When Toxic Families Are ‘Helpful’

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

I: Introduction

Part of the condescending attitude that toxic families have towards the scapegoat, or identified patient, is the idea that they’re ‘trying to help’ him or her. This is the lamest rationalization they can come up with when, really, they’re just trying to impose their will on their victims.

In their collective narcissism, they imagine that they have it all together, and that the scapegoat is clueless. If the scapegoat is doing something his or her bullying family simply doesn’t understand, he or she is judged rather than listened to. Not the slightest attempt is made to understand the scapegoat. It is assumed by the toxic family that the scapegoat, in his or her idiosyncratic or eccentric habits, is ‘wrong’ to be acting those ways, and therefore must have his or her behaviour ‘corrected.’

It never occurs to the family bullies that maybe they are the ones who have the problem (or at least are to a large extent the problem), and that whatever personality problems the scapegoat may actually have, that those problems were largely the result, directly or indirectly, of all that bullying (as opposed to the scapegoat having been ‘born that way’). The notion of pulling out the beam from their own eyes, so they can see clearly to help their brother get the mote out of his eye (Matthew 7:1-5), is lost on them.

This is one of the central problems I had with the five people with whom I had the misfortune of growing up in the same house. Each of them more or less had an agenda for me, something I was supposed to conform to, and when I didn’t conform, they made life very difficult for me.

II: My Parents

Though his agenda for me was quite irritating in its own right, my father was probably the least unreasonable of the bunch. At least when he tried to push me into getting a Bachelor of Commerce when I started university (at which I was failing miserably: I ended up dropping out of it half-way into my first year), his intentions were good…if misguided. He wanted me to get a high-paying job, and to do well in life. When it didn’t work out, he was disappointed, of course, but his attitude wasn’t rejecting of me as a person.

Enter my mother, whose intentions were nothing less than malignant. In her narrative about me having an autism spectrum disorder that I, about a mere ten years before this writing, learned was not only utter nonsense, but was also–a pretty dead certainty–a deliberate fabrication, she’d wanted me to be a loser my whole life, too afraid in my ‘mental disability’ to face the challenges of the world, emotionally and financially dependent on her, totally under her control. I was strong-willed enough, however, not to play that role, not to live the underachieving life she’d planned out for me.

In her lies, however, she smugly went on and on about how labelling me with classic autism (when I was a child), then with Asperger Syndrome (from about 2002-2016, when she died), was meant “to help” me. Honestly, people aren’t helped when labelled; they’re helped when listened to. And being lied to about mental deficiencies you don’t have doesn’t help you…it’s the opposite of help.

How is robbing someone of his confidence, from childhood to adulthood, supposed to be a form of help?

III: J.

My older sister, J., also tried to be ‘helpful.’ In her opinion, I can’t do anything right. She made it her mission to change just about everything in my personality. Apparently, I don’t dress correctly. I don’t listen to the right music. I don’t have the correct political views. Any time I express an opinion she’s never encountered before or considers odd, it’s automatically ‘wrong’ rather than an opportunity for her to see things from a fresh perspective.

Yet if I ever defend my ways with any measure of vigour, I am the closed-minded one, not her.

This snotty, know-it-all attitude of hers had a perfect rationale: she was getting me to see the ‘error of my ways.’ She has always deluded herself into thinking that what she was doing for me, back when I was living with the family in Canada, was for my own good, an act of love. As the family golden child, she felt obligated to play the role of the ‘loving sister,’ and correct my errant ways.

Her attempted ‘corrections’ of me were really a projection of our mother’s ‘corrections’ of her, since our narcissist mother manipulated her into playing the role of golden child as much as Mom manipulated me into being the scapegoat. J. mistook Mom’s mind games for love, imagining Mom was trying to make her into a ‘better’ person; for this reason, J.’s pushing me into being a ‘better’ younger brother was something she thought was an act of love, rather than a form of bullying and manipulation…just as Mom had bullied her into being the perfect daughter, a projection of Mom’s idealized version of herself. Mom’s False Self became J.’s False Self.

I refused to be an extension of J.’s ego (and of the negative side of our mother’s), as J. should have refused to be an extension of the positive side of Mom’s; but J. didn’t have the guts to refuse it, because getting Mommy’s (fake) love was all-important to J. My freedom from bullying and gaslighting is more important to me than getting Mom’s, or J.’s, fake, oh-so-conditional love.

