I want to maintain contact with my mother in the healthiest way I can, which is low contact. This is working fairly well. Being careful with my words in conversations is a work in progress to do this dance successfully. It is going pretty well atm.

I want to maintain and improve the relationship with my husband. Also, being careful with myself is the plan I am working on. We are on day 4 without me getting upset and crying. He treats me very well for the most part. We really have a healthy relationship outside of where it is totally dysfunctional. The research I’ve done trying to figure out why this is happening is staggering. It’s an intimacy issue on my part, maybe related to a sexual assault I had.

Then there is the semi-estrangement with my sister S. I’m putting it all on this thread. It’s not that I have such rocky relationships with everybody. But I have a few. I have stopped trying to connect with her after she repeatedly blew me off in crazy passive-aggressive ways. She discarded me, essentially over I wanted emotional validation from her because our mother was falsely accusing me of something and vilifying me. She outright told me, “I care nothing about you”. This was four years ago. I tried to discuss it. She deflected. She then proceeded to do several passive-aggressive things to me, other sister, and to our mother. There was a shady incident she and her husband did that could have ended in our mother being wiped out financially. This really had little to do with me. I was part of other family who talked sense into our mother who did not go for their bad plan. This caused a further rift between her and the rest of the family. So, she has basically discarded everybody. But, there may be a group text once in a while among us. It’s not total estrangement, just complete emotional distance. I also believe it has a lot to do with her husband behind it. The bad idea was not her idea. It had to have been his. She just went along with it without thinking of the disasterous consequences. Or she just really didn’t care about Mom. Or maybe she intentionally was doing it to screw us. Thankfully, it didn’t happen, crisis averted.

I am uncomfortable with feeling disconnected. I have a Norman Rockwell fantasy that I have a loving family. Though I am extremely low contact, and experts would say that is the best thing to do with toxic relationships, I am very bothered that it is the way it is. I bang my head in the wall wanting love from people who do not have the capacity to give it.

So I am dealing with the dilemma of if I should reach out at all including her as family- even as simple as a Happy holidays or if I should just stay no contact. The uneasy feeling is within me and only me. I seriously doubt she thinks of me at all. She truly doesn’t care. She told me the truth and meant what she said. This is so hard for me to accept because I want the fantasy. Ugh.

It even became worse recently when she recently had her daughter contact my son to tell me about another family member event at the very last minute, refusing to contact me directly. So I unfriended her, her husband, and my niece on facebook. Very immature of all of us, I know. I guess when something becomes this toxic it’s best to just move on and learn a lesson from it. I never go on facebook anyway and don’t think she’ll even notice. Mom ruined facebook for me, trolling for narcissistic supply, and the reason for the fallout that led to the discard from S was because of family drama I got into on there. I feel so small and stupid for all this unnecessary, infantile drama. I know how bad I sound. But this did happen. It was a house of cards that fell at the slightest breeze in my FOO and Mom made it all worse instead of helping her kids make up.

When someone has an emotional disorder, they usually do things that are very risky, antagonistic, unhealthy. I have been a loving daughter, sister, wife, mother who didn’t do anything to hurt anyone except I made a single, stupid comment once on facebook which started this huge implosion that ended in the estrangement with my sister, honest to God, hard to believe i know. I’m not looking for sympathy, just need to vent.