Dear Cali Chica:

For an hour and a half I’ve been looking for something you posted long ago and finally found it:

November 10, 2016, three years and two months ago, to the day, you wrote: “When I close my eyes I think of my mom as a damaged soul, a sad and abused (so to speak) fragile puppy that is now coming out in the world with a big bark. This feeling about her makes it quite difficult to ‘hate her’ or to feel I should attempt to have ‘power over her’ in a way it simply just makes me fee soo soo bad for her”.

Three years and two months later, you wrote: “I think of my sister as a wounded child”.

Seeing your mother at the time as a fragile puppy made it difficult for you to fully assert yourself with her, at the time, and seeing your sister as a wounded child makes it difficult for you to do the same. (What it means to fully assert yourself, to be discussed later).

As I was looking for the above quote I found other things:

February 3, 2018, almost two years ago, you wrote: “the thesis is that no matter what I do or don’t do, what I say or don’t say, who I’m with or not with, what I feel or don’t feel- she will always be the same. She will continue to go up and down, curse me then cry to me, be happy, be miserable, fee like she’s losing her mind, be ecstatic with glee- all of which has nothing at all to do with my actions. Maybe I am small  minded to think that I still have any Role in this.”. You wrote this  about your mother, but other than the part of her cursing you, it reads to me a lot like this paragraph could be about your sister.

Continued quote from above: “By accommodating her and giving into such things as contact and keeping in touch during vacation (or anything at all) I still feed the beast and allow it to be quelled at least momentarily (or so I think!). By thinking that- I essentially feel that I may have some power to prevent this beast from becoming a  monster. But this beast is by nature a monster! Whether you feed it or whether you let it starve whether you tranquilize it for a day or provoke it, it is all the same. The monster is a monster at the end of the day. Now and forever”.

– I hope this doesn’t all parallel your sister, I hope it is not Now “and forever”, but maybe it is.

February 5, 2018, you wrote: “I do this with my mom and sister. In different ways but similar. Actions based on ‘oh well I can relate so I need to allow her to express and be, I shouldn’t be harsh’. Or actions based n ‘well who am I to put my foot down and not accommodate it- for it’s not like I’m so above And enlightened”- same thinking that you expressed most recently regarding your sister.

A very important long, long  quote is next because it has to do with California where you may be moving to, leaving your sister behind in nyc, and keeping in mind that she may be thinking of following you there:

March 26, 2018: “I am away in California this week, I am here for all sorts of work interviews and meetings, my husband joined me this weekend.. to look at some potential homes and see if this is a place that we would really like to relocate to… Given that it is 2 physician jobs it is a huge decision career wise and of course personally. I had not seen my sister since the wedding, in September, so I thought it would be nice if she joined us this weekend too. So she came in on Friday.. I was excited to see her, and the hour that she was there before my husband arrived was really fun like old times, fun sister silliness. But what happened next I will try my best to explain… We are all at the hotel lobby hanging out and then proceed to walk around to get dinner.. Now what happens next is kind of a blur. We end up settling down on a pizza place, and all of a sudden I start feeling like it is not good enough.. we must eat elsewhere. The pizza place is blah.. A few minutes later, out of nowhere like I can not control it I say out loud ‘wow isn’t this place depressing’… I then proceed to say ‘well I’m not sure but I don’t know I don’t think this is going to be fun for her’.. It ends up being a huge, huge debacle. I end up having another meltdown… I felt overwhelmed and I felt burdened… I start getting really upset and crying and feeling just overwhelmed, I start saying things that are really inappropriate, I start saying things such as I can’t take it anymore between my mom and you I just feel so drained, I just don’t have anything left. My sister of course gets upset and said well you invited me this weekend and where is this coming from.. now you’re doing this? .. it does sound crazy. Like I am unraveling at a pizza parlor out of nowhere. I was. Then all these things start coming to me, I think about how she was so up-and-down about whether she wants to quit work or not before that week of my vacation.. I saw that my sister is a lot like my mother, and constantly giving into her was accommodating, it wasn’t going to even hep her get better… my sister had really put me through the ringer with going up and down about whether she wanted to be a part of her program or not. Which was so draining, I had told her that week away that I couldn’t speak to her. I needed space… not to say that this is the only way my sister functions… The root of it all is our mother, who has created a negative an abusive environment our whole life, so as you see it trickles down… However I made a huge step a month ago to cut off contact with my parents, so my threshold for dealing with negativity has become very low…My husband and sister stepped out for a moment then because he wanted to calm her down. During this time .. I said to my friend, I think I just can’t take it anymore. I can’t be a caregiver to her. He said well this is just her coming here and trying to have fun she hasn’t done anything wrong. I said yes, but I think I have a lot of anger and built-up resentment and just frankly an overwhelming feeling around her. The moment she came here I felt like I regressed and went backwards, kind of the way I do when I pick up the phone with my mom I automatically start feeling anxious and depressed… soon as my sister arrived I felt that same anxious depressed feeling. The kind that I would feel when I would be around my mom.. it was merely her presence. She had mentioned this at the pizza parlor before we left, she said to me ‘do  you know how horrible it is to say to someone that just your presence makes me upset and uneasy.’ She is right it is horrible. But I think it’s true… yes her mere presence makes me anxious and uneasy.. she does have qualities of my mother that can be draining.. it is also some PTSD of going up and down with her over the last few months, and so unfortunately even if she doesn’t do anything wrong per se, I still feel that around her. It was my first time seeing her over the last seven months but we speak all the time”

