awful phone conversation

[seastorm]

There is no way to know what is in your brothers head at any given time whether he is feeling ill or not.

It is lovely to have a connection with one's brother, but this brother seems to be unsettling you and downright destabilizing you. Will he understand? or won't he. Will he validate my painful reality or dismiss me?
This is not a guy to be responsible for one scintilla of your sanity or happiness. He just does not get what you went through and it is not looking like he is going to get it soon.

Sometimes we want the people we love to understand so desperately.  They can't or won't or aren't there yet.
What I am trying to say is get the focus back on your wonderful, dear self. You don't need your brother to validate your reality. You have worked hard to understand your past and to put your conclusions up against a mirror that can't conceptualize or empathize with what you went through is painful and so non productive. No matter how much you love your brother he is just not there for this. This is also a dangerous thing to do. This precious and hard one understanding was obtained through very painful breaking through of denial. Share only with people who understand.

I think it is important to get back to yourself to your centre, to loving yourself and not needing validation from your family of origin. Yes, it is nice to have this but it is not critical. I think it is more important to have people who support your experience and believe and validate the impact of the abuse you have experienced.  Go where this is welcome not shunned. Otherwise you get damaged again.

I am glad you are here. I believe what happened to you and know that reality all to well from personal experience. There are others here. It is so important to keep the connection with yourself not matter who is with you or who you are talking to.
You deserve to be loved by yourself.

Sea storm

[Hopalong]

What she (Sea) said. Perfect.

What I want for you, Ales, is for your yearning for him to be a stand-in for the love and support you SHOULD have gotten from your parents...not to drive him out of your life.

So you can have a good brother, just a peaceful connection with a decent human, later in your life.
(Obviously, this comes too from me having severed my connection with a brother who was kind of a monster to me.)

That's why I press you a bit to lighten up.

Even a simple, check-in kind of thing with him now and then that has NO drama and NO demand in it, if you practice it faithfully every month for a couple years, could show him that you are not going to = stress and pain, in his mind.

It has crushed me in the past, to learn how people really do not want to take on the intensity of my emotional needs.

But I am grateful I learned it. I can still express them, and have them met, IN SAFE SPACES. Like here, with trusted friends, in some spiritual settings, or with a therapist.

But the biofamily? I need to treat them as pleasantly (and lightly) as I would neighbors with whom I want to maintain comfortable long-term relationships. Hell, maybe even "relationships" is too loaded a term. Associations. That's it.

If you want a lifelong association with your sibling...I think that a more-cordial, even more-polite-neighbor, is the tone to take for a while.

Maybe, as he matures, he will come back around one day to wanting a heart-to-heart kind of connection in which he, too, can talk with depth and insight about your traumatic origins. But the only way that could possibly happen, in my opinion, is if you stop pushing him for it. If it happened as part of his own readiness and growth, then you could be--then, some future year or decade--glad it did.

But in the meantime, you deserve courageous hearing, and steady support, from OTHER people. Because that's functional. And probably best for your long-term healing and potential for happiness.

Hope that's useful but please toss whatever's not.

love,
Hops

[SilverLining]

He's emotionally frozen at age 10; but his real age is 52. As a result of the trauma we experienced together, he did not speak for maybe 6 months. I don't know if he'll ever figure it all out. That's sad, but there is literally nothing I can do about it. Maybe he's working on it, too. I don't know... and so I'm left with expecting him to act in a normal fashion and being prepared to protect myself, if he doesn't. He's not totally predictable... and since he doesn't communicate well or often... it's a minefield of eggshells. It takes an awful lot of energy on my part just to deal with him, most of the time.

So often I come to this board and read things I could have written myself.  My brother is age 48 but emotionally frozen somewhere around 10.  He was traumatized and retreated into his bedroom for years, spending his time reading Tolkien and other fantasy stuff.  I've come to believe he is emotionally still in the same place, at least part of the time.  He phases back and forth between being a (semi) functional adult and an emotionally crippled child depending on the mood of the moment.

And I have the same aggravations dealing with him as others above have described.  He may or may not answer phone calls or emails, depending on the mood of the moment.  When he wants or needs something all of a sudden he's very communicative.  But there is no reciprocity.  

I've come to realize this "phasing" is a critical piece of all my difficult FOO dealings.  They ALL do this.  My father can go for months or years without communicating at all, and then all of a sudden he wants to be "buddies".  When he feels the need to GIVE advice then I'm flooded with phone calls and letters.   But if I dare ask for advice I'll get a non response and he'll retreat.   I am expected to respond to their needs, but they don't  have the ability to reciprocate.  

[Ales2]

thanks everybody for this advice. i wont be calling him, so unless he gets his act together and values our relationship enough to be considerate  it will be his loss.

the relationship is already a downer, and i tried for many years to call once a week to further the relationship and it was never reciprocated, it was simply dismissed without any acknowledgment.  so, not my turn to make the effort.

[BonesMS]

thanks everybody for this advice. i wont be calling him, so unless he gets his act together and values our relationship enough to be considerate  it will be his loss.

the relationship is already a downer, and i tried for many years to call once a week to further the relationship and it was never reciprocated, it was simply dismissed without any acknowledgment.  so, not my turn to make the effort.

(((((((((((((((((((((((((Ales2))))))))))))))))))))))

I hear you.