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Op/Ed – Ask The Therapist – Scapegoated Caregiver Grieves Family Betrayal

Halifax (Glynis Sherwood Counseling) – Each month – Glynis Sherwood answers a question from a member of her mailing list on dealing with family scapegoating, narcissism, complicated grief, CPTSD, chronic anxiety, and relationship challenges. –

Seven years ago I moved out from a man who was so much like my father that I was deeply triggered and went on a deep journey to understand the mind-boggling lies and strange landscape of unreality that this man created.  What a gift, really, to discover narcissism and to finally understand the mind warp that was my father.

I am the oldest of eight children.  My mother, I now know, enmeshed with me and put me up on a very rigid pedestal.  She needed me to raise all her kids so she made me out to be very good, always fair, to never have any needs or emotions. I was praised and given attention by her for being what she wanted.  I thought it was love and, in some ways, it was.  

Meanwhile, my father beat us, moved houses and schools every year so we never had community support, and was especially cruel to my 3 brothers.  I went to 14 different schools by the time I was in high school.  Because I was smart and did well academically I graduated a year early, at 16, and moved out.  My parents were getting a divorce and I sided completely with my mother as she had been a fairly good parent — if a deeply codependent one.

I moved as far away from my family as I could get.  I was sick of being a babysitter and confidante, then being beat up by my father for standing up to him on behalf of my younger siblings.  When I landed in Boulder Colorado, I was newly divorced and had a 18 month old son.  Thanks to the very enlightened town I ended up in I discovered 12-step programs like Adult Children of Alcoholics and CoDA.  I found an incest survivor group and began to process my father’s sexual abuse.  Eventually, I found an excellent counselor and began a process of inner work that continues to this day.

I realized that my mother’s enmeshment had damaged me as much as my father’s cruelty and I began to learn boundaries.  At one point, in my 40s, I shared with my sisters that my father had sexually abused me.  To my surprise, my family thought I’d made it up!  I thought that his more than evident cruelty would have convinced them (one brother had his nose broken when he was bashed in the face with a two-by-four) but no. As much as this hurt, I was still too far away to be overly bothered by my family, so I worked through it.

Then my mother (now married for the fourth time) became very ill and almost died.  She and I were very close and had even worked through some of our issues so I really wanted to be with her and to help care for her.  My step-father needed help as she was bed-bound and asked me to come out. So, I quit my job and cashed in my retirement, put my household in storage and drove to Ohio to live with them.  I had always felt, deep down, that I “should” live near family.  Yes, I could go out into the world and live away from them but I had a secret belief that I was not a valid person away from them. I had been the family “hero” who had stood up to my father’s beatings and taken his abuse instead of my mom or sibs so I expected to be welcomed as I was now doing the very hard job of caring for my mother.

Instead, I found that I was only the hero in my mother’s eyes and that my sibs resent and envy me.  I see now that the scarce family resources of love and attention were taken up by me, my sister just younger than me (we were the working unit known as “the girls”), and my mom’s favorite son.  There was very little to trickle down, and I hated the straitjacket of domestic duty that smothered me, but all my sibs saw was that I was “the favorite.”

I was really uneasy.  I’d left my very conscious and loving family of the heart to come to do my duty only to discover I had moved into a very toxic household.  My step-father, whom I saw every summer for about 15 years and was trusted by me, hit on me twice, and when I politely declined, became toxic and punitive in a very passive aggressive way.  

When I turned to my 3 sisters who live in Ohio for support and guidance I discovered none of them believed me. Again! I was demeaned and belittled and made fun of.  I became the family joke.  “Oh, yeah, everyone always hits on her..”  Wink wink, Nudge nudge.  This despite the very scary evidence that my stepfather was unstable and had tried to overdose mom on sleeping pills and other alarming things I was witness to.  My forays into community resources got me nowhere as it was just my word ( a non-resident) against his (lived in that small town a long time.)

My money ran out and when my former job came open a year later, I drove back.  I was driving ahead of the COVID closures so I was not able to say good-bye to my mother as I had moved out of the household after the sexual advance.  So, I went from Hero to Zero somehow over my long years away.  And not even my closest sister “got it” that I was just as neglected, expected and abused as everyone.  Sadly, or maybe not, maybe it’s better, I don’t want to have anything to do with my family now. I feel so let down and betrayed. There is almost no reason to stay in touch.  How do I now deal with feeling orphaned and betrayed? I don’t really have a family, not like I thought, and I don’t now know how to relate.  Do I even have to?

Read Glynis’ Detailed Response Here

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