Triangulation

[NOTE: please read the second and third paragraphs from this post before continuing. Important–don’t skip reading them!]

We all grow up assuming our parents and family want only what’s best for us. We assume that, just because they get mad at us from time to time and say nasty things to us because of those momentary blowups of rage, that doesn’t mean they don’t love us. Fighting occurs in even the best of families.

Well, millions of families fall far short of the best.

As for my own family, while–to be fair to them–they were and are far above the worst of all families, they were and are bad enough. To know why I judge them so, read this, this, this, this, this, and this.

A huge source of their problems, something my surviving siblings will never admit to, is our late mother’s propensity for lying.

Everybody lies at least occasionally, of course–usually just to protect himself from getting into trouble; but my mother’s lies were generally indulgent, unnecessary, manipulative…and malicious.

I as a child was routinely bullied, belittled, and subjected to verbal abuse–and even threats of physical violence, from time to time–by my siblings. While it is understandable that I, as the youngest in the family, would get subjected to some of this kind of treatment, it is also understandable that I would expect to be defended considerably more often than I was by my parents.

It’s also understandable to think that my elder siblings should have had a more balanced attitude toward me when I was an awkward child and teen. The things that I did to frustrate them couldn’t have been so bad as to deserve the abuse I was subjected to.

One of their main beefs against me, as I’ve explained elsewhere, was my childhood/adolescent habit of maladaptive daydreaming. Instead of trying to find a constructive solution to this problem, they stupidly assumed shaming me would make me break the habit. Actually, and predictably to anyone who has a modicum of common sense, the shaming just made me engage in the habit all the more.

The chief lie my mother told me to manipulate me was to claim that a number of psychiatrists had diagnosed me, when a child, with a severe case of autism, and my maladaptive daydreaming was assumed, in the family’s collective ignorance, to be a manifestation of ‘my autism’. None of them considered, for even a second, that my solitary fantasizing and dramatizing of those daydreams could have been the result of all that bullying in my childhood.

In fact, lots of research has been done not only on the long-term effects of school and family bullying (both of which I’d been mercilessly subjected to when little), but also on the effects of childhood stress and adversity. These effects include the victim isolating himself from his family and friends, spending time alone and lacking motivation; also, the victim may feel anxiety, depression, irritability, frustration, feelings of guilt and confusion, etc. Again, the family’s shaming of me for having these problems only made them more pronounced, for their very shaming was a form of the kind of bullying that results in this kind of stress.

What I was doing as a child, i.e., my maladaptive daydreaming, can be described in the psychoanalytic language of object relations, too. WRD Fairbairn wrote of how children who are not given proper affirmation from their parents will develop internal object relations, that is, fantasied people to relate to–the endopsychic structure of Libidinal Ego/Object and Anti-libidinal Ego/Object–instead of having relationships with real people in the external world. Such ideas constitute the essence of my childhood world.

The family, in their refusal to empathize with me, insisted that my self-isolation was due to ‘my autism’, and in their mean-spirited attitude toward me, they linked this self-isolation to such fabricated ideas as my supposed lack of caring for others, as well as my generally being a ‘loser’. My mother did nothing to curb this attitude: if anything, she encouraged it through all her acts of triangulation. I’ll give a few examples:

Once, when I was in my teens, my brother R. came into the TV room in a rage at me. I tried, with a sad countenance, to explain my foibles as the result of loneliness and an inability to find something constructive to occupy myself with. He roared, “Make a friend!” I said, “It’s beyond you.” (That is, it was beyond R.’s understanding why I found it so difficult to make friends–see above.) He roared back, with especial cruelty, “It’s beyond YOU!!” (That is, I’m too much of a loser to be able to get anyone to like me.)

Be assured, R., that after hearing you say that, I was filled with encouragement and resolve to go out and prove you wrong, and make an army of friends! (sarcasm)

…and what was this terrible crime I’d committed to deserve to hear his cruel words, all during my sensitive, identity-forming adolescence? I’d eaten all the cereal (for the fourth or fifth time, admittedly), so R. couldn’t eat any…that evening.

