A Little Humanity Would Have Made All the Difference

I wrote this to another ACON blogger...commenting on one of her articles.



It still boggles my mind how there was no humanity shown there.  People will tell us narcissists are "human" too,  and that is technically true but maybe mine were just so extreme. Even the cards full of denial and the cold appearance driven "politeness" nauseated me to the very end. You could tell everything was a calculation. They can't show emotions like other people and everything is about how they "appear".

Long Past The Time To Walk Away

 

A friend posted this on Facebook, I think they were annoyed by their sister being late to a visit. It represented more then that for me though. I think about us ACONs though, especially those of us in the "ignored camp". My mother and sister would drive repeatedly within a mile of my apartment, while on trips to elsewhere. My brother told me, "I told them it wasn't right to do this." but I still wondered with him why he was shocked I walked away then? Why did he still make excuses for their treatment?

I could have gone two years without seeing nieces and nephews and she would not stop by. Rejection is a hard thing, I know it is something I struggle with as an ACON. It can hurt worse when it's relatives but being Aspie it is more complicated.

Our narcissist families would reject us all the time. There was no semblance of unconditional love where you were accepted and given a place. It's never easy. I remember when young I would chase people down, kind of sad and desperate of me. I didn't get stalky or anything like that but would call people and say "What's wrong?" So few would tell you the truth, they would make excuses. It makes me sad, that I did do this. A scapegoat's desperation to be loved can be a swathe of destruction across an entire life. It sets us up for trouble. It is a deep wound not to have a mother or parental figure who loved you. I felt it life-long and even being only four years old and thinking inside, "I am defective and not worthy of anyone's love."

I remember the friend from college who was always so busy and even if I waited a whole year to call her acted like I was bothering her. I ended my friendship or what there was of it, she only contacted me when she wanted medical advice for her or her children, the very month I went no contact with the family, she was added to the list. A "friend" of thirty years duration, I realized was treating me the same as my family, she liked calling me several times a week even though we lived long distance, but I realized as the years progressed she had no interest in ever seeing me again, not even when I got sick. I was held at a distance, like someone she wanted to "slum" with. I ended that friendship after betrayals and disrespect I could not make excuses for. Sometimes in a vacuum people will treat you decently, you talk to them on the phone but you have lived so long distance for so long, you hold no more mutual friends in common and then comes Facebook where there are other people and mutual groups and you realize they are treating you like a worm. You realize, how your family set you up to even keep a relationship like this in your life.

 Right now I am working my way through some of these issues and asking myself what defines the good relationships vs. the ones that went so badly. The good ones, I feel secure in, the people love me, they are loyal and don't reject me if we disagree on something. They are there for me in the ways that count and do not betray me for other people. I count too. The bad ones, well those things don't come so easily.

 When I was young,  I felt like I was begging people to include me in their lives. I don't beg anymore but it makes me sad. It doesn't seem to take much to get rejection, and trust me all of us ACONs went down the long lists over and over about why we angered everyone or what was wrong with us. The narc abuse sets us up, to be too "desperate and needy". Our relationships can become troubled because of this undergirding. Not having a family that loves or accepts you or even a parental figure that does can lead to a lifetime of insecurity. You never have had a place and sadly I think people can pick up on this about us. It is one reason ACONs can be more prone to abuse and for future predators.

With age as an Aspie, I learned that desperation was the soonest way to scare people away. I don't think I was needy when I wanted to see nieces and nephews once in a while who lived far away from me and who I didn't have money to go see. Health wise, I couldn't handle 12-24 hour bus trips even if those would be more affordable and yes it frustrated me.

 Here is a snippet of an email I got from my sister in 2010. I asked her to stop by with her children at my apartment for a few minutes to an hour. Her husband was not on that trip. At the time I had not seen them in a  year and a half. She was driving one mile from my apartment on a major highway that cuts through my state on the way home from my mothers and where I live is the midway point. She had spent an entire week at my mother's house. Notice the comment "We do miss seeing you wished I talked to you more often." Obviously that was a lie.

