So, I got a letter from my oldest brother a couple weeks ago.

In it, he offered to resume our relationship more or less on the previous basis.

I wrote a reply in which, once again, I tried to explain that if NOTHING HAS CHANGED, why would I do that?

And today I had kind of a brainwave.  And with it, maybe, just maybe, I can explain, in a way that just might get through, the situation as it stands for me, now, 2025, a full THIRTEEN YEARS after I told them what the problems were, and everyone refused to listen, or do anything about it, or even admit that there were problems — other than the obvious one, ME.

It was pretty clear from the letter that my brother is starting to worry that he just might feel a little guilty about all this after I die.  AS HE SHOULD.

Okay, here goes nothing.  I’ve tried to write kind of an elevator pitch for each person:

When I say, “We have a problem in this family” — what I mean by that is, there are systemic issues going back 50+ years, involving our mother’s mental illness, impacting every single one of us six siblings, that although having more than adequate information & resources to do so, no one else will talk about or even admit, much less work on, neither directly with each other, nor in therapy.

While they affect us all, these issues negatively impact me more than anyone else.  And by “we” I mean that ALL SIX OF US are involved in the problem, and therefore ALL SIX OF US need to agree to work on solutions.

When Bob says, “We have a problem in this family” — what I believe he means by that is, “The problem in this family is that the FIVE OF US think things are fine and the problem is YOU, and if you would just go back to the way things were and we don’t have to change anything or take any action, well, we could probably find it in our good Catholic hearts to forgive you for your disruptive behavior.”

(This is known as the “identified patient” bias.)

When Bets says “We have a problem in this family” — well, she’s apparently said out loud that “I ruined her senior year of high school” and for her, MY VERY EXISTENCE IS THE PROBLEM.  Needless to say, this is fucked up in a whole lot of ways, but the most basic is that she simply prefers not to have me as a sister.

I mean think about that.  Really think about that for a minute.  She wants me not to be part of the family, and her reason for that is something I had absolutely no agency in.

In fact, I have no agency about it EVEN NOW.  What am I supposed to do, apologize to her for having been born?

When Joe & Susan say “We have a problem in this family” — their version is probably something like, when our father died, I grievously wronged Susan when I asked her to leave the room that night for her inappropriate laughing, and again when I brought up her refusal to do so the next day, and I’ve never apologized for having thus made it necessary for them to yell and spit in my face.  Also that I won’t just “let it go” but instead made sure everyone at least knew about it.  (Which I only did after I made that disastrous attempt to work it out with them.)

When Henry says “We have a problem in this family” — my best guess is that his definition is kind of an amalgam of the above.  He dislikes my existence because with me not there, he gets to be the baby of the family, with all the attention that gets him from the older siblings.  He hates that I go “digging up the past” because of course that threatens the status quo, which again he likes because of his special position.  Again, the five of them are fine; it’s me that is the problem.

I don’t honestly have enough knowledge of my brother Charley to know where he stands on any of this.

Now.  Let’s talk about what COULD have happened, over a decade ago.

1) Someone could have told Joe & Susan that they were WAY WAY OUT OF LINE, that Susan’s thoughtless and egregious behavior, plus her refusal to take responsibility for it, had created a huge family rift; that they both needed to apologize to me sincerely and publicly, for what she did the night Dad died, and for what they both did the next day; and never act like that towards me, or any other sibling, ever again.  AND MEAN IT.

2) Someone could have talked to Bets about her cold behavior towards me at the reunions — which I have to figure if my husband could notice it, others could too.

She once emailed me a laundry list of 9 or 10 items, I think, explaining why it was impossible for us to have any kind of relationship.  Things like the age difference between us, our different views of our parents, of politics, of religion.  (One of them was downright hilarious — she insisted that as a child, I would not have understood that Dad was “brainwashing me”.  Um.  Exactly the same argument goes for her and Mom, but she truly can’t see that side of her own argument.  And she’s supposed to be MENSA smart.)

Maybe they could have suggested that for the next reunion, Bets could come up with a plan for some activity that she & I could do together, go out for lunch or something.  Or maybe they could have suggested that Bets could call me, on the same frequency that she probably called other siblings, and we could start to build a better relationship that way.  The point is, there are lots of constructive ways to build a relationship — if you want to.  SHE DOES NOT WANT TO.

