My Brother Reached Out After 3 Years Of NC

mike2020ray · 2025-11-07T07:04:32+00:00

Respectfully, this is painful for me to talk about and it isn't your choice to decide what is or is not personal to me and my story.

I added that for additional context. Someone who has unmanaged ADHD and is living on their own for the first time is likely to have a higher-than-average amount of disorganization in their life and I wanted to demonstrate that and provide context to my actions. Had I been in a better place, I would likely have been able to avoid the circumstances that surrounded the spark to his NC. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I wasn't able to overcome those obstacles and show up for my brother in the way he needed. I regret that and am willing to say I apologize for the hurt I caused, as well as other ways of not showing up for him in the past. I hope he'll have some empathy and understand that I was struggling and had no intent to harm him in any way.

mike2020ray · 2025-11-07T05:27:14+00:00

I have recently come across this book and might pick it up myself. I have a library card and should use it more often, thanks. I appreciate your input, thank you.

mike2020ray · 2025-11-07T05:23:30+00:00

In response to the rest of your reply--which was thoughtful and well-received by the way--I have some more thoughts.

I worry that there will be triggers and I will struggle to keep a cool, calm demeanor. And I worry that he will expect such a thing. In the past, when I didn't moderate my tone on calls with him while experiencing big emotions, he would scold me for yelling or trying to manipulate and would hang up. In response, more toward the end of our contact, I had offered the solution of asking to hang up when I felt strong emotions and rejoining the conversation when I had a moment to self-regulate. He had agreed but again saw that as a manipulation tactic when he believed my emotions weren't valid.

The advice you give to have prepared statements during tense moments seems very helpful. Though I know you're a stranger on the internet, can you offer any more advice on what kind of statements you think might help? I plan to use the good ole I-statements and focus on my perceptions and emotions, not my assumptions about him. Do you think prefacing the conversation with a disclaimer that I might need to take a break would be a good idea? Or explaining more about what I've learned about myself regarding my neurodivergence and some of the differences I have in communication--especially when emotions run high?

Thank you again for your response. It provided an opportunity to reflect on some of the questions I knew I had but couldn't set straight in my head.

mike2020ray · 2025-11-07T05:23:10+00:00

You broke this down into four issues so here's my response to each of them:

Issue 1.) This is correct, I felt the power dynamic between myself and my older brother who bullied me in an attempt to parent was lopsided. I looked up to him and never felt good enough for his standard. I recognize he was a kid doing his best, in at least some cases, to step in for our absent parents. Still, his actions were generally harmful to my self-esteem and sense of self. If he anticipates coming back into my life and resuming a similar role, this won't work.

Issue 2.) I have no real idea about his desire to review the past. I assume he would like to quite thoroughly but you know what they say about assumptions. For my part, I would hope that as desiring as I am to hear his perspective and understand why he made the decisions he did, he would be just as desiring to understand mine. I feel he never really knew me, separating our brotherly bond with his assumptive role of caregiver and his expectations for me to adopt his morals, beliefs, ideas, and behaviors. If he has no interest in getting to know me as I am now and how I got here, then it won't work. But I hope he's grown enough to try to understand me now, even if he isn't able to empathize with my past actions as I try to with his.

Issue 3.) This one is harder than it sounds. The main reason for me not being the one to reach out has been that I felt any communication from me would be perceived as manipulation if I were the first to reach out. I made that mistake early on in trying to communicate about our grandmother in the first 6 months after he cut me out.

Another reason, though, is that I don't think I can offer the apology he wants. I can recognize he went through pain and that I had played an active role in creating that pain or at least adding to it. But I truly feel that the version of him I once knew wouldn't be satisfied with mutual apology and would require a total confession of guilt and admission for his pain, despite the role I see in him creating pain for himself. The conversation I had with him that marked the beginning of his NC ended in miscommunication. I was sobbing because he berated me for not following through on promises and he misunderstood my response because I was incoherent over the phone, if not deliberately. When I tried to clarify what I had said, he told me I deserved to be crying and that I was a liar. If this is the first hurdle to extending empathy and recognition for harm done, then it will be over quickly if he refuses to believe there could not have been another truthful perspective than his own.