One thing I always noticed with my mother and sister is that other people always came far higher then priority then me. I once wrote my mother about something health related, and she said, "What about your sister and brother and their health problems?" This was before they hid my sister's cancer. I was always shoved in back of the line. My mother's letters would be detailing visits with her third cousins and great-aunts. One time before I went completely NC, she sent me a card asking to meet for lunch, and I tried to set it up with her and she ignored me for four days not even returning a couple phone calls. My mother is retired and has plenty of time and carries a cell phone on her. In a way I dodged a manipulative bullet and was able to continue to go No Contact knowing that "trying" anymore was a waste of time.

 One lesson for every ACON to learn is go never go begging when people reject you. I am not in take all comers land anymore. People make it obvious when they do not want you in their lives. We have to find independence even of being happy within ourselves.

Not having families that gave us this inner-security at a development point when young is something we ourselves will have to make up for.  With the narcissist families, they will keep you around to keep track of you but you really are not in their lives or part of it.  One life lesson to learn is when people reject you, it's long beyond time to walk away. If you are feeling that insecure feeling and know someone has put you last on the list, pay attention, it may not be a good relationship. It will be the family dynamics repeating themselves. 

Escaping these dynamics is escaping emotional slavery in general.  

They Left Me First

"You Just Have to Ignore The Little Things"

ME:

Do you realize mothers like this ruin their children's relationships.

You were scared to get close to me

because you knew it'd make her angry

she was to always come first

for visits and everything else.

she even told **** this year not to visit me.

[last year]

stuff like that happened all the time.

It is not normal ****, do you at least admit that?

I tried asking you what the real deal was? Like why treat me that way? You would want to know wouldn't you

She rejected me for weight for my whole life

People can let go of old stuff but not when there is plenty of new. Also you did not have my life. I was left to almost die in the ghetto, and when they did stuff like ignore me when I was sick, it reminded me of that

You were cared and protected and she treats you with respect. I am too old to take the disrespect.

MY SISTER:

I don't care what she would find out. You just have to ignore little things. His travel finances werenot good at the time is my guess I don't know to defend this. I don't travel.

***************************************

"You just have to ignore the little things"

I was thinking about this today, how we try and try to fix relationships that are beyond repair. I was pondering the other day, why I scrapped and bowed for their crumbs and how sad it all was. I struggle with the feelings that I did not stand up for myself enough. I suppose all ACONs do when it's all said and done, even if we manage to get out of the fog and go NC.

I know one thing that rescues all of us is finding those who do love and respect us in our lives. Their kindness stands out in stark opposition to the above. These people are Life Savers in the Narcissistic ocean. One ponders some of the crazy statements putting the pieces of the puzzle together. We want people who value us in our lives not chasing after those who never did.

Sister Light, Sister Dark

                                                       [picture source]

This is an article to accompany Sister Fat, Sister Thin

One sees loving sisters on TV all the time. Sadly it is not always like that in the real world.

When I was a child, I loved my sister dearly, we played many games together, shared a bedroom for years full of conversation, and even once I saved her life from a severe asthma attack my parents ignored but my mother would do everything in her power to destroy the relationship.  Well she succeeded. 1986, my sister still loved me, by 1987, it was if a changeling had taken over her. Love turned to hate at the behest of a narcissist!  My sin? Going away to college though now I realized trouble brewed far before that. What happened to the girl I once loved and who was there? It was like an eraser was taken to her very soul. I grieved the same as a woman who has lost a sister to death. That person I once knew is gone.

 A switch was happening in late high school that centered around my Aspergers and growing weight. My sister was embarrassed of me and would pretend not to know me in our high school halls, she knew I was seen as "the nerd". My parents backed her up in this rejection, telling her, that too much closeness with me would socially drag her down. Even though I was a far better student and my parents had me doing her school projects or reusing papers I wrote a few years before, I came way in last. They treated me like a "Nobody".

