On letting go in a sibling relationship.

To let go is to fear less and to love more.

I have Neptune placed in my third house of siblings and I have had two sister’s suffer from mental illness and both attempted suicide.  As many of you know my older sister died in 2014 after living about 15 years in a care home for sufferers of acquired brain injury.  My second sis has been hospitalised about 6 times for depression and anxiety.  Our family has a multigenerational issue of alcoholism and it goes back 4 generations and was generated by my Great Great Grandfather’s trauma of losing his Mum and then leaving his homeland and losing two babies.  He became an alcoholic and eventually my Great Great Grandmother Eliza Jane Trudgeon left him.  My Nana became a tea totaller until later in life when Dad would give her drop of brandy to help her sleep.  Her husband who died when my Mum was only 7 in 1931 had addiction problems too. They skipped a generation and then my sis and I became alcoholics as well.

I got into recovery in 1993 at the age of 31.  My older sister later in her life asked me to take her to some AA meetings, sadly I never managed it.  I do wish my living sister would try to find some help through Al Anon or look into adult child issues. As the third sibling I see her very much in a lost child role which is what John Bradshaw describes so often happens to the third child in dysfunctional or addictive/narcissistic families.  But my sister has her own path which involves just psychiatric support with medication and little in the way of any other therapy as the group work they seem to do in the facility she goes to each time never seems to focus much on the trauma history at all, from the little I know.

I made the decision over the weekend to tend to my own life and not visit my sis in the hospital, this is despite a lot of survivor guilt I have.  I found myself running the inner critic monologue of being ‘the bad child’ over the past few days and in therapy this morning talked the entire issue out with Kat.  I am not really the bad child at all.  I have had more serious physical trauma due to neglect than my older sister, but that said at one time she wanted to support me and due to lack of trust I would not accept that support.  That is what troubles me now.  I had up psychic defences that did not want to get too close again, in case I got hurt and often I was treated with sarcasm and lack of empathy.   So its not really my fault I struggled to trust anyone, but most especially family.

I have a virulent inner protector who tries to keep me safe.   This is necessary, we do need our protections, its something Scott was trying to express to me last week.   We also need to know when the protector is over protecting.  That said I do feel I need a lot of detachment at present from what is happening to my sister.  We started to get close after she came good following her last hospitalisation but then she stopped reaching out to me again.  My nephew reminds me its just the depression.   I need not take it personally, its just at the moment I am struggling with knowing how to support my sister.  With that in mind I am posting below a piece of writing on letting go.  Its what I need to read and it may benefit other readers though I am sure so many of you know it anyway.  I will keep praying to find the right kind of involvement in my sister’s life.