My (half) brother is 11 years older than me and in his mid 30s. I just blocked his number.
When I was 11 he started a relationship with a woman who would become his ex wife and had multiple kids with her. This relationship was a slow decent for him as a person, as he faced close to 15 years of slow narcissistic abuse from a woman who is clearly out of touch with reality. My parents enabled the situation financially, while silmiltaneously being driven out his life. When he was divorcing her I uprooted my life multiple times to move back to my home state to try to provide a stable influence for my neices until he was in a better position.
He told us to warn him if he ever found himself in this type of situation again, because me and my parents didn’t fully express our concerns about his ex wife at the time.
Recently, my brother has decided to remarry, and I told him my personal concerns (after his future wife initated a family meeting). Resulting in her uninviting me to their wedding for being ‘unsupportive’. (I never told them not to get married. I said maybe they should think about it some more because the relationship was only 8 months old, and they had broken up 5+ times already). My parents thought it was unreasonable to uninvite me and after having a seperate meeting to discuss, his future wife says awful things about me and my parents while my brother didn’t react at all. This resulted in my parents coming to the same conclusion as I have that he actually hates us as people and we need to segregate ourselves from it. It’s very strange because it’s like no one in my family is actually mad over any of this. I don’t even think my brother is mad from this event and told me I have valid concerns.
But it seems he has rewritten history and perpetuates his own victimhood of his life by blaming our parents for every grievence in his life and he holds great resentment towards me. He allows his partners in his life to be a metaphorical mouthpiece for how he actually views his family. This seems so strange to me, because I don’t discredit that there are struggles from childhood, but everyone has things about their parents they dislike. It feels like I moved past these things to have a normal healthy relationship with my parents, and he just doesn’t seem to be able to. And like objectively I don’t think our childhood was that bad. And if anything, how he’s raising his kids is a whole lot worse than what me and my brother went through so I don’t fully understand his complaints. Also he’s almost 40, and idk to me it seems strange to blame your parents for the decisions and choices you make as an adult.
My family (cousins) has a pattern of this type of dynamic where a more chaotic older sibling will segregate themselves and intentionally choose suffering, while a younger more “successful” sibling will achieve status markers ie obtaining education or general self sufficiency.
What makes this hard for me, is everything seemed to be going pretty well. My brother seemed to just come back from his last relationship and was doing well. And then it’s like he gets in a relationship and a switch flipped with them and he hates me again. He constantly views my family as having favoritism towards me, while discounting the amount of resources my parents have actually invested in him over the years. I think he has internalized resentment towards me partially because I am my dad’s biological child and my dad ‘only’ adopted him when he was 5. This has never made me view him as less of a sibling. And I refer to him as my brother, not my half brother. And my dad views him as his son. I feel like my brother constantly minimizes and diminished any accomplishments or successes I have had in my own life, but the expectation is there to celebrate even the minor ones of his. This seemed to consistently happen when I lived out of state and my parents would have to miss out on key hallmarkers of my life, or cut their trip short to deal with my brother’s immediate emergencies he found himself in. I feel like he fails to see the actual work and dedication I have put into my life to get to the position I’ve been in, and instead views everything as being handed to me. When I know he’s just projecting his own insecurities on his lack of drive and determination on me.
I think it is a blessing that this family meeting occured because it seemed to be the final push my parents needed to segregate themselves from him. They refuse to watch him go through another abusive relationship that he seems to be choosing for himself. It has felt like he has constantly guilt triped or manipulated us. For years it’s as if we have held up a one sided relationship where we have to drop everything to deal with an arbitrary emergency that he has created for himself that he refuses to take accountability on. It bothered me to watch my parents suffer. It bothered me to watch my brother suffer. It botherd me to watch his kids suffer, as he uses them as some bargining chip to hold my parents hostage with. Retrospectively, it bothers me that I wasted so much of my time and energy trying to help him for him to just objectively hate me.
I am to the point I no longer have a brother. I cannot maintain a one sided relationship with a person who is jealous of me out of obligation. I refuse to allow him to dictate to me what it means to make a moral decision for myself, when he is spineless and lacks conviction and lies and steals from me. Reguarding his certifiably insane and unreasonable women he associates with I have adopted the mindset that I do not negotiate with terrorists. As in I refuse to allow someone who bipasses logical reason to dictate the actions I’m going to take.
I feel like blocking his number was the right move for me. Because I know he shares all the conversations I’ve had in private with him with his women. And I doubt at this point I’m even hearing from him and not his future wife via the texts we’ve exchanged. If he was that concerned, he could track me down. But for the forseeable future I do not want to talk to him. (Not that I talked to him much before outside of friendly conversation).
I feel like he can parade around as a normal person when he is single and involved in religion. But I wonder if that’s even the real him at this point or a facade he made up. I also wonder if this wasn’t some intentional ploy to get us to remove ourselves from his life, or to blame me for this or something. I feel like his future wife is intimidated by me, and my brother’s silence-means-compliance type of support for a woman to talk rudely/inappropriately to both me and my parents hurts. His future wife is estranged from her own family, so objectively I don’t even care what they do. But if you break up with someone multiple times, perhaps your subconcious is trying to tell you something? And I honestly did want to look out for her interest in this potential union too. And I wouldn’t have said anything, but I feel calling a family meeting denotes a solicitation for input. I try to ration their behavior but it fundamentally makes no sense to me. If you didn’t want me to go to your wedding, you could have just told me, or just go elope. But it almost seems like this entire argument was staged to try to alienate me from my family, and when that didn’t work and my parents actually supported my viewpoint, it switched to being how we’ve never been supportive in his life, all coming from his future wives mouth. Because my brother didn’t actually say anything. But he obviously must support this message his woman is saying to stand by and let it happen. It’s almost like he wants this or just constantly has zero reguard for anyone else but himself.
Don’t get me wrong, I am really grateful I had the opportunity to be his sibling. I think it’s wonderful in someways the cultural influence he’s had on me. But in someways I feel horrible because I feel responsible for like ruining his life, because you can tell he’s using this as internal justification that my parents favor me over him for not supporting him diving into another abusive relationship with a woman who’s unreasonable.
These are my questions:
Should I get rid of objects gifts etc that remind me of him?
There’s a possibility (in my opinion) the path he’s going down leads to his eventual death or imprisonment. How do I reconcile my conflicting feelings. Or how do I come to terms with the idea that I have to cut him off for my own wellbeing (and in someways it’s the loving thing to do for him because he has free will to do what he’s doing and I respect his free will), while also not regretting that this is really quite possibly the last time I’ll ever interact with him before he dies?
How do I make the hoildays upbeat when he’s no longer going to be apart of them?
How do I bring up the topic of my brother to future romantic interests? I’m kinda nervous about it. Do I leave it at a simple we don’t talk. Do I just pretend he’s never existed in my life? It frustrates me because I had about a year long window when my brother was in between his relationships where I thought maybe I could see him integrated into my life in a healthy way again. And it’s just obvious that door is permanently shut now, as it should be. It’s beyond the stage of just set healthy boundaries, or maybe you’ll meet back up one day. I can’t stop him from perpetuating his own victimhood and I refuse to be apart of it. And honestly my life is a lot better when his chaos tornado isn’t a part of it.
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Thank you for submitting your post. You are asking too many questions for me to answer here. I do offer coaching, if that might interest you or other readers. In those sessions, we could explore the issues you raise here.
I’m not surprised to hear you say that your life is much better now. Some relationships are simply too toxic to sustain. It’s also important to recognize that he is making choices in his life and — however damaging you think they are — you are not responsible for those decisions or for his life.