I found a study that said “maternal relationship instability was a stronger predictor of children’s externalizing problems when family enmeshment was high” and flashed back to my own upbringing and the genesis of my own lifelong problems.
My sister has completely gone back on her word and spends money so wildly it’s like Christmas hit the trailer park and life rewarded her for enmeshment.
For the long term, though, that wealth won’t last and there will be no career counseling or college classes. I predict an awful person who will slide in to the massive hole my mom created.
I’m mad. I’m sad. My dog is hurt and I’m helpless. I’m helpless to the inheritance that made my sister a millionaire and I’m signing up for food stamps.
My mother made sure to leave my brother and I nothing. My sister was rewarded for living with her for almost 20 years after high school and my mom taught her everything she knows.
When will I get the hint that she will never like me and that she moves like my mom making a demon out of me. Is this PTSD brain with negative thoughts? Or can no one empathize with being left out, with being told as you go to college that you will never be successful and then coming back and the success is distorted.
I turn away help from my family because it’s never help, it’s money and a shitty comment, it’s very potent disgust and it’s pleading for the whole profession of counseling.
I’ve probably seen thousands of clients with one complaint against my license filed on Christmas Day by another angry mother and dismissed just as quick. Surely, I can create relationships, surely I’ve heard the stories.
My therapist said once that we are the meanest set of siblings (to each other) and she’s seen more people than me. She’s like my mom now, helping guide my heart and she reminds me I’m safe.
I’m hurt and my dog is hurt and I just pray for all the families in the middle of hurt and the genesis of substance use issues caused in part by poor parenting find healing outside of those systems.
It’s the hardest thing in the world to go against sentiment and nostalgia but I’m not an asshole and when I rip myself from the Velcro of enmeshment it’s in those places I move forward. I love you mom, but you were a mean old bat! And I love you sister, but you are too.
