No Boundaries

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

To respect one’s boundaries, you don’t have to feel familial love and affection for him or her; on the other hand, genuine love among people, family or not, necessitates a respect for boundaries. My ‘family’, while always claiming to love me, never respected my boundaries.

I’ve discussed elsewhere, in many blog posts, how the five people I was forced to share a home with in my youth and childhood emotionally abused me. This post (scroll down to VII: Conclusion) summarizes eight particularly egregious things my late (probably) narcissistic mother did to me at points spread throughout my life, right up to her death. Her flying monkeys, my brothers R. and F., and my sister J., helped her every step of the way. Though my late father did little to help them in their gaslighting of me and making me the identified patient, he did far too little to help me, either, especially with regard to Mom’s autism lie about me, of which he himself doubted the veracity.

Because I was designated the scapegoat of the family, it was assumed that I’m some kind of Untermensch utterly unworthy of respect. I find it extremely safe to assume my mother was engaging in smear campaigns against me (not only to my family, but to the staff in our restaurant in the 1980s [with ‘corroboration’ from R., F., and J., no doubt], for some of them mouthed me off, sometimes over trivial mistakes I’d made, apparently without fear of me complaining to their boss about their attitude), presenting her autism lie about me as a vice to be despised in me, rather than autism (which I assuredly don’t have, as two psychotherapists, who gave me treatment back in the mid-1990s, attested) as a mental condition to be given compassion for, as any reasonable person would do, in spite of the frustrations one may have in living with an autistic.

Often, Mom didn’t even need to smear me: just allowing R., F., and J. to bully me with nary a word of reprimand to them was enough to make their contempt of me seem justified. To this day, my siblings go to bed every night, not missing a wink of sleep in contemplating even the possibility that they may have done me wrong during the crucial, formative years of my early life, and thus emotionally scarring me for life.

Their contempt for me often manifested itself in a total disregard for my basic right to have boundaries. F. was typically the worst offender. When I was a teenager/pre-teen, he’d often barge into my room without any respect for my right to privacy. I could have been undressed; he didn’t care.

On one occasion, when I was about twelve and F. was about eighteen (and therefore old enough to be responsible for his actions), I was using the toilet, and he, also needing to use it and in a pissy mood for God-knows-what reason, decided that my having gotten there first wasn’t a good enough reason to let me finish. In a rage, he barged in and yanked me out of the bathroom. (Yet, according to him, I’m the one who doesn’t think about other people.)

On other occasions, around the same time, I’d have been in my room, engaging in maladaptive daydreaming, and F. would barge in, either mocking me or doing some otherwise immature thing (like playing with our dog); and if I gave the perfectly understandable reaction of complaining about his lack of respect for my right to privacy, he’d rationalize his rudeness by going into a snit about my not going outside and making friends.

Of course, he never gave a split second of consideration as to how his constant bullying of me–combined with our brother’s and sister’s bullying of me, Mom’s defence of them (and gaslighting me with the autism lie), and of course, the bullying I’d suffered in school–was poisoning my mind against the very idea of seeking out friends (furthermore, in spite of all the psychological hindrances they’d all afflicted me with, I still managed to make a few friends here and there in my youth).

F. wasn’t the only family member to come into my room uninvited. On one occasion, I’d posted some writing on my wall, ideas reflecting certain personal beliefs I’d been cultivating. I’d have been about nineteen or twenty at the time. I wrote up a list of “Virtues” and “Vices”, meant for my personal reflection. One of those people (probably my mother or my sister, J.–their personalities are practically interchangeable) went into my room and saw what I’d written, for now, scribbled under the list of my “Virtues”, was the word “MANNERS”.

Those two self-righteous busybodies were always griping about my rudeness (which, I admit, has been a problem of mine: consider the non-empathetic family I grew up with to get an idea why), while forgetting how they were often not all that much more polite.

I can imagine their probable reaction to “The Virtues” as I’d written them: “What an arrogant little prick that Mawr is! What does he know about virtue? Who is he to pretend he has wisdom in ethics? Who is he to push his ignorant ideas about right and wrong on the world? [Recall that I was ‘pushing my morality’ in the would-have-been privacy of my bedroom!] I’ll teach him a lesson: here’s a basic virtue he has no grip on at all!” She writes MANNERS. “There!” She walks out in a triumphant huff of pride, giving no thought to how she, in fact, was forcing her ‘superior’ ethics onto me, while rudely invading my privacy.

Many years later, Mom’s incessant prating about Asperger Syndrome, insisting I have it, without any need to consult psychiatrists to make sure, drove me to re-examine my childhood and conclude (as described here, Part 3–The Dawn of Realization) that she’d been gaslighting me with autism lies right from my childhood.

