Dear Kara:

I want to reply a second time. On Jan 26, 2019, three years and five months ago, you wrote in regard to your sister: “I know she will tell me that I am awkward, socially inept to hurt me and not to help me” –

– it is not far stretched to think that currently, she is still trying to hurt you, not to help you. When she recently told you in regard to your boyfriend that “she was not impressed.  That she thought I would be with someone more similar (i.e., career, education)”, her intention- being fully aware of it, or not- may have been to tell you that your choice of a boyfriend was awkward, socially inept.

You wrote back on Jan 26, 2019: “my sister always picked on me. Put me down. Treated me like I was inferior” – and recently, she treated your choice of a boyfriend as an inferior choice, and in so doing, she picked on you, put you down.

You wrote yesterday: “she was not impressed….  And to be frank, that hurt to hear” – because it hurts to be picked on and to  be put down, doesn’t it?

Back to Jan 2019:  “At family events, after we all hit a certain age, my sister would always hog my cousins from me. Making me feel like I was always the one to be left out” – is she trying now to cause you to break up with your boyfriend so that once again, you are the one left out?

“My sister always had to be right, so the moment I learned to stand up for myself, the more she learned to hurt my self-esteem” – don’t make her right by breaking up with your boyfriend; don’t let her to keep  hurting your self-esteem.

You wrote yesterday regarding your boyfriend: “I feel confident I know what I want and he has informed me he knows what he wants. We both want to be together. We are both on the same page concerning marriage and building a family” –

– to know what people want is very important when it comes to choosing what kinds of relationships to have with others, if any. It is sad when a family member (a parent, a sibling, other) wants to hurt another family member but it happens too often. In regard to siblings, it is often an older sibling who is repeatedly trying to hurt a younger sibling.

I have a saying: when it comes to Family, sometimes a family is just another F word. A crude saying, isn’t it? But yet, sadly and sometimes tragically true. Too often it is people outside your family that you can trust, not the people within your family. And in regard to your sister, seems to me,  that she is a person you would be very unwise to trust.

anita