3) Someone could have talked to Henry about the lecture he felt entitled to give me at the last reunion I went to, and the disrespectful conversation we had later that same weekend about sexual harassment in the workplace, where he said the whole idea was stupid and I countered with examples that I personally had experienced, which made him mad and he started telling me not to say what I was saying… Seriously, that happened.

And to be fair, Bob & Joe tried to do something about that one — but it wasn’t to make him apologize to me for it.  It was, once again, to try to get me to “be reasonable” and “let it go”.

At one point Joe was trying to explain to me that a person ought to “get one chance” to hit on someone at work, because what if she was really hot like the sales rep Francesca? **  And I was too flabbergasted at the time but I dearly wish I’d had the wits to ask him, “So it would be okay if the guy in the next cube said you had a hot ass and he’d like you to suck his dick?”

But the one person who could have done all those things would have had to have a very different mindset.

Instead of

The five of us are fine, it’s you who is the problem

It should have been

There are big problems in this family with the way everyone treats Tess like a second class citizen, and if Tess has a problem in this family, then WE ALL HAVE A PROBLEM AND WE NEED TO FIX IT.

Otherwise, we’re not a family.

It should be clear that the very fact that this line of thinking apparently did not ever occur to my brother Bob means that indeed, he too treats me as a second class citizen.

But even if he had thought this way, what would have happened had he done any of those things?

1) If he had held Joe & Susan’s feet to the fire, Susan would have thrown an almighty fit, refused to apologize, and would have insisted that Joe back her up.  She would probably have refused for either of them to come to a reunion as long as that expectation was being upheld.  And we can’t possibly let JOE go out of the family, now can we?  Not when keeping Tess in the family is the reason.  Keeping Joe, and even keeping Susan (not an actual sibling) is more important than losing Tess and Don.

2) If he had tried to talk to Bets about constructive ways to improve our relationship, I am pretty sure she too would have thrown an almighty fit, and then simply refused to discuss it.  She might have gone so far as to threaten to not host the reunions any more.

She PREFERS to hate me.  She LIKES IT THIS WAY.  That’s clear from the fact that she’s never once tried ANYTHING constructive to improve the relationship, in the past decade plus.

I say “constructive” because, for example, there was one occasion where she sent me copies of some letters written by Mom to her when she was in college — and I reacted badly, because my experience of communicating with our mother when I was in college was that my OWN MOTHER refused to speak to me for a year and a half over something I said that she didn’t like (she complained about my “tone”).

And my sister apparently shared my response to the rest of the family, without my knowledge or consent, and made herself out to be the wronged party because she was “just trying to show me a side of Mom that I probably never knew” — i.e., she was trying to show me how wrong I was about her — and sighed, “but I guess no good deed goes unpunished.”

Poor Bets.

Did you know that when someone wants to manipulate you, one of the first things they do is get you to feel sorry for them?  Our mother was a pro at being the martyr, and I suspect that means my sister is too, because she’s so enmeshed with Mom (I won’t say “brainwashed”) that she’s basically a carbon copy.

(But in a way, she’s right.  I never knew our mother when she was mentally healthy.

Of course, I’m not sure any of them ever did, either.)

But this negative attitude of hers towards me is what trickles down to everyone else’s view of me, so it most certainly IS everyone else’s business what she has done, or refuses to do, with our relationship.

At the very least, what could have happened is some kind of agreement brokered between her and me about what our relationship would be like, perhaps polite but distant, or whatever — not her unilateral decision, based on nothing I ever did.

3)  If he had tried to tell Henry that he was out of line to lecture me, that it was my right to try to understand our family history if I thought it would help me, and that maybe he should have tried to understand my experiences of sexual harassment over a dozen years of engineering?

Henry might not have thrown a fit, but he would have cracked some jokes about sexual harassment, and made Bob laugh, as the baby of the family does, and then Bob would have been unable to hold him accountable for any of it.

What Henry did instead  — when I finally had had enough and left the industry which incidentally was quite a painful decision to throw that hard-earned degree in the trash, but the alternative of staying was WORSE — was to double down and tell me that “you gave up too easily” and “our father would be disappointed in you”.

Obviously, none of THAT happened when it should have happened.

And Bob is smart enough to make the same predictions I did about how any of it would have turned out.

BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN HE WAS OFF THE HOOK TO TRY.

Doing the right thing, taking the side of your LITTLE SISTER when you know she’s right, and the alternative is losing her from the family completely — it’s not something you just blow off and make excuses for not doing, because you don’t think it’s going to work.

At least, not if you have any integrity.