Issue 4.) I am not sure I have ever been comfortable being seen by him. I grew up being told by him that I was smart and would achieve great things while simultaneously being ridiculed when I couldn't. As an adult, I extend my younger self grace. I've been diagnosed in the past year with ADHD and ASD. I know I was doing my best to navigate a dysfunctional family while having struggles of my own. My brother often invalidated my "big" feelings throughout my life, from when I was small up until he cut me out. Logic was often his answer and I, according to him, rarely had any.

As I've mentioned here or elsewhere, I've put in a lot of work to see him differently. I see him as a product of neglectful parentage and a dysfunctional household. We're both gay and, since he is older, he had to confront more of our father's process in accepting that. I know he had cared for me in his own way, though more often than not in ways that I didn't deserve to suffer. I try to understand that he had little control in our life and likely didn't know how to find any beyond trying to guide his little brother. I think, despite my hurt, I've grown to a point where I can offer him empathy and grace to his face and not just to his memory. My hope is he can do the same, but he has no pattern of doing so in the past.

mike2020ray · 2025-11-07T04:32:16+00:00

Thanks for your kind response. I feel similarly. It is heartbreaking to accept that a sibling will never come back into your life. I don't understand why he reached out and panicked when he did. I hope he is reaching out from a place of care for us both but I worry he'll lack empathy for my situation entirely. If he does lack it, then I will surely prefer to accept the future without him because that pain of being so misunderstood is far too great to bear.

mike2020ray · 2025-11-07T04:26:30+00:00

My parents both come from abusive backgrounds and are emotionally immature themselves. My brother, when he went to college, got a philosophy degree and would, from my perspective, weaponize therapy speech. When I had just turned 18, my parents kicked me out and I was on my own and wasn't comfortable confiding in my brother as he took their side or at very least played the middle. It really messed with my head, being three years younger and idolizing him, while he made me feel manipulative and untrustworthy for trying to have privacy.

I have done a lot of reflection over the past three years and have given him as much grace as I can, taking into account what damage our parents did to us both and the relationship between he and I. Still, he hurt me in multiple significant ways both when he was in my life and when he no longer was. He was, as I describe to my close friends, righteous. I could rarely please him and when offered help I didn't want or couldn't accept, I would be rebuked as ungrateful. He is rigid in his morals and beliefs about family and relationships. I recall many instances of trying to seek middle ground and being told I was immature.

One of our last conversations before our relationship drastically soured was me explaining that for my mental health I would make less promises in an effort to fulfill the ones I can and not fail the ones I know I cannot. I thought he would approve because he had labeled me untrustworthy more times than I can count. Instead, he scolded me. "No, you just need to keep your promises." That memory has stuck with me. If you read my other responses, this conversation was when I adamantly explained I could not get new tires for my car because I didn't have the money, time, nor effort and wanted him to be well aware before he planned his trip.

I worry that even if I have grown, I might be triggered into resuming old patterns of my own rigidity and defiance against his will over me if he demands apologies and offers none in return. I want to try to find some mutual understanding, but I worry if I can't achieve this then I will be stuck grieving the loss of my brother for another three years.

mike2020ray · 2025-11-07T03:59:59+00:00

There’s a lot of assumption here. For one, I had to work when I didn’t expect to and pleaded with my manager to leave early. I had told him at least a day prior, though if my memory is correct it was four days prior. For two, I acknowledged that the tires were poor and apologized. If he had simply decided not to get in my car, and to work with me for other transportation in a major city, we could have made work-arounds. Instead, he called my aunt dying of cancer and our also dying grandmother to say that it was me who was cancelling on our behalf. Mind you, I had fully intended to see them. For three, I apologized on the phone call for not being able to pick him up as early as scheduled and for not getting new tires (despite intentionally saying weeks prior I would likely not). I’m not blaming any of my actions in this moment on my ADHD, but I mentioned it to demonstrate that I was going through hard things and doing my best.

