Posted by:
ptbarnum
(
)
Date: December 09, 2019 05:46PM
Yes, I grew up with a sociopathic father. My mother was codependent, enabling, brainwashed, and battered. I loved her kindness, I miss her very much, but I can't explain or excuse how she let my father do the horrible things he did. She permitted it for whatever reasons, and she didn't foster healthy relationships between her children. She conformed to whatever rules and roles my father capriciously set for his children, even allowing us to form little abusive factions against whichever sibling was occupying the Scapegoat role.
She was also the nexus of my connection to my father and siblings. When she died, there was no emotional reason to stay bound to my father. I was finally able to break free, in jolting fits and starts, from his abuse and control.
Having joined and left a certain nasty cult in the meantime did help with that, I have to say.
The cost of this freedom was my relationships with my siblings. I think they were hungry for distance from my father and each other. They all turned their aggression on one another, myself included, and yes, I had to go to therapy and take medication but with the tremendous resource of support given by a long suffering spouse and the strong reality pull exerted by my kids, I got through it, I continue to get through it, and gradually I am even rebuilding a civil discourse with a sister. The REAL sister, not the puppet I grew up with, and she is getting to know the real me.
All these years of dancing with toxic family dysfunction, expensive psychotherapy, and years of thinking it and rethinking it, have distilled down into advice that probably sounds pretty brutal on the surface. I'm sorry about that, it's just my experience, the world isn't a cotton candy and rainbows place, and in medicine, physical cancers are remorselessly cut away by surgeons because amputation is still better than being devoured.
This advice is, let it all collapse and go find your own way, your own self. Let them all go, let the rotten Jenga tower fall into a smoldering heap. If the only thread holding your 'family' together was your ability to be molded and stretched like Silly Putty and be the receptacle for all their pain, you were never a family at all.
It's nice of you to want to stick around for your parents but waiting for someone to die (like me, with my mom) before you move away or cut the contact is, in my experience, a colossal waste of time, good years of youth and health thrown down the toilet because I was too empathetic and too blinded by devotion to Mom to see that I wasn't actually that real to her, I was only real inside the context and definition of me she derived from my father.
She never knew me. My siblings never knew me or cared to...we were players on a stage. Strangers under the same roof, except we knew enough about each other's weaknesses to hit where it hurt worst.
Besides which, my parents where the original source, the nuclear reactor made of two broken minds that melted down. My siblings and our ridiculous, petty, neurotic role-playing, our attacks on each other as we jostled for dominance, threw drama parties and formed and broke alliances...we were just the mutant, poisoned plant workers that lived around the reactor, trying to keep appease it like it was a sacrifice-hungry god.
Screw your siblings, They don't know you, never did. Screw your parents' elderly neediness. They fostered your Scapegoat role and you don't owe them diddly. You are free to move away and socialize at will by phone, if at all--do literally only what a decent stranger would do for a vulnerable person, nothing more. If they don't have adequate living conditions, these can usually be arranged by asking for help from various agencies. Let them learn to navigate their later years independently, advocate for themselves, and get their support from professional caregivers who can remain objective.
They all may whine that they miss you, but they don't. They miss fake you. Scapegoat you. The image of you they imagine and project on you and can manipulate.
Stop carrying the load. Cut out the psychological cancer. Let the Jenga tower you never wanted to hold up crash and burn. Tell drunk whatsisface that marriage is for grownups and he's failing at it because he's a passive aggressive manbaby, and warn him not to barf his insecurities all over you like that ever again. Drive off into the sunset and break the rearview mirror off the car.
If there are good connections buried in the family they will rise from the ashes and you can move forward with honesty afterwards.
Take this all for what it's worth...I'm biased, I've never met you, and I'm no sage. I can say with honesty that I was the family Scapegoat for a very long time, and my biggest regret is that I wasted so much healthy time waiting to torch the radioactive family landscape I was living in. Now I'm free and happy, but I live with an autoimmune disease I have to make concessions to. Don't let any reason, even one that sounds like a good reason, stop you from being happy, being free, and being healthy RIGHT NOW.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/09/2019 05:51PM by ptbarnum.