And now, an example of the cruelty of my other brother, F.

When I was about nineteen or twenty, I was watching TV while F., visiting our home (for he’d already moved out, to my general relief), was in the kitchen. He noticed ants crawling about in the sugar container, and naturally, he was expressing his disgust loud enough for me to hear. Not knowing what to do about the problem, I didn’t say or do anything: I just stayed in the TV room. He took offence to this.

He could have simply said, “Would you get your ass away from that boob tube and help me?” Such would have been an understandable expression of frustration with my not showing any concern, and hey, if he had dealt with the situation that way, I’d have gotten up and gone into the kitchen to help him…but he wanted to have more fun, of course, by blowing off some steam.

He shouted, “You don’t care! You don’t care! You’ll probably only start caring when the ants crawl up your pants!”

I said, “Well, you’re the one who ‘cares’ so much. You solve the problem.”

He said, “I don’t live here anymore.” (As if that changes anything.) Then he stepped up his rant against me. “You don’t care about anyone but yourself. No wonder you’re such a hermit.” He was now looking right at me with those contemptuous, beady little brown eyes of his.

So sick of hearing his verbal abuse, which I’d already been enduring from him for years, I said, “You don’t care about anybody, either.”

In feigned admiration at my ‘insight’, he said, “Oh, really?” in a challenging attitude.

I said, “Yeah. You wanna know why?”

He said, “Oh, do tell me,” as if he were fascinated to learn.

I said, “You act like you care only to get attention!”

Egad…the cheek of me, such an Untermensch, to suggest that he had faults! (To be fair, I admit I was clutching at straws with this judgement of him; but given the collective narcissism of that family, and their superiority complex over me, maybe his rage at my words came more from their accuracy than their inaccuracy.)

Anyway, F. flipped. His hateful, piercing eyes cut right into mine. “Who the fuck are you?!” he growled at me. “Who the fuck are you, Mawr?! Why, I oughta smack you for saying that!”

Shaking, I finally followed him into the kitchen. I got a can of Raid, ready to spray the ants. “Never mind,” he said, calmer now. “Wait till Mom gets home; she’ll know what to do.”

Then F., in his sweet generosity, offered an apology.

“Sorry about that, Mawr, but you’re just so annoying.”

(Translation: Sorry, not sorry.)

I don’t suppose it ever occurred to that self-righteous prick that he could be really annoying, too. It surely never occurred to him, either, that maybe the real reason I stayed in the TV room was because I, too, figured the best thing to do was to leave it to Mom when she got home. I guess I should have said so.

His vicious accusations of my ‘not caring’ could border on the absurd and irrational: during those years, I used to cake sugar on my cereal (remember my petty larceny of cereal, which traumatized R. so much!); why would I not care about there being ants on it? Did F. imagine I was too stupid to realize ants in my cereal would be a bad thing?

A clue could be found in our mother’s reaction to my complaints of his bullying at the time. “‘I don’t care about anyone’, he said,” I whined to her. “You don’t care,” she said, frowning at me and invalidating my complaint, a common family tactic. Really, Mother? So, I deserved his threats and verbal abuse, instead of just an angry demand to help?

I’ve explained before (Part VII: Conclusion) of the difference between the family’s legitimate right to complain of my faults, on the one hand, and the needlessness of the excesses of their verbal abuse and bullying (i.e., that it was way out of proportion to the wrongs I’d done). I’ve also pointed out elsewhere (Part 4: Abusing my Cousins) of how easy it is to link my mother’s contempt and bad-mouthing of my youngest cousin G. with her claim that he has an autism spectrum disorder (i.e., Asperger’s syndrome–AS). She claimed, fraudulently, that I have autism (and AS); she encouraged, directly or indirectly, my siblings’ bullying of me; it’s far easier to believe she’d been bad-mouthing me to them, through triangulation, than to disbelieve it.

On another occasion, when I was in my early twenties, I’d had to endure the snotty condescension of my sister J., day after day after day. She, in her narcissistic imagination as the family’s #1 Golden Child, remembers those years of her relationship with me as one of pure love and affection; while any moments of friction between us were, conveniently for her, all my fault, of course.

