Dear Cali Chica:

I feel comfortable. I wrote to you earlier that the details of what she shared with me here and in private email is confidential, I will not tell you what she told me. But what I learned about her, that is my private property, to share as I see fit. And my purpose of sharing it with you is for your “own best interest” which is what you stated right above. (As well as for her own best interest! I am still interested in her best interest and wish her well).

I never thought about this issue though, how you can possibly practice strong boundaries with her, so let’s figure this out together. I’ll think as I type: let’s say you have a puppy who is as cute as can be, delightful! You have a wonderful time with this puppy, but every once in a while the puppy bites you and your husband. You don’t know when it’s coming, and often when it happens, you don’t even know you were bitten. You feel confused, it hurts, but no imprint of teeth where you were bitten, you are not sure. What boundaries to you set with this puppy?

You can put one of these things over its face, so it can never bite you. But you can’t do  that with  your sister, make her incapable of talking to you or behaving any which way, you can’t restrain her. So back to the puppy, restraining its mouth is not an option. What do you do?

You can do what a lot  of people do: limit the time with the puppy/ with people who figuratively bite. So you are bitten less often. It doesn’t prevent biting, only make it so that you are bitten less often. A lot  of people try something else, to not feel the pain, to be less sensitive. It would be something like when you are with the puppy, you were thick gloves that cover your hands and arms, maybe you can wear an armor, so  that the bites don’t hurt. But it is quite clumsy, to  play with a puppy while wearing protection. It restrains you! Problem is there is no such thing as an emotional armor. You can numb yourself for a short time  only, at best, while let’s say taking particular numbing drugs, tranquilizers, or narcotics, or let’s say you take a very hot bath and for the first five minutes you are not anxious about when you will be bitten next.

What if you scare the puppy, when it bites you, you scream at  it, or hit it, or place it in a cage, isolated, as punishment. Maybe the puppy will learn its lesson and no longer bite you-

– I think I am getting somewhere here. Not that you should hit your sister of  course. But let her suffer a consequence when she does bite you. But to do that, you have to  identify the time you were just bitten. This is the difficult part because you don’t know! Sometimes you may think you got it, but you are not sure, you may ask her, she won’t tell you and at times you have no  idea.

Unlike the puppy imagery, there are no teeth imprint or blood to make it clear to you that you were indeed bitten.

Take it from here, will you?

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

Using the example you gave, she bit you, you gave her “direct feedback”, in other words you let her know that you were just bitten by her, and her response was to  bite you more (“throwing it back at  me.. reminding me many times I have done exactly the same”), so she is blaming you for biting her, and telling you that she “suffered plenty .. protecting” you, meaning that in the past she protected you from being bitten by others, “and god forbid she slips once in a while” and bites you.

So she “remind you of all the good work she’s done” protecting you, and she lets you  know that “she is only human and is allowed slip ups” aka biting you “once in a while”. Then she “get more angry” and hangs up the phone.

So what she is telling you is that life is tough ( agree), that people bite (I agree),that she protected you in the past from other people’s bites (that’s admirable), and that she is only human and therefore she has to bite you once in a while and you should take it.

Let’s look at the last part: she has to bite you because she is human and you should take it and not complain to her..  because your complaining is making her suffer and she suffered enough, so don’t add to her suffering by complaining about being occasionally bitten by her.

In other words, your fair assertiveness feels to her like aggression and her message is: stop your aggression against me!

The puppy bites, you remove your bitten hand and scream at the puppy: you bit me! And the puppy is petulant, angry: you screamed at me! So what if I bit you, I am only a puppy, all puppies bite, and you are unfair to me!

Well, her solution to the problem is that you don’t assert yourself with her, but take her biting passively, and see her biting as insignificant in the context of her good works  of past (present and future). In other words, her perspective is that she will keep biting you, that she is entitled to bite you occasionally (she earned that right).

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

I want to make sure I understand what you are saying: are you saying that biting aka abuse is “the nature of relationships especially family ones”, that you should accept that she will bite you again, and that you will bite her too, and you shouldn’t feel guilty about biting her because she bites/ everyone bites???

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

Good, I was scared for a moment, saw in my mind’s eye all our work going down the drain. My goodness, I am glad to read that abuse is indeed “Wrong. So wrong”.

I’ll make it short and direct (we can develop it further later):

1. You have to make sure that you no longer abuse anyone. I had to do the same. This integrity is necessary: don’t dish out abuse and do not accept any.

