, and you do care about them.
“It’s safer to say, “Fuck you,” than “Please don’t hurt me anymore.”
“…know how it feels to be the smallest voice in a crowd that fucking hates you and will scream you into silence, or turn their backs on you as if you could not make any impact whatsoever on their day.”
“Who do we think we are, asking questions? Who in the hell do we think we are, wanting answers?”
“We are grieving. We are discovering how many people we love won’t stand next to us.”
On another note, a good friend just had HER BROTHER ASK HER TO GO FOR A WALK SO HE COULD YELL AT HER about family issues.
It was kind of hilarious, although not really, because she is the one I had lunch with after that lousy reunion in 2012 and the first person I told what had happened to me and from her reactions I got my first inkling that THIS WAS NOT NORMAL.
She said when he asked her to go for a walk, her immediate thought was of my experience, and she thought, “Oh, I know what this is about!”
Sure enough, his wife is mad at her — probably jealous — and so the one-sided “discussion” was all about what my friend is doing wrong, and was probably meant to pick a fight so the brother would have some justification for the choice he was being forced into making, between his wife and his sister.
Did I mention the wife is a raging alcoholic? She lived for a year with my friend while the brother continued working in CA, before they moved up here. My friend saw first hand how bad it was, but put it down to the stress of the life changes, and helped her cover up her drinking from the brother.
So yeah, the wife is triangulating, trying to separate the brother from the sister, because the unhealthy wife feels threatened by the healthy sister and oh, how familiar the dysfunctional pattern. The brother is appealing to my friend, “the reasonable one“, to please, PLEASE put up with this bullshit dysfunction so the wife doesn’t have to do any real work on her personal issues, and can go on being the missing stair that everyone will agree to work around.
Because, of course, that’s the easy way out for everyone — except my friend.
Being a brother, he knew what buttons to push, but I am proud of my friend for doing a better job than I did — she is literally 20 years older and wiser than I was, and she had my example to learn from — and she didn’t let it become a fight.
We discussed her next steps and she is going to talk to her brother and say something like, “Look, there’s clearly a conflict between her and me. I didn’t create it, and I don’t know exactly what it is. You’ve been put in the middle and you’re supposed to “take a side” [literally the way he put it] and it sounds like you don’t want to do that, so you came to me to try to find a way out of this mess.
“I just want to make it clear that you’re talking to the wrong person. You’re in a tough position and I understand that, but I’m not the one who put you there, and I’m not the one who can get you out of it. She’s the one who put you there, and if you’re unwilling to make that choice, she’s the one you need to talk to about it.”
“Several times a day I want to put a pixelated arm around a digital stranger and say, “My god, who did this to you? Who gave you these bad ideas? You know it doesn’t have to be this way, right? This way you’re thinking… it’s not really real. Come over here and take a seat. Here is the land where we read whatever we want and we like what we like and we don’t tweet nastiness to strangers. Have some punch and a cookie. Do you feel better?””
…In political discussions, we don’t have enrollment in the scientific method. We’re not open to effectiveness or proof. We’re engaged in a tribal conflict.
…[When] they’ve already made up their minds, they’re not thinking at all. Merely arguing.
This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents.
Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit messages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.
“The effect is catastrophic,” said Charles Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. “There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”
“To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma…”
For decades, Romania’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had banned birth control and abortions, and imposed a “celibacy tax” on families with fewer than five children… the government ended up opening massive state-run orphanages to deal with more than 100,000 children whose parents couldn’t afford to raise them.
At those orphanages, Nelson said, “we saw kids rocking uncontrollably and hitting themselves, hitting their heads against walls. It was heartbreaking…” As the children grew older, Nelson and his colleagues began finding unsettling differences in their brains.
Those separated from their parents at a young age had much less white matter, which is largely made up of fibers that transmit information throughout the brain, as well as much less gray matter, which contains the brain-cell bodies that process information and solve problems.
The activity in the children’s brains was much lower than expected. “If you think of the brain as a lightbulb,” Nelson said, “it’s as though there was a dimmer that had reduced them from a 100-watt bulb to 30 watts.”
The children…had been separated from their parents in their first two years of life… Their fight-or-flight response system appeared permanently broken… What alarmed the researchers most was the duration of the damage. Unlike other parts of the body, most cells in the brain cannot renew or repair themselves.
The reason child-parent separation has such devastating effects is because it attacks one of the most fundamental and critical bonds in human biology.
From the time they are born, children emotionally attach to their caregiver and vice versa, said Lisa Fortuna, medical director for child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center. Skin-to-skin contact for newborns, for example, is critical to their development, research shows. “Our bodies secrete hormones like oxytocin on contact that reinforces the bond, to help us attach and connect,” Fortuna said.
A child’s sense of what safety means depends on that relationship. And without it, the parts of the brain that deal with attachment and fear — the amygdala and hippocampus — develop differently. The reason such children often develop PTSD later in life is that those neurons start firing irregularly, Fortuna said. “The part of their brain that sorts things into safe or dangerous does not work like it’s supposed to. Things that are not threatening seem threatening,” she said.
“… I have figured out how to never be around assholes at any time in my personal and professional life. That’s rich. And not being around assholes should be the goal of every graduate here today.”
And he brings up another excellent concept here:
“…the poor of spirit… can have a big bank balance but is stupid by choice – uncurious, judgemental, isolated and unavailable to change.“
