Wednesday, January 21

[gottawonder]

Today I am grateful for:

Good sleep.

The kindness of most people.

Skip this part and scroll to the break if you're tired of reading about TW.

WEll, it was inescapable that TW would grace my peace again today with her issues. She's called pretty much every day this week so far, and every time I lose most of my day to being upset afterwards.

It eats into my own happiness, and takes away the personal happiness I've tried to build for myself.

Today when she started whining about how bad she felt, I called her on the drinking, and she didn't deny it. Then I tried to talk to her about how she was doing GREAT less than two weeks ago, going out, being part of a few community things, doing pottery...what happened to doing that?

Drinking means she won't do things like that. She can't drive if she's drunk in town where she would surely get pulled over. So she stays home, and that means it just gets worse and worse.

So today, she just drops the "I don't want to live anymore" bomb on me, even though she refuses to go to AA or talk to a therapist, and she isn't taking her antidepressants because they can kill you if you mix them with alcohol (I guess that at least shows some consideration?).

So what do I do? I can't help her. She's depressed, and I know from personal experience that depression makes you feel like NOTHING matters, and your brain lies to you about how impossible it is to have hope.

I'm not going to drive to try to help her. She won't get help.

I also appear to have an old phone number for her son, that is now assigned to someone else, and so far no one else I've talked with has his current number.

Isn't that great? When I get frustrated and say that life is a choice, but she has to DO SOMETHING if she wants to live, she just does her classic escape..."I can't deal with what you're saying, I have to sleep now". Meaning she's going to go drink some more and black out, or just doesn't want to be held accountable.

So then you try not to feel worried that she might be dead tomorrow, or just soon. Her liver is shot and she almost died twice last year, and everyone including her knows she can't drink anymore if she wants to live.

I talked with my brother T for a while, who is a good person, but I also feel badly for dumping MY feelings on him. He's more or less stopped talking to TW a long time ago, because he can't deal with her either.

Then I looked up Al-Anon meeting locations, and there was a contact number for a woman named Joy (right?) who is a co-ordinater. I called and she picked up, and of course I was still very emotional, and she talked with me for a while.

She lost her husband (who at some point in the journey became an ex) to alcoholism, and she repeated and reinforced many things I already "know" but have trouble practicing. Things like detaching myself from TW and not caring any more about possible outcomes because TW is an adult who can make choices for herself.

I "know" that. TW can call 311 and they'll talk with her, they can give her locations for AA meetings, they could help her find a counselor.

TW could get help, and she could go outside and find things to do with her life that have meaning if she wanted to. She could even take some damn vitamin D.

Everyone was very supportive, though I was pretty distraught. It's not possible for me to "be okay" with someone who says they're ready to die now, and they're drinking (and drinking will kill them soon if they keep it up). It just isn't.

I don't enjoy being this dramatic and emotional. I have some kind of problem with being easily emotionally entangled with people, I don't like the woo woo descriptor of being an Empath, but I FEEL THINGS on a level that I don't think most people feel.

I don't like calling people up, crying, and feel like now I'm making their day worse too.

I don't like having to hang up the phone on someone who says they want to die, but they have to go now so they can go "sleep".

So then I have to somehow just...let it go. Because I have things I want to do today, things I need to do today.

I would like to live MY life today too. I would like to just move on with my life, and not keep getting dragged into TW's misery that never ends.

I want to just...be done talking to her. I really enjoy talking with her when she's sober. This last couple of months where I felt like I was talking to a reasonable person who was going outside and doing things, and talking about things in the present and future tense was great.

It's just that here we are again, back to the same old horrible crap we had last year when she nearly died. The same "I don't want to live" and "I don't want to talk anymore because you're being too hard on me", and then wondering when you hang up if she's going to die.

I've had stretches where I stopped talking to her, and I wonder if it's even possible for me to have the will power to just stop all together, even if she does improve.





I did chores (much colder today after last night's insane wind).

Then I went to the barn for our lesson.

As it often is, the barn and working with River was the highlight of my day.

