Dibble

@Livemike Thank you for your response. I'm not sure if the mortgage story really is false. Here in the Netherlands they do tend to be more wary of who lives in a house and who's name it's in. Plus, my dad worked for the bank as a mail courier so it doesn't seem unlikely to me that someone he worked with turned him on to this rule that there should be a Mrs there if the mortgage is in the Mrs' name. But let's say that it wasn't the case. Why would they then have a second child if they couldn't stand to be around each other? I have to say that neither parent really talks about the past and questions are met with curt answers after which the topic is changed. I could try finding out what day they were married and then compare that to my brother's birthday. That might clear something up. I'm not entirely sure if it was child services she was afraid of. To the outside world we always appeared perfectly normal. I know that I often appeared odd to people because I didn't reason like most other kids did. I was very much stuck in my own imaginary world (compensating for a lack of attention, perhaps) and would sometimes react based on that. She seemed to take this as me not being capable of much and felt it to be less of a bother if she only had to take one child to the store. I don't recall anyone ever asking me or my parents questions about the situation at home. One time, when I was 17, I went to an assertiveness training because the people at the school I was attending thought I need to become more assertive. During those meetings I did mention my mother's influence a few times and so one of the therapists asked to meet with my mother and me on a separate occasion. My mother was very surprised and slightly disgruntled having been asked to show up and when the therapist asked her questions about how things were at home and between us she denied there being any trouble. And I, stupidly (though keeping in mind that I was the one going home with my mother later and not the therapist) agreed with her. Still, a therapist I would think would know that a child wouldn't openly criticize his or her parent especially when the parent is sitting right next to the child. But nope, the therapist concluded that she must have been mistaken and never mentioned it again. I highly doubt that child protection services would have bothered. My mother's very good at seeming friendly and heartwarming and I was ever the obedient little girl. I think you're right; if I wasn't related to him I wouldn't bother with him. I guess in a sense it's my internal conflict that tells me on one hand to let him go and on the other still longs to have any kind of relationship. There is definitely a co-dependance factor as he's quite torn up mentally and emotionally and has great difficulty trusting people so when he needs someone around him it'll be me. Not my mother, strangely, even though she'd like that. He's very wary of the way she snoops around his house and keeps asking questions about his private life. Neither of us can stand that, by the way. I couldn't ask him to own up because he's too volatile. He can have fits of rage just seeing children carelessly crossing the street as though they're tormenting him rather than just being kids. If I were to confront him with something serious I probably won't like the outcome. Guess I'll just stick to only seeing him when I absolutely have to and just leaving him be otherwise. I have recently stopped letting him just annoy and abuse me and just taking it for the sake of keeping the peace. I've just gotten up and left a few times because he needs to learn I'm not accepting that anymore. @TheRobin Thanks. This may just be an internet forum and we may just be exchanging typed words but it's still quite helpful. After reading your post I've figured out that I can want a whole lot of things but I can't force him to want those same things. Honestly, he is very easily upset and violent. I don't think it's worth it to me anymore to try and hit that hornet's nest. I had sort of forgiven him along the way for the things he did but I hadn't really thought about what caused the behavior. You're right that for a child to start abusing another child it must have had previous experiences first, else it wouldn't occur to them. I'm not sure I'll ever know. Sometimes he does seem to want to talk but it'll be tricky because anything that disagrees with him fills him with rage. He's got a lot of anger and frustration within him. I'm glad he has no interest in alcohol. I think the best thing for me to do right now is set and keep my boundaries and wait and see what he'll do further down the line. Perhaps seeing that I'm not accepting his nonsense anymore might make him face some of his issues. Perhaps not. Time will tell.

She doesn't want to talk about the past? What was her response when you told her that you felt talking about the past might help with the present issues? If one of your issues were that you're afraid to be left alone by say a spouse or partner or whatever how does she intend to solve that without looking for the source of this fear? I haven't been to therapy yet myself but I understand your confusion. It's what I would expect to be doing during these sessions as well. Maybe next time you go to the therapist sit her down and state clearly that you want to work on issues from the past, or at least look for the sources of your troubles keeping in mind that it might be something from a long time ago, else you can't see how the therapy's going to work. After all she might have the greatest of plans in mind for you but if you don't feel it's relevant and have little faith in the effectiveness of the therapy it's not likely to work. Did you have an intake meeting before the therapy began in which you stated your issues and desired outcome?

The State has been known to encourage children to spy and snitch on their parents. He must have known or suspected what the consequences would be, though. He's 15, so old enough to know that they wouldn't be getting away with it with just a fine and a slap on the wrist.

Makes me wonder what happened in that family for the son to want to report his parents to the police. There's no way he only just found out about it and 'decided to do the right thing'. Is there? Else we're looking at another fine example of the implementation of '1984'-morals and values in society where the parents were fearful of their children.