What J. fails to understand is that this urge to change me into an utterly different–and ‘more acceptable’–person is another rejection of who I am. Love is about accepting people as they are, even though their imperfections are annoying from time to time. J.’s rejection of me, therefore, was the opposite of love. It was the opposite of helping, too.

IV: F.

Next, I must come to the attempts of my older brother, F., ‘to fix’ what was wrong with me. Now, I must confess that, when I was a child, and especially as a result of when we moved from the Toronto area to Hamilton in 1977, there was something seriously wrong with me. My family’s ‘diagnosis’ of my problems, however, was not only terribly wrong, but also to a great extent caused by them.

I can’t blame them for the move; that couldn’t be helped. My then-best friend, Neil, lived in Rexdale, just down the street from our house, and having to move away left me emotionally devastated (I was seven or eight years old at the time). On top of this, I was being bullied at school…and on top of that, I was being bullied at home…mainly–and in a largely physical way–by F.

He used to rationalize his anger towards me by claiming that he was frustrated that, in Hamilton, I made no attempts to make friends (actually, I made many attempts, but my social awkwardness made most of those attempts failures). One of the effects of bullying, as well as of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) in general, is that one tends to self-isolate, to protect oneself from further bullying. It never occurred to F. that he was one of the main causes of the very thing I was doing that, so he says, was frustrating him.

His attempt ‘to help’ me go out there and make friends was to force me to play baseball. He’d throw a ball to me, and I’d swing at it with a bat. It didn’t matter to him at all that I didn’t want to play baseball. One of my bad habits at the time was engaging in maladaptive daydreaming (a self-isolating escape from reality into fantasy–a mechanism, really, for coping with trauma), something the family had every good reason in the world to get me to stop doing, but something they were going about in all the wrong ways.

Granted, I can’t expect them to have had all the answers to fix this complicated problem, but I can expect them, as my family, to have a loving enough attitude to empathize with me, to attempt to get at the root of the problem (bullying, ACE, and my traumas related to these and to the loss of Neil’s company), rather than thinking that shaming me would make me stop the maladaptive daydreaming.

Similarly, to be fair to F., I couldn’t have expected him, a teen at the time, to have had the maturity to understand that forcing me to play a sport I didn’t want to play wasn’t going to work; but I could have expected my parents to have done their job and told him that he couldn’t make me like baseball. Of course, the fact that Mom was lying to me about autism, as well as winking at almost all of F.’s bullying, should indicate that she wasn’t interested in helping me at all.

Indeed, she was cultivating the very trauma, self-hatred, and alienation that was making me behave the way I was.

V: R.

Now, my eldest brother, R., never really tried to bend me to his will, to be ‘helpful’ (the reason being that the smug egotist never gave a shit about me). He never did, that is, except for one time, when our mother was dying. (I discussed the whole story in Part 6 of this post: “Is My Mother Dead?”)

Several months prior to the story given above (and described in detail in Part 5 of that post: “More Elaborate Lies”), Mom had told me a string of about seven lies about my cousin, S., and his mother, my aunt (a more detailed account of these lies is given in this post). Understanding these stories is key to having the context behind this issue with my brother, R.

My mother had already been a proven liar with her autism and Asperger Syndrome fabrications; these two, and the seven lies told me in the late summer of 2015, were three of the eight outrages she perpetrated against me, as listed in VII: Conclusion, from this post. All of these outrages were more than enough for me not to want to talk to her on her death bed, a very mild punishment given the enormity of what she’d done to me.

Immediately after having told me those seven horrible lies by email, Mom had the audacity to pressure me into getting on an airplane and flying from East Asia (where I live and work) to Canada to visit her, because she “would love to see [me].” She expressed herself as if she’d done nothing wrong, and I was expected to snap to attention and do her bidding. By telling her in an email reply that I didn’t want to see her, nor did I ever want to communicate with her by email or phone, because of her “Lies, lies, and more lies,” I was simply trying to protect myself, but she predictably spun my response as if I’d gone crazy and had “hurt” her, a typical narc tactic.

I actually did end up talking to her–once–on R.’s cellphone while she, 77, was in hospital, dying of metastasized breast cancer. During the phone conversation, she never took any responsibility for her lies, the acknowledgement of which could have been a wonderful moment of final healing and reconciliation between us. Instead, she not only pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about by accusing her of lying, but she also laid a thick guilt trip on me for being a “self-centred” son and for having “hurt” her. Then she congratulated herself on having given me “the most love” when I was a pre-teen.

