Aunt Confused

                                                     

                                                                                     [snippet from photo of Jon Lewenstein]                                    

 This is the same Aunt as Aunt "No Pictures for You!" I have named her Aunt Confused because I believe she was another scapegoat, but one who has remained within the fog life long with incredible damage done. She is another person my mother destroyed my relationship with. Yes, there are parallels with my story of Aunt Scapegoat!

I grew up with a woman that whispered in my ear while at a family meal at Denny's and told me,

"The mafia's coming after me"

as she popped multiple blue pills into her mouth.

She would get drunk and high and one could tell. Is this something a 9 year old should have dealt with?

I dealt with that and other crazy stuff as a child, the two times she lived with us.

This was my father's sister. She was the product of the 1950s, New Jersey culture, and of an alcoholic father, enabling mother, and narcissistic brother who became my father who was around 5 years younger. She had and has serious problems from earlier drug addiction to possible multiple personality disorder. What can I tell you but to say at times it seemed she "switched"? There definitely is some kind of personality disorder in the mix there. I have never been diagnosed with one in case anyone is interested, and have seen enough therapists in my life time.

At this point you may be asking, "How could fivehundredpoundpeep have such disturbed aunts on both sides of her family?" How can someone's family be this crazy on both sides?" But it was. Recently I watched a video forget where, where the presenter said, that narcissists will seek out other narcissists. Water will find it's own level. "Romance" and connection blossomed between two dark souls that slithered out of dark families.

Narcissists do drive people to insanity. There is a special sort of soul murder at the hands of sociopaths and narcissists. I am not sure sometimes how I myself even survived. Sometimes I think Aspergers gave me some distance with an analytical mind surveying the insanity from above, knowing the people I was surrounded by were not normal. Spiritually I sought out God to rescue me from insanity too.

If you are in a family full of cold and cruel individuals, you will also have the ones you see who have cracked up. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger they say but many people are destroyed in family systems like these. You see the human emotional casualties strew around like chopped and tossed firewood. Aunt Scapegoat and Aunt Confused are definitely among their number.

 There had to be incredible abuse back there somewhere for her. When talking to her even in recent months and years, she would seem lucid and then would segue her way into talking about how the mafia was after her, or she was being watched or how all her neighbors were her enemies and trying to steal her husband. Her third husband is now deceased and she lives with her daughter, but the odd talk still would pop up from time to time.

I was doing some family research, and founds this old gossipy neighborhood newspaper that covered
my father's neighborhood. They actually reported on his birthday party at the age of 7. It looks like big money was poured out on this festival especially for the late 1940s and for a lower middle class factory worker who had been disinherited and cut off from his own father who was a multi-millionaire.

  Is it possible to be spoiled into being a narcissist? Was she the scapegoat compared to my academically achieving in math and science father? It makes me wonder. My father was an obvious golden boy, he would go on to earn a full ride 4 year scholarship to a well-known Ivy League university. He would go on to marry a golden daughter who outshined her four living siblings from the farm.

 One thing as I look back at the past, my father put his sister down constantly. He had no respect for her and no love.  I grew up being told Aunt Confused was trash, was "crazy", and even at one point my own father told me, "She's a sociopath!" as he told me she would hide beneath his bed to scare him as a kid. Perhaps that was a dose of projection?

One creepy thing, is both of my parents would express outrage that she dared to leave her abusive husband and leave her children behind. When I became an adult and learned about domestic violence and volunteered at a shelter in my 20s, this lack of mercy over a woman getting beaten by her husband  totally disgusted me. I don't understand why she left her kids behind perhaps it was her lack of money, but grew up being told she was the devil incarnate by both parents!