Hello Ruben, I found Stef's video on the uselessness of voting on Youtube and started clicking on his other videos in the 'related' list and found that they were pretty interesting. So I subbed to his channel and then found out about the Sunday shows which struck a lot of chords with me whenever someone talked about their childhood. Since I'm on a 'self discovery' road at the moment I just steadily keep going deeper down the rabbit hole Still considering therapy. Talking with my immediate family won't do me any good as I just have to accept that there's going to be no aknowledgement forthcoming from them, stuck in their own issues as they are, I might have to seek external parties for digging in the subconscious memory :S

Heya As I'm new here I can't really offer any explanations as to why you got no replies, etc, as I'm unaware of all the details. What I can say, though, is that I have a lot of experience with internet forums and means of communication and what you often find on large communities like this one is that messages don't tend to get willfully ignored. I don't think people are purposefully witholding information from you and it really is just pure bad luck. :S I do see that they have a chat option here, though. Maybe you could try using that instead? Live interaction usually works best. You might even try calling the live show on Sundays. Either way don't give up being awesome

I have a brother, my only sibling, who is 2 years older than me. He was born with slight learning disabilities or at least so I've been told. He tends to be very difficult to deal with. My question is how could I have a meaningful relationship with him? I don't have much of a connection with my extended family or my parents and as we grew up together I want to stay connected, sharing a background as we do. I just find it really hard not to just turn my back on him. What should I do? The details of the query are as follows: He can't have a serious conversation with me as he ridicules everything I say and do. He is violent, volatile, suppresses his emotions and has issues with his sexuality. He frequently disrespects me both verbally and physically, though he does use my presence as a support, wanting to hang out with me and take me places. I know he has issues because of our childhoods which I'll try to sum up below. I don't remember anything from before age 7 or so but what I do remember is an uneasy feeling that always hung around our family. My parents didn't marry out of love; my dad was living in his mother's house even though his mother had moved to a different town. In order not to be kicked out of the house by the bank due to the mortgage being in the name of Mrs. Jones (not my real name, btw) he needed to guarantee that there would be a Mrs. Jones living at the house so he married his girlfriend at the time; my mother. My mother comes from a strict Catholic family. I don't know why she said yes to marrying an atheist (my father) but I suspect it was her way of rebelling against her parents. I never asked her, though, as we don't really tend to have actual conversations. My parents never showed signs of affection toward each other so my brother and I didn't have very good role models when it comes to healthy relationships. They pretty much ignored each other. My mom did the housework and did most of the interacting with my brother and I while my dad would either be at work, out with his friends or sitting on the couch reading the newspaper. My brother was very violent while growing up and specifically toward me. Though he would also do harmful things to himself like slamming his head in to the wall while claiming it didn't hurt. I suspect that was mostly to get my mother's attention as she would react strongly in such situations which he seemed to enjoy. My brother would hit me hard and often and has tried on at least one occasion to drown me in a public swimming pool and several times to smother me with a pillow. If either of my parents were near by they never seemed to notice what was happening until I managed to break free and would start screaming at him and then they'd be mad at me for being so loud. My mother treated us both as though we weren't capable of making our own decisions. She would arrange things for us, making us dependent on her actions. She never approved of anything we did, our friends, our interests, our choices, etc. She seemed to think that I was especially clueless as often, when she needed to go to the store, she would take my brother with her but lock me in my brother's bedroom with a bedpan. This did nothing to increase my self esteem as you could imagine. She has always had a preference for my brother as he could (and still can't) do no wrong, probably because of his learning disability. I specifically recall a time where she was sitting on her bed with my brother beside her and they were reading a book. My brother was supposed to read out each line but I got impatient after a while and read some lines out for him as I had learned to read much quicker than him. My mother got so upset with me that she grabbed my hair with both hands and shook my head violently, yelling at me to let him read the lines. I ran in to my room afterward and put a note on the door which read 'Off limits to bad mothers', which I meant wholeheartedly. Once she noticed the sign she was amused and started telling me that I couldn't possibly mean it, being all apologetic all of a sudden. A year or so later my brother started trying to abuse me sexually. He didn't quite know how it was done but he knew where all the parts where so would frequently want to play this 'game' with me. One day my mother walked in on one such occasions and got mad, of course. But what shocked me the most is that she was mostly mad at me, stating that 'I should have known better'. Then came the evening of January the 1st of 1991. My parents had decided that this was a good evening to tell us that they were getting a divorce. Why they figured this, I still don't know. We were never really involved in any of the family's decisions. My brother got to choose which parent he wanted to live with as he was 13 and I was to leave the house with my mother. He chose to live with my father, not because he liked him so much but because he didn't want to leave the neighborhood where all his friends lived. On the evening it self I was very upset, naturally, and I turned to hug my dad. My dad didn't respond at all, just sat there staring blankly ahead. It felt really awkward and I moved away after a while and just sat quietly in my corner of the sofa. My brother hadn't been much of a talker before the divorce but he got really quiet and secretive after. He would talk to me about how it had all been his fault and say things like how it wouldn't have happened if he just hadn't been born. I knew him to be violent and unpredictable so I didn't question him as he was also very paranoid that I might tell either of my parents what he was telling me. At one point he started telling me how he was going to commit suicide. That in particular upset me because I couldn't break the vow of silence to tell my parents as if I told my mother about it she would really underestimate the severity of the situation and patronize him which would probably have made him angry enough to go through with it to 'prove' to her how serious he was. If I had told my father he would have tried to have my brother committed to a mental hospital which I feared wouldn't work; if they did commit him he would eventually get out again, having been deemed 'cured', and probably have come after me and my parents for having locked him in there as one of the things that made him the most violent was calling him crazy. If they didn't commit him because they saw nothing wrong with him than this retribution would only have come sooner. I wasn't sure if he was really planning anything until I one day found an actual suicide note in his room, signed with a bloody finger print, laying next to a full bottle of whiskey. He never drank. I'm not sure what he thought the whiskey would do, maybe for courage, maybe he was hoping it would lead to alcohol poisoning, but I knew the note and the bottle were connected. So now I knew that not only could I not tell anyone, he had actually gone and prepared himself. Luckily he never actually did try to commit suicide. He didn't try to make anything of himself either. He failed his schooling and got turned down by the military. He was resentful of everyone. He lived at my dad's house but the two never spoke to each other. My dad would occasionally try to 'motivate' my brother in to doing something with his life by reminding him what a failure he was. When he was at my mother's house she would just do more of the same; patronize him some more and keep him dependent. Meanwhile he and I were at war; he was convinced that I had been talking about him behind his back so he refused to talk to me and would refuse to go places with my mother if I was coming as well. This only got me in to trouble with my mother more as it was obviously my fault that he was being so stubborn. Both of us are living on our own now and we usually meet once a week. He tries to push my buttons constantly to get a rise out of me and seems to be struggling with his sexuality. By that I mean that he makes an awful lot of unnecessary gay-jokes and keeps trying to pass me off as a lesbian, and points out women on the street trying to get me to notice them. When I tell him he should be chasing after the women himself he'll give any kind of evasive answer but never a straight one (pun not intended). Meanwhile I've failed consistently in landing an actual relationship. Having had no solid foundation while growing up I got bullied constantly, grew very insecure and reclusive. Having had no real relationship with my dad (and still not having one today) I've only ever had negative experiences with men. I never dated while I was a teenager and my mother asked me twice if I was a lesbian which I could only deny. I just can't see myself getting intimate with someone as there's just too much old scar tissue there. So I foresee a very lonely future for both my brother and myself and would like to keep the lines of communication open between the two of us, but it's very, very difficult...