So, when she’d been lying to me, around when I was from nine to twelve years old, about an autism spectrum disorder I don’t have–using such extreme language as to say that psychiatrists had recommended locking me away in an asylum with mentally retarded people, or that I might not have even made a good garbageman when I grew up–and when she did virtually nothing to stop the bullying I got from R., F., and J., she was giving me “the most love”? I was furious.

The above is the context in which R.’s wish to have me do what he wanted should be understood. After the ordeal of having to listen to Mom talk to me that way on R.’s cellphone, I chatted with him. I tried to get him to understand why I’d been acting the way I was, in response to her lies, but of course he didn’t listen to a word I was saying (presumably imagining I was making her death ‘all about me’ instead of about her…actually, I was making it all about her). Anyway, he talked some clichéd nonsense about how ‘Mom loved us all our lives, so now it’s our turn to love her back.’

He wanted me to call his cellphone number to chat with her regularly between that time and her eventual death–an easy and perfectly reasonable thing to do, on the face of it…if your dying mother happens to have been a genuinely good one who ‘loved us all our lives,’ but in my mother’s case, I beg to differ.

Needless to say, what R. wanted wasn’t helping anybody, except her in her narcissistic schemes. This ‘brother’ of mine never showed any real interest in contacting me the whole time I’ve lived in East Asia; the only reason he wanted me to contact Mom is for the same reason the family has ever acknowledged my very existence–as an extension of them. When I never made those calls he’d requested of me, he began cyberstalking me. He had the bad luck of stumbling upon a video I’d made and posted on YouTube (under my original name back in 2009), an obscure little recitation of Philip Larkin‘s poem, “This Be the Verse.”

Now, Mom had just died, and he was very upset with my embittered recitation (a pain he could have easily spared himself if he’d simply minded his own business: he knew I was mad at Mom, so he should have known that sneaking around in my online affairs would have been like walking in an emotional minefield). Below was his snarky comment, almost a word-for-word quote, which I’ve since hidden from the YouTube page because of how triggering it is for me:

“Disturbing words from a disturbed individual with an imperfect mother who loved you more than anyone else on the planet. You misunderstand her, just as you misunderstand everyone else except yourself. Shame on you.”

Everything he said in this comment is wrong, except for the very first two words…and even their correctness is dependent on their interpretation. My words weren’t disturbing for having been crazy and way off the mark; if so, they wouldn’t have been disturbing, but easily dismissed as nonsense. They were disturbing to him because they were true. Mom and Dad really did fuck us all up, and R. doesn’t have the guts to confront the trauma we all received from our parents.

VI: Everything Wrong With R.’s Comment

As for being “a disturbed individual,” though I do believe I suffer from C-PTSD (caused, for the most part, by…which five people, I wonder?), I’m not any more inherently “disturbed” than R., or F., or J., or any other average person. Making a video in which one vents one’s frustrations against the family one has been hurt by doesn’t make one mentally ill, just emotionally scarred.

Calling her “an imperfect mother” is meaningless. Is anyone out there perfect, R.? I’m not concerned with Mom’s imperfections; I’m concerned with her lies, triangulating, smear campaigns not just on me but on our cousins, and her divide-and-conquer agenda. Loving mothers don’t do these things…period! News flash, R.: I’m “imperfect,” too; but there is a double standard in our family as to whose imperfections are tolerated, and whose aren’t.

R. has no idea who “on the planet” has loved me more or less; nor does he have any idea how much or how little our mother ‘loved’ me. All he knows is that neither he nor F. have ever loved me, or even liked me. He projects, onto the whole world, his and F.’s unbrotherly attitude towards me to justify how shitty they’ve always been to me. And incidentally, R., Dad loved me, and my wife loves me–in spite of their own frustrations with me–far more than Mom or J. ever did.

R. also has no idea of who I understand or misunderstand. I actually understand our mother all too well. R. flagrantly misunderstands me, and to this day he wilfully refuses even to try to understand me, as do F. and J., because judging me is far more fun than it is to examine how the events in my life shaped my personality. Imagining I was ‘born this way’ (i.e., Mom’s description of ‘my autism’) means they don’t have to rethink anything.