 She and her husband lived at home with her parents, my father's parents and grandparents. She married young and had two children. Her husband was a factory worker she married right out of high school. He worked at the same factory as my grandfather. He was an alcoholic and beat her to the point of punching and black eyes. What gets me is thinking how could an abusive husband go full froth with her parents there? But he did. Things were so bad for her that she disappeared, leaving her two children home with her grandparents and husband she was fleeing from. My early memories of the grandparents on that side are very vague. [When I was very young, my parents had me and my brother live there too for some months when my sister got sick]

She would disappear. Literally off the map for several years. She paid one visit to my family and then went poof! My father was angry about this too, but when we moved out of state, she reconnected with him to her own detriment. During this time she hitchhiked the roads being homeless.  I suspect did what she had to do to survive. Why didn't her parents help her throw out the abusive husband? That question comes to my mind. But anyhow she disappeared, got divorced from afar and got rides with truckers. She found a nice one to rescue her. She would marry an African-American trucker [her second husband] who had a side line business as a pig farmer his relatives helped with while he was out driving truck. They lived in the wilds of the state my family just moved into. It was a very small town and extremely remote, poor and rural. I never met her husband but sadly he died. She reached out to my father out of desperation being left penniless with his grown kids inheriting just about everything. My father loaded up us kids into the family sedan and my mother too, and we drove up there.

As we drove up to the trailer on a muddy road, my parents argued. My mother expressed her disgust, with the rural area, it's poverty and everything else. There was outrage over her choice of husband as well with mean-spirited racial overtones.  We would drive up to her trailer and knock on the door. I was around 13 years old. I remember her looking shell-shocked, but she gave a wary smile and wave and "Hiya!". I had not seen her for a few years. The trailer was in horrible shape and had become a hoard, with piles of trash piled up. Bottles, piles of dirt,  rags and newspapers laid scattered all over the floor.  Obviously her grief and new loneliness had pushed her over a new edge. I walked gingerly in behind my father and my mother was there too.  My parents yelled at her, "What in the hell happened here?". She didn't respond.

She then laughed and said, "I made youse lunch!, it's in the oven!" My father handed me a oven mitt, and said "Go see what roadkill she made for us!", I went over to the oven, and opened it, and in it was a ROTTEN PIG'S HEAD! It had been cooked, but was at least 3-4 days old and left unattended. It's eyes bugged out, it's ears flopped. Flies poured out of the oven. "It's still good!" my aunt cried. I literally swooned across the table and almost passed out. My father yelled at me, "What in the hell is your problem?" but took a few steps closer and looked into the oven.

My father's response to all this would be getting her committed to a psych ward. That would happen twice in the few years that followed. I remember mutterings about speed induced schizophrenia. She speed loaded diet pills to remain under 200lbs. This definitely wasn't the full picture. I doubt the psychiatrists warned her about her brother or narcissism and sociopathy though.

However one thing that followed is my parents started to use her to abuse me further. They laid on the threats to commit me as well. At the time they scared me saying they would force me into an institution for life. No psychologist or counselor ever was ever sought for me. Why not? I would have told them about all the abuse. Multiple times, they would slap me in the face if I said the "wrong thing" and scream "You're just like Aunt Confused!" with a sneer of disgust.  My Aspergers brought me severe abuse. 

If I had not been a quiet and dutiful student, with a 3.5 grade point average, and had run into even a little bit of trouble as a teen, I could see my parents using something like that to destroy my life. I knew enough to hide my worsening OCD problems and to internalize any risky Aspie meltdowns into withdrawing instead. Constant comparisons reigned, "You are as crazy as Aunt Confused!" "Do you want to end up like Aunt Confused?"

I would hear this for years. Double-tag-team scapegoating. My father was a cruel brother as well as cruel father! The evil mindedness shown towards the mentally ill was something to be disgusted by as well. This has continued to this day, where any mental health problems are seen as an "in" and something to condemn a person by. As someone who has done volunteer work with a depression group and been part of one and worked with young people with emotional challenges earlier in life, their attitudes sicken me. That is narcissists for you! This aunt got no mercy from them either just like Aunt Scapegoat. They had no mercy for my physical problems either.

