Tags
Anxiety, Brother, Bullying, Depression, Lost, Self-esteem, Sibling abuse, Verbal abuse, Violence
This is not a sob story. Nor a pity party.
I’ve tried to understand, but in retrospect, it makes little sense. The answers aren’t obvious. I’m struggling to see as I reach back through the years to that murky time.
Was it just opportunity and wilfulness? A very sad case of absent self-esteem? An undiagnosed family history of depression? All of the above?
How does a bright young child take so many wrong steps? Embarrassingly letting down all those who imagine great things for her? She never knew really, what she wanted for herself, not then. But it was clear her own failures hurt those who hoped her life would be more than theirs.
Why was her head so fuzzy? Looking ahead, she saw nothing for her. No future appealed or seemed within her grasp. So much of her short life included pain, rejection, poor guidance, lack of support, anger, heartbreak and sadness. Feeling unloved, unwelcome, unhappy, unincluded.
But it’s all pedestrian stuff. Rather unexceptional, to tell the truth. Yet she was a mess before her twenty-first birthday. Before she’d left her teenage years, actually.
Woeful yet ordinary tales of angst could be told. Was it just the number of them, one after another that counts? Her over-sensitivity to the world, its slings and arrows? High levels of unaddressed anxiety?
Feeling comfortable in her own skin around other people was never her forte, after all.
Maybe in part, she was just born that way. Overly imaginative and sensitive. Artistic, showing early intelligence and yet, so very shy. Which she covered with extroverted behaviour. Still does.
How to tell this tale without recounting things that probably don’t matter?
It’s icky and tough-going peering through the eyes of a sad teenage woman-child, who, felt herself invincible but had clearly and truly lost her way.
Looming large in the viewfinder of those times were of course, her first boyfriend. Her subsequent pathetic attempts at relationships. And her brother.
Imagine living with someone who told you aggressively negative things about yourself every day of your life, relentlessly for years on end.
From the age of twelve (or thereabouts), til the time she left home at nineteen (to escape his non-stop torment)… she was her brother’s prime target.
The seeds of his behaviour were there earlier, though. And actually she has no memories of him ever being nice to her. But as she got older, he focused on her more and more. Especially when their mother went back to work.
As the eldest child and only male sibling, his anger and aggression ruled the hour before parental order was restored.
At first it was just verbal abuse, day in, day out. Sneering, growling, lip curling aggression for reasons completely unfathomable.
You’re fat. You’re ugly. You’re so fucking stupid it’s not funny. Worthless. Hopeless. You’ll never make anything of yourself. Get out of my face you ugly slut! No wonder you don’t have a boyfriend, look at you!
And so on. And on. Every day. Relentlessly. Often, the same angry mantras repeated over and over. Years of such bilious nastiness, sprouting from who knows where?
Constantly, she’d try to tell their parents. But what can a child say to properly explain this kind of verbal assault? To make it sound serious enough? Challenging too, when parental figures don’t like dealing with conflict and want the easiest solution to make it all go away.
The physical abuse started earlier than she recalled. She must have been ten, at least. And for no reason she knew, at her brother’s soccer club, on awards night… he pinned her arms to her sides, kneeing her in the stomach. Hard. So hard, she couldn’t speak. Bent over, clutching herself in the middle of a room of people who saw. They had to.
Somehow, she wasn’t quite believed. And he didn’t quite get punished for his actions. But the panic and humiliation stayed with her for years, under the skin, re-emerging inopportunely.
But the full on smack down violence was later. Their sister watching helplessly and tensely. The fights were nasty and aggressive and for a while she took whatever he dealt out.
Til later, when she decided it didn’t matter how much he hurt her. She’d find a way to hurt him back. Waiting, goading him even, to see if she could find a weakness. Looking for a way to make him pay for his wickedness.
She had trouble explaining how bad that was to her parents, too.
But actually, the daily verbal torment was worse. The opposite of positive thinking hurled at her daily.
Say something to someone often enough and without a doubt, they’ll believe it. Which is one sure way to tear down the confidence of a young girl who, was never the most popular, the prettiest or anything special in her social circle anyway.
She didn’t see her future as bright, bristling with potential and no one told her otherwise. She couldn’t see anything great happening.
She had no idea what to do or where to go.
~Svasti
Svasti: A Journey From Assault To Wholeness 
Svasti,
You brought tears to my eyes with what you went through and how it was written. Sibling abuse is as damaging as parental especially when the parents don’t intervene. I am so sorry that you experienced this type of torment.
I commend and applaud you for writing this. Not much is ever really written about sibling abuse. How painful.
(((((Svasti)))))
CC
Svasti–my sister was quite abusive to me while we were growing up so I related to this post. My mother was also oblivious to this abuse–but compared with what was going on with my father, it’s not surprising at all.