And no one in this so-called family EVER TOOK MY SIDE, on ANY OF IT.

And you know what?  It’s too late to do it now.

There was a time when people could possibly have changed, if the right actions had been taken.

But it’s way past that time, and it’s too late to be worried about what you should have done then, and try to make up for it now, ONLY BECAUSE I’M DYING OF CANCER.

What that is, is SELFISH.

They all should have felt guilty for over a decade — the minute I said “there’s a problem, and it’s not me”, and they refused to do anything about it.

And to be completely honest, I hope they all feel guilty for the rest of their longer-than-mine-by-a-long-shot lives. *

* I’m going to guess that anyone reading this far will now seize upon this single sentence and say, “well this here shows that she’s really not a good, forgiving, Catholic person” WHICH IS BLAMESHIFTING SO FUCK YOU

** this woman ended up marrying Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill — so like my brother would have had a chance in hell, BUT HEY GOOD NEWS JOE THEY ARE DIVORCED NOW

Over the past year or so, as my therapist has become familiar with my FOO history, she has often said that what she hears is a family that was “always fighting for scraps”.  “Scraps” in this case being love, affection, recognition, self-worth.

There wasn’t enough to go around — partly because dad was perpetually gone during the work week, partly because I don’t think my mother ever had what I call a “full tank” — meaning that you have to have a solid foundation of those things for yourself before you can truly give them to another person in a healthy way.

Another way to put it came from a set of cassettes that Mom once gave me about relationships: the presenter said that you have to become a “whole person” before you go looking for a mate, and they also need to be a whole person, or else you’ll just be two half-persons trying to make a whole person.  Substitute “healthy” for “whole” and “unhealthy” for “half-person”.

I strongly suspect that my mother’s family was hugely dysfunctional; I know there was trauma.  She was not close to any of her many siblings during my childhood; the one sister she was super-close to died in young adulthood (of some kind of “female” cancer, I believe).

There was once an incident when Dad had a new job and the family was moving back from the East Coast to the Midwest; along the way, near Chicago, the two oldest boys got very sick, to the point of requiring hospitalization, and there was no health insurance because of the job change.  Dad had to borrow money to pay the hospital bills.  My mother was from Chicago and all her family were there, AFAIK — and yet, they apparently did not contact her family in this crisis. Weird, to say the least.

(And even without that crisis — if you had been on the East Coast for the past several years, away from your family for the first time ever, and had three kids that none of them had ever met — wouldn’t you SCHEDULE a visit as you were passing through??

Well, you would if everything were normal.)

So. There was never enough healthy good stuff to go around.

And naturally, the children in this family saw each other as competition for that scarce resource.

Then there was the incredible stress:  moving to another state, another new job for Dad, him being home all the time, a new house, my birth, my mother’s increasing dysfunction and eventual hospitalization, the stigma of mental illness, and finally the older kids being given the job of covering mom’s responsibilities.

And naturally, there was resentment among these kids — although it seems to have been directed at each other, and specifically me (as the new baby who was causing all the problems) — rather than appropriately at the adults.

And it probably was never “safe” to do so.  There is a very strong tendency in this family’s children to protect & defend the mother, rather than the normal other way around.  Getting angry at Mom for not being able to take care of her own responsibilities and choices, and having to do it for her, was probably unthinkable.  As for Dad, the older kids apparently barely knew him, and had been taught to distrust him, if not to hate him — and now they were dependent on him.

It shouldn’t have happened that way.  There were so many bad choices, so many other decisions that could have been taken, to prevent all this pain.  The adults in the room did their best, but it wasn’t very good.  Dad was out of his depth, Mom was out of her mind, and basically they tried to cope by turning three teens into one functioning adult.  [In retrospect, they might have been able to pull it off if, say, it had been summer or they were otherwise allowed to do the job together — but they were still expected to go to (a new) high school part-time.  Just a fucking impossible situation.]

As someone who knows a thing or two about childhood development, my therapist has tried, as best she can, to explain to me the effects it would have been likely to have had on all of us — including taking into account what was known at the time versus what is known now — and the hugely insurmountable distance it created, especially between my sister and me.

At one point she theorized that we are like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort:  “neither can live while the other survives”.

My sister’s reality and lived experiences require mine to be denied; my reality and lived experiences, especially during that first couple of years, are of a sister so deeply intertwined with our mother that they are practically the same person.  And I am still, in some sense, that crying infant who doesn’t understand why her mother/sister keeps abandoning her.  I only recently realized that when my sister went away to college, to me, at about a year old,  that was yet another huge abandonment (three in one year, if anybody’s counting).

