The challenge of difficult feelings around my relationship with my sister

An ignored child does not get her emotional needs met and cannot work on self and separation because she is still trying to fill up her own tank with Mother’s love. She keeps trying to merge with her mother… to get her approval and attention.

Karyl McBride

Will I Ever Be Good Enough : Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers

I really struggle a lot with my feelings around my only living sister. I try as best I can to show the love to my sister but I don’t find it easy…she rarely calls me, I am excluded from family get togethers and there is a past history that is anything but warm and friendly and cosy, in fact at times I feel a coldness from my sister on one level but then at times there are surprising times of connection when I pour out my soul and feel met, I long for her to take an interest in me but the nature of what she struggles with psychologically seemingly makes this impossible and while writing this I really am tapping into the deepest well of sadness around our relationship.

I know I can have a relationship only if I keep opening my heart to extend love out. I feel starved all the other times waiting for her call or for her to return calls which over Easter took more than a day on some occasions and as I write this part of me says its petty to count who calls who. So you can see the argument going on within my mind.I felt the need to write about it today because in therapy yesterday a lot of anger burst out of me about past treatment and I arrived there feeling good but the pain in my body comes whenever I think of my sister and past treatment, the hurt feels like knives going into my body. I then attack my need to continue to explore it in therapy after coming home. I think of spiritual teachings that tell us we must love unconditionally and keep extending love even to our enemies and feel like a bad person for even exploring these angry feelings.

Kat and I spoke yesterday of how it is possible to let go in love rather than in hate. When my mother was alive it was harder as they often triangulated leaving me on the outside. There was never a depth of empathy shown to me and that is what I have been exploring after reading Karyl McBride’s book on narcissistic mothers….when we don’t get seen or shown empathy by caregivers it is harder for us to take our own feelings seriously. Often we will be told we don’t or must not feel the way we feel, religious education can also so this to us, but our feelings contain what therapist David Richo calls our ‘lively energy’ if this is too much for our caregivers we can be shamed or led to believe we ‘should’ not feel the way we do, then an inner conflict comes up, if we want to stay connected we then have to stuff our feelings back down deep inside in order to win love, or else we must suffer the sting of being alone for a time or made to feel bad for having our true feelings. A young child will do anything to turn towards the sun of connection, but often there may not be, for many of us from narcissistic backgrounds much warmth at all in our families of origin. I just watched the movie On Chesil Beach and the lead character comes from such a family and her ability to express love and particularly sexual love becomes so badly stunted.

Luckily my warm affectionate, giving nature was not killed out of me in childhood. I did become very wary and fearful. I was lucky I had one older sister who was very warm but as many of you know she got married and left home when I was only 3 and in later years (age 34) suffered an aneurysm. It was very painful to witness the outfall and now in later years it is her boys I am closest to and feel the most affection from.

Kat said to me yesterday that it is lucky I was able to have my anger and rage over the coldness and dismissal of feeling in my family. She said it helped me to survive rather than die inside, but when I had my lively and natural protest I was often shamed for it from my other sister and mother. So many times I got shut down, sidelined, exiled or demonised for it. I had a serious head injury in 2005 on the back of such terrible emotionally abusive treatment from both of them and despite this I came back here in 2006 to try and reconnect but immediately I got on the plane I developed the most intense stomach ache.

Its clear to me now that I am going through some kind of separation with the old inner shaming judge and jury. My inner critic just doesn’t seem to be as relentless lately. I am celebrating myself more. I am telling myself I love myself more. I am allowing myself to just goof off and have free play. On Sunday Jasper and I had the loveliest walk through the park and we came across a young couple with a small baby and a small Italian greyhound that was one year old and he and Jasper had the hugest play. It was such fun to see them running through the grass nipping at each other, tumbling over and wrestling and chasing. This doesn’t happen often for Jazzie even at the dog park other dogs just stand still while he jumps round then tempting them to play chasings.

As a kid I never got to just play. When I found neighbours I could play with we moved away from that house after only a few years. The house we moved to was huge and cold and half finished and on a long street that mainly had formal houses and embassies. I felt so deeply lonely there and sought my comfort in music and chocolate biscuits and television. I had no one much to talk to as Mum and Dad’s concerns were elsewhere. Requests for life were negated over and over. I am realising lately how much my true self got put to death in those years and the later ones. I learned what I wanted was not important and not possible to make known nor achieve. I was not allowed to know the truth and so I started to drink and abuse drugs. I was severed from relationships with peers due to being forced after a time of trauma to abandon my university studies and do secretarial studies. I know its not too late to change that now but the point is I have literally LOST YEARS. And the truth is that I am grieving, I am deeply grieving not only for those years but for the following ones of working to become fully conscious of it all.

In many ways lately I feel I am only just waking up to the truth.. to my True Self. I am not that sad, depressed, anxious, fearful person I turned into. I am actually a happy, lively, bright, intelligent, sensitive, caring, beautiful soul who has and always had so much love in her soul to give. I am empathic and soft and gentle and that is why at times I have struggled in this world, feeling like I did not really belong. But the truth is I do belong. I belong to my self, I belong to life and I belong here on Word Press and I also belong to a more caring empathic world that I know does have a place and exist.

Its is nice on most mornings now to wake up happy and not sad. I am sad that I cannot easily connect with my sister because she too has been put to death at times by my family, by the medical profession, by psychiatrists. I saw all of that ‘killing’ and silencing go down over the years 2005 to recently, the worst of it took place from 2012 to 2017 and a suicide attempt was part of that. I stuck by her side and fought for her then against the doctors who wanted to drug her more. I stuck by her said through two cancer operations but now I am not as prepared to be the one ALWAYS REACHING OUT. It sounds really selfish when I say this. For I cry about how I do love my sister and just long for a sense I exist for her at all.. this longing really really hurts. It would be so good to feel the love coming back to me… just one call….but maybe in the end that is just asking for far too much. And that makes me very very very sad and yet that sadness I now know IS NOT THE WHOLE OF ME. IT IS A NATURAL RESPONSE TO WANTING A REAL CONNECTION. TO WANTING TO BE AND SHARE A REAL CONNECTION. So in many ways I can be glad that I ACTUALLY CAN FEEL IT. BECAUSE THAT MEANS I AM REALLY ALIVE AND NOT WALKING DEAD! My feelings really do makes sense, they have meaning and they do matter. But maybe I cant have what I want in this case. Maybe I just need to find a way to let go.. with love.