The Blame Game

This spring my parents moved to the same city as my sister, something to do with getting away from the brutal winters in the Northeast (and, yeah, it was pretty bad this past year).  My sister has a bit of a smothering tendency towards my parents, but one that fluctuates with extreme degradation when it fits her agenda.  As I've written previously, my sister has worked hard to put our parents in the middle of a situation that concerns only her and me.  In her mind, if only my parents would consent to being her flying monkeys. 

Alas, my mother -- being a fair-minded woman -- just will not submit.  In a noncommittal tone, my mother's response to my sister's list of grievances against me is that people grow apart.  In her blog (forgive me that I don't link to my sister's blog, but I don't want to risk her finding mine and using it as a pretext for harassing me), my sister writes about how my mother refuses to understand her and how my sister is reduced to tears by my mother's nonchalant behavior.  

The most telling bit is when my mother responds by telling my sister: "You're grown-ups.  You created this fight by yourselves."  My sister then tells the world about, gasp!, my mother's failure!  You got it -- this is all my mother's fault, darn it!  If only my mother had taken charge.  

Then, oddly enough, my sister thinks that she can reinforce the view of my mother as a failure by talking about her weaknesses: 1) she can't drive; 2) she doesn't speak English.  Let me talk first about my mother's English.  It isn't that my mother can't speak English -- she's just not a fluent English speaker.  And who can blame the woman?  She came to the U.S. when she was already in her thirties and while she took some ESL classes in the first few years of our immigrant life, she didn't have access later on when we moved to the South where there were less resources.  Yet, despite such limitations, she picked up enough English to successfully co-own and run two small businesses with my father.  Their customers, practically all of whom she had to communicate with in English, adored her.  She remembered their names, their children, their celebrations and their sorrows.  The customers loved to talk with her because she listened to them on their ground (a trait sorely lacking in my sister).  So, is my mother's English less-than-perfect?  Perhaps in my sister's eyes, but that has never stopped my mother from communicating.

Now, in regards to my mother not driving.  Um, big effing deal.  In all honesty, I don't drive.  I learned to drive when I was in my late twenties and have always been a horrible driver.  I had two car accidents and decided that the world was safer without me behind wheels (I notoriously once crashed a go-kart -- I guess that makes three accidents).  And to expand on that truth, every single person in my family of origin is a horrible, bad driver.  My father drives too slow, my brother drives too fast, my sister drives too fast and frequently stops paying attention while driving. 

But to get back to the point, my sister refuses to accept what my mother said, namely that my sister is partly to blame for the rift between me and her.  As my sister has written to me: "I am sorry.  I don't know what I did so wrong that you are treating me wrong but let's forget it."  The infamous non-apology of a narcissist.  My sister doesn't care what she did wrong.  More likely, she thinks she did nothing wrong.  My mother and me -- we are to blame.  I understand her blaming me but her blaming my mother.  Wow.  Just wow.  

My sister also expands a great deal of effort on her blog on her own sorrow.  Here are some choice tidbits:

 I weigh my efforts to convey the depth of my sense of calamity. I have sobbed in front of her. I've talked to her of how I can no longer trust people, how I couldn't rely on anyone else to stay by my side when my own sister abandons me. I've told her how I'm persistently angry, how I cannot shake this feeling of betrayal.  (Just baffling, I know, why her younger sister who she harassed with fourteen emails and five phone calls every single day, stalked, threatened with destruction of her possessions, threatened with commitment to a mental institution would choose to "betray" her.  I know, my sister was soooo trusting.  She trusted that she could act with impunity and that I would always, always be by her side... you know, because my role is to be the sidekick, the Tonto to her Lone Ranger, Nicole Richie to her Paris Hilton, Robin Hood to her Batman.)   

I now feel like I live my hours on the verge of an impending crisis, of yet another breakdown. How one minor spurn, one signal of rejection, or one careless word is enough to spiral me into a hole of despair. How I feel more like a stranger here on earth, with few friends I feel I can turn to.  How what I now see are inevitable doom, inescapable failure, impending betrayal. (Run for the hills! The apocalypse is coming!)  

And I never thought to question whether they were worth it. That my family was worth whatever effort I put into it. That they were worth however much time I spent with them. That they were worth however much money I spent on them.  (Let's just admit it.  None of us, no one in her family of origin is worth the greatness that is my sister.  I mean, we spent effort on her.  We spent time with her.  We even spent money on her -- although, in fairness, perhaps not as much as she given that she is married to a millionaire and spends his money on the family.)

