Is there such a thing as the reverse of a fair-weather friend?

[missroserose]

I've had a rough relationship with my brother. Plenty of it is my own damn fault - I remember my mother warning me when I was younger that I should treat him better, but when you get into the habit of talking over somebody and basically acting like they aren't their own person because they're too in awe of you to stand up for themselves, it's tough to change (especially when you're young and aren't even sure what a healthy sibling relationship looks like). A lot of it also comes from plain ol' personality dynamics - when you're a shy and quiet kid, and your father isn't much of a role model to you (and eventually leaves), and your mother and older sister are incredibly opinionated and outgoing and charismatic, it's easy to feel lost in the shuffle. My mother and I joke sometimes that the reason he became a firebreather is because it was the only way he felt like he could get anyone to pay attention to him. Maybe it's not that much of a joke.

We took fairly different paths away from our home. I took the more traditional route, going to college (some) and getting a job, getting married, gradually getting stable with some help from my mother (and, once Brian and I were together, future-mother-in-law). Ace, on the other hand, took the school-of-hard-knocks route - left home at 18 more or less penniless, flew across the country and never looked back so far as I know.

We've been in contact sporadically over the years, but there have been long stretches where I haven't heard from him. Usually these occur when things aren't going so well for him, and usually-usually they'll be precipitated by my trying to give him advice and his spouting off about how I'm on my high horse and how dare I tell him how to live his life. (I suppose it's worth pointing out that that's not the tone I'm meaning to take at all, but part of the problem is likely that we mostly communicate over IM, where it's easy to misread tone - especially when your own mental state is overwhelmingly negative.) So then he disappears for anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of years, until things get better for him and he can talk to me again.

I suppose it's pretty obvious that this has happened again, and frankly, I'm just not sure what to do with this. I do care about him (obviously), and I don't want to shut him out of my life like I have my father, but if this were a friendship I'd frankly advise the person involved to move on - their "friend" just doesn't have the social maturity to be somebody worth knowing. But since it's my brother, and a lot of our problems are my fault, do I have a responsibility to keep going back and trying to repair things? How many times do I put up with being hurt like this? At what point does that responsibility end?

Comments

[jamesd.livejournal.com]

I suggest behaviour modification: "Usually these occur when things aren't going so well for him, and usually-usually they'll be precipitated by my trying to give him advice".

There appears to be a pattern of a bad time to be making suggestions there. So don't. :)

This is easier to write than do but when someone doesn't trust you they aren't likely to be more receptive when things are going badly than when they are going well. The quality of the advice you give doesn't matter to this, so try to resist a "but the advice I give is good" view of it.

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

I'd like to point out that it's less about "the advice I give is good" and more just that it's habit for me. Also, just as he has trouble reading my advice and understanding that I'm not trying to preach to him, I often have trouble reading his messages and understanding where he's coming from - he tends toward depression a lot of the time, and it can be hard to tell the difference between "moderately depressed but willing to listen/discuss" and "seriously depressed and completely unwilling to do so" until the aforementioned rant comes up.

[jamesd.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think it's part of your nature to try to be helpful and to give guidance that you think will be useful. That's generally a good thing. :)

I can understand the difficulty of communication. At the moment it appears that he is so sensitive to this issue that it's likely to undermine any relationship building, whether you do it at a bad time or even a good one that he can be angry about later at a bad time.

Better to try to suppress your desire to be helpful with suggestions, to increase the chance of being a person he can come to for general discussions and who he might eventually come to accept as someone who can listen. Maybe, in many years, that might become one in which you can offer some thoughts about the situations he finds himself in.

If you'd like more family relationship fun, try a brother who's using suicide threats as a blackmail tool to try to avoid having to move out of the only home he's lived in, something that is required to sell the property to settle our mother's estate. :)

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Touche. Good luck, and I hope you can get that resolved without the interference of the law/men with white coats. :/

[jamesd.livejournal.com]

The white coats got involved after the overdose-based suicide attempt last year. :) Lawyers next, because he's declined to consider moving or looking at properties he might have bought for him to rent. A transition from being kind to him to being kind to the rest of us, including a sister with serious debt troubles who badly needs the money he's living in.