I remember the extreme differences in our treatment that for some reason worsened immensely by the time I was in high school. My mother would walk into my sister's room every morning to help her get ready, combing her hair,  tidying up her bed, fluffing her pillow for the next night and laying out her clothes and helping her choose what to wear. I remember being around 14 and 15 years old wondering why my sister who was only a year younger got all this attention and I did not. My mother would also make her school lunch, cutting the crusts off the white Italian bread making her favorite garlic bologna sandwiches with lettuce and putting always the same amount of goldfish crackers in a baggy for her.   No one ever made my lunch, I made that on my own. My mother also would pour her bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios--she ate nothing but for breakfast for decades even into adulthood and could even still eat them now for all I know.

Before I went no contact I had to face what my sister really was about, the picture was bad. After I have gone no contact, clarity has made the picture even more frightening.

There were many years I did not want to face who she had become.  The day after Thanksgiving 2012, she sat in my mother's house giving me the same look of disgust and disdain, I had gotten so long from my mother. Going back to that day, looking at her winced up face, staring at me, I thought to myself, "Here is someone who has it all [well on paper], and appreciates none of it. There is no happiness, no light in there."  She had lied to me about her family visiting my mother on Thanksgiving, else I would have gone the day before for Thanksgiving. Her lies and my mothers ensured that I was not there.

I was being punished for the year before's Thanksgiving  [2011] for telling them, they should not have a relative with open and active MRSA [the flesh-eating virus] come to our family Thanksgiving gathering. Just two weeks before he had a surgery to remove a portion of his thigh where the MRSA had ate away at it. I feared losing my leg. This was before I had lymph therapy and my lipedema diagnosis and constant infections came from that.  I warned them because I feared CHILDREN getting it, but I pissed both of them off beyond no belief. Does that make any sense? No, it does not.
This whole episode told me how sick and dysfunctional both of them really were.

I remember my mother even though this other relative had given it to three others, saying, "We can wipe the toilet seat off, with alcohol and make sure to use different silverwear!". She had other ideas like requiring the relative use the second bathroom upstairs instead of the one downstairs. Instead of having the guts to tell this other relative, that not everyone felt safe, and wanted to wait, my mother cancelled the entire event and lied to the other relative, saying she had hurt her knee and was not up to fixing Thanksgiving dinner. My sister was no help, and backed up my mother's lie and asked me, "Why did you open your big fat mouth?"  Both treated me like I was over-reacting and abused me for telling them the truth about what was going on with the relative. They didn't seem to even care about their own young children or grandchildren getting life-threatening MRSA. With the relative in question, I had barely gotten the truth out of him on the phone and he admitted to me at the time he was a carrier. His selfishness was immense, as he called me bawling me out for "messing up Thanksgiving". This was part of my horrific path to no contact.

Can you all believe it? That is how my family operates. I knew I wasn't going to go. Loosing my leg or my life to MRSA was not on my game-plan. Concern for my nieces and nephews, fear of death or being an amputee overcame my fear of my mother. I took a major hit for keeping my sister's children away from it. How stupid can people get?

Fast forward to Thanksgiving 2012, Back then still with the fog in my eyes, trying to desperately get my family to love me, I had gone out the day after, wanting to see my nieces and nephews.  She had flubbed up Thanksgiving lying to me, telling me no one was getting together. This year of course, I will be making my own turkey and will be free of their dramas. Thank God.

Being no contact this long,  I started getting more objective about my sister.

1. I realized she had become my mother. She was a narcissist. She was cold, she was a frozen wasteland of a person. She may even be a sociopath. She seemed to have no feelings or emotions.

2. She had the same coldness my mother displayed and the same extreme lack of empathy. My sister never cried at funerals. Never. Other family members would remark on this and wonder why she never cried. She didn't cry otherwise either. She didn't bother with faking a few emotions like my mother did on extremely rare occasion. One day a few years ago, one of her sons got a rare heart disease that almost killed him. He would survive but I remember how utterly blank she was about it. She didn't seem to care in the same way a mother should care about a child facing life or death.

