How do you deal with your siblings when they can’t see the abuse?
Penelope, I wrote to you recently that I resonated with one of your comments about abuse because it happened to me. I’m constantly working with therapist who has been very helpful. But I struggle to relate in any small way to my two sisters who have always denied the childhood we shared was abusive.
My therapist suggested writing to you asking how you’ve reconciled with relationships with siblings. How have you moved on from the grief & loss?
The sibling thing is not easy. My family talks openly about the abuse we suffered. I write about it freely and my parents accept that. They have apologized a million times to me and my brothers.
Each of my brothers has their own wounds from growing up in an abusive house, however it was definitely the worst for me. You’d think that would make my brothers have extra empathy for me, but it doesn’t. My brothers think I have brain damage from being beaten up and sexually abused and they have tried to take my kids away from me twice: a family intervention. I have decided to not hold that against them. Because there’s no point. I’ve kept my kids, and I keep onto the relationship I have with my brothers even though they think I’m a terrible parent.
If I didn’t have a relationship with my brothers I’d be very lonely. I’d also miss out on living with the shared experience. Broken families are terrible. I feel like the one thing I can do is stay in some sort of relationship with everyone because loneliness is also terrible. That said, my oldest kid won’t talk to anyone in my family. When my brothers show disrespect for me as a parent it really isolates my kids. My brothers don’t understand that.
So. Yeah. I don’t know what to tell you. No one will change. I mean, everyone changes but not in the ways we hope. So all we can do is accept people. I don’t know what else to do.
Penelope, your response really stayed with me because I’m living a version of this from the other side of the spectrum.
I grew up in a family where the abuse isn’t acknowledged, and my siblings especially my brother don’t see it the way I do at all. I’m in therapy and have been working through PTSD, and one of the hardest parts isn’t just what happened, but the fact that the people who lived it with me don’t recognize it as trauma. It creates this strange reality split where I feel both certain of my experience and yet alone in it.
I’ve started to understand that this might be less about truth and more about survival styles. My therapist and I have talked about how people can come out of the same environment with very different attachment patterns some of us move toward connection and keep trying to repair, while others cope by distancing and minimizing. So when my brother says he doesn’t have trauma, I’m beginning to see that not necessarily as clarity, but as a form of protection. His system copes by not looking at it, while mine copes by trying to understand and process it.
What I’m struggling with now is something you touched on, but from a different angle. You’ve chosen to maintain connection despite the cost because loneliness would be worse. I relate to that deeply I’ve spent most of my life returning to family even when it hurt, because the pull toward connection felt stronger than the pain.
But now I’m at a point where I’m questioning that pattern, especially as I think about having children. I can already see how the same dynamics, undermining, enmeshment, lack of respect for boundaries, would play out in the next generation. And that’s what’s making me consider distance or even no contact, not out of anger, but out of a desire to not pass this on.
I think what makes this so hard is the paradox, staying means ongoing hurt and distortion of reality, but leaving means grief, loneliness, and losing that shared history you described. There’s no clean option, only different kinds of loss. I always think about something you once wrote, “Adulthood is choosing what you’re going to sacrifice instead of letting it happen to you”
Your honesty about “no one will change” is very true, even if it’s painful. I’m coming to terms with that too and figuring out whether acceptance for me looks like staying connected with boundaries or stepping back entirely.
Thank you for speaking so openly about something that’s usually kept quiet. It helped me feel less alone in a very complicated place.