I would also like to believe that her (our mother's) words came from a place that contains no malice, no ill-will, but from that crevice where we lack easy access to other words, to words of sympathy, words of understanding. I would like to think that I have the fortitude to withstand these words without suffering too many bruises.

Yes, that says it all.  Because god forbid that your mother would ever expect you, as a grown child, to take responsibility for your own mistakes.  What an awful, awful mother.    


      

Family

I am currently addicted to a Korean drama called Dandelion Family.  One of the main characters is a woman married to a man with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  The husband can well be said to be malignant.  He needs to control every single aspect of his wife's life: her weight, finances, daily movements, what she wears, the food she eats.  Of course, the control happens behind closed doors.  To her family, he is the perfect husband, an amazing son-in-law, a phenomenal brother-in-law.  Even while her every move is being controlled, the wife is uncertain about why she is unhappy because she cannot take apart her husband's machinations.  Finally, he stands revealed for what he is when she discovers he had a vasectomy without her knowledge.  During the eight years they were married, she desperately wanted a child.  When she tells her parents about her husband's betrayal and asks for their help in leaving him, the husband turns the table on her by insinuating to each family member that his wife has been having an affair, that he still loved her, that he would forgive her and take her back.  (If you choose to watch this drama, please do so with caution, particularly if you are suffering from any trauma in the aftermath of a relationship with a narcissist.  I found the husband so believable and creepy that it was hard to watch.)  The wife's family begins to believe the husband and encourage her to return to her husband.

I bring up my tv-watching to talk about the complicated scenario one might face in going No Contact with a sibling.  When I started having serious and continuous arguments with my sister (the multiple phone calls and emails sent to me at work cursing me out), I never sought to place my parents in the middle.  However, my sister thought otherwise.  She immediately called our mother and told her that I was treating her unfairly, that I was angry at her for no reason whatsoever.  When my mother called me, I gave her specific instances of what my sister had done: yelling at me in a bar because she thought she should dictate who I was dating; yelling at me in the street merely because I happened to fall out of step with her on the sidewalk; calling me at work to tell me I needed to quit my job immediately and get a job in an industry that she, my sister, approved of.  My mother then asked me if I couldn't apologize to my sister.  I asked my mother why I should apologize when I hadn't done anything wrong.  She answered that because I was the more compliant one, that my sister was the strong-willed one.

As the problems continued through many years, my mother eventually stopped urging me to reconcile with my sister.  Perhaps the urgency of the situation became clearer when I told her to never give out my address to my sister, that if any harm ever came it me, it would most likely be from my sister.  This is my perspective, but from my sister's side, she still urges my parents to act as mediators.  She still insists that she did no wrong.  She tells our parents she apologized ("I am sorry even though I don't know what I did wrong") but that I refused to accept the apology.  To my mother's credit, she now tells my sister: "What can I do?  You are both adults with families of your own.  Just worry about that."

My mother's neutral answer angers my sister.  My sister has written multiple times on her blog about how "weak" our parents are, how "disgusted" she is with them.  When I first read such posts about my parents, I found myself crying for my parents, sad that they were being publicly derided by my sister for no reason than for not agreeing to abide by her wishes.

After reading my sister's blog post about our parents, I lessened my tone with my parents where my sister is concerned.  I don't ask them to take sides.  I just ask them to not share any of my personal information (address, work location).  I request that they not involve themselves in my problems with my sister.  I think, too, how difficult it would be if my parents had to take sides with one or the other of their daughters.  Inasmuch as possible, I want to spare them that pain.

I also know now that they can never see my sister the way I see her.  To them, she is a dutiful, good daughter.  She has had many years of practicing image-management whereas I rarely prioritized my image.  I always tried to behave sincerely and honestly.  I do not want to change my values and lower myself to my sister's standards and appear more than I am.  I once thought my parents would someday see the pain my sister caused me, and perhaps it is disappointing to not have justice in that regards.  But I'd rather compromise with them than do what my sister did on her blog.  Therefore, I am now content to have a reasonably good relationship with them on other grounds.
      

The Narcissist in Your Head, Part 1

No, I don't mean that you are a narcissist.  But chances are that if you have been abused by a narcissist, an internal loop will keep playing the insults, threats, and insinuations...even for years afterwards.  This is the way it's been for me.  For close to a decade, I reread emails between my sister and me, looking for some logic, some turning point to which I could return and correct our relationship.  I tried to see it the way she said the disconnect happened, that she was well intentioned, that our relationship was important to her.

