Dear Peace,

Sorry to hear that you didn’t manage to pass your exams. But I am glad it didn’t discourage you and that you will try again!

As for your siblings, I am sorry to hear it, but unfortunately it’s not anything new – they have been behaving abhorrently for a very long time. Blaming, guilt tripping, threatening, accusing, extracting money from you, trying to control you and coerce you into doing what they want, “spiced up” with loads of emotional blackmail – that’s what your siblings have unfortunately been doing to you.

And I understand why it hurts so much. I guess a part of it is that you indeed saw them (specially your oldest sister) as parental figures:

I realize that maybe I saw my older siblings as parental figures because my father was not around when I was young. I looked to them for love, support, and protection, much like a child looks to a father.

You wanted love and protection, support and validation from them. You wanted them to be proud of you, right? But what you received instead is their condemnation, despise and disapproval. You were told you are an embarrassment to them. You were also made into their scapegoat – they are accusing you of not solving the problems that they as adult people should be solving for themselves.

As you say, they treat you like a villain (I am the villain of everyones story).

That’s a horrible message to get, a totally unfair and baseless message. A toxic message, coming from very self-absorbed and greedy people, who have zero empathy and zero consideration for you.

But I understand that it still hurts, because they are your parental figures, and we look for validation from our parental figures. They mirror us our own worth. Our own lovability. And if they reject us, if they tell us we are no good and we’ve failed them – then of course we’ll feel horrible. We’ll believe it is our fault. We’ll believe that we are indeed unlovable, undesirable, and unworthy.

And so I guess a part of you (the child part of you) believes their opinion of you. The little girl in you still seeks their approval…Would you agree with that?

If you want to be less affected by their treatment of you, I think you’ll need to stop seeing them as parental figures and stop seeking approval from them. Because how they see you is not who you really are. What they believe about you doesn’t reflect your true worth. Their image and opinion of you is warped. It reflects who they are, not who you are.

So you’d need to reject that – reject the entire narrative that there is something wrong with you, that you’re not helping them enough, that you have betrayed them, let them down etc etc. Reject all that, and accept that you are a good, caring and compassionate person, who helped them a lot, but they were never grateful for that, and no matter what you give, it will never be good enough.

You’d need to accept, and perhaps grieve too, that they don’t see your worth. But also, it’s not the end of the world, because you see your own worth, and your husband sees it too (and we too on the forum see your worth). You’ve got people in your life who see your worth, and you don’t need your siblings to validate you.

They aren’t even capable of that, in their current (self-absorbed) state of mind. The more you can embrace your own worth in spite of what they think of you – the happier you will be…

How does this sound to you?