My brother on Mother's Day

[Cascade]

Hi Group,
I'm not sure there's a solution or anything to be done here.  Just need to get this off my chest and away from me.  All thoughts are welcome!

I never talked with my brother, who is four years younger, about the childhood sexual abuse I experienced at the hands of our father.  We've been communicating more than we usually do out of necessity, since our mom passed away about six months ago.  It's brought a constant barrage of triggers that I've kept to myself.  I always tried to protect him.  Our communication is still very superficial and logistical.  Once I left the house at age 18, we rarely talked at all.

Anyway, he texted me today with his usual humorous front, "Happy (not?) Mother's Day," and said he was just checking in on me.  It was a kind message, but I still responded very superficially.  Guess we just haven't laid the trusting groundwork that would be needed for me to respond more honestly.  There was a part of me (larger than expected) that just wanted to unload on him and tell him everything.  No, I'm not okay.  I've been in an emotional flashback for two and half months, and dealing with all the instability of CPTSD and oh yeah, left my job!

I know there wouldn't be any point in doing that though, because once all this with probate and everything gets closed out, we'll probably just go back to not being in each other's lives.  And now I'm crying because it kinda sucks and feels pretty painful not to have a relationship with my only living immediate relative.  Dad died in 2017, thank god.  But there were things that I saw in my brother when he visited for a few days right after mom's death that make me think maybe he fell into the trap of narcissism.  He sure can be manipulative.  Our father probably trained him well, too... except to be a "man," instead of the way dad "taught" me to be a woman.

I was doing better today till I got that text.  Everything came flooding back as I imagined telling it all to him.  Plus the newly felt pain of our superficial relationship.  It all hit me.


Thanks for letting me express all that here.  At least I have someplace to put it! 
   -Cascade

[Armee]

 

[Phoebes]

Gosh, Cascade, I'm so sorry you're going through so much right now. I wonder what his intentions were with that.. seems insensitive..?. It would be so nice to think your brother could be supportive and understanding and that y'all could commiserate over shared experience. I think it's smart to observe that he is manipulative. That's a big red flag to me. If you do disclose anything to him, proceed with caution, please. Listen to your body.

I wonder if you dipped a toe in and asked him what his experience was like, what he would say. Sending support to you as you navigate your relationship with your brother.

[Cascade]

Armee, thanks for the tender loving hugs!  And Phoebes, thanks for sharing your wisdom.  It got me to breathe again.

Yeah, when I confronted him about manipulating the guy at the bank to reveal hints about the accounts he really couldn't reveal, my brother's response was, "But I do it for good!"  OMG, doing bad things for "good" reasons only reminded me of power-hungry narcissists I see in movies like Medici and The Borgias.  I think it would take another in-person visit over something really emotional to get us talking about our childhood.

TW:  Rape
I suspect he knew something was up the last time I remember our dad raping me during a summer visit.  He kept asking what happened in the hotel bathroom, if I was okay, and I finally had to get mad at him to get him to stop asking.  I was 12, so he would've been 8 (and going through his cancer treatment).  Not sure he remembers that.  I didn't even remember till more than 35 years later, eesh!  Not sure I want to go down that memory lane with him.

Thanks so much for all your well wishes and support.  It does feel good to get this off my chest!
   -Cascade

[Papa Coco]

Cascade,

I'm so sorry to hear that you are in the middle of this probate process with your brother.

For me, when my family was closing out the estate, any contact with my siblings exploded in my brain and heart like fireworks. Receiving even the most benign text from my cold-hearted siblings was able to fully open all the wounds from all the decades of abuse from the entire family.

So, I resonate fully with you, in that I know that just receiving a text, no matter how benign, is like opening the door to the storm in all its fury all over again.

You mentioned that are aren't sure, but you suspect your brother may be a narcissist himself. Obviously, I can't know if he is, but my own personal rule about narcissists is: if I even remotely suspect someone is a narcissist. They are. I would be disturbed too by your brother's response that it was okay for him to manipulate someone as long as it was for "good."  (To most people "good" means to get what he wants). To me, a skilled manipulator IS a narcissist.

I went 100% No Contact with my family because my life depended on it. But even though it was my move to escape, I still hurts to be no longer with any family. But then I remember that if I were to ever connect with them again, they'd make my life as miserable as they did in the past.

I hope you can find peace between the texts and that the post-probate world will be a little easier for you and the triggers.

[Cascade]

Papa Coco, thanks so much for sharing your own insights with closing estates.  Agreed, no contact was so much better.  But then there's also the fact that if I wasn't so triggered, I wouldn't have so many lovely opportunities to heal, lol!  

Guess it's just the right time, and I have to hold on and do what I can do, when I can do it.  What I hear mostly from you is that at least the probate will have an end-point.  That's what I'm hanging onto!
   -Cascade

[Papa Coco]

Cascade,

From my heart to yours, here's a nice, safe, distance hug just because we have felt some of the same things. There IS an end in sight.

[Cascade]

to you Papa Coco.

[Kizzie]

Guess we just haven't laid the trusting groundwork that would be needed for me to respond more honestly.  There was a part of me (larger than expected) that just wanted to unload on him and tell him everything.  No, I'm not okay.  I've been in an emotional flashback for two and half months, and dealing with all the instability of CPTSD and oh yeah, left my job!

I feel like there is a part of you that really wants to at least be heard and maybe it is possible. You won't ever know until you give it a shot. That said, as Phoebes suggested, when we come from families like ours it's probably best to dip a toe in rather jump straight in.  That way you can gauge what his interest in more of a relationship is and what he's prepared to hear about from you.