I keep thinking about how my therapist said, with a long sigh, closing her eyes, turning her face upward, with pain and sadness written all over her face:

“… you were ALL. STILL. CHILDREN.”

(From Seth Godin)

When it slams into your house and destroys it, we’re likely to pursue one of two lines of thinking:

–How did I cause this? What choices did I make, what mistakes did I permit, why did I deserve to have this damage, or who can I blame?

–Well, that happened, now what should I do?

Looking for reasons, blaming others, or worse, blaming ourselves is a waste. It’s self-defeating. It creates shame and second-guessing, separates us from our community and distracts us from the work at hand.

Sometimes there’s a lesson to be learned, but when actual bad luck leads to a significant bolt of lightning and all the pain it causes, there is no lesson.

There’s simply what happened.

Now what?

Blaming and blame-shifting has always been a huge part of my FOO dynamic.

Mom blamed Dad for EVERYTHING.  She shamed him for being a “country bumpkin” because he was born in a small town in Iowa, even though he also joined the Coast Guard and traveled more than she ever did internationally; he even learned some of another language when he was stationed in the Marshall Islands in WWII.  Plus he later moved to Chicago (where they met) and then he traveled all over the US for work.  She moved with him to CT, VT, MA, MO and IA, but never willingly traveled anywhere as far as I know or in my living memory, except back to Chicago for holidays with my sister.
ETA:  She did travel for weddings, and she did come visit Texas once, outside of any such occasion, that I recall.

I believe my siblings learned this reaction to adversity from her example.  They unilaterally blame Dad for the adversity we all experienced, from my mother’s hospitalizations & mental health diagnosis; they now blame me for things such as me “overreacting” to The Susan Incident.

I will bet a significant amount that my cancer is being ascribed to me being atheist, rather than simple bad luck or the more scientific likelihood, the effects of early childhood trauma.  One reason for that is self-defense:  if I got cancer because I am atheist, then they are safe from the same adversity.  If it’s just bad luck, or the effects of trauma, then they are not so safe.

But what about all the praying they say they are doing for me?  Should I go back to the god who apparently GAVE me the cancer, despite all their prayerful efforts?

Of course, the faithful would say the cancer is a sign to me from god saying TURN BACK NOW, REPENT YE SINNER or some such.

So if I had gone back to church today and prayed, does anyone really think I’d be cured tomorrow?  Why doesn’t that work?

I’ve always said, if there’s a god who demands more or other from me than what I can perceive as reality, through the senses and brain that he supposedly gave me, that’s a shit setup.  That god lost me around 7th grade, with the doctrine of transubstantiation.   I tried for another 20 years or so to find some other, believable religion, but never have and finally gave up.  (And my life immediately became simpler and happier.)

And one big reason for my non-faith is, how much time has my FOO devoted to actionless prayer, rather than taking concrete, earthly action?  Our mother preferred to pray about her failing marriage:  talking not to her husband, but to an invisible man in the sky, asking him to solve all her problems WITHOUT her having to change any of her other behavior or choices, such as the put-downs, the constant blame-shifting, the triangulating between us kids in order to maintain control, or the refusal of the medically-recommended hysterectomy after her fourth pregnancy nearly killed her.  Or even the decision to marry our father (which I believe she saw as a way to get away from her FOO, which I believe was also dysfunctional.  I mean she had to learn it someplace).

I believe our mother was a deeply unhappy person, but I also believe she never understood how much of that was due to her own destructive choices, and how many of those choices were due to her religion.

There’s probably no lesson to be learned from my cancer Dx, other than to make the most of whatever time I have left.  It’s just bad luck, or childhood trauma, neither of which I can change, and little of which I can understand without help from people who are mostly invested in ignoring that whole period of my birth and life, wishing away my very existence.

And I get that delving any more deeply into that would be likely to cause them a lot of pain.  OTOH, what pain have I suffered, and will I suffer, in the almost complete lack of knowledge of my early childhood?  It will potentially cost me my very life — and with no hope for me of an afterlife, that’s ALL the marbles.

This won’t cut any ice with them, because of its source:  but my dad always used to say, “Love is when you care more about the other person than you care about yourself.”  It’s one of life’s truisms, as far as I’ve experienced it.  And it says quite clearly that they don’t love me, when their potential pain is more important than my actual existence.

