I did it the right way

Habitual and faithless readers have seen my cold, declarative and terminal statements about my sister (and possibly other generic family thrown in). She is not a bad person; in fact, is probably an excellent person. She has done at least one astounding mitzvah: to raise her disabled adopted baby almost singlehandedly to be a high-integrity and accomplished man. I couldn’t have done that. My problem with her has been that owing to our family-of-origin hypnosis, she can’t extend her capacity for empathy to me. And I would need from family visibility or nothing. That’s the slogan: Visibility or Bust.

I’ll occasionally crack my principle of never writing to her or any of the others who may be still living. So here is this morning’s letter, probably after a year’s passing, followed by brief commentary:

Barbara – I discovered a while ago, with no pleasure, that I am completely incapable of talking to any of my family (meaning: if anyone other than you cared to contact me) about their here-and-now. It’s impossible to me: Like a law of nature, I could not possibly be interested in how or what anyone’s doing. You all just live in my past in my mind. So communication is basically rendered impossible. And worse – everything about the past that comes to mind is self-referential, except for one question: Did you ever learn what father meant in his statement (old letter) that he had spent some time living under assumed identities? Presumably post-war? I’m willing to accept that that nebbish wasn’t delusional. Everything else, it’s just about my childhood, and I would never want to go there with any of you again. The noninterest seems mutual, anyway. If I don’t get to hear that someone has died (Harry, Jr.), then I am clearly out of the loop.

Las Vegas – the air and sky and sun and breeze are nice. I don’t like the big bugs (https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-defenses-of-weak-and-strong.html). But Liz likes it here and has a main project of beautifying the apartment. At work, I keep getting both more subtle and more dull as time goes on. And have gotten to the point where I can hardly imagine learning anything new from a psychology book. Obviously that’s arrogant, but I’m open-minded and may pick up a new book some day. We have been essentially full-time caregivers to Liz’s 88-year-old mother, whom Liz shipped here two years ago from near-starvation in Madison, WI.

That’s all on my mind.

While all clients are heavily “adult children” with unfinished business through which they unknowingly live, the most childish of these may be those still drowned in their hellacious family-of-origin dynamics. These are usually middle-aged sisters – sometimes with an outlier brother – and mother still linked at the id: hateful, amazingly vindictive, huge sucking rivalries. They remain stuck in the past and have not moved on at all, either by growth or insight or willpower. They have carried the past into the present, and cannot see any difference between them.

I have handled the dynamic in the right way. I know I’m still stuck in the past – though only about my family of sister and cousins. I know the past can’t be mended by being mindful, positive or “forgiving” (https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2017/05/curmudgeon-2-forgiveness.html), and that we don’t really move on without mending. I have needed the empathic visibility – and likely the catharsis enabled by that – that this family cannot give. And so I have left them in the past. Many, many clients would be better off if they could do the same.