Dear Cali Chica:

Good Sunday morning to you! 2020 is going fine for me, thank you. NYE had dinner at a friend’s home, an intimate kind of dinner with a closing of Irish Cream, a 1000 calorie small glass drink, I am (over) guessing. Tasted like candy.  And unlike you, I was back home and asleep before midnight and through the fireworks of several miles away.

And now, to your post, my response using your words (italicized): living your childhood and on in a family that was full of emotional outbursts and hysteria was almost like constantly walking in fields of dust and trying to get out on the other side. Your sister, extremely distressed, yet again showed her passive aggressive behavior, and anger,  thro(wing) out abuse and punches, creating dust in your life.

The dust of your childhood, through your adolescence and your twenties, all through your wedding and beyond.. that dust is still thrown at you nowadays. Not by the original dust thrower and her accomplice, but by her other victim, your sister. Your sister now is continuing the dust throwing tradition of her mother.

You don’t want that dust in your life, but she throws it at you and when you complained to her about it in the past, she responded with: well, you threw dust at me too! And you still are throwing it at me (blaming me for  all your problems)!

But you you don’t want to throw dust anymore at anyone and she sees no other way but to throw dust at you. She can’t locate her valid anger and remove it from her own brain dust, so whenever angry, which is often, she either holds the dust in with great difficulty, or she throws it out at another, and you are one of these others.

I compared her passive aggression to a puppy biting, suggested you may experience those bites as nibbles, local areas affected and not too badly; you can attend to those local areas. But dust is a different metaphor: no specific area to attend to. The danger is bumping into things and falling, or dropping a bottle on your foot, because you can’t see through the dust, can’t see o focus on where you are going.

You do your best to assert yourself with her, but living in dust again and again, on and on is draining, creating an exhaustion that is dust in itself.

Regarding what is best for your sister: that she keeps her employment, keep her financial independence, not depending on her parents or on you to pay her rent and effective psychotherapy that she still very much needs. There is absolutely nothing that you can do for her. The fact that she grew up with the same parents as you means nothing at all at this point. The fact that she was a victim of the same mother means nothing at all. Because your mother too was a victim of someone else, perhaps of her own mother (who committed suicide eventually). And there are millions of people in the world who are similar to your sister and who do not share your mother.

Not only is there nothing you can do to help her mentally/ emotionally, you are the least likely person to help her because she automatically throws dust at you and feels entitled to do so. She complains that you blame her.. but she blames you and that is her source of entitlement. She believes that you deserve her dust. So how can you help an individual who  is already invested in throwing dust at you.

It is possible that you will need to remove her from your life if she doesn’t stop throwing dust at you. I don’t see her being able to stop. Where does it leave you: dust in your eyes, dropping things, bumping into things, falling as you try to get out on the other side.

There is more in your post this morning, but I will stop here for now.

anita