Proud Parent of Amazing Children

[faith-rose08.livejournal.com]

Wow am I impressed by this blog entry. Shows an amazing degree of maturity, patience and willingness to suffer personal hurt for the good of those you love.

To answer your question, one of the most amazing and difficult passages of scripture that come to mind is the story of Peter asking Jesus "how many times must I forgive my brother - even as many as seven times?" And Jesus' response "Nay, as many as seven times seventy!" When it comes to those you have accepted as family - be they by blood, marriage or love, the advice from one of the greatest teachers to ever walk the planet is: genuine relationship requires infinite patience, infinite understanding and infinite willingness to take responsibility. It isn't easy, but I promise you it will be worth it. Love, Mum

Re: Proud Parent of Amazing Children

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Heh, I wish Ace had agreed with you. Sadly, judging from his response on Facebook, I don't think he did. (I recommend finding the post on FB, though - some friends and I had some good conversation regarding family.)

Now will you believe me when I say I'm not writing anything mean or escalating? :P

Re: Proud Parent of Amazing Children

[jamesd.livejournal.com]

Consider a work situation with an unreasonable customer. Success isn't your manager agreeing that the customer is unreasonable, it's the customer recognising the unreasonableness and coming back happy many times in the future. that's a much harder problem than you r manager agreeing that the customer is being unreasonable.

To answer that rhetorical question, the key is the difference between intent and effect. You can have the effect without the intent.

Have you discussed with a mother, not yours, her thoughts when her adult children tell her that they are trying not to fight and that it wasn't them who started it, honest? :)

This is somewhat rhetorical but it's interesting that you are seeking approval for failure. Regardless of who started it, you still failed to prevent it from escalating and that was part of your task, as the participant in the best emotional position to manage the relationship in a way that may become productive. This isn't fair. Just life.

Best to discuss this post with mom, not me. It's mostly about changing of a relationship from mother and child to two adults working in concert with a common objective of helping a third adult.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Funny, because I'm pretty much the opposite side of the equation. Not as much with my sisters, but with some friends, I pretty much embody the blue-moon acquaintance level you describe. For some of us it's just easier to wall up and slither away, and the threshold between "gee, that's helpful and useful advice" and "OMG moralizing and judgment GTFO" is a sole misfired neuron.

At this level I don't even think it's a "social maturity" issue as much as a genuine disorder (but despite my assertions in the past, I'm legally obligated to mention that I am not a doctor), but more importantly, in your case, it's not a hypothetical friendship that you can just let atrophy under the weight of distance and time. Blood makes it different. (Not implacable, just different.)

That said, don't blame yourself -- either for being the bookish older sister or for dispensing advice as is your wont (and possibly genetic obligation if my research is any indicator). His circumstances-slash-condition are not your fault; what you perceive as affronts or offenses may/should have been received entirely differently by a fully differently socially-functional individual. You can't control that, and you can't undo what's been done. Don't let that pain you, and don't let it leverage your future choices under any more obligation than necessary. You have enough on your plate.

Where does that responsibility end? I don't know that anyone else can answer that question for you. You know what it's like to cut ties (for better and worse) and it weighs on you, but you don't like being bungee-sister. And you shouldn't. It's a wretched way to interact with someone. It's another telling sign that he doesn't recognize or appreciate this. It's obvious that it's taking a toll on you or you wouldn't ask the question.

It's interesting -- when asking a question like this, we could be looking for so many things: permission, forgiveness, discussion.... Permission's not ours to give -- nor even forgiveness, but really, you would have that anyway; I don't think anyone's in a place to judge any action you'd take from this position...I'd have faith that you'd make the right choice, though. Discussion, oh, that I got tons of. Obvy.

Most (if not all) of this you knew already, of course, but sometimes it helps to hear it. I hope.

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Discussion is pretty much what I was looking for, and I very much appreciate your input - it's good to hear from someone who's had similar experiences on the other end of things.

As I said in another response on Facebook, I have no intention of cutting him off - frustrating as he is, he's not toxic like my father is, and while it's hard to consider myself "close" to him I do appreciate his (virtual) company when he provides it. OTOH, as you say, being "bungee-sister" seems a bit too...doormat-ish, if that makes sense.