Nothing proves love more surely than imputing all faults on the ‘loved one’, rather than on oneself. (To be clear, unlike J., I don’t claim to love any of those people, so please, Dear Reader, don’t imagine I’m being hypocritical in my judgement of them.)

During the time period I just mentioned, I’d gotten mad at her over some relatively trivial matter, and a day or two later, I felt bad about it and wanted to apologize to her (not something the family were ever in the habit of doing for me), so that evening, I did.

All J. had to do was say, “That’s OK, Mawr. Forget about it.”

But that’s no fun, is it?

She’d had a habit of criticizing me for ‘taking too long’ to assert my feelings; she insisted that one should speak up right away, instead of bottling up one’s feelings, which is so unhealthy!

Wow, I didn’t know that assertiveness had such a quick deadline.

Furthermore, the notion–that speaking up too quickly, in the heat of anger, could result in the danger of saying mean things one would later regret–didn’t occur to her…

…or was her real intention, in knowing I was too meek and timid to speak up right away, to shame me for taking too long, thus making me stay mute, to make me ‘forever hold my peace’?

Can you see, Dear Reader, what a slimy little bitch J. is, underneath her fake smiles of love?

Anyway, back to my apology and her response to it, which was the by-now-typical, “Why did you take so long to get that off your chest?” horse-shit. Since I found it difficult to process my feelings, and therefore to talk about them, I explained myself in a very longwinded manner (which, by the way, is also why these blog posts are so long–sorry about that) that J. found irritating.

What must be remembered about her, and the entire family by extension, is that none of them ever wanted to listen to anything I had to say, not even for a few seconds. Their impatience in this matter, of course, made my difficulties in expressing myself all the worse, not that they ever cared.

So as I went on and on trying to explain to J. how I felt, my ‘loving sister’ ran out of patience as usual, and let out her anger in the usual mean way, shouting, “How much longer do I have to listen to this autobiography?!”

Naturally, I was losing patience, too, and what had started out as a simple apology transformed, in all absurdity, into yet another fight. She got petulant and said, “You always take forever to speak up! Go to Hell!” End of spat.

OK, J., I’m sure those words will encourage me to speak up immediately next time!

(Recall when I’d spoken up immediately at our grandmother’s funeral [Part IV: Rationalizing Irrational Behaviour], and how willing she was to listen to my prompt assertiveness!)

Now, that was the end of my spat with J., but it wasn’t the end of the emotional abuse I had to endure from the family; for our mother, sitting on the sofa in the TV room, overheard the argument between J. and me (J. was in the bathroom, at the mirror, and I was standing in the hall, near her). Mom decided J.’s verbal abuse wasn’t enough, so she–who, recall, “gave [me] the most love”, scolded me (I was in my early twenties, recall) as if I were a ten-year-old, for having irritated her Golden Child, who apparently was suffering from a cold (Cold? What cold? J. wasn’t sniffling, or coughing, or anything like that! More fabrications, Mother dear?) Our blustering mother ended with, “Go to your room!”

And all of this had started with me trying to apologize to J.

What a wonderful family! I wouldn’t trade them for the world!

Now, what must be focused on is not so much that ‘R. once verbally abused me this way’, or ‘F. once bullied me that way’, or ‘J. played such-and-such a mind game on me on this or that occasion’; but rather, what did all of this abuse mean? What was the real reason for it? Were my behaviour, manner, and overall personality really all that infuriating? Or did they have the attitude problem?

To be sure, a child spending hours and hours in solitary play, every day, instead of going out and making friends, is and should be worrying to a caring family; but why would any reasonable family imagine that shaming him would cure him, instead of making matters worse?