There were emails in which she wrote, "I am sorry.  I don't know what I did so wrong that you are treating me wrong but let's forget it."  Or the email in which she wrote about how her son would grow up never knowing me and that she regretted that I had only met her husband a couple of times.  Those emails worked to some degree.  I felt guilty: it was as though some one had grabbed me in the guts and were twisting my insides.

What I couldn't understand though was why she insisted she didn't know what she had done wrong.  She had once tried to have our parents put me in a mental institute.  During a period when she kept calling me at work and emailing me vitriolic curses, I asked her to stop because her harassment was causing me to hyperventilate.  The next day, my mother called me, sounding very concerned.  She said that my sister had rang her, saying that I told her I was going to commit suicide and that I needed to be hospitalized to prevent me from harming myself.  Fortunately, my mother believed me when I told her I said no such thing.  As I once wrote in an email to my sister, this is a wrong she did me.

The other part I kept thinking about when I read her email in later years is how she always mentioned her family, her children and her husband -- that I was missing out on being part of her life.  Never once did she ask about my life, about my husband.

So, why did I keep hearing her in my head?  I think it's because it took me a long time to unravel what she was saying.  She always couched her words in terms of our family, of her good intentions.  I am the type to overthink things.  I try to be conscientious, even if I don't always succeed.  She knew her target.

Most likely you are reading this because you also have (or had) a narcissist in your life.  Recognition of the person's illness is the start of letting go of these words.  Once it started to dawn on me what ailed my sister, it was as though my perception of our relationship had shifted, as though I was seeing our past interactions through a different-colored filter.  I understood that my sister never asked about my life, my husband, or anything about me because my value to her was as a spectator to her life.  I saw that my sister decided to deny any wrong-doing on her part because it conflicted with how she viewed herself: perfect.  This idealized sense of herself is more important to her than our relationship.

It is only two months since I started to think my sister was on the far end of the narcissist spectrum.  There are still days when I hear my sister in my head but they are less now.  Many things that have been missing in my life have returned to me: my sense of valuing the present moment; enjoyment in the small things of life such as taking walks, reading novels, cooking; the ability to concentrate; and most important of all, slowly, I am working on my regaining my confidence.  

To Begin

Recently, I realized that I am most likely the younger sister of a woman suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  I've been estranged from my older sister for close to a decade now.  The decision to sever contact with her was not an easy one.  There were times in our lives when we were tight, shared good moments, and laughed together.  I came to a crux in our relationship when my sister insisted that she had the right to dictate who I chose for my boyfriend, a job, and whether I could continue to write creatively or not.  When I replied that I was an autonomous being, she emailed me that I had hurt her feelings by insinuating that she did not allow me a free existence.  She followed up with multiple emails and phone calls, sometimes fourteen emails and phone calls to me at work, each following upon another loudly insisting an immediate response.  This behavior culminated with a threat to stalk me.  She acted upon this threat by showing up at my work place under an assumed name.  

In hindsight, I see how fortunate I was to move to another city.  Yet, my physical distance has not deterred my sister from her behavior.  I do not respond to her emails or phone messages.  She has let me know her displeasure by portraying me on her blog as a cold sister who has estranged her for no good reason.  Herself -- she was the loving sister who did everything for me, without reward or recognition.  Her readers believed her and commented on what an awful sister I must be.  For that, she thanked them.  For years, I felt demoralized and humiliated by what she wrote about me publicly.  It took me a long time to discover the disorder by which my sister has ruled her life.  

This blog is not a revenge blog, although it will most likely have bitter posts.  There will undoubtedly be moments when I will be unable to reflect but will rant and rave with anger.  But I hope that such posts will be interwoven with genuine resources.  Since coming to consider my sister a narcissist, I have spent quite a bit of time looking at other websites, blogs, forums and resources.  In general, most of these resources are dedicated to children of narcissists and those involved in romantic relationships.  If this blog can affirm the experiences of other siblings who have been emotionally or physically abused by their brother or sister, I will have contributed something worthwhile.  

About the user name: I had considered Echo first but it seemed too defeated.  Instead, I chose Athena, a Greek goddess known for so many of the better things in life.  May you too find these better things in life as you journey out of whatever mire and confusion that you might have suffered in the hands of a narcissist.