Hi! It’s me, Cary! How ya doin?
I’m out of the pool eating toast and thinking about the novel. I’m committed to finishing by the end of May. I have it all planned out. It’s practically done! Finally.
Plus yesterday I finished my application to Yaddo, thanks to my Finishing School commitment. It was a long day but I got it done before my 6pm writing coaching appointment (I’m doing that too now, acting as a coach for writers who have projects that are promising but resisting ; I get on the side of the writer and together we push to dislodge invisible impediments).
Finishing School starts next week, Tuesday, January 6, 2015, at 7:30 p.m. at the house. If you have a project you’re trying to finish, let me know.
Me, personally, I used Finishing School in December to finish fiction and send it out and do my Yaddo application (I sure would love to have some uninterrupted time to write the next novel!) and I have dedicated the next five months of Finishing School, my own personal goal, to finishing the current novel. I’m dividing it up into five sections, one a month to finish up (they’re mostly written anyway). If you have a project you want to write and would like to dedicate one month or the next five months to it, get in touch with me at cary@carytennis.com. Maybe we can work something out. Dive in the deep end with me! I want company making art in the 21st century.
Now let’s answer a letter:
Dear Cary,
I have read and admired your advice for many years. I have always loved your well-considered and thoughtful advice about really difficult problems. I have started this letter to you hundreds of times but never finished it, but today is that day.
When I was a teenager (early ’90s, before the Internet – you might remember these distant times!!) I wrote something called a zine. It was a magazine about music and art that I wrote and laid out with a glue stick and photocopied and distributed at record shops where I lived. It was pretty well received – and if I do say so, looking back at old issues, well designed – and making it was the first baby steps in what would be my professional career. I learned to write well, to finish things, to find interesting stuff, to produce something that looked great that people would care about, all with absolutely no money.
As everyone did in those days I included an address to write to (again, no internet), and a few people did, sending contributing material and what I guess was fan mail. One guy in particular sent a long letter and some contributions, and I used them and wrote back and said thanks. He wrote again, became a regular contributor, and we corresponded over several years. I considered this person a good friend, though I didn’t know who he was. Later on we kept in touch and, thanks to Hotmail, this included keeping in touch when I moved overseas when I was 19.
A year or two later I found out that it had been my brother’s girlfriend – 6 years older than me – who had created and orchestrated this personality, written all these letters, corresponded with me for so many years. She was a horrible bitch to my face, often telling me I was worthless, selfish, ruining my family, didn’t deserve anything, she told me that my mother called her to complain about me (not true), her nickname for me was “charming little princess”, etc. etc., and in the meantime running this charade of a person who was my friend and someone I trusted.
The shock and fallout was unbelievable. Unbearable. A year later, my brother married her. That was the last time I spoke to my brother, in 2001.
It has been 16 years since I found out what she was up to, and the intervening years have been so fucking hard. I felt like a fool, I felt stupid, I was angry, I was humiliated, I was confused. I told my parents, who told me in no uncertain terms that they would “choose” between me and my brother, and would not exclude her from the family. Family anything became psychological torture as she paraded around as if she had a right to be there, and I felt like a pariah in my own family.
The campaign of emotional abuse and manipulation was bad enough, but the fallout has been another circle of hell altogether. My immediate family – parents and one other brother – simply do not believe that what she did was that bad, no one has advocated for me, no one has demanded that she apologise, and I have been told such things as “if it was sexual abuse it would be different” or “you just need to get over it” or “she had a hard life, it’s not her fault”. Every time I tried to talk about it, the subject was changed.
Cary, this made my 20s hell. I trusted no one. My self-esteem was nonexistent. I wanted to die. I didn’t trust my own experiences and was angry at myself for not “getting over it” and so very angry at my family for just abandoning me to my own misery. My parents refused to talk about it with me. I went to years of therapy, I was on medication, and I did all the things that are indicative of extreme and prolonged emotional distress. Eventually I moved 4000 miles away from home and started a new life.
Three years ago my remaining brother – who I had tried to have a relationship with – told me that my abuser and the brother who married her (who I think was implicit in the abuse, but have no proof) babysit his baby twins. I asked him why he would allow a woman who he damn well knew was an abuser of children to act as a person of authority in their lives and I was told “Oh we watch them really carefully” and “that just won’t happen.”
The subtext there is one of two things: either he doesn’t believe that the abuse happened the way I said it did, or he doesn’t think it was a big deal. Both of those things are absolutely unacceptable. I told him this, and told him that if those children are describing their relationship with those people to a therapist in ten years I will be the only one in the family not directly responsible for knowing what the situation was and letting it happen. We have not spoken since.