A youth who eats all the cereal on several occasions, slams doors a lot, accidentally hurts the dog when playing with her, doesn’t respond to an ant problem in the kitchen cupboards, or rambles on and on when trying to assert himself, is an irritating, frustrating person; but do such problems necessitate yelling that he’s a “little shit!”, and an “asshole!”? Is haranguing him the only cure (or any kind of cure) to his self-centredness? Does shouting at him to “Go to Hell!” or “Go to your room!” encourage him to be brief and prompt in his assertiveness? Does showing no empathy whatsoever for his adolescent loneliness, saying it’s beyond his ability to make friends, help him to be comfortable in social situations, or does it make his antisocial aloofness even worse?

We all blow up from time to time, and say cruel things we shouldn’t say; but kind families take the time to reflect on these blowups, then say sorry…and mean it.

What did the family’s attitude toward me mean? F. said he was just “frustrated” with me. J. once ‘apologized’ about her and our brothers’ “immature” treatment of me with a giggle that trivialized all the pain they caused me. This kind of talk isn’t a real apology. They were either rationalizing their attitude, or minimizing its hurtful significance in their own minds. Invalidating the abuse-victim’s experience is what emotional abuse is all about…and they judge me for not being considerate enough of others.

Being angry with a person, and abusing him or her, are two wildly different things.

Something other than just being angry with me was going on in that family. It wasn’t just my foibles that were putting my siblings into such rages. I’m convinced that I was being portrayed as a worm to them, a despicable little loser that wasn’t worth any consideration, whereas they, the ‘superior ones’, urgently demanded my consideration of them every step of the way. I could see the scorn in their eyes; I got sneers and scowls of contempt from R., F., and J. on a regular basis…and remember, I was just a kid at the time. Also, their attitude has persisted until the present day.

Who was responsible for painting such a lowly portrait of me?

It had to have been someone my siblings revered as a primal authority figure–not our father: for all his faults, he was relatively nice to me; besides, his grouchiness put my siblings off in a bad way, so they wouldn’t have honoured his opinions all that much.

So, who does that break it down to?

Could it have been…the one who lied to me about having an autism spectrum disorder? Could it have been the one who largely stood by and let R., F., and J. bully me, with nary a word of reproach to them? Could it have been the one who defended them, and rationalized their attitude, while never telling them to be patient with me, a child/adolescent who–according to her–suffered from a mental disorder, thus making me especially vulnerable? The one who never spoke a kind word about my youngest cousin, G., even to the point of fabricating details in her smear campaigns against him, and claiming he, too, had Asperger’s syndrome, thus in effect making G. into my double, as it were. The one who, as soon as she learned G.’s brother S. was mentally ill, instead of even trying to help him, she made him into a family pariah?

This was a pattern of behaviour in my mother. She and my siblings bad-mouthed me to my face on a regular basis: doing so behind my back would have been all the easier.

Mom would say, “[So-and-so] said this [or that] about you.” Psychiatrists said, apparently, that I, a child, was retarded and suffering from early infantile autism. J. said that I have all those books on my bookshelf to look impressive to other people (<<<Part V: No Empathy Leading to Lots of Antipathy). My cousin S. yelled (<<<Part 5: More Elaborate Lies) on the phone one day about how I am a liar who constantly gossips about him to our former teacher friends in Taiwan. My aunt claimed I’d sent her a series of “over-the-top” emails to her, including content my uncle called “disgusting”. My aunt claimed I must have been quite “a burden” to raise.

No, Mom, They didn’t say those things. You did.

This is the essence of triangulation. Over the years that I have lived here in Taiwan, thankfully oh, so far away from the family in southern Ontario, I rarely engaged in email correspondence with R., F., F.’s family, or my cousins’ family in Canada. I hardly needed to: Mom was communicating with them for me.

God knows what garbage she was telling them about me (which was surely a major factor in their virtually never emailing me, though Mom–in an email–blamed only me for the non-communication that was obviously a two-way street), but I do know that her words usually couldn’t have been much better than smears against me. She smeared my aunt and S. against me and my siblings: what else am I supposed to think, other than that she smeared me, too?

I’ve written many times about the string of lies she told me about S. and my aunt the summer before Mom died. I’d like to go more into detail about that now.

