Did I reach out to my sister enough?

I know I am not responsible for my sister’s pain but as the only one in a family affected by multigenerational trauma of alcoholism and Complext PTSD in recovery I do feel it was only in those times we talked that she felt responded to and empathised with.  The experience I have seen of her family is they try to control her so she is engaging in the world and if she won’t do it, it;s considered better for her to be in hospital.  Maybe they are right.

But I know in the end is actually me that needs to get me to engage with life, the inner voice of the critic (what another blogger has just identified as the devil or enemy within) can and does hold us back from connecting, telling us lots of things of how the world might not be a safe place or others are out to control us or hurt us (which in some cases can be true but once we know ourselves well enough and develop protective boundaries and emotional insight or intelligence we can protect ourselves from this in other ways than by complete disengagement or withdrawal.)

That said being emotionally abused or traumatised does shatter our sense of trust.  I was reading a definition of trauma in another blog which I beleive comes from Judith Herman which says that a trauma is “anything less than nurturing which changes our world view”, and abuse or negation of our inner reality or who we really are does this to us.  We can be put down by others and so never feel safe enough to be real if the criticism was relentless and then we can internalise this criticism or project it outwards. And if others are unable to relate to and identify the deeper feelings that may underlie so called ‘manic’ or ‘depressive’ reactions or episodes and help us to externalise and name them we get similarly stuck and its hard to unravell all the mixed up feelings they comprise.

I’ts such a long road back from this kind of abuse.  If we learned to use substances as a way of dealing with the negative voice (in order to shut it up) as a lot of addicts do (I dreamt one time in early recovery I was hitting my inner critic – who I call Mr A over the head with a bottle and my therapist at the time pointed out this was how I dealt with that part of me in active addiction.) when we put them down we have to understand how this part of us functions to keep us paralysed and self sabotaging or disengaging.

I know I reached out to my sister where and when I could but I expected things of her she was not capable of.  I had thought of suggesting she get to some 12 step meetings so she could know she was not alone with what she struggled with.  I tried to talk to her about anxiety and how reading the journey of other bloggers online has helped me to feel less alone, especially on the very dark suicidal days which are rarer now I am more aware of my own issue of emotional neglect carried multigenerationally that led to my addiction and codependence as well as emotion struggles in recovery.   Perhaps I did the best I could, so why do I feel it just wasn’t enough and I have failed her? Could that be my inner critic lying to me again and my ego giving me a false sense of the degree of my power or control, denying my powerlessness over the dis-ease in her? Maybe I need to get back to some Al Anon or Codependency recovery meetings.