Dear Cali Chica:

I just finished putting together the following and it is a very long post. I put hours just in this one post. Please give it all the time it takes, be it however long before you post back to me.

Part 1: I am copying and pasting your words, once again:

1. November 10, 2016: “When I close my eyes I think of my mom as a damaged soul, a sad and abused.. fragile puppy… makes me feel soo soo bad for her”. Jan 2020: “I think of my sister as a wounded child”.

2. February 3, 2018: “the thesis is that no matter what I do or don’t do, what I say or don’t say.. she will always be the same. She will continue to go up and down.. be happy, be miserable.. be ecstatic with glee- all of which has nothing at all to do with my actions…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”.

3. March 26, 2018: “I am away in California..  to look at some potential homes… 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… I was excited t see her.. fun like old times, fun sister silliness. But what happened next.. is kind of a blur… I start feeling like it is not good enough.. we must eat elsewhere. The pizza place was blah… out of nowhere like I can not control it I say out loud ‘wow isn’t this place depressing’… I felt overwhelmed and I felt burdened.. I start getting really upset and crying and feeling just overwhelmed, I start saying .. I can’t take it anymore between my mom and you I just feel so drained, I just don’t have anything left… I saw that my sister is a lot like my mother…I had told her that week away that I couldn’t speak to her. I needed space…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… it was merely her presence.. 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… I become someone I don’t really like around my sister, someone on edge.. when my sister arrived I felt like that old uneasy ball of stress… 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”.

Part 2: I am copying and pasting what I posted to you on this thread, this month: “She doesn’t want help if the help offered her includes her re-evaluating her thinking and behavior. She will not consider that her thinking may be distorted or that her behavior may be dysfunctional… This is the hallmark of personality disorders… She and your mother, both exhibit severe personality disorders… Either one can learn a new passive aggressive strategy, or your sister may learn a new way to hide her intense and frequent anger, but neither one will change into an honest and trustworthy person… You have to put a complete stop to your SCC role with her.. all in vain… Let go of SCC, she is not and never will be super enough to fix a person with a severe personality disorder.. live far, far away from your sister. She lives on the East Coast, so the West Coast is as far as you can be away from her… don’t allow her to follow you!”

Part 3: your last night post, and then my response to it today, Jan 23, 2020: you wrote, paraphrased, that you “see it clearly” that your mother needed an audience, not truly a solution to her problems, and that she was “never ever being satisfied or happy” no matter how much audience time she got, and no matter how much the audience tried to help her to solve the problems she complained about. But you don’t see your sister clearly. You thought of her as being on your side, not on your mother’s side. You thought of her being with you on one side and your mother- on the other side. You thought of your sister as troubled but not as “hysterical and crazy” like your mother was.

You wrote that if you did try to help her recently with the roach problem, she would have “jumped to the opportunity”, but if you told her that you were stressed about helping her, she would have said: “oh I never told you to do this”. Then you wrote that she did need your help to “move into Manhattan and in so many different ways. Those are facts”. But she “puts down and de-values SCC… angry and denounces SCC.. a victim lost puppy some days- but angry beast others.. highly troubled and erratic and hysterical”. You then asked me to elaborate on what I meant by your sister is helping herself to you.

My response: it is very difficult to separate everyone in this three people combo of your mother, yourself and your sister (I am not including your father because he and your mother “morphed into one”) because the three of you interacted for so long, starting when you and your sister were babies and infants, before you had words. It is difficult to see who is who, what is true to reality and what is not. So here, I will do my best to organize this mess based on my extensive communication with you and with your sister, your communication with her on your threads, and my study and re-study over time of these communications (going back and computing new information into old, seeing more in the old every time).

*Because of the complexity of the topic, because even though I have a lot of information, I don’t have it all (even you don’t have all the information and definitely a lot of the information you have is not objective), and because even if I did have all the decades long information, no brain is capable of computing it all and producing a complete and perfect analysis— what follows is a simplification, but the principles, I believe, are true to reality:

Each one of the three of you is a “damaged soul, a sad and abused.. fragile puppy.. a wounded child”. The oldest sad-abused-fragile puppy grew up to become, in addition to an abused puppy,  an abusive adult dog. She gave birth to two healthy young puppies, then proceeded to bite them so badly over many years, that they too became sad, abused and fragile. The older of the two younger puppies took  on a Super/ Savior Puppy Role, she was going to help and fix all those injuries of the oldest puppy and the youngest puppy.

Now I will focus on what happened between the two younger puppies (because you are clear about the oldest puppy): the two puppies, sad-abused-fragile, had a common enemy (whom they loved desperately and hated). They had a together- time pointing out the faults of their common enemy. This was their common ground.

The Super-Savior Puppy was and always has been super motivated to fix the younger puppy, a role born early on. Super Puppy will do anything to fix younger puppy, so motivated that she is willing to look into her own thinking and behavior and challenge these to see if it will help her fix younger puppy. She looks at her behavior and thinks: I am guilty for this and that, I hurt younger puppy saying this and that, I shouldn’t have.

