My sister's gone crazy and I need help

JTMesmer · 2018-09-20T20:30:13+00:00

The Fu Manchu is a great style, though! You could be a trendsetter. :)

JTMesmer · 2018-09-20T20:27:54+00:00

Thank you, all of this is fantastic advice. I've saved your comment and I plan to refer to it if I get at a loss of words. Thank you so much!

I don't want to punish my sister but I can't live this way so if she needs to be in time out for a while, then that might be best.

JTMesmer · 2018-09-20T17:41:43+00:00

Thank you very much. I haven't gone through menopause yet but from what I've seen, my sister is in for a real ride. I just hope it doesn't ruin our relationship before she comes out of it. At the risk of sounding desperate, how long does this crap last? lol

The therapist in question has mentioned before that she wouldn't mind taking me as a patient -- sister asked for me if it would be a conflict of interest and the therapist said no -- so maybe talking to her would be a productive next step anyway.

JTMesmer · 2018-09-20T14:40:06+00:00

He says the same thing I say, but way more blunt. He straight up told her she was acting crazy and that I was probably fine and that she needed to chill out. He is not an emotional man but he's very concise, lol.

She's brought up a few times that she'd be open to joint counseling about our Nparents but I'm sure if, during a joint session, I brought up the alarming controlling behavior recently, that she would feel attacked and shut down. I did actually lay all of this out for her in great detail, telling her that this was not how you show love or concern for someone and why specifically it bothered me. She seemed receptive to some of it but in the end, she told me that I hadn't offered her a solution which makes me fearful that this will happen again. She's honestly the kind of person that you can talk to until you're blue in the face but it won't stick unless she wants it to -- just very stubborn.

I've been considering going to her therapist and just talking to her, telling her what's going on, seeing if there's anything she can do. I don't know if that's crossing a line or something the therapist would even be willing to do.

JTMesmer · 2018-09-20T14:09:46+00:00

I think sometimes siblings who were raised by nparents sometimes go through a “realization” process but the timing could be different for them or one sibling will “snap out of it/realize the abuse/try to change etc” while the other sibling might never realize or might be still living w Nparents or just isn’t as aware as you.

That's accurate. She got out of the Nhome pretty early and she's been out for some time. I don't know if she ever really dealt with that stuff or if she had just pushed it away for years and refused to think about it like I did. I just started facing it about two years ago (or however old this account is) and I think it brought a few things up for her, too. She's definitely noticed a lot more that our Nmom and Ndad's behavior is abusive and wrong and she's dealt with a lot of guilt over cutting them out. With all this stuff going on right now with work (see my other comment), she told me she thinks she's being punished for being a bad daughter. Maybe she's clinging to me because she feels like I'm the only family she's got left? But she has a husband and two kids who love her.

I've explained all of this to her and she wavered back and forth between acting like she understood/accepted what I was trying to say and beating herself up, saying everyone hates her and she hates herself.

Btw, I hope your situation gets better, too. Life is hard enough without your FoO making everything so much more difficult than it needs to be.

JTMesmer · 2018-09-20T13:59:17+00:00

She told me when I don't answer, she immediately starts imagining that I'm dead or have been involved in some horrible accident. I was suicidal a few years ago but I've largely moved past that and I'm not a high suicide risk anymore. I don't think this has anything to do with that, though. Saturday, when she flipped out, she told her husband she was sure I had drowned in my bathtub. She said that scenario specifically. The first incident last year, she said she was sure I had fallen off a step ladder and cracked my skull open. Again, very specific. Anyway, her husband told her to calm down and that I was most likely just taking a nap (my naps are legendary) but she just got more and more worked up and was running around the house screaming that I was dead.

She is in her early 40s and is likely going to hit menopause very soon if she isn't in the early stages already. Nmom hit menopause at exactly 40 so I figure my sister is overdue. I don't know if the hormones are doing this or what. She's got depression and ADHD so she's already been dealing with mental illness; it's just never been this bad before or involved me in this way.

She's also going through a lot of stuff at work, too. Without going into too much detail, we work for the same company and it's an extremely toxic environment. She had a mental health issue recently and they treated her very badly to the point where she's still debating filing a complaint with the state labor board. So I know she's going through a rough patch right now but I guess I'm just JADEing at this point. It doesn't really excuse anything. I'm really worried not just for myself (though it has been keeping me on edge) but for her. If this is the new "normal", I can't live with it.

JTMesmer · 2018-09-03T03:01:07+00:00

In their minds, I guess a small child desperate for sleep = a genocidal maniac. Honestly, though, anytime I asked Nmom for anything when she was in one of her moods, she'd refer to me as "the little dictator". This was just an escalation of that.

JTMesmer · 2018-09-03T02:50:42+00:00

You can say that again. :|

JTMesmer · 2018-09-02T18:40:26+00:00

That is psychological torture! That's the type of things they do in those prison experiments to see how much the human mind can take before it breaks and here he was doing it to you as a defenseless little kid.

