Dear Lola:

This is the most important part of your recent post: “I have had some very serious struggles with my mental health and I feel like I can’t look after myself if I keep accepting other people’s burdens…  I want to get myself to a really mentally healthy place before I start my own family. My husband and I both have demanding careers and there’s really only so much space I have in my head for stressors… I’ve just reached a point where I want to resolve and disengage from sources of trauma and not carry that forward to my own children“.

Looking after your mental health, disengaging from other people’s burdens (your brother’s and parents’ included), minimizing your stressors, focusing on your new family and on your demanding career, resolving and disengaging from sources of trauma and not carrying that forward to your children- these are the best goals I can think of, admirable goals and I say: they should be in the forefront of your mind as you choose your attitudes and behaviors every single day.

For the sake of your mental health, you will need to abandon your childhood-and-onward role in your family of origin, you will need to reverse the role reversal that took place.  I’ve been studying your thread for over 4 hours and I think that I am getting a feel for what has been happening, this is my best understanding at this point, my theory, you can call it:

“I told my mother that he really upset me but I can’t explain the extent of it without breaking her gentle heart“- I think that growing up, neither of your parents was a strong figure in the family. I think that your mother was child-like, not mature/ not emotionally resourceful, and therefore unable to effectively mother her children. The results: two of your adult brothers are not involved with the family, being “outliers” as you put it,  the brother we are discussing is significantly disturbed and you are the anxious “mother” of the remaining three members of the family: your parents and brother.

I think that since an early age, you viewed your mother as a child with a gentle-child-heart, a heart that can easily break. Therefore you took on the role of the adult in your family who’s job is to protect your mother and keep the family together.

“My mother always loved him… She knows that he’s an oddball and frequently just smiles and says ‘your brother really is a strange fish‘”- she always loved your brother not as a mother who is engaged with her son. She loved him from a removed- detached position, as if indeed she was watching a fish in an aquarium, pondering how strange the fish is.

“When I told her that he told me something that really upset me, she asked me not to push him away because I’m the only one he ever opens up to. Unfortunately, I… have always tended to fill that role in the family“-

– your mother knows that her son doesn’t ever open up to her,  so she assigned you the role (and/ or you took on the role) early on to be for your brother what his mother was not able to be for him. There has been a Role Reversal happening in your family and you took on the strong adult/ mother role, filling in the gap left by your parents.

“for me to disengage with my brother will be very obvious and cause a huge amount of distress to my parents… I will be the one creating a rift and I fear it will hurt my parents and that they might resent me for ruining the family“- there has been a rift, a gap.. a hole in your family, left by the absence of a single strong parent, and so, your role was to fill that hole, to bridge that gap. Currently, in your 30s, you still identify with that role and you feel guilty about abandoning it, as if your family will be ruined if you do, as if the rift will become too much and the family will break apart completely.

“(husband) said he’d always gotten a dark vibe from my brother… I always explained away my family dynamics as ‘we’re just a weird family but what family isn’t’ etc. I believed this too but the more I think lately, the more I feel it’s all just a bit beyond the realm of acceptably strange“- the darkness, weirdness and strangeness was in the family before your brother was born into it.  He did not invent the darkness etc., he grew up with it.

Let’s review the darkness in your brother’s mind and heart in a chronological order: he was cruel to one of the family’s dogs, abusing the dog, and as a result of the abuse, the dog ran away. He was cruel to other animals as well, “in general he has no concern for what animals feel“, but he loved and never harmed (?) one of the family dogs, the one who was exclusively his own. When he was about 14, he was playing-wrestling with you (7-years-old), his arm around your neck so tight, choking you, that you started to lose your vision. He then let go and said that he had no idea that you were struggling. Ever since you were 10 and chose to be a vegetarian, he made fun of you and accused you of being “a weakling etc.” for not eating meat. He still does more than two decades later.

In his late 20s he watched a man choke on his vomit, could have saved him by rolling him over, but chose not to because “he enjoyed it and it made him feel powerful“. Sometime later, still in his late 20s, he was out one night and saw 2 men beating a third man. He intervened in behalf of the third men and was badly beaten for it to the point of getting hospitalized. During that time, he was in a relationship with a woman (for a total of 16 years), but didn’t bring her to meet his family for 8 years (keeping her a secret), because it would have been “too awkward” to introduce her to the family, he said.

The night before your wedding (he is in his late 30s) , while drunk, he confessed about having enjoyed watching a man die ten years earlier. You asked him if he felt guilty for it and he said that “he has no remorse“. He also joked about killing any one of your wedding guests, asking if there is someone at your wedding that you’d miss. He then proceeded to list the people he wouldn’t let die. On your wedding day, he didn’t say a single word to you or to anyone and wasn’t in any of the family photos. He currently has an office job, a girlfriend and a 2-year-old son. He didn’t introduce you to his son and when you tried to meet his son, he didn’t make it possible for you.

My thoughts regarding your brother’s darkness and strangeness: in general he has no concern for how animals feel because he was not shown concern for how he felt growing up. He grew up lost, and lonely, like a fish alone in an aquarium, eternally swimming in still, silent water.  He felt powerless, a weakling, unable to make waves, and he hated that feeling. He needed to feel powerful, he needed to make waves, so he hit his dog, he choked you, he beat people on the street, and he felt powerful letting a man die.

Perhaps growing up, your brother- alone in the ever still, quiet water, being observed by people on the outside (people he desperately needed to be emotionally engage with him)- felt like he was dying day after day for what felt like eternity. Fast forward, watching the man dying, maybe he felt that this time, he was the one on the outside of the aquarium watching another man die inside. It felt powerful to be on the other side of death.

“I never noticed any abnormal anger towards them- just the usual teenage angst, you know? So with no obvious issues, I will be the one creating a rift“- you never noticed any abnormal anger in your brother toward your parents not because his abnormal (intense, long-term, dangerous) anger does not exist. What if he dissociated from his abnormal anger toward his parents, and has projected it elsewhere. His abnormal anger does exist, so there is an obvious issue. You did not create this issue. And the rift that you are scared of creating: it’s been there all along, it’s not for you to create because it was created before you were born.

When he told you that it would have been too awkward to introduce his (former) girlfriend to his family, maybe he meant that it would have been too awkward to introduce his family… to his girlfriend. Maybe he didn’t want her to see the darkness that’s in his family.

“I’ve just reached a point where I want to resolve and disengage from sources of trauma and not carry that forward to my own children“- a healthy goal: to reverse that Role Reversal, to no longer support the darkness and strangeness, to be kind and wise and … disengage.

anita