Is your brother older or younger than you?

When someone that has been abused is a "pacifist"..i go..oh,oh..hrmm...Sounds like supression nad repression are at play, or dissociation i trust open self-proclaim ragers more.

Repressed emotions make people toxic to be around.........Thta's how specially one of my sisters is......She's goners.Totally gone.

Yep, she goes to India and follows swamis....But its all a way of denial in reality she very emotionally cruel....i no longer talk to her or wish to.....

He is a year and a half older. In aggression ratings, I always was and remain meaner. Arf! I promise, I bite! I still haven't made it to India, but I studied with swami equivalents on three other continents. Yes, it was blatant, outspoken denial. My early travels were pure flight mode. Anywhere but here... My brother crawled into a hole at the first opportunity and pulled a rock over the opening.

I have thought leaving him in peace was the kindest thing I could have done this past 40 years. We balanced and helped one another in the nightmare of childhood, but we have not been children for a very long time.

Onward through the fog...

Wow Arfie is hard that you guys were there for each other as children and now have to part ways....I don't know how i would handle that...None of my siblings were there for me as a child...so easy for me to say....

But maybe you're right....siblings can trigger each other...If your brother is not as self-aware as you.......Like my siblings they are in complete denial still and actually have very bizarre personalities, terrible memory, and they hate to see me.Cause i remind them of who they really are and what they did.....They also want to continue in the dysfunction and even tried to MAKE continue in it.

They are very controlling people.

I have a similar situation with my sister. Our childhoods were very messed up, and my parents played favorites. We all did terrible things. I got sent to a couple of foster homes, where I learned that not everyone was like we were, and that some families lived differently and didn't hate each other and fight, though I did not learn how to do that. My sister and brother, had more social life than I did, friends, which was good for them, while I had to stay with my sick mom.

When we reached the age of 21, it was sooooo bad, my sister was almost killed. Somebody was going to get killed. We talked of moving out, and we did. My sister didn't want to live with me and got herself into a bad situation and then did live with me for awhile. Then life took us in different directions and I moved to another town. We each got mates and had kids, and that complicated things so we parted ways.
What happened then was that she has PTSD and I have PTSD. I'm in 12 Step recovery and doing the 'talk it out, and try to face it slowly, forgive and heal', while she is doing the escapist avoidant thing of forbidding anything arou0nd her that reminds her of anything upsetting. So she is very controlling about how I move, what I say, etc. and I just can't do that. She treats me as if we are stuck in time back in our childhoods, though I've grown and changed a lot through experiences and things,, so really she doesn't know me. I'm not the girl of 15 any more.

I did google and find her name and an e-mail addy just a couple of months ago. I had lost track of her totally. Found she's in another state. I did e-mail her,, just 'hello, it's me'. We've exchanged 3 very brief e-mails now, all just 'hello'. And that's a start for us.

Perhaps you could just send a short message to your brother? Just 'hello'?

I often feel unlucky and lucky....all things considering...

Unlucky cause i never bonded in my childhood to my abusers (my family) to one sister but then she betrayed me still both of us very young..

And lucky for the same reason...To at least not have had the abuse so mixed in with love too...For my parents i felt nothing at all...and for other siblings too, nothing..

I think is worse when you really loved those that hurt you as a child....more complex.

The one sibling that hurted the most only hurted that bad because i did have more of a bond with her than anyone else...

For me to have any realtionship with my siblings they would have to come out of denial, admit to everything and shunn my father...like the crimminal he is.

As long as they say they are neutral...They're on his side.Not mine.There is NO relationship with those who insist on protecting a crimminal.

I'm facing similar circumstances with my sister so your posting has really hit home with me. I agree with xa1... about just a short "hello" just to see if your brother is responsive to you. As for leaving him in peace, I feel it's highly unlikely he's even there. Maybe you could help him through the "Wreckage", either way it's truly a soul searching moment, and i do wish you the best with this. Blaine

What is "Love"? It's not the same as 'like', and it's not the same as 'dependency'. It's not an emotion. It's a decision to try to do what is best for the wellbeing of the beloved, no matter how we feel. That includes our selves, even at our worst moments, as well as others. We can do this even when we don't trust, by being very careful.
I know my sister has all kinds of PTSD, and sees things from the perspective she had as a child, and doesnt' know me or trust me, and she has some crazy ways of behaving with me. That's why I can only just say 'hello' safely, but that small hello is a lot considering.

As a male survivor of repeated attacks by a pedophile when I was a child, I, too, have thought long and hard about sexuality and anger as you have. When I reached out for help to my parents, it turned out they were such primitive people that they turned on me. My mother actually had my father beat me to "toughen me up" when she thought I was effeminate on the one hand. On the other, if she suspected I was sexually active with a girl, I got a beating for that, too. It didn't have to be proven what I was doing. Just the suspicion of sex was enough for my mother to call in my father, the beater. And my mother had a very suspicious mind.

Sex and rage, then, were connected by my mother's use of beatings to "educate" me to overcome victimization by a pedophile. I had to control my anger like you say your brother needed to do, or I learned boys get arrested for things like that. So I did. I was married for 16 years and never had a verbal rage or physical incident, I'm happy to say. On the other hand, I tended to pick women like myself, who had "sexual rages" as you put it. I was never unfaithful myself, always wanting to me a mama's good boy I suppose, but I was betrayed by many partners I chose. People wounded like me, but whose rage was expressed in betrayal.

I try not to just judge, but to understand both my own tendency to choose those people who seemed to understand me, and then to comprehend why the betrayal from them. These were not terrible people, but any stretch of the imagination. One is an accomplished published poet. Another is a state attorney general. Bright, sensitive women, just with that flaw that matched my own. I'm still in touch with them from afar, though we'll never be intimate again as we learned we're not the best people for each other in that way.

Thanks for posting about this from your female perspective, arfie. It resonates as very real. I'm sorry you haven't the way to make amends with your brother, but as a guy I'm glad you shared your insight with me. Blessings.

I'm so sorry. This childhood sexual abuse stuff sucks and is ingrained in our brains because we were so young. I'm so sorry.

I think anyone from a dysfunctional famiy can relate to having trouble with connections whether relationships of any kind have no contact with family very very hard as I am aging I do love them but we are all very different me being the tortured gifted artist and them being entrepreneurs or having babies what ever makes one feel signifigant but the pain and dysfunction has left us all shell shocked and wounded I am sad to not have them in my life i have accepted it for the most past , It still hurts , but I am better away from them ,