I began distancing myself from the family, starting at the beginning of the 2010s and continuing–and intensifying–up until her death in 2016: I did this partly to punish them, and partly to establish those ever-so-needed protective boundaries, which, of course, they never wanted to respect, as evidenced by, firstly, Mom’s string of seven lies (scroll down halfway on the link to find them listed), told to me the summer before she died; and secondly, by R.’s cyberstalking of me in May 2016, when she died, and I’d left my landline telephone unplugged to stop them from bothering me.

Recall R.’s livid reaction to my YouTube video, in which I recited Philip Larkin’s poem, “This Be the Verse” (Emotional Abuse (Part 6–Is My Mother Dead?). Had he just minded his own business, though, he could have spared himself the pain of hearing my bitter reading, right when he was in the middle of grieving our mother’s death. He may think I “misunderstand” our mother, but he misunderstands the true nature of my relationship with her, in his smug delusion that she “loved me more than anyone else on the planet”.

For fuck’s sake, R.!

During his cyberstalking of me in that May of 2016, R. also found me on the PsychopathFree website, where I’d posted a shorter version of my story. I’d made the mistake of adding a photo of myself on the page, thus making it easy for R. to find me. My account was removed when he tried to contact me there, to tell me that Mom had died; I suspect he gave an ever-so-cursory reading of what I’d written, smugly called ‘bullshit’ on it, then told me of her death in the nastiest, most guilt-tripping language he could muster (Similar to his snarky reaction to my YouTube video: recall how I wouldn’t call Mom at the hospital as he’d hoped I would; but after her refusal to admit to the string of seven disgusting lies she’d told me, what else would I have done?), thus shocking the admins on the website, and making them close my account.

Thanks a lot, R.! Stalk me on a website where I was getting the emotional support I’d never gotten from you, F., or J., and make them kill my account! No boundaries!

Have I no right to vent my frustrations with all of you, R.? You don’t have to expose yourself to my ramblings if you don’t want to.

As I’ve complained so many times before, Mom and her flying monkeys regarded me as little more than an extension of themselves, hence the lack of respect for my boundaries. I was supposed to be only the brother/son they wanted me to be: Mom’s identified patient, the sports player F. wanted me to be, the social conformist J. wanted me to be, and the emotional punching bag all of them wanted me to be. Creating this kind of artificial self is the kind of thing that leads to toxic shame and the danger of psychological fragmentation (scroll down to “The False Self” on this link).

Yet, remember: the family all love me!

I refuse to allow my siblings, the three surviving members of that family, to infiltrate my life anymore. They can carp and complain all they want about what an ‘unfilial’ son I am, but NO CONTACT is a perfectly reasonable way to deal with a family of emotional abusers who think they not only have the right to manipulate, bully, mock, and verbally abuse me, but also imagine that I have no right to complain about their attitude.

And now, Dear Reader, after tolerating all my complaining about my family, I’d like to reward your patience with a little advice, in case you’re going through similar problems with your family, boyfriend/girlfriend, or spouse. If people won’t respect your right to have boundaries, then you not only have the right to impose extra-strong boundaries that keep toxic people from continuing to hurt you; you also have the duty to do so, for the sake of preserving your mental health. It’s called self-care, NOT selfishness.

Here’s the thing about emotional abusers: their behaviour doesn’t improve over time–it gets worse. My mother’s attitude deteriorated with age, as typically happens with narcissists. You can try to stand up for your rights, but they won’t listen: they may physically hear you, but nothing you say will ever register in their brains, for they cannot take criticism as well as they can dish it out. Cut them out of your life, for the sake of your sanity. You deserve better.

I’m sure that if R., F., and/or J. ever find my blog and read any of what I’ve written about them, they’ll troll me in the comments, saying how ‘wrong’ I am about everything (conveniently for them), then make vicious slurs on my character.

Ironically, they’ll be proving how right I am about them.

It will never occur to them, in a million years, to comment by saying, “Wow, Mawr, I never thought about our relationship this way. I have issues with some of the points you’ve made here [fair is fair], but a lot of what you’ve said here has given me food for thought. I don’t even know how to begin to apologize to you for all that we and Mom did to you. I really hope you can find it in your heart to forgive us, then one day, we can fix everything between us and be a family again.”

If they were to say something like that in the comments, they would, in all irony, prove me wrong. Dialectics (i.e., the unity of opposites): sometimes, in order to be right, you have to be wrong yourself. I have been wrong in their eyes for decades; maybe, R., F., and J., the three of you can switch roles with me, for a change.