She showed no fear during extreme asthma attacks, that to my horror, I realized she lacked the ability to feel fear like my mother.

3. My whole sister's life revolved around pleasing my mother. She did not care about pleasing me ever or having me or anyone be happy. I've mentioned this before but the creepiest thing is she DRESSES just like mother. The same clothes. The same lack of make-up. The same unflattering helmet hairdo! However it's worse then that, just like that movie where the evil roommate tries to take over the other's life--in "Single White Female", my sister sought to replicate my mother as closely as she could. Have any other ACONs encountered this with a golden child or is this just an extreme case?

I noticed how her first house, was the same exact design and color of the first house my mother married and moved into. She even tried to have three children [supposedly just like my mother] but ended up with four because the third pregnancy was fraternal twins. She watched the same exact TV shows as my mother including General Hospital for thirty years. She cooked the same food. She bought the same furniture.  She modeled everything exactly except my mother's government job.

4. While my mother kept me from her friends and I barely knew who they were, my sister was brought into my mother's social circles as an adult and vice versa.  Seriously my mother and sister were like a clique unto themselves as I remained an outsider. Trust me, it's weird to see your mother's Facebook, with all her friends, know barely any of them but realize your sister who lives even further away then you do, is friends with many of them.

5. My sister saw her children as trophies. In one letter when we were still in contact, I told her don't honor children only according to their achievements. Everything she wrote on Facebook was "****** became an Eagle Scout, ****** won a school award". She didn't seem to know her children as people seeing them as objects in filling out the "perfect family life". Family photos were odd with everyone lined up like tin soldiers, my sister always to the side with the children grouped together.  Image like to my mother was everything. I worried about the values her children were being taught, hopefully some loving teachers and others filled in a few blanks.

6. My sister has no friends. She had a few activity partners, and was friends with a couple that her husband had a close friendship in from college, but when I used to talk to her, everyone was inferior, everyone had done her wrong, everyone didn't know what they were doing. She seemed to always meet the world's most incompetent people if I was to believe what she told me about them.  I asked her once on the phone, "Sure there are people annoy me, but you don't ever meet someone you like in any group you join or volunteer with?" She ignored old high school and other friends I ended up having more contact with. She just didn't seem to be that attached to anyone. There was no girlfriends coming over or Mother's groups even. She was superior to all!

7.  She was so fixated on pleasing and being what my mother wanted her to be, she became an empty shell. This is the negative side of being a Golden Child. They become the narcissist's total mind slave.. That is exactly what the worse of the bunch become. All the false praise, presents and elevation makes the narcissist a false "god" to them. This "god" is who they desire to please. My sister was never open to any thinking that my mother was adverse to. She followed my mother's church obediently. She shared all her politics to the tee. She shared her same exact views of life and what was important and what was not. She disliked everyone my mother disliked and scapegoated including me and my brother's ex wife. She had no mind of her own. She has no identity of her own. It is frightening and it is scary. She always obeyed my mother no matter what and never ever disagreed with her once that I can remember in 25 plus years. Can you imagine someone like that never disagreeing with another, even MILDLY where even banter is off the table?

8. Spiritually my sister gave me the willies. This worsened with time. As I talked about in the People of the Lie article, being in thrall to a narcissist will make evil grow.  In one last conversation, I got a stomach ache and she kind of "frightened" me and wanted to get away.  She wrote weird stuff like "I do not travel' and then wrote she was going to Florida almost in the same paragraph. During the last two-three times I saw her, She never smiled in my presence. She never laughed.  She spent most time robotically looking at an empty Kindle as her school-aged children escaped to their various gadgets and/or wiping down my mother's tables to perfection, pinky in the air.

