Dear Cali Chica:

Good Friday morning. I just read your first sentences and had to respond before reading the rest: earlier this morning (before you posted)  I thought about re-reading our recent communication so to post to you what I learned from it (something I normally do with threads), but then I thought to myself: Cali Chica will do that, she doesn’t need me to figure it out for her, she can and will figure it out (learn what there is to learn) on her own. And so, I went to another member’s thread and re-read it, then came back and read: “I went back to  our threads from the last 2 days and re-read them”!

I just read the rest of your post. Here is a key sentence for me: “I do, by all means, have a deep primal love for my sister”. The next sentence:  “The type that is difficult to explain”. Things that are difficult to explain interest me, so I am going to try to explain just that, what it is, this “deep primal love”. I just looked up the definition of the word primal, and the first definition I came across is: “relating to an early stage in evolutionary development”. Synonyms listed: initial, early, earliest, first.

The earliest meeting between Cali Chica and calisister is when CC was seven years old and calisister was a few days old. The baby doesn’t talk, so the primal relationship is non-verbal. The baby doesn’t think in the sense that she doesn’t possess words yet, and she doesn’t bite yet- she doesn’t hide her feelings and then bite. Seven year old CC does not engage in conversations with the baby. What she knows about the baby is what is true to all babies. This primal love then has nothing to do with an individual personality or character of the baby (beyond it crying more or less than other babies and such), because these are not developed yet.

Fast forward, this primal love you feel for her has nothing to do with who your sister is, who she became or evolved to. It is all about that early, long gone “stage in evolutionary development”, a seven year old and a baby, later, an eight year old and a one year old, by then the primal love has been established.

Let’s see what you wrote about her in your post today: “she is that delightful puppy that tends to unpredictably bite”- the delightful puppy is the baby part in her, the passive aggressiveness is what she became later, not a part of that primal love.

Her communication is “indirect- which can leave me feeling confused, uneasy, and feeling invalidated”- the baby that she was, the one you have that primal love for, communicated directly as all babies do. The indirect communication on her part is something that happened later, and is not the object of your primal love for her. And it harms your mental health (“Confused, uneasy.. invalidated.. hurt”).

“I know that I do not do well with indirect or passive aggressive communication”- no one does well with this in the context of intimate relationships! It is always a problem in this context.

Next you wrote that you don’t want to lose contact with her but, “I have to accept, even if it feels sad, that I am going to inevitably lose that ‘closeness’ I feel”.

My thinking at this point: I don’t think you will lose that closeness feeling because it is primary. It is a good idea that you lose any and all misunderstanding about the nature of this closeness. This closeness is preverbal. It was not built around verbal communication. So stands to reason, limit the verbal communication with her, talk way less with her, do not continue a routine of past daily best-friends conversation. Keep contact and interact with the baby part of her, keep it that simple.

“I will maintain my main energy on my inner circle”, good. “and ask  myself each time I communicate with her and/ or make a plan with her: does this serve me RIGHT NOW, does it serve my husband. And lastly, is this a good time”- I would go beyond that and change the way you view her. If you view her as the person she was when you formed that deep primary bond with her, you will no longer care what she thinks and believes and so forth, because you will see her as that baby.

Leave the communication with her as the adult that she is, to other people who may form a bond with the adult that she is. For you, she is just that baby. You are not here to be her therapist or her best friend. This new view of her will allow you and her to enjoy that earliest pleasant closeness.

(I didn’t understand your last paragraph regarding “this ‘luxury'”)

anita