Siblings – Trivialities & Intricacies

It’s about respect in today’s random question. It asks…

Who has completely lost your respect?

One person, who completely lost my respect, is my mother’s son [my so-called brother]. He has been rude and disrespectful towards my parents for as far back, as I am able to remember. He is a narcissistic, manipulative and aggressive jerk, to put it bluntly. So long as you serve a purpose to his needs or benefit he will be nice to your face and ignore you completely otherwise. If you dare to disagree with him or don’t do what he wants, you get screamed at first, then punished afterwards with the silent treatment and distance. Not to mention that he hates my guts [without being able to give a plausible reason] and disowned me several times in front of family, longtime friends and relatives. Screw those family ties. That bond is not a free pass to treat your parents and other members of the household // family like crap. I’m done with his behavior, especially towards my mom. Let him hate // disown me, if it makes him happy. I lost my brother three decades ago. And after years of trying to reconnect with him, it’s time to call it quits for good.

To be perfectly honest, I have become disappointingly good at repressing truths that are hurtful. One of them being, that my mother’s son completely rejects me. For years I’ve been trying to reconnect with him and my sister-in-law. Unfortunately, there’s no progress to be made. He just hates me. The truly sad part is, that I don’t even know why. My mom talked to them both a number of times, trying to find out the reason. I have asked them flat out, to just tell me what I have said or done to upset them so much. No answer. I’m given the silent treatment and distance. Throughout the year, not seeing them at all, it is becoming easier to repress the fact that they reject me.
Now, the Christmas season is upon us once again, the time for families to get together, spend quality time, create memories and simply be happy. Well….in a perfect world maybe.
Why is it such a struggle to accept something for what it is, to try and move on? Perhaps it could be more easily done, if I knew the reason for being rejected? At least then, I could try to make amends with them. I could reflect my behavior and learn from it. Because I have this obsessive need to understand everyting, and could not get answers any other way, I reached out to a psychologist on YouTube, who does videos every Saturday and responds to questions and problems of her viewers in the comments section. She actually responded back to me, saying, that most likely it is nothing that I said or did to him/them. She thinks, that my mother’s son is probably not happy with himself, or his own life and projects that onto me. It is also possible, that he is jealous of me, because I lived far away by myself and managed my life without “the family safety net”. There have been some truly rough times, as you’ve been able to learn throughout my time here on WordPress. But I wasn’t “stuck all my life” in the area in which we grew up, like he was. At the same time, no one held him back from doing what he wanted, not even his wife. Why does he hate me for the choices he made? Neither my mom, nor I can come up with a plausible reason to justify his rejection towards me. I will have to find a way to come to terms with this situation the way it is, because there is no sign, that it’s going to change anytime soon. 😢