Both my mother and Brian have commented that they think he might well be suffering from some form of undiagnosed mental illness, either depression or bipolar disorder; I couldn't say for certain, but I do know that such illnesses do run in our family, and according to the diasthesis-stress model it would make perfect sense that he'd develop it to a far worse degree than I would (as he's been exposed to far worse stressors than I have on a regular basis - come to think of it, when I was younger and had stronger stressors in my life, I reacted in similar, if less dramatic, ways). But the likelihood of his making it to a doctor for diagnosis and possible treatment is pretty remote due to his financial situation, so I have to take him as he is now.

Re: blood making it different, I was meditating on that also in the FB post...as you say, it's not implacable (I tend to think the idea of "blood is thicker than water" is bullshit) but it is different. Possibly due to genetics, possibly due to socialization - humans are social creatures, and we're hard-wired to value people with whom we have a history. And you don't get much more history-oriented than you do with family. (I almost wrote "histrionic" there, which wasn't quite what I meant but probably also accurate. :)

Since he's the one who's cut me off at this point, the choice isn't whether or not I'm going to do so, but whether I should pursue some kind of reconciliation, via email or phone or what have you. I know that my mother thinks I should, but I'm honestly not sure whether now's the time; the way I see it, blocking someone on MSN and unfriending them on FB sends a pretty clear message that you don't want to talk to them. And if we're right about the mental aspect of it, then trying to pursue things isn't going to help - to use a favorite quote from a different context, you can't reason someone out of something if they didn't use reason to get into it. But I'm also concerned that things will just...lapse. And after I really felt like we'd made some progress over the past year or so (after the last three-year lapse). So...honestly, I don't know what's the right option here, and you're right, nobody can make that decision for me. But I do very much appreciate your discussion. :)

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

I think you're probably right -- he does sound genuinely afflicted, though that doesn't change the given circumstances very much, does it?

It sounds like he's feeling disempowered right now -- the IM/FB blocking/unfriending seems like an assertion of control over a situation, something someone's more likely to do when they can't assert that control over another aspect of their lives. You're not even necessarily the trigger -- it's just that you give him the capacity to lash out, and he takes it because it's all he's got.

Of course, if that's true, actively seeking reconciliation at this juncture just takes that control back away from him and would probably just goad him (by his interpretation). He'll have more ownership of the situation and probably a deeper investment when he decides he wants to be civil. You've demonstrated a willingness to be there in the past, so he's probably working under the assumption that that will continue. And if we're right and there's more to work here than just awkward familiar dynamics, there may need to be more time that passes to allow other mitigating factors (biochemistry, living conditions, medication, perspective) to shift enough to help bridge the gap.

Yeah, inaction does run the risk of letting things lapse, but some people, whether we want them to be or not, are just indelible. (I guess the flip side to that is that we are just as indelible to some others as some are to us. But oddly enough, that's no comfort.) And fantastic gulfs of distance and estrangement can sometimes just melt away between people without any rational explanation. I see no reason not to be optimistic here, and you know me -- I'm more than capable of finding signs of gloom.

I think you're doing the best you can, and that's still more than most would. Maybe should. But I'm one of those people who's lashed out when all he wanted was someone to keep trying, so I appreciate it.

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you've pretty much summed up my assessment of the situation. Disempowerment is probably the biggest contributing factor - as I mentioned, this only seems to happen when things are going particularly badly for him. And I wouldn't be surprised if there was some of the "perfect sibling/black sheep" dynamic coming in - how dare I give him advice, when I took the easy route and have no idea what his life is really like? (He said something to that effect the last time this happened, and while I think it's BS, I understand the underlying psychology.)

Guess it's just time to sigh and move on, and hope that things get better for him soon, whether or not he decides to re-initiate contact.

[jamesd.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's BS. You can be the one who took the easy route in his perception even if you're the one who really took the harder route. :)

An open door is sufficient for now. Maybe more later.

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Also as a thank-you - this (http://i.imgur.com/apAsm.png) struck me as something that would fit well in your collection. :)

[alexmegami]

My only going opinion of the matter is, you probably shouldn't have posted this particular musing to Facebook (or here, if he reads here also).

...maybe also to second that if the advice issue is a recurring pattern, and he's said so, work more to even catch yourself doing it and apologize if you can't just cut it out? Whether a 'sorry, I know you hate it when I do that' would help settle some feathers, I don't know, but it might be worth a shot.