I have tried really hard to maintain a relationship with my parents, though they are clearly of the opinion – and have told me – that this really isn’t a big deal and the problem in the family is my failure to get over something minor. They’re in their 70s (I am 35) and I try to have compassion for the difficult position they’re in. I think I deserved better from them; they should have advocated for me, they should have protected me from this fallout by holding her accountable, but my abuser did so much to torpedo any trust relationship I had with my parents by telling me misinformation and manipulating the way I felt about them that I figure I have lost too many years with them to cut them out completely.
In recent years, after cutting my second brother out of my life, I have felt for the first time like I can breathe. I now realise that having a relationship with someone who invalidated the biggest trauma of my adult life was retraumatising me over and over, and that when I cut off ties with both of them I was validating myself, I was believing my own experiences, I was advocating for me – all things my family never did for me.
My problem is this: I visit my parents annually and spend the entire time sobbing. I am there right now, surrounded by family portraits of my parents, my brothers and their wives … I’m not in any of them, it’s as if I just don’t exist, like there’s two families. My mother said something tonight about all this being not as big a deal as I thought it was and it just set me off again; how can all this pain, all this therapy, all this hell of 16 years not convince them that what happened to me really happened? Why is the status quo more important than their own daughter? Why was I sacrificed on the altar of not making waves? I have had so many years of feeling desperately alone because of abuse where I was the victim, and have gone through so much shame, so much turmoil, so much loneliness and felt so bereft of love and worth. Everything about this situation sent the message that I am worthless – she perpetrated this, my brother married her, no one held her responsible, everyone pretends it didn’t happen. But it did, because I have been wading through the pain for 16 years. I don’t think that’s nothing.
My question is this: How the fuck can I finally feel okay about any of this? I am more functional than I used to be, but if I pause long enough to think about this whole system of abuse I just can’t stop shaking with sobs that last days, that shake me to my core. I fantasize about revenge sometimes – starting a website with her name dot com and outlining my story for employers and others to see, or other things that make her a victim instead of a person that can cruelly abuse and manipulate without consequences, but I know that won’t work and will only result in me poisoning my own psyche. I know it is not the spoon that bends, but me, but I have spent 16 years bending and I just can’t bend far enough. I have wished things were different, tried to make things different, been to years of therapy, drank, raged, did drugs, found a fulfilling relationship, made a good career, but nothing has ever been able to touch this pain of being disregarded by my family and my abuser winning. When I start to get better I am jolted back by the realisation that I am just disposable.
Thank you for reading. Please, if by some miracle you have read this diatribe and decide to respond, sign me off as
Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,
So, I have to say, intuitively, I like you. You are a fine person. It hurts me to see you keep putting your hand in the flame.
You were the victim of a sociopath. You continue to be victimized by your family.
I suggest that you cut off all contact with your family for two years.
You are locked in an impossible struggle with them. You want them to be something they are not. This struggle is futile. It is hopeless. It is full of pain. But you have a choice. You are free to walk away from this futile struggle. You do not have to justify yourself or explain. They don’t own you. Walk away. Cut off all contact.
You are free to make this choice. It is the right choice for you. You are a free and independent person and must make this choice for your own survival and happiness.
Cut off all contact. Cut off all contact for two years. Do not call or write. Do not read emails from them.
If certain communications are necessary, make communications with them through a third party. There must be someone you can trust to do this. You say you have built a pretty good life for yourself, 4,000 miles away. That is great. It makes it easier to cut off contact because you will not be running into family members on the street.
Imagine how it would feel to go a day, a week, a month, enjoying your life and not thinking of this event even once. Imagine how that would be! To be pretty much like other people, going about your life, enjoying the things you enjoy, being a master of your craft, being a part of a community, a worker among workers, liked and loved for who you are, sleeping well at night, enjoying life.
That is possible.
Do this, please. Give yourself a chance to heal. Stop opening the wound. Give yourself a chance to forget.
Maybe you won’t forget. That’s OK. I am not saying you should forget it or there’s something wrong with you if you don’t forget, or if it comes to mind frequently.
You’ve been injured. That’s not your fault.
But you have some choice in the matter. You have it within your power to change your habits and your circumstances. So give yourself a chance. Give your wound a chance to heal.
It won’t heal fast. It will heal slowly. That’s why the two years. Two years is doable. See what happens. After two years you might want to resume contact. Or maybe not. Give yourself two years and see how it goes.
