Hi Anita,

Thanks very much for your reply. Yes, I think my post was really looking for reassurance because I kind of know that she is not respecting my boundaries by constantly drawing me into crises that occur periodically between my dad and her. We are now stuck in a back and forth on Messenger. She keeps asking me to let it go but then basically justifying her behaviour. So I’m supposed to just say ‘ok sure, let this go’ but at the same time she gets to have the final word and at the same not acknowledging that what I am unhappy about is her lack of respect for my boundaries. It’s seriously infuriating!

However one of the things she acknowledged in her recent post is that ‘doesn’t take advice’, which is quite an incredible thing to admit. I have known this for quite a long time, because it has always seemed strange to me that as her sister and having gone through my own struggles with my father (who I will admit is an incredibly difficult person), I sort of developed a whole bunch of strategies for coping, but she has never once asked me about that. So it feels like you can see this person trapped in this cycle of conflict and yet they refuse to admit their own contribution to the cycle and refuse to take advice. So that leaves you in the position of a passive bystander who is just watching this train wreck happen in front of your eyes. It is also vey invalidating, because it means that whatever you have gone through that might be helpful to her is just being ignored and treated as irrelevant. So what’s left is a superficial relationship which is not based on a genuine exchange and also one where she feels she can trample all over my boundaries by using the fact that she has experienced a lot of hardship as the excuse.