Since I have been in recovery, I have worked to try to develop a relationship with my sister–but it is superficial, only. Our childhood abuse affected her in different ways than it did me (she is incapable of showing or feeling true, raw emotion) but it did affect her, nonetheless, so I am not too hard on how I view her behavior today.
I always thought it was such a shame that we could not have been an ally to each other–it certainly would have made our childhoods more bearable if we had.
I’m so sorry for what you endured–and you know–this could also be somewhat of an explanation for the adult abusive relationship you found yourself in.
(((((((hugs to you my friend))))))
Melinda
I’m so sorry. The belief held by some that childhood is in the past isn’t always true. For some, the scars never disappear. I’m glad you’re working through this.
“You’ll never make anything of yourself”
Damn. That’s what my mother used to tell me. In my early teens I became so hateful that I would make huge scandals every time she told me this. I yelled that I’ll never be worthless as she wants me and programs me to be.
I am sorry for what you had to overcome. And my big respect to you that now you are brave to write it and to get through it now.
Not that I’ve had kids, but I can imagine how you would never really want to give up on them. I’ve seen that in the way my parents are with my brother even today, no matter how many times he’s let them down or the years of no-shows for important family occaisions.
Eventually, his agro became obvious to others in the family, but it took years.
In the meantime, I was considered the ‘bad guy’ because I didn’t want to have anything to do with my brother. I did get an appology and an admission but that was only around five years ago.
I’m sure they don’t want to believe the worst of their children, despite evidence to the contrary.
I can’t count the number of times the ‘sorry’ ritual was enacted.
Me: Mum/Dad, he did X or Y again.
Parent: Did you do that?
Brother: No!
Me: Yes he did!
Parent: Okay, say sorry for what you did.
Brother: Sorry.
Parent: Promise you won’t do it again.
Brother: I promise.
Of course, he always did.
@CC – Good to see you out and about, commenting again! 🙂
This is actually not something that torments me in really obvious ways any more. The most prominent and lingering impact I still deal with is a very warped self-image. Other people say I’m pretty. Honestly, I can never see what they are talking about.
I wrote this to help myself understand how I got to certain points in my life. Its not all clear. And while I take responsibility for my own life, I think its important to understand the source of my own “stuff”.
This is the first time I’ve ever written about this, too.
@Melinda – Oh Melinda, more in common – I wish it was something more positive!
I can be civil to my brother now, but its taken me a long time. I hated him for years. Then, eventually I realised my hatred wasn’t hurting him, but it was hurting me. Letting go of that was quite amazing.
But, he is a person with so many issues – as they say, he has a chip on his shoulder – that no one in the family can get any closer to him. He hasn’t shared Christmas with the family for years on end.
I do know that my brother’s treatment of me, and my reaction to all of that has had a bearing on my relationships with men, and with myself. Most definitely. That’s kind of why I’m writing about it now.
Because I don’t believe any longer, that all the grief I’ve been feeling was just about that one night when I was assaulted.
@tricia – thank you. Actually, most of this is in the past. But trying to remember all of this stuff clearly has shown me that its not as gone and forgotten as I thought.
@Alexandra – Funnily enough, people don’t like hearing negative things about themselves. We can’t help but rebel. But it does seep in, and we do start to take it on.
Everyone I’ve ‘met’ via blogging does in fact, have a lot to deal with and overcome. Some, much more than I do. So, I don’t think of this as overly important. Except that its helping me to see the bigger picture, and how its possible that I ended up meeting someone who would treat me so badly.
Thanks for reading 🙂
Good for you for writing this for the first time. 🙂
Svasti … I so relate to this years-long kind of injury … I have two older siblings who were both merciless to me, so often … I can’t help but recall the lesson I was taught way back when about how families operate under the threat and stress of abuse — “Dad hauls off on Mom … Mom hauls off on her favourite scapegoat child (and on herself), and other sibs do this too, recognizing the scapegoat … The farther down you are on the pecking order, the worse you get it … ’til it gets down to the family dog (or some other small creature) … ”
So it goes, that terrible legacy …
In my case, it was the worst with my older brother, who could do no wrong in our mother’s eyes. He beat the daylights out of me on a regular basis, and called me names that I would not repeat. Why? … To this day, the only way I can understand his actions is through that above lesson. I know that he got the worst of it from our father (father + eldest son = LOADED DYNAMICS!) … and I was next in line …
Now my relationship with that brother is ruptured, probably for life … Breaks my heart, ’cause in our early adulthood (or rather, late adolescence!), we were quite close for about a decade. My family went KABOOM after my mother died, and I did what I always do: I walked away. Wouldn’t participate directly in the family’s self-destruction. My brother may have been the primary architect in this event …
It’s so sad … and I suppose there comes a time when we need to assess the (usually long-running and habitual) quality of our relations with original family members … and decide what kind of relation we want with them, and whether this is possible (i.e., both sides willing to play clean and fair?) …
Over the years, I brought myself (finally!) to a guilt-free place of being able to decide clearly; I did this by constantly asking myself, “Have I related like this (in reaction, fear and habit) with my chosen relations, i.e., my beloved friends, mentors, and lovers?” [Well, OK, occasionally I did … as did the others … We humans are such creatures of habit 😉 ] But the overall quality of these relations has been so different from those with my immediate relatives … always, no matter what, a modicum of respect; a much more responsive, rather than reactive (archaic; instinctual) way of being and communicating; vastly more humour, kindness, and understanding.
