RIP Garrison Brown

 

Trigger warning on this one...........

Sister Wives is a show I've watched for years. I watched it when it began and have continued to watch it. I always saw polygamy as an ill-fated path in life to take. The family was going to break apart the day they left the AUB community and entered the regular modern world. The worse has now happened.  Garrison [Robert] Brown, only 25 years old has committed suicide. 

Reality TV isn't good to those in it. Some have felt feelings of guilt even watching this show and I understood. When you see someone young and full of life come to an end like this, how much did the reality TV show damage their life?  For years on message boards dealing with the show, many people got concerned about how abusive Kody Brown was both to his ex-wives and adult children. When the show was new, Kody Brown seemed to be a lot happier fellow. The darkness built up over the years, he got angrier and meaner especially with the introduction of his 4th very manipulative wife Robyn. Many people theorized that Kody Brown was a malignant narcissist or had some other personality disorder problems. I agreed with those theories. He showed extreme selfishness, coldness and other very negative traits. 

Some of the poison obviously is inherited issues from a misogynist cult with a history of treating young men like "lost boys". Kody probably passed on some treatment he received at the hands of his own father but this does not excuse it. He treated his adult kids especially the sons very poorly. Oddly when they were young, Kody seemed to be a loving father who was there for them, perhaps making this even more painful.

 There was one show where Garrison's brother Garbriel cries because of Kody forgetting his birthday. Kody used arguments about Covid protocols to start banning his sons from his life and cutting them off. What kind of man calls his sons jerks on national TV? Surely this impacted Garrison and his siblings. The "divorces" and breakup of three plural marriages was followed on the show for years too.

Now Garrison had other problems, that have been described with drinking and relationship issues but its easy to ask how malignant narcissism or abuse from his father impacted his life leading to this fateful decision. It is alarming to see how these things have come out. He was a very kind young man who built his autistic half-sister a garden. His mother Janelle, Christine and siblings loved him and you could tell he loved them. The damage that abusers can do is insurmountable.

 Some people wrote they hope this would wake Kody up, and he would reconcile with his other kids on message boards. I think the reaction will tell us how far on the personality disordered spectrum Kody is.

Watching this show and remembering how he was talked about and treated was very sad. I fear for his siblings too, especially Gabriel and others who bore the brunt of abuse, the extreme pressures of fame, and stresses from the reality show world. Garrison supposedly wrote some TLC employees prompting family members to do a wellness check, so his final words even concerned the show.