2. People who abuse do so as a result of their suffering. It is very difficult to suffer and no longer abuse. It is often the sufferer’s only relief. A suffer doesn’t want to stop abusing others because it is her relief.

It takes enduring suffering without abusing. This takes something of a strong, decent character.

3. People who  abuse feel justified, as if they earned that right, especially if they did or do good things for the person they abuse. They figure: I did or am doing all these good things for this person, I am entitled to also abuse that person from time to time.

No one is entitled to abuse another, no matter what good they did for another.

Take it from here, whenever you are ready.

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

ROAR back at you! I read your recent post but I am not focused enough to read as well as I want to. Feel free to add anything you want to add to the above, if you do, before I return, maybe specifically what 1-4 mean in the context of your future interactions with your sister.

Will be back to your thread tomorrow morning, have a good rest of Thursday!

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

Good Friday morning. I just read your first sentences and had to respond before reading the rest: earlier this morning (before you posted)  I thought about re-reading our recent communication so to post to you what I learned from it (something I normally do with threads), but then I thought to myself: Cali Chica will do that, she doesn’t need me to figure it out for her, she can and will figure it out (learn what there is to learn) on her own. And so, I went to another member’s thread and re-read it, then came back and read: “I went back to  our threads from the last 2 days and re-read them”!

I just read the rest of your post. Here is a key sentence for me: “I do, by all means, have a deep primal love for my sister”. The next sentence:  “The type that is difficult to explain”. Things that are difficult to explain interest me, so I am going to try to explain just that, what it is, this “deep primal love”. I just looked up the definition of the word primal, and the first definition I came across is: “relating to an early stage in evolutionary development”. Synonyms listed: initial, early, earliest, first.

The earliest meeting between Cali Chica and calisister is when CC was seven years old and calisister was a few days old. The baby doesn’t talk, so the primal relationship is non-verbal. The baby doesn’t think in the sense that she doesn’t possess words yet, and she doesn’t bite yet- she doesn’t hide her feelings and then bite. Seven year old CC does not engage in conversations with the baby. What she knows about the baby is what is true to all babies. This primal love then has nothing to do with an individual personality or character of the baby (beyond it crying more or less than other babies and such), because these are not developed yet.

Fast forward, this primal love you feel for her has nothing to do with who your sister is, who she became or evolved to. It is all about that early, long gone “stage in evolutionary development”, a seven year old and a baby, later, an eight year old and a one year old, by then the primal love has been established.

Let’s see what you wrote about her in your post today: “she is that delightful puppy that tends to unpredictably bite”- the delightful puppy is the baby part in her, the passive aggressiveness is what she became later, not a part of that primal love.

Her communication is “indirect- which can leave me feeling confused, uneasy, and feeling invalidated”- the baby that she was, the one you have that primal love for, communicated directly as all babies do. The indirect communication on her part is something that happened later, and is not the object of your primal love for her. And it harms your mental health (“Confused, uneasy.. invalidated.. hurt”).

“I know that I do not do well with indirect or passive aggressive communication”- no one does well with this in the context of intimate relationships! It is always a problem in this context.

Next you wrote that you don’t want to lose contact with her but, “I have to accept, even if it feels sad, that I am going to inevitably lose that ‘closeness’ I feel”.

My thinking at this point: I don’t think you will lose that closeness feeling because it is primary. It is a good idea that you lose any and all misunderstanding about the nature of this closeness. This closeness is preverbal. It was not built around verbal communication. So stands to reason, limit the verbal communication with her, talk way less with her, do not continue a routine of past daily best-friends conversation. Keep contact and interact with the baby part of her, keep it that simple.

“I will maintain my main energy on my inner circle”, good. “and ask  myself each time I communicate with her and/ or make a plan with her: does this serve me RIGHT NOW, does it serve my husband. And lastly, is this a good time”- I would go beyond that and change the way you view her. If you view her as the person she was when you formed that deep primary bond with her, you will no longer care what she thinks and believes and so forth, because you will see her as that baby.

Leave the communication with her as the adult that she is, to other people who may form a bond with the adult that she is. For you, she is just that baby. You are not here to be her therapist or her best friend. This new view of her will allow you and her to enjoy that earliest pleasant closeness.

(I didn’t understand your last paragraph regarding “this ‘luxury'”)

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

It is now almost 1 pm your time. I hope the next few hours go smoothly, as difficult as they are,  and that maybe you get a massage later for your back, that you rest well this weekend and have a pleasant and productive meeting with your in laws tomorrow. Looking forward to read from you Monday.

anita