Dear Cali Chica:

I read/ re-read your two recent  posts and  I am  developing more clarity as I quote you and type my  thoughts:

1. You wrote: “It’s not necessarily help that they seek, but this sort of audience for their performance. For, when  I actually try to give objective and straightforward help, they can be very resistant to  it.”

The histrionic person suffers, I  know  that because  everyone suffers. Histrionic behavior is born out of suffering. And it is also true that when a histrionic person does her thing, she is performing. This means she has  side stepped her suffering, that is, she  is distracting herself from her suffering by focusing on the audience. Her  aim is to create as strong an affect on the audience as possible, just like an  actor on a  stage.

Only when you pay to see a play, you know the deal. But as you grow up with a  histrionic mother (and now experience a histrionic sister), you don’t know  you are watching a play, a performance.

Again, it  is these two things happening together, co existing. They suffer in life and they perform. It is not one or the other, it is one and  the other.

When you are the audience to a histrionic person you are watching a  performance of a person who is focused on creating strong  emotions in you. You are being manipulated. It  has  taken me many years to understand this co-existence  of these two things: they suffer in life and they perform, the suffering  I  see during  their performance is not honest.

They don’t want your help because they are already helping themselves to you, by having you as the affected audience to their performance.

2. You wrote: “I thought about  my mother, this feeling  of wanting  to protect  her image- not make her look bad, as other people would  not  understand… makes her look selfish and bad, but in reality they don’t  understand  her…all she (sister) isi is a sad suffering soul?… this person struggles on such a deep level that they can’t help being that way…”

It is the adult child who is less likely than others  to understand who her mother is because as a  child there was  no mental separation, in the child’s brain, between the  child and the mother. When the child is formed (during those formative years) with an unempathetic mother, the child over-reaches with empathy to the mother (that 95% percent I mentioned to you before, to make up for her 5% of empathy). And then, as an adult, the child-now-adult is still feeling that great empathy that obscures objective understanding  of who the mother is.

Same obscurity exists in regard  to your sister.

Again, they seem to be suffering but they are not suffering  when they are performing. There is a  touch of suffering, but they are  not suffering. In between the performances they honestly suffer, not during.

3.  Regarding  my  comment  on loyalty: “stay loyal but not to their illness, not to their cruelty.”- I am not sure if  you understood me  correctly, not clear on that. What I mean by staying  loyal to them is to do what is right for them, and that  is, to not be  their audience.

When you are their audience, you are being  manipulated, and in so, you are promoting their dishonesty. Without honesty there is no chance for any one of them to heal.

4. You wrote: “I have in the past… sense of helplessness and Extreme despair and thus inflicting my suffering upon another…recent I have been able to move away from thinking that I am by any means defined by those prior actions…when my mother was inflicting a lot of negativity and guilt upon me. I was  without doubt inflicting this action on to my husband as a reaction… I would instinctively and reflexively just pour out onto him. It is not unlike what my sister is doing these days”-… The difference is… I have developed a huge sense of self control… contain the  suffering. Often  times, if I contain the suffering long enough it disappears on its own!… actions that are first active and  deliberate can then become second nature overtime”

This is so well stated, I wanted to quote you so to have your words repeated. It is truly beautiful.

Notice this: it  is very unlikely that your mother will heal. It is also, unfortunately, not likely that your sister will heal. It is best that you don’t expect her to heal. Hope for her healing, I understand that, but expecting  it will bring you despair. Do what you can do to help her by not being her audience. I can’t stress that  enough. By refusing  myself  to be her audience, I will probably lose her myself, in the context  of this website.

Yes, I said it, you may lose her in a strange way when you are no longer her audience. She will be looking for an audience elsewhere.

There is a price to pay for your learning and understanding, for your hard earned well being.

anita