Hey I am a disabled person prone to some depression, so understand depressed people but this was worse, it was a like black cloud hovered both in her eyes and in the room.  This occurred during the Thanksgiving 2012, and during one of my last conversations with her. Her letters freaked me out. Here are some of these last letters before I went full no contact. When I look at these letters, it reminds me what I left behind. It keeps my no contact firm.

I realized my sister always, always, always invalidated me just like my mother if not worse. She copied my mother's techniques in dismissing my emotions, for calling me a liar, and ignoring all my feelings and me as a person. She saw me as inferior to her. My mother emphasized our economic differences telling my sister I was a loser for having so little money and not marrying wealthy even though I am far more educated then my sister. The below is a response to my last no contact letter where I confronted both of them with having lipedema and their treatment. Her summation of a three page letter was this little paragraph. Double Click on all the below pictures of text to enlarge.

Her refusal to face the truth, about the lies, the refused visits, the cutting me off from my nieces and nephews and things that are proven is summed up in her "talk to the hand" dismissal..."Many false accusations have been said".

While a few attempted nice but empty things are written with strange syntax just like my mother, she is incapable of EMPATHY, incapable of EMOTION and just as COLD. In this second letter, you dismisses more of the NC letter with, "I am not going to do this-you hate me crap". That is one thing I noticed about her just like my mother she would dismiss everything and anything. This was not someone capable of listening.

About a year before my no contact wanting to "wake her up" I sent her links on narcissistic mothers, I told her our relationship had been severely damaged by our mother. Know from my experience with this, this does not work on golden children or flying monkeys, they are under the spell of the narcissist. This was a waste of time. Don't make my mistake. They simply do not care. Intellectually and emotionally they do not want to know.

One thing about my sister is she served as an enforcer for my mother. Everything to my sister, was about someone getting IN LINE with my mother. This applied to all other people. Anyone in a disagreement with my mother was my sister's automatic enemy. She never looked at their side.  My sister was upset at anyone daring to disagree with my mother. Notice the phrase above, "as a decisions to move forward with US." It is weird she writes many prayers come to me. I suppose she is not really praying to God whatsoever.

No matter how cruel my mother was to another person, my sister would always defend her. My mother remained superior while everyone else was inferior. She writes above, "Why now, mom has nothing to do with this". My mother is perfection squared in my sister's eyes. According to my sister, my mother did not abuse me. She has never done anything wrong. My mother is her true "god" as other human beings including her own sister mean nothing. Remember at this point in time, I am totally walking away.

She has no inkling of loss or even trying to save the relationship with me. She simply does not care like my mother and brings up her OWN problems in response. Her coldness and lack of empathy is shown towards her own daughter with the line "Today ****** is throwing up and not feeling well though she will recover". One can tell she is more annoyed by her daughter then actually feeling concern over her health. One thing you will notice about the letters of narcissists is they are kind of like Hitler's artwork. Ever seen Hitler's finely attuned watercolors which while technically good led to him flunking out of art school? Notice something? They lack SOUL.

I saw that in here several times I was around her. I sometimes fear what will become of her children facing a mother like this. She keeps secrets like my mother, that are brought up as needed. What health problems? I had no idea. She could have everything from cancer to a stubbed toe for all I know. Narcissists and their ilk remain strangers.

And here is a letter that had come earlier which I ignored. Both her and mother hated people simply for being my friends. That alone was a giant red flag to flee for the hills. Why wouldn't I distance myself from a family that slammed doors in my face? Here you see the refusing to take responsibility and more. The bullying comments are more projection. Her line about "I made a decision that was best for *********" was her excuse for cutting me off from my nieces and nephews.

One line I got on a PM after my no contact letter sums this all up.

"You Just Have to Ignore the Little Things"

What does that tell a person?

The worse thing about narcissists is they darken other souls. One can feel very helpless as this occurs, I threw her lifelines that were ignored from an early age.  They infect them. My sister got infected. There was nothing more I could do. A stranger sits there, not a sister.