Find a narrative. A narrative is like a box to put the story in and close the lid. The narrative is that you were the victim of a sociopath. Not just a sociopath but a sociopathic family system. This was unusual in its extent but its general pattern is familiar: When terrible things happen in a family system, the family system works to deny it. All these individuals are part of that system. They are doing what they think they need to do to survive in that system. They are afraid the system will destroy them if they oppose it. And they might be right. Look what the system did to you. This system is being run by a sociopath. It will try to destroy any member who to opposes it.
You are already the enemy of this system. You are a truth teller and so it had to crush you. You continue to be a threat because you continue to say what is actually happening. So it attacks you when you appear. So don’t appear. Disappear. Live your own life.
You can do this. You can cut off all contact with your family. There is no law against it.
There will be difficulties. A part of you will resist making this change. It will feel weird like you just can’t do that. But you can. You can and I think you should.
Give yourself a chance to heal. Stop putting your hand in the fire.
This has touched me so much where I’ve actually cried because of how similar this story is to my own life. The only difference is, my mother is really sick and I suspect she either has had a stroke or has a tumor which debilitates her speech, hearing, and thinking. This has put a whole lot of stress on me because no one in the family has tried to get her the help she needs except me. I too have moved far away to get rid of the toxic relationships within my family, but I also love my mother and I want to give her the help she needs without dealing with all of the toxicity of my family. I am at my wits end and I don’t know how to deal with this situation without having a war between everyone. Also, my brother that is with the sociopath is only engaged to be married, but whatever I say to him will only create friction and a war.
Great advice, Cary, I’m so glad you’ve supported the LW 100%. LW, your story is shocking but not unusual. I see so many families and social groups based around getting one’s own needs met. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. After all, for most of our history the priority of a family has been food, shelter and procreation, end of story. Emotional contentment, truth and justice didn’t figure, as far as I understand the history of marriage and the nuclear family, and for many still don’t. So don’t try to change them or their ideas. It’s impossible. Look after yourself. As another LW has said on this thread, and as I have experienced, it’s possible you may experience the most profound healing when you stop trying to incorporate these people into your world, and instead strike out on your own.
I hope I’m not too late replying to this issue. I have so much sympathy for the letter writer. It is horrible that your abuser couldn’t just be rude to your face but had to worm her way into your deepest confidence in an elaborate scheme to get beyond your defenses. I have a good friend who was abused and eventually cut off contact with her family, even changing her name as part of the process. I supported her through this, but I didn’t really understand and deep down I thought she should give them another chance. Now that time has passed and I know more about abusive behavior, I feel she was incredibly brave to create this distance, and I agree with Cary that you should do the same. Take care of yourself and do what makes you feel healthy, not what others tell you.
Dearest Anonymous,
I echo Cary’s advice, and the comments of many here. Your family has hurt you deeply, and you must take time away from them to truly heal. The necessity of this requires no justification other than the reality of your own feelings: you are at your parents, sobbing. What does this tell you? Contact with your family hurts. What must you do? Remove yourself from the hurt. Not “get over the hurt,” “put things in perspective,” “put the past behind you.” Rather, remove yourself.
To the excellent advice and perspectives offered here, I would add–or rather, amplify–one thing. We human beings owe it to our fellow human beings to take their pain seriously. Especially if our “fellow human being” is an intimate, is a child. When a person comes to us and says, “This is my pain, this is how much I hurt,” the only loving reaction is to listen, really listen, and take whatever steps really listening suggests. We are not called upon to evaluate the “rightness” of another’s hurt, only to respond to its palpable reality. (Nor are we called upon to imagine “how we would react in a similar situation,” but rather to imagine feeling–to actually share in–the pain the person before us is feeling. If we cannot do that, it is probably because we are in the habit of pushing away or denying our own pain, and thus are frightened by pain in others.)
Your parents and brother failed to respond to your pain. They failed to accord it reality or deem it important. (And why should they do this? Simply because it is your reality, because you deem it important. That is all we need to know when responding to another person’s pain.) By failing to take your suffering seriously, they failed to take the reality of your humanity–the inner, suffering being-ness of you–seriously. That, to me, is the crucial fact here. Your family’s failure to recognize your pain is indicative of a deeper failure to recognize you as a person, a failure that surely is not situation-specific, but more likely endemic and lifelong. This failure is, I suspect, at the root of what hurts, and continues to hurt, and will go on hurting until you separate yourself.
There is, in the end, only one person who can take your pain seriously. (Though responses like Cary’s are a huge help!) That person is you. (Continue to) take your pain seriously, and see what steps doing so demands, and then, with all the self-love and self-belief you can muster, take them.