Lie #1: As stated above, Mom claimed, in an email and telephone call (months after she’d complained of my never communicating with her, thus igniting her narcissistic rage and giving her a motive to spread rancour in order ‘to get even’ with me), that S. had flipped out on me again, making baseless accusation after baseless accusation. Since I had no independent corroboration of this alleged outburst (S. hadn’t, and hasn’t to my knowledge as of this post, attacked me online, on the phone, or anywhere in years), I can safely say this was another of Mom’s fabrications. Still, I went along with it, out of a foolish hope that she’d be willing to help my cousin get psychiatric help.

Lie #2: After her continuing unwillingness to contact my aunt about her son’s mental illness, Mom finally claimed she’d let me email my aunt, after checking to see if what I’d written would be sufficiently tactful. (See Lie #4 below to see why this was another lie.)

Lie #3: Mom gave me my aunt’s new email address, which I believe is a fake one Mom made to prevent me from actually contacting my aunt (see Lie #4).

Lie #4: A day or two after I’d sent my email, Mom emailed me, claiming my aunt didn’t want to read my email, since, apparently, I’d sent her a series of “over-the-top” emails with “disgusting” content that made reading anything I’d later sent her too upsetting even to risk reading. My aunt thus wanted us all to “forget about the whole thing”, and Mom clearly agreed that that’s what we should have done (which, of course, raises the question of why Mom brought up the whole issue in the first place). Now, as I’ve stated elsewhere, I never sent my aunt any such upsetting emails; I hadn’t even emailed her at all, over a period of ten years (from about 2005 to 2015, when this incident occurred).

Lie #5: In another email, Mom claimed that my aunt said I must have been such “a burden” to raise. My aunt hardly even knows me: she’s seen me only in brief visits from time to time over the years, especially over the past twenty years. She’d have no reason to think of me as “a burden”; she’s also too ladylike to say such a thing, and too meek besides–she’d be risking my wrath if Mom were to relay the message back to me. Besides, since I was born five years after J., the youngest (and, I suspect, last intended) of our parents’ children born in a cluster of three with R. and F., I’d say there’s a good chance I was the result of an unintended pregnancy; furthermore, there were virtually no baby photos of me in the family photo album or elsewhere in the house, as opposed to the many taken of babies R., F., and J.; and on top of that, there was my scapegoating as the identified patient, so in all likelihood, Mom, not my aunt, thought of me as a burden.

Lie #6: Mom’s next email to me was a warning that S. might angrily confront me in Taiwan once he’d returned from his visit to Canada (during which, allegedly, he’d ranted on the phone to my Mom about me), on the assumption that he ‘knew’ I’d emailed his mother about his mental illness. (Well, Lie #4 shows how spurious this warning was.)

Lie #7: Mom emailed me about a month or so later, after I hadn’t sent her any email replies, claiming she’d talked with my aunt about the email she’d refused to read, and now she was finally willing to talk about S.’s problems. Oh, really? WHY NOW? Why didn’t Mom do this with my aunt immediately after her refusal to read an email my mom had checked to ensure a tactful choice of words? Why had Mom agreed with my aunt to “forget about the whole thing” then, but only now had changed her mind? Mom was obviously hoovering me.

When I replied, knowing this was an obvious mind game, and said we should just, indeed, forget about it, Mom agreed…but, wasn’t my aunt finally willing to confront this issue with S.? After ‘all that work talking with my aunt’, we were just going to drop it because I said we should? Lies, lies, and more lies, Mother Dear.

What’s more, during all of this lying, manipulating, gaslighting, and triangulating, she’d asked me to make a visit to Canada, because she’d “love to see me”! Sure, Mom! I’d love to have a vicious liar in the same room with my wife and me, squirting more of her poison in my ears! She’d asked, on the phone, when I could make another visit (in 2015, seven years after my last visit to Canada) between Lies #2 and #3; my cold, evasive silence should’ve made it clear to her that I didn’t want to visit; then, in an email after Lie #7, she pressured me to visit again, even offering to pay my plane tickets, and I was forced to reply in the following way (pretty close to my actual words, as best as I can remember):

October 9, 2015

I don’t need help paying for plane tickets; I wouldn’t want to visit regardless of my money situation. You should already know why. Lies, lies, and more lies. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about; you know perfectly well what I mean by that. You’ve been provoking me for the past 12-13 years.