Well, for starters I've been doing a lot of soul searching for about 4 to 5 years now. I had never really had much faith in politicians and institutions and my interest in documentaries didn't improve it. I ended up on Yout00b and noticed a 'recommended' video in the side bar on voting. Since I already lost my faith in voting the video sounded like music to my ears and I subbed to the stefbot channel The ball's just kept on rolling from there, really. I enjoy being wrong as through listening to a lot of FDR videos I'm frequently confronted with 'morals and values' which I used to consider to be true but then find to be spoon fed nonsense, mostly originating from my mother. I'm amazed how many people call in to the Sunday show and start off with 'I had a pretty normal childhood' only to end up telling a story that just amazes me. The power of denial is great. Not great as in 'Wow! That's great!', though, naturally.

A big hello from the Netherlands! I haven't been listening to FDR for a very long time (4 months or so) but since I like to have something to listen to while I work from home a few days a week I've been plowing steadily through the backlog of Sunday Philosophy Shows, which are my favorite. I've gone from "My parents used to hit me and it didn't hurt me or make me a bad person" with a lenient attitude toward 'corrective spanking' to "My mom used emotional blackmail and hysteria to get us to do what she wanted and my dad ignored us until he deemed it necessary to dish out some physical disciplining" in those short months. It's been quite a ride. I have always liked the Super Nanny shows because it's nice to see families in distress become harmonious but now it's turned in to quite an obsession. I've watched so many episode it wouldn't surprise me if one day one of my neighbors asks me how my kids are doing since they've heard so much screaming and yelling coming from my house. I don't have any children, so that will be a confusing conversation if and when it ever comes up. Anyway. Looking forward to meeting the folks here and doing some more digging in my past as I simply can't remember anything from before age 7 or so.