It’s always struck me how a broken family can produce one or two or a few truly *kind* people … people who seem to have been kind at heart from the get-go, struggle their whole lives long to keep that kindness alive inside them, and really can feel compassion … I find myself at age 50 feeling compassion for each of my immediate relatives — Believe me, it’s taken almost this long to get to this feeling!! — while having *very* on-and-off (mostly “off”) contact with them … and *no* contact when the rest of my family go off attacking each other. I disappear because I refuse to behave that way with anyone; because I abhor violence of any kind — especially the psychological and spiritual; I’m scared shitless and utterly useless in conflict with them … and I long ago decided that I don’t want *anyone* in my life who behaves in these ways. The stress of ongoing relational assault would have disastrous effects on my health. … I do my best to live by “I and Thou”, not by “me vs. you.”
Right now, one of my siblings and I are tentatively, watchfully, reconnecting. (It’s not the brother I mentioned.) We recently saw one another at a family birthday party, and had some surprisingly easy, sometimes hilarious, moderately meaningful conversation. Her husband told me twice, “We miss you …” and their son, my nephew, wonders why the hell I’m so in and out of his life; I’m there, then disappear for a long time.
My sister and I spoke on the phone a few days ago (for the first time in about six years), and laughed ourselves senseless over — Remember, I’m 50 and she’s nearly 58 — nose hair. Then onto chin hair, ear hair, moustache hair, boob hair … until we were doubled over. Somehow, I suppose that’s the “sister gene”, especially as you get older, that you can laugh like maniacs over such basic things. And you can shred each other’s souls in an instant over the old, simmering jealousies, by hierarchal bullying, and the jockeying for *decades* for one or both parents’ Favoured Child position. (Sometimes I call it “Haulin’ Out The Old Bag Of Rocks”.) So I, for one, get verrry tired of the old, goading bullshit from my siblings (I admit that I’ve gotten a few swipes in too). There are parts of each of them that I adore — my sister’s zanyness, fabulous impromptu dinner parties, her elegant sense of design, and how she can wrap a gift! My older brother’s taking me under his wing — literally! — when he flew me up to 2,000 feet in his handmade Ultralite aircraft; his trustworthiness as a pilot and his gentlemanly qualities, his unrelenting quest to do the right thing. My younger brother’s sweet, embracing charm and his outright generosity in friendship; his way of bringing other people into a jovial state of mind; the love he pours out to his “peeps” and his animals (dogs and cats).
On the other hand … when any of my sibs, and my father, go ballistic … I disappear. That avoidance is my saving grace. “Making up” amongst my relatives tends to take *years*. I always get the question, “Where the hell were you?” — and the lambasting for “not being responsible for your part!” … to which I reply, “Look, I’m not perfect. I disappear. That’s my part. You all know that I want no part in character attack and acts of vindictiveness, so I stay away.”
And so it goes … with all of my immediate relations this days, except one, I am gradually making gains in having some kind of contact, and hopefully some ongoing relation …
Oops … I blathered … but your post really got the wheels spinning!
Thank you, Svasti … and folks who have commented here … Lots of food for reflection … 🙂
@Jaliya – Well, this sounds like something you should think about a little more and turn into a post of your own. Wow, I think its great my post sparked off so much for you – as long as you’re okay??
No one gives families a manual on how to be parents, or
siblings etc. My parents came from a very repressed generation and I imagine yours did even more so.
We westerners have been utterly horrible to ourselves and each other for many years now. So much repression, and we all know that repression means things get squeezed out the sides. Resulting in some of the crappy behaviour that goes on in our world, both in families and outside of them.
Problem with stuff that happens inside families is, if the parents aren’t doing a good job of percieving and managing things… it goes unnoticed and its never dealt with.
Its a rare thing to see family relations that are all good and positive. They do exist, but its not as common as it should be, unfortunately.
I don’t expect to have a relationship with my brother ever. Things might change, but I don’t expect that to be the case. If it does, I’d welcome it and find a way to relate. But its a tough call, when there are so many years of ingrained patterns in play. It takes a lot of self-awareness for everyone involved to change such dynamics.
Wishing you peace and healing in your family relations 🙂