River did REALLY well today, and somehow I was able to put a lot of focus into my communication and how I held my body, my energy, and my cues.

R and I talked quite a lot about energy and intention and calm leadership (awareness of surroundings, looking up not at your feet, emotional regulation).

Later she asked if I would make an urn for Earl the barn cat. He hasn't been doing well lately, and though for the time being they haven't made a decision, it's kind of inevitable.

I'm honored to do so, though that's also kind of sad.

I did pick Earl up and gave him a hug for as long as he would tolerate it.

I came home and my Sweetie was taking Dandy back to his pen when I parked.

He was working in the shop on the sink system for our pottery studio. You can use the sink to wash clay off of your tools and such, and then by having a tub for the water to settle you can reclaim it.

I'm not really sure we need to do that, I don't know that we would reclaim enough clean clay to make it worth the effort, because water with clay in it would be perfectly safe to dump outside too.

Well, I think that what he wants, is the challenge of building it.

Then I called brother T again, as he had texted that he was still upset about our earlier call and wondering how I was doing. We talked for a while about the futility of trying to care about TW, and by this time I was feeling a lot better about things. So we talked about how he and his wife are looking at places where they might want to retire, or at least spend winters for a while.

They used to go to the U.S., but now they have no desire to travel there.

Then we ate and my Sweetie headed to bed.

Comments

[ratunderpaper]

I don't know - could you and your siblings give her a few hotline numbers and tell her "the people here are waiting for you to call when you feel this way"? At least you will have tried. At least you will have sidestepped manipulation.

[gottawonder]

I have gone through the trouble of finding counselors near her before, and she was insulted.

It's EASY to find AA meetings, they're everywhere.

She does apparently use a hotline from time to time.

She somehow doesn't want to do any committed work to overcoming her drinking. She got cleaned out the last time she was in the hospital, and said "well, I don't seem to care about drinking anymore, I guess I'm fine now".

It seems that when an alcoholic is back to drinking, they go right back into the shame and hiding and thinking they deserve to die, and that seems to carry on until they are mostly dead and have to go to the hospital and have burned just about every relationship they have.

[ratunderpaper]

Her shenanigans are taking a toll on your comfort and happiness. What does your sweetie think of all of it?

[gottawonder]

While I have compassion for her, It's really hard after a while.

We're taught these days that alcoholism/addiction is a disease, something she can't control. I understand that she had different childhood trauma than I did, and a series of events as she got older that stemmed from that trauma, that compounded her issues.

There is a point though, where it's up to her. We've been asking her to get help for decades. Likely thirty or more years. She won't do it.

Thus, I don't HATE her, but I want things to change. I have invested so much energy and lost so many hours and days to being upset over her, that I could have been doing just about anything else and it would have been more fruitful and meaningful.

My husband of course is well aware.

He very much wants me to stop wasting my time on someone who won't get help, to get some support in the form of a counselor specializing in family of alcoholics, and to stop feeling guilty for protecting myself.

[ratunderpaper]

I'd suggest he is right. Once someone's history of insistence of self-abuse seeps into your well-being, it's wise to protect yourself.

[gottawonder]

It's a lot more than just her current state of mind that has caused damage.

It's a lifetime of having her in my life. She is ten years older, and she started acting out when she was about twelve, right after our Dad died.

My whole life, I've been affected by her choices and her suffering and having to witness it, sometimes live close to it, it's hard to explain.

[ratunderpaper]

Her kids must find it difficult as well, alas.

[gottawonder]

Her kids suffered very badly by being raised by her.

Her hoarding meant never having a clean, safe home. There was never any guarantee of there being "safe to eat" food on hand. There was often rotten food in the fridge, or on the floor.

I helped clean her kitchen once and she had just layered cardboard over the rotten food, and there were maggots in it.

She was unpredictable, scary at times, used to smoke in bed in her hoarded houses.

I could go on.

Those kids are a mess as adults, and she literally says to me she has no idea why they're like that when she worked so hard to raise them.

They should have been taken away from her, but somehow it never happened.

