For many years now, we've endured every holiday with sadness due to the unmitigated bad fortune of a close relative. She's made every Thanksgiving and Christmas a time to be endured rather than enjoyed. It happened again yesterday and her eruption of anger and hostility left us both . Her misfortunes are legend and now she's angry because we refuse to once again come to her rescue. Sadly there are two wonderful kids involved and they suffer due to her lack of planning, lack of proper employment and on and on and on. Our hearts hurt but we've reached that place where we've decided to erase her name from our cellphones, remove her address from our address book and pretend she no longer exists. Has this happened to you? How do you manage to just forget about it and move on?

 

You can only help someone so much. You have your own lives, move on.

 

Fortunately, it has not happened to us. that is has happened to you.

At this time, you have to do what is best for you and Jim. Unfortunately, none of us can fix everything we'd like to in life, though we sure do try at times.

 

Some people seem to be rather like Joe Btfsplk, the Lil Abner character who always had a rain cloud over his head. We know a some. Claire is more charitable than I, but we both get rather tired of their never-ending crises, crises most often of their own making.

We try to sympathize with the crises they can't control, but even that's hard. I guess they're just very needy in terms of getting attention from anyone and everyone. And they're certainly an energy sink.

Ultimately, you've got to protect yourself before you can help anyone else -- getting dragged into their bottomless quicksand won't help anyone. HPH

 

I would be tempted to tell her ,firmly but with compassion, that your celebrations have been marred by her presence. That unless she seeks some professional help, she is no longer a part of your life. In the meantime, you will have no further contact with her.

Put the burden on her to clean up her act.

If she really wants to be a part of your celebrations, she will strive to improve.


Sure, easy for me to say. I have never been confronted with that problem and hope I never m.

Best of luck

 

A&E broadcasts a program Monday nights called "Intervention". Although you are not describing an addictions scenario, the affect on the family, from what you describe, is the same. Watch how the Interventionist teaches the family how to deal with the person. It doesn't matter if it's addictions, mental illness, or whatever, their sickness is like a tornado and can affect the entire family. Many times the family, through trying to help, or trying to stop the behavior, end up just as sick, if not sicker than the person. Ask yourself if there are any areas where you or members of your family enable this person. And STOP it.

Being compassionate human beings, it will be very difficult because the persons illness/behavior will take them down hard without the safety net of the enablers. This is extremely difficult for families to step aside and watch. Unfortunately, this is usually the only way they will hit their emotional bottom which hopefully will provide the motivation to get real, long lasting help. I truly wish it were different, that we could logic or reason them out of their craziness. But it doesn't work.

It's normal human behavior to want to protect and save the person you love. Usually we just interfere with them hitting the bottom they need. Life has an amazing flow, a rhythm that works these things out. Some people call it God, Higher Power, nature, whatever. It always works. Peace to you and your family.

 

to all of you for your responses. It does really help me emotionally to deal. We've known for a long, long time that we'd eventually reach the point of no return and I guess we've now gotten there. We have great kids who have been very supportive. It is very difficult to simply cut someone that you love out of your life without emotions coming to play.

BTW, OR. I've seen Intervention before. Tough love to say the least.

 

Sorry to hear this, Val. It is very difficult to draw that line between helping and enabling. I'm sure most can identify with your situation. Unfortunately, the holidays are the time when lots of family baggage gets unpacked.

 

Quick story - maybe not too quick.

I have two brothers - we are all very well educated - we have 9 degrees between the three of us. I'm the slacker since I only have a BS and MS in engineering.

Anyway, my middle brother has a PhD in Psychology. He has been consulting for several years, but can't seem to get out from under a black cloud (usually of his own making). In 2007, he decided to move back to the city in which we were raised, and ended up moving into our mother's house paying essentially no rent. My mother is in an assisted living facility which costs her a substantial sum every month. A substantial portion of her assets were tied up in her house.

We kept trying to dislodge my brother so we could put the house on the market. At the time, I thought it might take a year to sell the house, and so we finally convinced my brother that was living in my mother's house that we should put the house on the market.

The house sold in 3 weeks instead of a year, so my brother had to move out much sooner than he anticipated. It worked out great for my mother because much of her assets are in the stock market so we all know what has happened to that lately. But she is living off the proceeds from selling her house, so she is not having to tap her equities accounts right now, and it looks like it may be 3 or 4 years before she will have to access them, so they have a chance to rebuild.

The brother that was living in her house is now upset at my oldest brother and I to the point that he will not speak to us. I have made no overtures to try and contact him this holiday season, and I don't anticipate that he will attempt to contact me either. I am very disappointed in him that he took advantage of our mother for 6 months essentially without paying her any rent.

Then when we made a decision that was best for our mother financially, he felt offended and that we had conspired to gang up on him - just to make life difficult for him.

 

What baffles me more than anything in life is that people like your brother actually believe with every fiber of their being that they were wronged. I don't know if there is a name for it...delusional, denial, whatever. It's very frustrating. You and your brother obviously had pure motives in helping your mom. And yet that action has fractured your family based on your brothers skewed version of reality. It's crazy. I applaud you for not buying into the bullshit.