I won’t answer any of your phone calls or emails, because I’m so sick of all this manipulation. Please drop this. Take comfort in the fact that you have the love of R., F., J., and your grandchildren. If you love somebody, set him free.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this was one hell of a blunt email reply; but let’s face it–she was really asking for it.

What was her reaction, which I could predict, and which came true in an email from J. in November? Mom used a typical narcissist tactic–she played the victim. In J.’s email, she wrote of how my above email message “hurt” Mom; and like a typical flying monkey, J. took our Mom’s side 100%, saying “Mom truly doesn’t know what I meant by lying“.

I was expected to reply with a confirmation of my address in Taiwan (another thing my sister wanted from me in her message), as well as, of course, an explanation of why I was mad at Mom; I answered only the former question, to which J. replied approvingly, saying it was “Short and sweet”. (Recall how much my sister hates my long-windedness.) Since a longwinded reply was the only way I could discuss my falling-out with Mom, I didn’t reply to J.’s reply; in fact, I didn’t even read past these words of her question, “Are you mad at Mom because…?”

Supposedly, this was supposed to be my sister inviting me to offer my side of the story; but seriously…I know these people. They have never respected or validated my perspective on anything in my life, except on the rare occasion when it was convenient for them. J. had already demonstrated her absolute loyalty to Mom in believing her that she ‘truly didn’t know’ what I was talking about in my accusation of her lying to me. So, why should I have even bothered trying to explain anything to J. in a following reply? She would have ‘heard me out’, then proceeded to relay my answer to Mom, who in all likelihood had a ready-made refutation of my accusation, and J. would have believed her.

Knowing what I do about triangulation, I can even visualize how Mom communicated her ‘version’ of what happened: she cried a deluge of sympathy tears to J., who probably played the role of consoling ‘parent’ to Mom; she sobbed copiously about how she ‘only want[ed] to see [me]’, that as my mother, she so ‘deeply loved’ me and missed me, and how I ‘always hurt her and hurt her’, a pure projection of her always having hurt me, including this recent triangulating tactic, all to vilify me to the family.

Here is what her real reaction to my email was, in all probability: she flew into a rage, saying (or thinking) something to the effect of, ‘That ungrateful little brat!’ (I, a brat in my late 40s.) ‘After all I’ve done for him! I’ll fix him! Everyone in the family’s gonna hate him–I’ll make sure of it!’ Then she practiced sobbing in front of a mirror, so to speak.

On top of all this, her health had been declining; she was 77, after all. Her breast cancer metastasized, and I was contacted around April of 2016. While I was wrong to think this dying of cancer was a lie to manipulate me into visiting (she died the following month), it was a perfectly reasonable suspicion for me to have had at the time, given what had previously happened.

From the family’s perspective, I was being monstrously unfilial; while she lay there in hospital on her deathbed, I was expected to do my part in honouring the great matriarch of the family. R. wanted me to be available to chat with her (her using his cellphone) as often as possible, but after not only her original lies about autism and Asperger’s syndrome, her triangulating against me my whole life, but also with those seven lies the previous summer, which she wouldn’t even admit to, chatting with her was the last thing I wanted to do, whether she was dying or not.

And oh, the way she played the victim card during that one phone call I did concede to have with her! She went on and on about how I’d hurt her, laying the guilt trip on so thick, while not even having the decency to admit to all that she had done to provoke me. When people are trying to be reconciled, it’s generally good policy to be fair and admit one’s own faults as well as complain of those on the other side.

She ended her whole J’accuse by mentioning how she, during my pre-teen years (which she’d also claimed were a time I’d made life especially trying for her…a time when, by the way, she was prating about how ‘my autism’ made her wonder if I’d “ever make a good garbageman”, and that the psychiatrists said one should “lock [me] up in an asylum and throw away the key!”…projection), “gave me the most love”! Reaction formation…I was infuriated to hear those words.