I, on the other hand, in spite of how judgemental I’m being to the five of them here (everything that goes around, comes around), have made efforts to understand what must have happened in the lives of all five of them to have made them what they were and are to each other, to me, and to our cousins. You can read about my speculations here, among other posts I’ve written on the subject.

I also never had the advantage of witnessing their early years, as they had for me. They could have, with reasonable ease, worked out the life events that made me what I am, but didn’t, not because they couldn’t, but because they never cared to try–listening to Mom’s lies about me was sufficient for them. I, on the other hand, who had virtually no first-hand material to work with, cared enough to try to construct theories about how they became so nasty to me.

To put it briefly, R., F., and J. traumatized me because Mom and Dad traumatized them when they were little. Our parents, in turn, were traumatized by such things as the Great Depression, the Blitz, and the early death of my maternal grandfather. None of them were ‘born that way.’

R.’s final remark, that I “misunderstand everyone else except [my]self,” doesn’t even make sense. People who misunderstand everyone around them are by far the least likely to understand themselves, because personality development is all about symbiotic relationships with others. Our misunderstandings of others are usually projections of our misunderstood, unexamined selves.

This overgeneralization of his, emotional rather than logical, was obviously meant as a slur on my supposed autism, defined by my family as a kind of narcissistic self-absorption. This is an outdated conception of what autism really is, and a projection of their collective narcissism onto me, the identified patient.

“Shame on you” was meant to guilt-trip me into communicating with the family and apologizing to them for expressing what I had a perfect right to express (in the video), and for establishing boundaries where I had a perfect right to establish them. This attempt at goading me into doing what they wanted me to do proves once again that their trying to be ‘helpful’ was all fake and phoney.

VII: Did Mom Really Die in May of 2016?

Here’s another thing: though I assume that Mom really died back then (the pendulum swings towards it being only probably true…I never saw a corpse!), it’s still possible that my original speculation, that her death had been faked, was at the time correct.

With the combination of everything that happened back around April and May of 2016–my being informed of my portion of the inheritance in Mom’s will, the above comment from R., an email from J. saying that I had some belongings left in Mom’s home, a notice about her funeral mailed to me (presumably with photos: I never opened the package; were the pictures of Mom Photoshopped?), etc.–it really seems as though she died, hence I said so here.

But as it says in this video, one of the ways a toxic family tries to hoover you back into the relationship is to make a false alarm (e.g., a member of the family is ‘dying’). I’m still assuming she really died back then, as the evidence still leans that way. In any case, if she hadn’t died in the spring of 2016, she’s probably dead by now (i.e., having died at around the age of 80), from old age and a ‘broken heart’ from my having gone NO CONTACT. Incidentally, I will not be held responsible for a ‘broken heart’ that she’d brought on herself with her lies and manipulation.

Now, if the family had been faking her death back in the spring of 2016, if they had been lying to me about her worsening health–right after I’d accused her of lying, which they, of course, dismissed as nonsense right as they were engaging in further deception of me–then they are even more reptilian than I’d originally understood them to be, and my actions are all the more justified.

To my knowledge, assuming the above is true, they haven’t tried any more stunts on me since then…thank the gods for that.

VIII: Conclusion

Anyway, in sum, these examples that I’ve given should help you understand, Dear Reader, that toxic families don’t help you in any way, in spite of their claims that they do. They don’t help you get better work. They’re unfit to diagnose you with any mental condition. Their bullying doesn’t encourage you to make friends–the trauma it causes does the opposite of that. Their constant criticisms destroy your self-esteem, making it all the harder for you to thrive in life. And they can’t reunite a family–literally–to save anyone’s life.

Now, I know that I’ve said a whole lot of harsh things about my family, and perhaps, Dear Reader, you’re finding my harshness rather grating; but try to understand the pain and hurt they caused me…for decades, without any sincere expression of remorse. When one has that much pain bottled up inside oneself, one can’t help but spew rage against one’s victimizers over and over again.

This leads me to my next point: my repetition of largely the same incidents, over and over again, after having discussed essentially the same things in so many previous posts. Part of my purpose in all of this repetition is a processing of my pain through writing therapy, a putting of trauma into words. It is part of the process of healing, and if you have gone through the same kinds of things, I recommend doing this kind of writing again and again, to heal yourselves.