Wishing you all the best,
Audrey
I am glad and grateful that Cary is Cary, and you Simon are no Cary. Enough with the victim shaming, the “reframe it as a compliment” is classic victims shaming. For years Anonymous was stalked/catfished whatever you want to call it by someone impersonating someone else, calling the, a sociopath seems generous to me, then to have that sick person welcomed into your family? That’s even sicker.
Anonymous, PLEASE take Cary’s advice, I just began my second year of non contact with my parents and although it’s been hard, there is a lot of grief over what could and should have been, it is so worth it, I wish I had done it 13 years ago when I was your age, I would have saved myself so much heartache. I don’t miss them, I miss the abuse and sometimes the dream of the chance that some day they would come around and care about me. That’s all it ever was, a dream, it will never happen.
You can do this. The only way we can stop the abuse from people like this is by walking away from the abusers, it is one of the hardest things in the world to do, it goes against what society tells us to do and what people who don’t get it will tell you. A good friend’s husband who reconciled with his serial abuser dad after the dad was diagnosed with cancer insinuates that “I’ll be sorry if I don’t make up with him”, no I won’t, and he probably won’t either. The guy who made up with his dad is the same mixed up, angry guy he’s always been, no difference. The only regret I have in severing the relationships is recognizing now that I’m wanted a real family desperately enough to put up with abuse my entire life and not accepting earlier the cold truth that my mom and dad don’t love me and they never did, they are both sick narcissists, and narcissists don’t change.
I wish you luck and peace, it will come, try two years, please, don’t wait until you were 47 like I did. Enjoy as much as your life free from abuse as possible, it will be hard for a long time, but it’s the only way to heal.
Major kudos to Cary for giving Anonymous 100% support! Cary seeing through the hysteria (Simon, I get your point) to the strength of this person, the Truth Teller, is the healing deserved and needed.
Anonymous’s family probably has not had her back in many ways that may actually be harder for her to see or accept right now. This one thing with the SIL is probably just the beacon and what makes this look extreme. It’s proportional to something for sure, and I’m going to bet the discovery has just started for Anonymous about her family’s betrayal.
I was in a similar boat. Because of a borderline stepmother’s manipulation of my family I finally did what Cary suggested, cut off all ties. When I stood up to her it ticked them off and I got attacked! Crazy making because they had convinced me as a kid their version of reality was more valid than mine — that was actually the deeper wound I needed to heal.
I initially felt cutting off contact was extreme, ridiculous and immature but it was the only way I could think of to create peace. What happened next was profound and very surprising — I immediately felt safer in the world and in myself. My relationships in every sphere immediately improved. I couldn’t believe it, it was such a gift. I spent years (far more than 2, maybe 7) growing in new ways.
When I finally re-engaged my family in limited ways it was as a separate adult that didn’t need their approval. They look even weirder now! 🙂
Here’s a kicker: it’s two way and Anonymous will discover her part in the madness. Trying over and over to get people to see something in a different way is also manipulation. I had to let go of my attempts to manipulate my family into being the one I wanted in order to find peace. Later I was able to see how arrogant I had been with my insistence they change their view. No wonder they fought me. Relief to let go in so many ways. I don’t accept their treatment, don’t hang around them, and I don’t try to change them. I see them or interact for very specific reasons. That’s liberation that separation will help create.
When I get rattled it’s a warning sign to me I’m too involved and need to back off.
Anonymous, believe in yourself. It was wrong. You don’t need to convince anyone else, that will drive you crazy. But hang on to the people that immediately agree with you it’s not ok to lie, manipulate, betray and not have remorse for it! Those people are real friends and family.
Cary’s advice is spot on.
There’s also a denial/acceptance pattern that gaslighted victims need to go through.
Accept that it happened.
It happened to you.
It was real.
And now it is out of reach.
Out of reach, does not mean unreal.
I cut ties with my parents indefinitely for major reasons.
At the 5 year mark I was getting round to feeling OK about my parents (my siblings had remained supportively “neutral” and did not factor in the situation because it was strictly a “business” matter that was between solely me and my dad and step-mother.)
I waited to make contact… Eventually, ten years later, on my birthday, I received a loving message from my dad, who now sounded old, and I was ready to pick up the string.
(It was after all, more my stepmother who had created the fiasco that my dad had got caught in the middle of…)
And so we now have a correspondence. It is limited, but sincere. After I first heard his message I wrote a 20 page letter telling him what ten years without him and my stepmother had taught me (no holds barred) but that I also forgive them. Like Cary says –it’s their system, after all.
My new system is fine. Neat little calls on seasonal holidays and birthdays.
What my parents did to me really did happen.
It is not happening anymore.