I refused to call her after that. I even left my home phone unplugged, so R. couldn’t contact me and pressure me into talking to her. She soon died. He discovered a YouTube video of me back in 2009, reciting Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be the Verse’ with a bitter scowl. Naturally, he was enraged…though, in my defence, nobody forced him to watch it. In his snarky comment to the video, he claimed I was “a disturbed individual” (no doubt a judgement influenced by our mother’s triangulating, to discredit any opinions I have that might have exposed her for the probable malignant narcissist that she was), and–no doubt influenced by Mom’s “gave [me] the most love” self-congratulation–he said she’d loved me “more than anyone else on the planet”.

Now, did he mean that she loved me more than she loved anyone else? A totally ridiculous thing to say (umm, more than she loved our Dad?), and one that can be defended only by acknowledging that he was grieving over her, and my rather nasty video enraged him beyond his ability to say anything rational.

Or, did he mean that she loved me more than anyone else has ever loved me? Another absurd generalization: he didn’t consider my wife’s love for me, she who–for all of her reservations and grievances against my faults–has loved me more than everyone in that Canadian family combined!

I suspect he meant the latter; if so, I wish he could understand that his implication that his, F.’s, and J.’s tepid-to-non-existent love for me, as well as a lack of love for me from the rest of the world, isn’t so much a reproach of me, but a reproach against them as a family. As I explained at the beginning of this post, my faults are enough to provoke an understandable level of anger and frustration from them as a family, but they are nowhere near enough to provoke their abusive, contemptuous attitude.

I’m R.’s kid brother: he’s supposed to love me, regardless of how trying I can be for him or anyone. He, as well as F. and J., have their sense of cause and effect all mixed up; it’s not that I get a paucity of love from them because I do irritating things–I get a paucity of love from them, so I do irritating things.

To return to a discussion of Fairbairn and object relations, when children aren’t given the love and affirmation they need from the real, external world (from their primary objects, their parents and primary caregivers), their Central Ego splits into fantasied, internal objects: a Libidinal Ego/Exciting Object configuration (pleasurable object relations), and an Anti-libidinal Ego (or Internal Saboteur)/Rejecting Object configuration (negative object relations).

In my childhood world, my Central Ego was torn apart by the family’s constant bullying and emotional abuse, causing me to retreat into a world of maladaptive daydreaming, in which I created imaginary Exciting Objects (including characters in sex fantasies) for my broken-off Libidinal Ego; to protect myself from further hurt, my Anti-libidinal Ego made Rejecting Objects of my family and most people I knew in my neighbourhood and at school (for indeed, so many of them were such bullies that they really were Rejecting Objects).

So, the family’s bullying of me caused me to develop a rejecting personality as a way to protect myself. I’m the youngest of all of them, so I didn’t cause them, they caused me. I reacted to them, causing them to react to me, too, but they–as the older ones–were the first cause.

I wasn’t the worst-behaved of our parents’ kids: I was actually the best-behaved. R. dropped out of school and left home as a teen; F. crashed a T-bird into a telephone pole when he was a young adult; J. got caught shoplifting when she was a pre-teen (I believe F. influenced her in that direction); F. and J. smoked pot and drank beer during parties when our parents were away on vacation; J. (about 19) got caught in bed with her boyfriend when our parents suddenly came home one night; I, on the other hand, slammed doors, ate up all the cereal, and accidentally hurt our dog once or twice. Perspective.

The only time I did anything significantly bad–from the family’s perspective–was when I was so cold to Mom during the 2010s; but as I’ve explained so many times before, she provoked it. R., F., and J. know nothing of our mother’s provocations, because, through triangulation, she made sure my siblings never knew my side of the story.

I’m sure their willful ignorance and cognitive dissonance will ensure that they never learn my side of the story, let alone validate it. If they ever find this blog and read it, their trolling comments below will prove, ironically, just how right I am about their attitude.

Further Reading: WRD Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, Routledge, London, 1952