Perhaps There is No Other Way?

I've been doing some soul searching of late for a variety of reasons. I'm starting to wonder if I ever stood a chance of having anything approaching a normal life. They say family is the single biggest influence on who a person grows up to be. I'm starting to understand how absolutely true that is. I think a lot of people when they say that are thinking positively; if you bring a child up with love and respect they will go forward and love and respect others. But I think that's the optomist talking. I think reality is something far darker and twisted and upside down than that. I think the reality of families is what makes us who we are; and that reality is far from being the result of positive outcomes.



I grew up being bullied by a sister two and a half years older than me. My mother encouraged her to be strong and independant and to have a take charge attitude. And inadvertantly my mother encouraged her to walk across people in the process. In raising us my mother only had her role models to work from, which is probably why my brother remains fairly removed from the insanity. My mother had two sisters growing up and no brothers. In short, she didn't know how to screw up a son, but she knew how to make sure her daughters didn't get along. She raised them as she had been raised by her mother; a woman who'd herself had a highly chaotic childhood lacking in stability. Grandmother's parents were killed in a tornado when she was young and she and her siblings were shuttled from relative to relative till she married a much older divorced man at 16 or 17. She must have a had a very hard upbringing, and I'm sure she survived it by being tough as nails, competitive, strong and independant. She taught her daughters those skills without knowing I suspect how to teach them to be friends as well. That I saw, my mother and her sisters were never terribly close.



So I grew up being criticised at every turn. I was slapped, pushed, kicked and verbally and emotionally abused by my sister. To this day I don't think anyone saw anything terribly wrong with it. I know they didn't then and don't now understand how crucial that was in my turning out the way it did. Why should they? I didn't figure it out myself until this week. What do you get when you criticize everything someone does? You wind up with someone who communicates as little as possible in order to avoid criticism. You wind up with someone who will empathize and sympathize with the oppressed absued discounted and marginalized people of the world. Yeah, you wind up with me.



The flip side to that is that I idolized her at the same time. Some part of me knew she was being unfair and cruel but I would have done anything to win her approval and friendship, so I buried any negative feelings. I kept hoping someday she's like me. Someday we'd be friends. Someday she'd respect me. I kept trying to figure out what I could do, how I could make that happen. As a result I also grew very good at gauging how people were feeling, what they needed to hear at that moment and how to communicate something important to them. Those were all skills that came to help shape not only who I am, but what I've done for a living.



I made excuses my whole life for her. I rationalized the way she treated me, or believed that I deserved it. I rationalized or ignored the way she treated other people. She told me I was fat. I not only believed her, I ultimately became fat. Keep in mind we're about the same size now, as we were then. I get now that she pushed the worst of what she believed about herself off onto me and then ridiculed me for it. All this time I thought all my negative beliefs about myself came from my mother. While she had something to do with it, an awful lot of it came from my sister.

So I "got" all this with sudden clarity the other day. I thought she and I had been forging a new relationship with elements of mutual trust and understanding for quite some time now. I thought that my sister and I would one day be on equal footing and be friends. I thought one day I'd make her proud of me. I know now that could never have happened. I can never make that happen. Nothing has changed. Well, not true; I have changed.

She went off on my on my facebook page. Yes, I now understand one shouldn't have relatives on your facebook page. Anyway she did that in front of all my friends, real and cyber. It was pretty vicious. I cried for days. Then very early one morning I got it. Nothing has changed and she's a bully. I suddenly saw all the connections I'd missed all these years. I suddenly understood what a lifetime of bullying had done to me. It was a light bulb moment. I've been trying to win from her the one thing she would absolutely never give me, becuase to do so would be to give up her power over me. That power she believes she has is part of what keeps her propped up and going . . . at my expense. I wasted 47 years searching for an approval I was never going to get. That's all.

I still don't know if there's any value in trying to communicate any of this to her. She'll deny she was every a bully, and most likely will just call me worse names than she's already called me. Insert eye roll here. I don't know. I'm still thinking on it.