You continued to share that the next day you and your husband were busy and you were worried about your sister being alone. You wrote: “if the person is a mentally healthy individual that is independent.. you don’t really worry about them while you’re at work.. But on the flipside if the person that is staying at home while you’re at work is lonely and not very stable, you worry the whole time.. are they bored? Are they lonely? I wonder what they’re doing.. Now the latter person will say well I didn’t really ask you to worry about me so you shouldn’t be. But the truth of the matter is that this person doesn’t have to ask for me to worry.. just their presence is going to cause anxiety while you’re at work because of the baseline kind of person who they are. Just because of the baseline kind of person they are.

This is quite interesting. One may say well that’s on me, my sister is fine and perhaps I am hypersensitive and feeling uneasy because I am thinking that I have to always help her when in reaity she’s fine… And of course she mentions how she has made a lot of progress.. However.. I don’t all of a sudden say OK great.. my sister is 100% fine and she is no longer someone to have to worry about woo hoo!

Also, I am not just absorbing this energy out of nowhere. The energy has to be coming from her too.. it’s the baseline person she is, that will cause me to feel like that in almost any situation..

I also noticed.. my entire demeanor changes. I become someone I don’t really like around my sister, someone who is on edge, someone who is talking too much and overcompensating… Just two days ago I wrote to you a post that you felt was book worthy. And I agree. But yet when my sister arrived I felt like that old uneasy ball of stress..

My husband noticed that I changed as soon as she arrives.. He felt that he was more drained and run down the whole time because my sister was there… By the time that the weekend ended and I dropped both of them off at the airport, (I am staying here a few extra days) I saw that my husband was truly drained- the same face I’ve seen after a weekend with my mom… He mentioned how he feels that just my sister being around feels like the energy is down. It’s kind of like being around a person where you have to walk on egg shells even if you’re not doing anything or saying anything. .. I said to him well isn’t this interesting even if she was to say nothing, just her presence makes us feel that way. And we both agreed yes. For example if in the future she lived locally and we saw her more regularly I can see myself feeling extremely drained just like I did with my mother.

..And- she herself has some qualities of my mother… like prior to that vacation of mine when she was up-and-down with her residency program.

..He mentioned something that is very true.. I have stopped talking to my parents and we are going in the  right direction. But it felt like a weekend with my sister was a step backwards. Because of that feeling of anxiety and depression that came back again and also the energy

.. So as a result I think that I will just have to have some better boundaries with her. Looking back this was a very important weekend for my husband and I, with the dinner and the meetings and just soaking in the energy of this new place. It probably would have been better if she wasn’t there because the energy of the weekend was based on her, not really about the surroundings. We both felt really bad admitting that to ourselves.”

End of quote. There’s a whole lot here, and I have a few things to state following retyping the above. But I’ll give you some time with this. If you want we can both respond to this post before reading each other’s response, and then compare. Do you want to do that?

anita