Anonymous, you are still young, there is still much chance left for joy to come your way.
This is a wonderful article and right on target. We need to use our own brains & perceptions in the world. It is unfortunate that some individuals and whole families can be so disillusioned in their own sense of reality that they perpetrate agony on wonderful human beings. What this woman & family did to the writer is abuse in the extreme. She owes them nothing. I agree to cut off contact and trust yourself.
As always, Cary, your advice was spot on. I went through a similar situation with my Mother years ago. For seven years, I refused to speak to Mama or have anything to do with her. I probably would have never started talking to her again if it had not been for my son coming along when he did. In the spring of 2000, I was 40 and horrified to find out that I was expecting a baby that September, due to the possibility of Down’s Syndrome. My Mother was a registered nurse who had many years of experience in Obstetrics. So I called Mama, and she reassured me that the baby and I would be okay, despite my age. I gave birth on my due date, and everything went okay, just like Mama said it would. My relationship with my Mother resumed, and it was better in many ways than before. I felt better because I had made it clear that I would not tolerate any shit from my Mother. My Mother and I actually had a decent relationship in the last years of her life, though we did not resolve all of our issues. Since my Mother’s death in October, 2009, all of the anger I felt for her when she was alive has vanished. She’s dead – what’s the point of me being mad at her now? When I told my now-14 year old son this, he said something very profound. He looked me in the eye and told me “At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.” Very wise words, especially from a teenager!
Interesting letter, and great response.
I just want to reiterate something here, that I am sure most people know, but just in case there is a reader “out there” somewhere at their wit’s end dealing with a crazy person ruining their life:
Certain kinds of people like to dream up elaborate ways of tormenting others, and one of the deliberate strategies they use is to instigate scenarios that are so intricate and bizarre that the person at the receiving end comes across sounding like the “crazy” person just by explaining the scenario.
It doesn’t only happen with unstable family members and young people’s shifting relationships. We have a high-profile case right now here in Canada involving a media personality being legally charged after years of bizarre, violent sexual assaults against young women, which he has been attempting to frame as an expression of a misunderstood alternative sexual identity.
Some of the women have, after many years, finally discussed their experiences publicly, and when asked why they didn’t tell anyone sooner, they have said that the assaults were so sudden, so unexpected, so bizarre, and so stupid-sounding, that they themselves could barely believe that that such a thing could be possible from this person. It seemed to go without saying that no one else would believe it. This is one reason why the person got away with horrifying actions for so long (in addition to his fame, influence, and affable and charming public personality).
Sorry if that strays too much off the LWs original topic, but I wanted to mention it as a concrete and widely known example of a very specific “modus operandi” that certain people intentionally use get away with creating pain and chaos it the lives of the people they target.
I think the LW is dealing with a parallel situation, and should find ways to build a life separate from her crazy family.
I think Cary’s assessment of psychopathy and his advice are spot on. Additionally I would like to see even more compassion toward Anonymous. If you’ve never had anyone of significance to your life deny your reality, you can’t imagine the havoc it wreaks and how incredibly sticky it is. Normal people’s responses when caught doing something wrong fit somehow. Lines can be drawn or deeds can be forgotten or forgiven. Abnormal people will deny the reality of something. This denial of reality is what is crazy-making. Not only because of a lack of redress but because it makes the recipient question their own experience. Over and over, in effect doing the same to themselves. It can become a vicious circle and the desire to be finally seen, heard, believed and vindicated continues unabated. I strongly support the solution of ceasing all contact because people who deny reality like this family does will not change their position. LW, my heart goes out to you! You’ve been through a special hell that few understand and I only hope that you have built a community of people who are trustworthy and authentic.
It hurts when others don’t get it, like another commenter here. They don’t because they literally don’t know what you’re talking about. A brush with a psychopath is always wounding because they lack the most important thing above all else, without which nothing makes sense and nothing has any real good to it, and that is humanity. I’m so sorry this happened to you.
There are support groups for victims of psychopaths and books describing examples of the condition. They can bring the healing and validation that won’t come from your family. My prayers are with you.
I’m missing something here. She wasn’t a friend to your face, so she created a personality and was a friend to you for many years, when you needed a friend. It’s weird, sure, but not abusive. At least it wasn’t the other way around, right? What if she had been sweetness and light to your face and made up an abusive stalker personality that harassed you with letters? You then made it a catastrophe, but thats all you it seems. If I were Cary I would have said make friends with her now. Girls have weird, somewhat creative ways of messing with each other when they find each other interesting. She was interested in you. Reframe it as a compliment.
To respond to your first sentence, Simon: Yes you are missing something.