Yes, they have a lot of problems coping with her now as adults. It was her sons that had to drive a couple of hours in the middle of the night to scrape her off the floor and get her to the hospital recently.

Literally she's been the focus of our family for her whole life, as we all end up just talking about her, day after day. Is TW alright today.

She's not the only messed up one either, she has just continued to be the most messed up into her later years.

I wonder what therapy can even do for me at this point.

[ratunderpaper]

It's a shame she grew up when she did; the older ones never had access to professional help, therapy or medication. I'm not sure how much you experienced overall, but a good therapist will bring acknowledgment and a positive future to you.

[gottawonder]

She's only ten years older than I am, and I didn't have access to professional help of any kind either, though I maybe could have found some once I left home.

TW hints at some form of sexual abuse in her teens, but does it in a way so that's it's manipulative. As in, "I get to do whatever I want because I'm messed up". Dad died when she was ten, I was just being born. So she had loss, I didn't. Then, her continuing issues just kept compounding until there's almost nothing in her mind or body that functions well anymore.

I'm sure that any time in about the last thirty years she could have gotten therapy, could have started separating her past experiences from her choices, and started taking responsibility for her actions.

I did not experience sexual exploitation as a kid, but I WAS around my messed up sisters and their messed up lives, which sort of normalized their dysfunction. I lacked a proper understanding of sex, appropriateness and boundaries when I was older.

Which is not to say that there weren't good things in my life too, but there was a lot of things I needed that I didn't get, and I lot of things that I got that I didn't want.

It's not like I could have chosen to distance myself from them.

So I've struggled through adulthood trying to figure out what a healthy person would do, what healthy might look like, and how on Earth would you do that? What does appropriate behavior and speech look like? How do healthy people do things? How do they socialize at a polite gathering? How much sharing is enough, but not too much? How do you learn who to trust, when you grew up around untrustworthy people that you were told were safe? How do you get your emotional needs met without draining other people? How do you ask for help when asking for help makes you feel like a burden or running the risk of being considered useless? How does a healthy person deal with failure, difficulty, criticism or rejection? How does a healthy person deal with good things happening to them? What kind of things would a healthy person not accept in their lives?

I do hope that therapy can help me sort out some of my feelings.

[ratunderpaper]

Many of us understand that there's no such thing as normal, but when one's disquiet and discomfort take over, it's a good idea to get the perspective of a professional who will listen and offer guidance for a healthy future.

You have good self-direction, but whatever becomes of TW is neither your responsibility nor fault.

[gottawonder]

Any time I get to know someone, you get to see where their issues are, and you realize that even the most everyday, calm, nice person has things in their lives that are not okay.

Sometimes they've dealt with it, sometimes they are currently trying.

Like that nice woman from Al-Anon that picked up the phone. She calmly told me her story, that her husband who died of alcoholism was also a pedophile, and did time in jail, and she had to deal with that. I bet you'd never guess that kind of thing about her if you saw her in a grocery store.

It's easy to see everyone else going about their business, and think that they're "okay", and that their lives are normal.

I think my own perspective has been skewed by a lifetime of being exposed to things that are not okay, though I've worked to recognize things that aren't okay.

What I need from a therapist is a way to move forward, not to keep wallowing in the past like my family tends to do.

I don't need to be a victim, I don't need to constantly be reciting the old script, or defining myself by the family dynamic we had.

I know that I have become an individual outside of all of that, and I would like to bring that person to the fore, and to keep refining, polishing, and developing myself as this person.

I would like to continue to have contact with my other family, though I don't always know if they CARE about having a relationship with me.

I don't even want to have an aggressive approach to less/no contact with TW. When one is aggressive, that very resistance keeps something in your mind. Like trying not to think about polar bears, you end up having to think about them to "not" think about them.

I've just spent far too much time and energy on her, and it's rarely positive for me. If I weren't related to her, I would have nothing to do with her.

There's a point where being family isn't enough reason to keep doing this to myself.

[ratunderpaper]

Sometimes unhealthy connections bring more harm than good, and we walk from those unless we're drawn to bad gossip or have reasons of financial security.