I would spent a lot of time with Aunt Confused after she was more stabilized when she lived in a trailer in my family's town. I would leave my family's 6 bedroom house near a country club to sit in her trailer in a seedier part of town and watch TV.  In my early to mid-teens, I would prefer her company to that of my cold mother. I knew something was wrong with her, but she didn't yell at me or criticize me every minute. She was nice enough to me at least on the surface, but sadly there was rejection there too, that would come. We would talk about current events and share meals of home-cooked hamburgers with fried onions on top and reading Globes and National Enquirers. My family would mock me for spending so much time with her. Sadly my parents scapegoated her so much, they got my GC sister to reject her and even my brother to express disgust with her "craziness", and to make up rude nicknames for her. Neither of them talk to her or her daughter to this day.

                                                  From Pinterest snippet of photo by Andre' Gamma

My mother did what she could to destroy that relationship. One day when I was around 15 years old, Aunt Confused simply moved away and didn't even say Goodbye to me. I think my mother forced her in some fashion to leave town seeing our growing "closeness". My mother never allowed me to be close to anyone and always did what she could to take people away from me. This devastated me at the time. I would later get some phone contact and write letters but it was never the same. The same thing that happened with Aunt Scapegoat, happened with her.

She would move back to her home state and meet a financially comfortable older man, married him and moved with him to Florida. I would only see her once in person 30 years. She forgot about me, and kept me at arm's length at the behest of my mother and would not visit even when I asked as an adult years later.  One odd thing is she would send my brother and sister $1,000 dollars on their wedding days for presents but ignored my wedding and did not attend. This should have given me a clue.

 Aunt Confused was scared of the narcissists in her life. She never confronted my cruel father but submitted to him.  She had cloying respect for the man who committed her twice and who never stood against her first abusive husband. Where did I come from? I refuse to submit to any narcissist or abuser. I match none of these people. While she called me "her buddy" even to two months ago, she betrayed me as well multiple times when it came to the narcissists.

So she was no loyal ally. She would throw me under the bus in a milli-second if it kept narcissists pleased. I realized this was true too when I was teen but I was desperate for love and digging for what crumbs of it I could find. I did truly love her too but here too was cast aside. She put my parents way above me.

For years, I took the few morsels that came from her and now realize, there really was no relationship anymore and I was fruitlessly trying to recapture the days of my youth where I and her could talk to one another. There was only feigned niceness and more rejection. My narcissist mother is friends with her son's wife who displays the same personality. There is some massive control via that network. Her son controls her money and could be a possible guardian over it so perhaps you can see where I am going with this.

 She decided to bow before the narcissists like Aunt Scapegoat on the other side of the family. I found out I was chopped liver very recently. Like Aunt Denial, I took her crumbs of a kinder tone of voice with me and didn't face the facts of how much she lied to me. I suppose it was easier. I also ignored too long how she took my mother's side on everything and served as her enabler. She also does fear my mother. She lied for my mother as well.

 While she would admit some of the narcissist wrong-doings to me, my mother always came first to her. I never will understand this. The second to last time I spoke with her, she kept telling me that my mother loved me. If that is love what is hate?

She knew of the abuse I faced, and as an adult, I have faced facts, she served as another enabler too, too mentally ill to really lift a finger herself to help. While I worked to form a stronger relationship with her over the last year, there was my mother, always put first even though they live 1,000 miles away. Her grand-daughter would not invite me to her wedding but would invite my mother. I tried to talk to her about all this and how it hurt me but it was a fruitless venture. I went no contact with her recently after she refused the pictures. It does hurt but I see no other choice. She was telling my mother everything I told her. I could not trust her. I asked her not to even let it be known we were still in contact.

It was scary to have that cousin call me and use threatening language. Aunt Confused never tried to fix the relationship or reach out to me. Sadly I think she is glad I am gone. She doesn't care. The relationships my mother have destroyed are endless. My would be family is so sick on both sides. I'd rather be alone then sacrifice integrity and my well-being to any of these people anymore.

Looking at her story, she is just like Aunt Scapegoat. Driven to mental illness, scapegoated to the max, abused, stockholmed, institutionalized, left in extreme poverty for a time-though she was driven enough to find husbands to take her out of it in this case, and submitting to the wicked. Narcissists destroy entire families.