Dear Aum:

Of course you are not insane for wanting to maintain a relationship with your brother and with his family, once he marries and has children.

“Idk whether it’s repression or denial, but he never feels bad feelings, never wants to talk about bad feelings and whenever I approach him to talk about my struggles, he gives me a few moments of his time before getting bored/disengaging/withdrawing. It’s like he can’t handle heavy emotions“-

– he has bad feelings but he is able to brush them off and not dwell in them. Be happy for him, that he is able to do that. Try to be more like him in this regard. I am not saying that you should deny or repress your feelings, but when you are around him and his future family, when interacting with them, focus on the here-and-now, and not on the past. Stop approaching him to talk about your struggles in regard to your parents and childhood: he is your brother, not your friend, and not your therapist.

You are unhappy about his responses when you shared your feelings in regard to your parents and childhood, but it is very unlikely for any adult sibling to have an adequate and accurate understanding of another sibling’s subjective experience of childhood and parents (when it is different from one’s own) because a sibling is not objective enough to have such understanding. No matter how much one sibling shares with the other, the other can’t really get it.

He cannot understand your subjective experience of your childhood and you cannot understand his subjective experience of his childhood because neither one of you is objective. It is well known that for a psychotherapist to have a good understanding of a client’s experience of childhood, the therapist has to be objective enough, that is, to separate her experience of her own childhood from that of the client’s, which is often not easy to do. Siblings with different subjective experiences of childhood are very unlikely to be able to do that. Therefore, I suggest that you no longer try to make him understand your childhood experience, including your relationships with your parents. And keep in mind that you don’t really know his experience!

When you told him recently something about how you were treated negatively by your parents, he said:  “But mom and dad do that to me too“- you didn’t know that, did you? You thought that your parents treated him perfectly?

anita