Younger puppy is not motivated to fix anyone. She is not a Super- Savior puppy, so she is not motivated to do whatever it takes to fix or save anyone. She is not  motivated to look into her thinking and her behavior and consider making real changes. Instead, what younger puppy does is what some dogs do, burying carcasses and bones in the ground. She buries her hurt and anger in the ground, sits on it; once in a while she digs it up, throws it at whomever is around (being “hysterical and crazy”), buries it again,  adds to it, reburies it and repeat.

The carcass and bones of older puppy are above ground. Younger puppy’s carcass and bones are under ground. Younger puppy is way too angry to consider bringing up the carcasses and bones from under long enough to look at them and consider letting them go.

Now I will leave this imagery and go back to particulars regarding #3: when at the pizza parlor back in March 2018, you told her that her presence alone distresses you, her response was: “do you know how horrible it is to say to someone that just your presence makes me upset and uneasy”, and you wrote: “She  is right it is horrible”-

– first, it was horrible for you to experience this, to suffer in the company of your sister just because of her presence. It didn’t cross your sister’s mind that it is horrible for you. What came to her mind was only how horrible it is for her- self centered to the extent of it not occurring to her how it feels for you. Second, she said how horrible it is for you to say, not how horrible it is for her to hear it. She is pointing the finger of blame at you: you said it, you are bad!

Your sister and you are not on the same side and your mother on the opposite side, not outside the context of the two of you talking about what your mother did wrong. Outside this context, the two of you are on opposite sides. She repeatedly accuses you of being a bad person, and you feeling bad for  it.

She accused you of saying that you felt badly because of her presence alone and you accepted her accusation, “she is right it is horrible”, that is, she is right- I am horrible for having said what I said.

Here is a different scenario in that same place and time: you tell her how distressing it is for you to be in her presence, she responds: I am so sorry sister, I know how hard you try to help me and make me feel good, so I know it must be horrible for you to get so  distressed simply because I am present -If she said that, you would have probably felt better, validated, because she acknowledged how hard you tried for  so long, that you are a good person. But she didn’t say any of that, no empathy for you, only an accusation of how bad you are.

What she did right there is add to her carcass and bones arsenal, to burry along with all that’s already buried.

I think that the reason you felt so distressed in the pizza parlor before she said anything is that you expected her to say something to make you feel bad, so you jumped ahead and felt bad. You knew from experience what was to come.. it was only a matter of time.

Regarding your recent post: I agree, she did want you to help her many times, when she moved to AZ, when she moved to Manhattan, when she had the medical emergency and many other times. Yes, she wants that kind of practical/ material help. But as far as mental help: understanding herself or understanding you, she is not interested in any of your help.

What I meant by her helping herself to you, is not in the context of practical help, but in the context of mental help. You want to help her to be mentally healthy. This is truly what she needs. But this is not what she wants. She wants to feel better without understanding anything better, without learning (and therefore, without healing, because learning and healing are synonymous).

At times when she is in a significant crisis, she is focused on the current emergency and she will not complain to you when you add to the practical help you provide efforts to help her mentally. She may even pretend that she is interested in your mental health efforts to help her,  so to not discourage you from completing the practical portion of the help.

When she is not in the midst of a significant crisis, when she doesn’t desperately need your practical help, what she is helping herself to in the mental realm is this: she is helping herself feel better by making you feel bad.

#2, Feb 2018- all that I quoted was what you wrote about your mother but it all fits your sister perfectly. The two of them exhibit severe personality disorders which means that neither one of them did or will challenge their own thinking and behavior, so indeed, they “will always be the same”.

You wrote then: “I essentially feel that I may have some power to prevent this beast from becoming a monster… Whether you feed it or whether you let it starve.. it is all the same. The monster is a monster at the end of the day.Now and forever”-

-the monster feeds on you, you are the food. It makes your sister feel good when you are feeling bad, this is what a monster is about. You see her as a puppy but that puppy is biting and feeding on you. How can you possibly feel good in her presence? Only if you forget and have silly sister time with her, as long as you forget.

Your mother too felt better when she made you feel bad.

You and your husband chose to move to California, to have a new beginning. Bring the monster to California and it will feed on  you yet again. (Isn’t it amazing how a person you love so much- wants you to feel bad, isn’t it amazing that a person you care so much for- feels better when you feel bad.. and they go about making it happen, again and again).

This is the hallmark of abuse. Basically what I am saying is that your sister is stuck in a pattern of accusing and blaming you and making you feel bad, that she is very unlikely to change this pattern.

Now, let’s say you share with her that when she says this and that, and when she does this or that, it makes you feel bad and therefore you will no longer practically help her, what she is likely to do, is to be very careful to not say this and that or do this or that specific thing. And you may think that she changed and that the relationship is getting better (all this probably happened already), but it is not true.

She didn’t change, she adjusted her strategies. She will find new ways to make you feel bad, catching you by surprise.

You wrote: “I essentially feel that I may have some power to prevent this beast from becoming a monster.”, but the beast is already a monster, the puppy is already a monster. Like you wrote: “The monster is a monster at the end of the day. Now and forever”.

anita