Recently I skipped my NM's memorial service and told my brother the reason was that I didn't feel the same way as he does about our mother and at some point if he's interested in hearing about that from me we could have a talk.  He did say he was coming our way in the fall and maybe we could get together so he didn't dismiss it out of hand and seemed interested to hear what I had to say.  I don't hold out a lot of hope for a better relationship though as he's an N too, but at least I will be heard and just that is important and enough for me. 

Kizzie

 

[Cascade]

Kizzie, thanks so much for your thoughtful insights.  I really appreciate your own example, too.  Yes, I can hold it in the back of my mind, but putting effort into a relationship with my brother right now is too much.  I'm not sure it'll ever be in the cards, but I'm not closing the door, either.  It's just a big maybe.  Who knows?! 
   -Cascade

[Chart]

Hey Cascade, I've just been surfing the Forum and I came across this/your thread. I'm impacted by what you have written as it slightly mirrors certain aspects of my own life. I'm the younger brother to my sister who was traumatized (along with me when I finally came along) by our biological father. My sister was never victim to sexual assault, but she was very severely physically and psychologically abused. As my sister and I each passed into adulthood we went our separate ways, both pretty dysfonctionnel, although from the outside my dysfunction was pretty well masked. It was assumed by everybody that I had been spared the greater part of the abuse as I was too young to be abused and too young to remember it. So in a funny way I now see my sister's behavior in a different light (through what you have written of your experience). I think my sister assumed I wouldn't understand much of what she experienced. Though maybe that's just not true. But the fact has always been that we have been pretty separate over the decades and don't get in touch too often. Regarding your brother it's hard to know what to share. And the question is: what do you want in a relationship with him and how much do you think he is capable of giving. One of the things a family relationship is about is the "shared experience" and understanding that can come along with that. This can be immensely helpful and satisfying, like what we do here on the forum. But if the experiences in the family were profoundly different, this can cause certain difficulties in that connection. I think this was the case with my sister and I. But what I'm realizing now, in reality my Trauma was in fact just as significant to me as my sister's Trauma was for her. We just don't believe that the other had the same experience (in my case I wasn't aware of the source of my problems until I discovered Cptsd a year ago, and in her case she just didn't think I (or anyone, herself included) really understood her experience).

A lot of this turns into second-guessing. The truth is that my sister's experience WAS different, but that I AM capable of understanding it. And vice-versa. But added to this fact is the element of being ready to re-open the past. And thus another level of complication enters into the picture.

When I discovered and started to understand Cptsd, I immediately thought of my sister, and wrote to her and was ready to buy Pete's book and ship it to her. I actually didn't have her postal address so I wrote and asked for it but she never gave it to me. She replied that she had just downloaded the book in audio version... and was listening to it on her commute to and from work... I thought, how in the heck are you going to encompass the concept of CPTSD while negotiating intense urban traffic?!?!?

So, to date, nothing has materialized from the therapy work that I have been involved in since understanding more completely my Trauma, and the relationship with my sister.

And as a conclusion, I have to say that all I can really do is to continue to work on myself. I don't think my sister is ready to come to the level that I've reached. I am keeping the contact possible, and she has communicated nice things to me, but I feel on a deeper level that she's not where I'm at at this point in time.

And maybe that's okay. But I empathize with your feeling of absence of contact with the only remaining family member who's not part of the abusive element. But we are all changing, slow or fast, if I continue my healing I'll be much more capable of any future relationship with her should things develop in that direction. I still love my sibling, so I've (once again, like many things in my life) decided to be patient.

Hope that might help. Sending love and hugs. -Chart
 

[Desert Flower]

Hello all. I just found and read this thread and it got me to think about my relationship with my brother too. We were in the same neglectfull 'home' growing up so that experience is 'the same'. And my brother is still very much affected by our childhood and we share the same view on that. And he's been really supportive and has given me some great insights and recognition too.
And at the same time, I was sexually abused (by someone from outside our 'family') and he was not, so that experience is not the same at all. But I don't think that matters much, because we have enough shared experiences to really understand each other after all.
What I find very difficult however, is that I see him struggling as well and he doesn't want to get into it the way I'm doing now and I'm thinking I'm now finding a way to cope better and he might not. And I find that really hard.

That said, Cascade, from what you're writing, I'm not sure your brother would be a support and I understand you would say 'who knows?' for now.

[Chart]

What I find very difficult however, is that I see him struggling as well and he doesn't want to get into it the way I'm doing now and I'm thinking I'm now finding a way to cope better and he might not. And I find that really hard.

Desert Flower, this resonates with me. SOOOO many of the people I knew and still know clearly suffer from Cptsd like me and my sister. I can go back years going over many of my acquaintances and friends and see the patterns of abuse and trauma clearly indicated in their lives and histories. I've even considered recontacting some of them since discovering Cptsd. But my sister is the only one I tried with. And I don't think even with her it had any effect. Not to long after we began discussing the subject I reached out to her and she rebuffed me. So since then I've been very reluctant to re-engage. My emotional needs (especially respect of limits) have NEVER been a priority in my family. I know this is entirely unconscious on their part, especially my sister. I think relationships between persons suffering from trauma are especially complex, family members or otherwise. I don't think this will smooth out until I've done the better part of what I need to do to heal.

I hope to heck that was coherent...

[Desert Flower]

Yes, it was Chart. I'm sorry things are this way with your sister.

I don't think this will smooth out until I've done the better part of what I need to do to heal.

I think so too.

And as you say, I see so many other traumatised people everywhere too. At this point, I try to not engage too much because I'm afraid it will overwhelm me. I really need to heal myself first as well.