Some say the world will end in fire,
Robert Frost
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
A fun fact about me is that I went to grad school at a university where Robert Frost was briefly an adjunct, so professors would sometimes include a poem of his in their assignments. I like this one because it describes, among other things, the way families in cults react to their apostate offspring. Most families respond with fire. They send hate messages and their kids have to block them. My family has responded with ice. I get such radio silence from them that eventually I wouldn’t respond even if they did reach out. I was the last one to initiate contact with my parents and that was a year and a half ago. But I’ve tried desperately to hang on to my siblings. This did not go well. For my brother’s 29th birthday I sent him a list of 29 fond memories of him as a kid. I really tried to write as descriptively as possible and I was sure it would make him happy. He replied by referencing something from before, and completely ignoring the 29 positive memories. So I directly requested that he read the 29 memories and I got radio silence. He never did acknowledge that I had sent them. But later he somehow had time to write an extremely long, cruel, mean screed about how irresponsible and lazy I was. I ended up in day treatment sobbing hysterically. The clinicians there responded compassionately in Therepistese. “What do you think would happen if you just stopped talking to your siblings?” they asked. I said it was uncanny how all the clinicians in my life, including my outpatient therapist, all of whom work for different agencies, had all been curious about the exact same proposed experiment. I was not on board BUT it was a Friday afternoon and day treatment was about to close for the weekend so I and I didn’t want to end up back in the hospital so I agreed to give it a go, just for the weekend.
It lasted longer than the weekend. At first, it was constant agony. I’m in an online support group and at first I was on there at LEAST once a day posting about how emotional I was. Interestingly, it seems like they (and most of my other loved ones) had just so happened to have wondered about the EXACT SAME proposed experiment that had piqued the curiosity of my clinicians. So my support group supported me as did many other people and I got an app. The app is supposed to be for romantic breakups but it works surprisingly well for toxic family as well:
Note that my “ex” never contacted me. I had been in a group chat with my brother, my sister, and my brother-in-law and I sent them messages constantly throughout the day. They never responded because they “didn’t have time.” Except sometimes my brother had time to write long nasty messages and my BIL sometimes managed to scrape enough time together to click the “like” button on something I said. As soon as I stopped writing, they didn’t even write to me to check that I was okay. The relationship is one in which I always have to be the one to initiate, and if I don’t do 100% of the work, they will declare that I have abandoned them. But it’s hard because my sister was due to have a baby this month and I wish they could just “have time” to let me know when my nephew is born, but I suspect they either won’t or haven’t (if the baby is born already). But when I think about reaching out, I think of my app. The more time that elapses without my siblings, the less it hurts. I don’t want to be back where I was a month ago. Whatever narrative they want to spin, the reality is that they can contact me when and if they want to.
So. The siblings thing has been really painful but I’m doing my best to push them out of my mind. The aforementioned app has been sending me notifications of positive affirmations which I actually like. I would have done anything for those two but at some point, I had to admit that the relationships were over.