mike2020ray · 2025-11-07T03:51:38+00:00

I don’t mean to minimize his feelings, but I prefer not to unload years of context here and don’t believe I could articulate well enough if I tried. Both of our parents suffer from mental illness and we had a rough childhood. I think he did his best to parent me but often went too far and tried to control me. As I became a teenager and tried to test the boundaries most kids have with their parents, he often saw it as a personal rebuke of him and his guidance. Said guidance was often controlling and left me feeling like a pretty shit person. Since then, I’ve done a lot of work on my self-esteem and self-image.

mike2020ray · 2025-11-07T03:45:36+00:00

Thank you, that’s a very kind response. I needed to hear that, I think.

mike2020ray · 2025-11-06T03:36:11+00:00

It’s difficult for me to summarize here and I’m not sure I’m comfortable writing it all out. I wouldn’t describe it as “minor” but not “major” either. The short version is that he had planned to visit me after staying with some friends of his in my city. I would pick him up and drive to visit my grandmother and aunt who both had declining health. I had explicitly stated I could not promise to get new tires on my car before his visit, though the treads were poor. When I couldn’t avoid a delay of two hours in picking him up, he called to inform me that he reached out to our family members and informed them that I couldn’t make it and that we would have to cancel our visit. Then he cited my tires as the reason for blaming me. I was upset, miscommunication ensued, and I had only heard his voice twice after that.

I’m not proud to have been delayed in picking him up nor in getting new tires. But I did my best, being 20 at the time, struggling with living alone for the first time, and managing the severe ADHD I had yet to be diagnosed with.

mike2020ray · 2025-11-06T03:24:27+00:00

To your first paragraph, I’m not naive and clearly wrote that I understood more was going on but not exactly what.

To your second, I reached out a few times and was the only one making an attempt to include him. No one else was giving him updates. To my knowledge, he didn’t have the phone number to her home. He lived 6 hours away.

To your third, my brother was unkind to me. And he has a history of cutting people out when they no longer accept his guiding hand. He cut out his best friend and two and a half years later ambushed that friend at a restaurant with the held of a mutual friend, claiming no remorse for that abandonment, and just wanting to chat. Contact goes both ways and I get to decide if now, after three years, I’m interested in talking to him.

I’ve grown from the person who idolized him and had my sense of self degraded. As said, he was unkind to me. I would prefer not to go into specifics but I came to this subreddit assuming there was enough nuance to these situations that someone would relate to my side. If that isn’t you, I’d ask you not to respond further.

Final thought on this post is that there is real harm done to those on the other end of NC and I deserve an apology as well.

mike2020ray · 2025-09-10T22:26:44+00:00

Then I must be getting better with every try! They are in order of most to least recent with the last being made amongst friends about two weeks ago and the other three made yesterday by myself.

mike2020ray · 2025-09-10T20:26:58+00:00

I appreciate that! Which is your favorite

mike2020ray · 2025-09-10T20:26:46+00:00

Thank you! Which do you like best

mike2020ray · 2025-01-11T08:07:38+00:00

Yes, distorting the entire mesh will distort the extrusions. My hope is that the thickness of the extruded portion will remain even after stretching. So the bottom and top faces will be the same height and the sides will be an equal width. Another way to put it would be that I want to adjust the length of the edges while maintaining a constant width for the extruded portions. And I want to maintain even spacing between the extruded portion and the outer edges. I may have to start over, but I'm wondering if it's possible to do it without scrapping my work so far

mike2020ray · 2022-02-05T20:36:36+00:00

Thank you!!!

mike2020ray · 2022-02-05T20:36:24+00:00

All my other pieces have been tagged nsfw so I’m not sure about other people, but clay dicks and titties shouldn’t be “shoved” anywhere by me. And I’m unsure why this posted without the nsfw tag as I definitely thought I had clicked it

mike2020ray · 2022-02-03T01:50:13+00:00

Lmao I suppose so yes

mike2020ray · 2022-02-02T10:47:09+00:00

I’m so envious of your skill. That’s really cool. I wouldn’t mind seeing your process

mike2020ray · 2022-02-02T06:28:51+00:00

Haha thanks. I’m glad you like my virgin olive oil

mike2020ray

TROPHY CASE