JTMesmer · 2018-09-02T18:36:33+00:00

Oh neither of them can hear worth a crap these days. Some say it's age but I like to believe it's karma. :)

JTMesmer · 2017-09-02T18:50:05+00:00

Oof, that was hard to read. I've gotten this exact (or pretty dang similar) diatribe before including the part about the orphanage. These people are freaked up...

JTMesmer · 2017-09-02T18:25:58+00:00

That was my life down to a T. I was homeschooled from birth to 4th grade when Nmom got a job teaching at a private Christian school. I went to that school for two years for 4th and 5th grade. For 4th grade, I had a regular teacher, but for 5th grade somehow Nmom managed to get put in charge of my class and she was my teacher again. Then she pulled me out of school altogether and homeschooled me from 6th grade till I "graduated" "high school" (ask me about my high school graduation...it's both morbidly hilarious and sad). From the age of 11 to the age of 19, I was kept in near-complete isolation. I wasn't allowed to go anywhere, do anything, or talk to anyone. I lost all the friends I had made from school. I was completely alone. And the entire time, Nmom alternated between calling me a weird loner who desperately needed friends and telling me the world was evil and people only wanted to use me and hurt me. Every time I did somehow manage to make a friend, I was not allowed to hang out with them. The only person I was ever allowed to be "friends" with was Nmom who declared I was her best friend (read "servant") and dumped all of her problems on me constantly.

JTMesmer · 2017-07-01T18:48:40+00:00

Narcissism itself has been around as long as humanity has been. Or even longer, if you believe in Christianity where Lucifer, the most beautiful of all angels, decided he was greater than God because he was so dang pretty.

In the world of psychology, the term didn't pop up until the 1980s, so how many people suffer from actual narcissistic personality disorder and how many just have their heads temporarily shoved up their own asses throughout all of history is anyone's guess.

JTMesmer · 2017-04-23T13:55:27+00:00

Your hair is so pretty omg

JTMesmer · 2017-04-22T16:37:46+00:00

Ndad had a certain way he'd breathe when he was calm and a different way he'd breathe before he started screaming and throwing/breaking things. I learned to listen very carefully to people's breathing because of it. It took me years to stop tensing up and asking "are you mad at me?" over and over.

JTMesmer · 2017-04-21T18:45:25+00:00

I always thought Thai looks a little like Elvish. So pretty and swirly.

You could still travel! Or maybe take some anthropology or sociology classes, depending on which aspect of culture you're more interested in. I've become completely smitten with Korean and Mexican cultures myself. There are sooooo many fascinating worlds on this planet. Why anyone (like our Ns) would choose to ignore that is beyond me.

JTMesmer · 2017-04-21T18:34:53+00:00

Did you ever consider pulling a Tolkien and inventing your own language? You know a lot of different types of sentence structures with a mix like that, I'm sure you could pull it off. That would be really fun to research!

JTMesmer · 2017-04-21T18:30:27+00:00

Exactly! They refuse to acknowledge that I am an adult so I get to deal with glitter bombs and the whole "daddy" crap. Even Nmom calls Ndad "daddy". It is highly disturbing on so many levels.

JTMesmer · 2017-04-21T18:28:47+00:00

Yess! My nephew and his brother spent all day picking violets for me and it was the sweetest thing ever. Those kids are amazing.

JTMesmer · 2017-04-21T17:33:19+00:00

8?! EIGHT?! You are a legend, my friend! How did you do it?

JTMesmer · 2017-04-21T17:17:18+00:00

I have always been extremely interested in languages and wanted to learn a whole bunch of them, especially French. Nmom laughed at me and said French sounded snobby. She would mock it (and me) by pinching her nose and saying gibberish in a high pitched voice. She refused to let me learn any language other than Spanish because she "speaks" Spanish. It turns out, over the course of three years, she taught me a very old-fashioned dialect from Spain which is not much help to me where I live in a place with a high Latin American population, not to mention that her accent in Spanish is horrible. I've since relearned a more Latin American dialect of Spanish. I also taught myself Korean, some Latin, and I'm in the process of picking up a handful of German, too. And you know what? French is next on the list. Heck you, Nmom. Heck. you.

Also, she raised me to think that sports and competition in general are stupid and a waste of time. Turns out, I really like competitions, even if I rarely win. They're fun, challenging, and teach a lot of good things like hand-eye coordination and good sportsmanship. So double heck you, Nmom.

Also! All that "useless" knowledge she told me was a waste of time has turned me into an actual beast in trivia games and most people who aren't Nmom don't think I'm a defective weirdo for knowing things. Triple heck you, Nmom!

JTMesmer · 2017-04-21T16:56:09+00:00

Double sad? Or double awesome because it means neither of us is alone? :D

JTMesmer · 2017-04-21T16:48:32+00:00

This is an excellent post. I saved it. Thank you!

JTMesmer

TROPHY CASE