You know how most people have cute stories of something they did when they were 2, or 4, or whatever?  I don’t have any.  The best version of that I have is that when I was 3, my birthday fell on Easter, and I was so excited because I thought all the baskets and everything were for me.  But that’s my own memory, not because anyone told me about it.

There could be some lessons to be learned from that, but my siblings don’t want to teach me, or learn about me.  Or maybe the cancer is supposed to be a sign from god that’s a message to THEM?  hahahahaha of course not, they aren’t the ones who need “fixing” as I was told I was.

But if that flesh and blood thing is so damned important, maybe they should start with their own.

Pavlovitz is writing about political brainwashing, but this resonates with me as also describing what happened in my family of origin.

I’ll include the idea of projection, which is yet another form of blame-shifting and one that is “commonly found in personalities functioning at a primitive level as in narcissistic personality disorder .”

Over the years, our mother often accused our father of “brainwashing” us younger kids, to “get us on his side”, so as to win The Divorce settlement.  It was a convenient explanation for how she could have lost custody of “her” children, without having to take any responsibility for that outcome whatsoever.

All Dad’s fault! She’s the victim!

“…Cult leaders prey upon emotionally vulnerable people, leveraging their loneliness, their disenfranchisement, their disconnection. They bombard their targets with a steady stream of misinformation, incendiary rhetoric, and chaotic prophecy—and into the swirling confusion created inside their heads, they come promising safety and security, while having no concern for them at all. They start a fire—and rush in with a bucket of water.

“…a group of now emotionally-dependent human beings, whose internal story and well-being depends on him winning. That’s the only way their world makes sense anymore, it is the only outcome they can conceive of.

“People who’ve tried to rescue their loved ones from such inculcation will tell you how incredibly difficult it is to deprogram them after such repeated deception, such prolonged lying, such protracted fear. They will detail the excruciating efforts to reach parents and best friends and adult children, through the haze of their addiction to the connection they have come to feel with someone who is predatory toward them. And many will describe the long and bloody battles they’ve fought for the people they love—battles they  sometimes ultimately lost to the cult.”

Well this explains a lot.  Goes well with not dealing with reality, by starting with what you believe or want to be true and working backwards:

“if it could be demonstrated that there’s a more effective or just solution to this problem, would you change your mind?”
“no.”

The difference between an actual discussion (where we seek the right answer) and a political one is simple:

In a political discussion, people don’t care about what’s correct or effective or true. Facts aren’t the point.

…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.

Notes from here:
“What’s happening on a national level is activating and retraumatizing a lot of people who have been gaslighted in the past. The crazy-making, mind-bending, massive confusion-inducing effects of our current administration’s recklessness with the truth and disregard for verifiable facts is creating an emotional and psychological whiplash.

Four survival strategies:  check, check, check, and check.

Remain defiant

…anger protected me, because I knew what I knew. It couldn’t be erased. Being defiant does not make you difficult. It makes you resilient.

Recognize there will never be accountability

The person who is gaslighting you will never be able to see your point of view or take responsibility for their actions. They will never get it. They will never say, “Oh, you’re right – you have a point.”

Acknowledgement is not on the cards. And asserting yourself is not just useless but harmful. Because the person gaslighting will never be able to respond to logic and reason – and so you have to be the one to recognize that logic and reason can’t be applied.

Let go of the wish for things to be different

The wish for things to be different is very powerful and inoculates you to the tumult. It allows you to continue to believe logic and reason will prevail. You want to believe the person will change. You want things to make sense. But they won’t. You want to feel you are on safe ground. You have to let go of this wish. Because things will never make sense. You will never be heard.

Develop healthy detachment

“You feel confused and crazy. You’re always apologizing, wondering if you are good enough, can’t understand why you feel so bad all the time, or know something is wrong but can’t put your finger on it. You thought one thing, they say another; you can’t figure out which is right.”

A tip she offers for handling things is to write down what actually happened in the conversation. “Once you are not flooded with emotion, you can reflect rationally. Look at the conversation and see where it took a turn.”

When someone is so certain about what they believe and they keep on insisting and trying to convince you – over a period of time – it erodes your own perception. And having to verify reality is in itself destabilizing.

With gaslighting, it feels as though the ground is always shifting beneath you. There is no center of gravity. And while we’re being told up is down and black is white, the only way to make sense of it is to remain resolute. Let people have their alternative facts. You’ll stick to reality.