"Being rhetorical here: can you hold your space well enough in the face of dissonance?"
I've had quite a hard time establishing boundaries. Last November, after a "last straw" experience, I cut off all familial relationships for several months. After my surgery, I was so helpless I had no choice but to re-establish contact.
I'm really not happy in this state of affairs. I wish I had been strong enough to keep going without them and it felt like a personal failure when I let them back in. It was either that or starve.
Still, it's been easier to establish boundaries after keeping family at bay for several months.
"It appears that stifling one's emotional voice is a loyalty that runs through your family."
Oh, most definitely! One must NEVER show one's true emotions. In fact, I rather doubt my brother has any clue how much I've grown to detest him. I'm superficially friendly. At the same time, I had no idea how much my mother had grown to detest me until I invited her to a therapy session and she spent the full hour railing against me and my shortcomings. She never said a thing about it afterward, but I know how she feels about me now. I carry it as a daily burden. My father never said a damn thing about his emotions. He used to pace quietly with a belt in his hands, snapping it. He was always very quiet during the beatings he administered. He was angry in silence.
My nephew was caught between his parents during their divorce. His mother enlisted him as a spy against my family. He lied during his testimony in court. My mother was furious with him, but I knew that he'd had no choice. At one point my ex-sister-in-law claimed my brother beat my nephew while my mother and I watched. This is untrue. I would never allow anyone to beat a child in my presence.
My ex-sister-in-law turned my nephew into a spy. I believe she has filed over twenty lawsuits over the years against my brother and the wife of the man she was having an affair with. She took first one to court, then the other, until she got custody of my nephew and (just recently) custody of her husband's kids. She's a nutjob fundy who tested out with histrionic personality disorder and (I believe) narcissistic personality disorder. (I guessed these diagnoses before they showed up in the tests.) After these disorders showed up, she SUED the psychologist who administered the test.
This is the kind of mother my nephew has.
Now, for my brother.
When we were kids, my father usually spent three days away at work and four days home to "take care" of us kids. When my brother was very small, my mother came home from work one day to find black bruises on the backs of his legs. He had probably been "disciplined" for not cleaning his plate or some such nonsense. My father's weapon of choice was the belt.
My mother claims she threatened my father with divorce if he ever did such a thing again. Well, he did such a thing again. He did it quite often, but never when my mother was home. I got beatings for all kind of infractions, real and imagined, minor and major. I never knew what would set off my father. I lived in fear of him. I can only imagine what my brother felt.
I was never able to connect with my father, but my brother connected with him to some extent because 1) they were both male and 2) they both enjoyed hunting. If you're interested, read this story of my hunting experiences:
Hunting at the Crossroads.
During his hunting experiences, my brother learned cruelty. He learned to be cruel to the dogs, to whip them with leashes the same way he'd been whipped with a belt. He learned not to care about "lower forms of life." He learned to kill without remorse, to hunt game out of season, to disregard environmentalists as "commie fools." He also learned it was fun to beat up on his younger sister and torture her pets.
When my brother brought home a Walker coonhound from Missouri, he and my father hooked up with this guy:
Rico Oller. You can read about him in my story, "Hunting at the Crossroads." Interestingly enough, I came across this denunciation of Rico Oller during my Google Search:
http://www.humaneusa.org/ads/campaigns/archive/ricooller/ricooller.htm . There's even an ad against him:
http://www.humaneusa.org/ads/campaigns/archive/ricooller/Rico%20Oller%20Oppose.mp3 . Wow! Just WOW! I'm am SO not surprised. The reason he's against the reporting of animal cruelty is that he's done it himself so bloody often! There are thousands of dead dogs on his old property in Jamestown, California. I know because I knew the bastard well. You can read about this and many other cruelties he perpetrated in my story, "Hunting at the Crossroads."
I can remember many instances of my brother being cruel to animals: beating dogs, beating my pet raccoon, dangling my pet raccoon over the coonhounds' pen. Once when we were walking along a creek, my brother spotted some mud swallow nests under a bridge. He started grabbing rocks and smashing the nests. Baby birds tumbled into the water, stunned. Some were close to fledging.
"Stop! Stop!" I yelled. "Why are you doing this?" I started to wade into the water to save a bird.
"Swallows carry diseases," he stated simply and went on smashing nests.
Maybe shrub should get my brother to help him with the avian flu issue?
When my brother was young, he learned to be cruel to animals in cages. Now that he's an adult, he's learned to be cruel to humans in cages. He is a correctional officer. He used to work Death Row at San Quentin and would tease the prisoners with refrains of "Pop, pop, fizz, fizz! Oh, what a relief it is!" This was in reference to the gas chamber and their upcoming dates with death.
A couple of years ago, my brother and I were watching an episode of NYPD Blue when that dumpy officer--what the hell's his name?--went off on someone he was interrogating, beating the shit out of the guy. I was flabbergasted.
"That's brutality! That's illegal!" I yelled.
"Well, if someone had killed your loved one, who would you want interviewing the bastard who did it?" asked my brother. "Would you want some pussy, or someone who would make the guy talk?"
I explained that torture will make innocent people confess, but my brother just doesn't get it. I know in my heart that he has crossed the line at work. His early training has compelled him to take out his own frustrations on people who are under his power, just as he was under my father's power. He hasn't learned a thing. He may not beat up on my nephew, but he's perpetuating the cycle of violence in another way.
This is my nephew's father.
This is the man from whom my flesh recoils while sitting in the dark at the movie theatre. He reminds me so much of my now-deceased father. I'm sure this is part of the reason why I am so repulsed.
Sigh.
I didn't mean to go on like this, but I just needed to get it out of my system. No one in my family recognizes the negative things that went on, that still go on. I am the only one who ever changed enough to say, "Hey, look! This is wrong!" Yet, I, too, am guilty of many of the same things. I learned cruelty also and applied it before I decided it was wrong. Part of me is always holding the cruelty at bay. One of the many reasons I never had children is that I was terrified I wouldn't be able to keep myself from erupting in anger and treating the children the way I was treated.
This is me.
This is my family.
This is the conundrum.
Part of me still loves my family very much. The other part is repulsed, terrified that my nephew will become like them, or end up like his stepbrother in Iraq. Between his crazy, fundy mother and bizarrely cruel father, he's had absolutely no chance to speak out on his own behalf. Since the divorce ten years ago, or so, he's had to keep his mouth shut. He's never been allowed to have his own opinions or emotions. I wanted to help him, but that's probably a pipe dream.
People who had no knowledge of this background, or of the myriad things I couldn't cover in a single post, judged me. How dare I undermine the values of my nephew's parents? How dare I feel repulsed by my own brother?
Well, I, too, have been silent for ten years while I watched my nephew's parents make his life a battleground. I don't want him to retreat to a battleground in the Middle East.
:cry:
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