I used to think when I was younger that siblings should have a lifelong relationship, but I have since changed my opinion. Speaking for myself, I will find it exhilarating when I no longer have to have contact with my sibling. I won’t go into detail about my sister, as it would take too long, but it will be wonderful to hopefully have some years down the road without thinking about her, and all of the hurtful things she did to me and our parents, with no apologies. Do you folks think that siblings should keep in contact and have a lifelong relationship? If I may be personal, are any of you on bad terms and/or not speaking with a sibling? Have any of you ever ended a relationship with a sibling? I think under certain circumstances it is best to call it quits.
I have an older brother who can completely fuckoff.
I’m an only child so I can’t speak specifically to sibling relationships, but I had to terminate all contact with my mother for several years to recover from her toxicity. We’re on better terms now, in no small part because she realized she couldn’t just do whatever she wanted with impunity.
I think the very first thread I started on this board was asking for Doper thoughts and stories about familiar estrangement. You’re in good company here. 
In general, though, I believe you have to look out for and protect yourself; nobody can do this for you. How you do this, and where you draw the lines, are solely up to you … although, as with being a new parent, individuals in particular and society in general will feel free to judge you for your decisions and actions about how you do this.
I can’t imagine cutting ties with my brother. I’m lucky, he’s my best friend too.
But we did have a situation in our family where someone was cut off by a step relative in a most severe way. The ripple effect with other relatives directly involved made a bad situation worse.
It took nearly 15 years to resolve. And it’s a shallow resolution. So many years lost.
I’m sorry about your relationship with your sister. But think about your other relatives before you do something too drastic.
I can speak from several perspectives. I am one of five siblings, the youngest of whom is my father’s child from a second marriage. (We don’t use the half designation, as my late compadre Joel Rosenberg once said.)
I became estranged from my older brother and oldest sister over an estate - usual minor BS that blows up and inflicts completely unexpected shrapnel wounds. After 30+ years without so much as a fight over a last piece of pie, I was on one side with the next-oldest sister, they were on the other, and it persisted for 20 years that way. (They were Older and Wiser and Just Couldn’t Understand why us two younger ones - 35 and 43 - wouldn’t See Things Their Way… nuf sed.)
I have since reconnected with my brother; the dispute is not resolvable and I am the affected party - I just decided that he’d worked hard enough to stay in contact with birthday cards etc. and there was no point in out-stubborning him. We regret the lost time but in the end we don’t have a lot in common, so a few dozen emails a year is plenty.
I have not heard from my oldest sister since the break, but then, we weren’t all that close beforehand either. She has twice my stubbornness and was always the family outlier - had a huge thing about never coming home on holidays, a laundry list of gripes that came out with the slightest provocation (or none), always touchy as hell, etc. - she’s welcome to her isolated ranch in the boonies. I don’t really expect to ever have contact again, and unlike my brother I don’t think either of us cares much.
After being fairly close, I slowly fell out of contact with the next-oldest sister, who lived in the same town. She (from my perspective) fell into mild mental illness from a lifetime of poor relationship choices and isolation, and got more and more bizarre and demanding - every get-together was characterized by some kind of complicated “game playing” as she “tested” and “confirmed” her strange notions. (I figured this out but slowly and belatedly, since her idea is not too far removed from believing that I and my family were aliens or something.) I last heard from her about three years before we moved from CA to CT; one almost-accidental contact by Mrs. B. produced a long spew of invective and rage and I haven’t made any attempt to reach her since. She knows where we are. I don’t expect to hear from her, ever, either. (Too bad, as she is the family archivist, with all of my mother’s stuff - I am likely completely shitlisted with her few old friends and will have little chance to get any of it before they “handle things.”)
And then there’s my younger sister. I was close to her until she was about 12, and when my dad died, his second wife slammed the door and I only heard from her at very infrequent intervals. Then, out of the blue, she made all of these fervent attempts to reconnect (she lived one town over, maybe a half hour away)… but every plan to meet or have lunch or get together fell through, from her end. We finally had one lunch that was supposed to lead to more family-connecting, and… gosh, every plan fell through again. She would neither stop making dates nor keep any of them. We moved away two years later, and I’ve only had one or two emails since.
So… I believe blood ties are worth something, and sibling ties are valuable, but I don’t think they trump any reality of being people with nothing in common, with no particular affinity for each other or even active dislike, for real/good reasons or none.
My younger sister has never ever been wrong in her life, and most of her problems are caused by me. I haven’t spoken to her in over 20 years.
The fact that she is currently in prison, having angered the judge at her hearing, is totally my fault. I have the abilities to get her out of prison, but I won’t help her because I’m a horrible person.
You want me to have a relationship with her?
I strongly disagree. The OP is not responsible for other people’s relationships with her sibling. And if in the OP’s opinion, benefits of cutting the sib off outweigh the benefits of not cutting them off, that’s her call to make.
Keeping toxic people in your life to please others is a recipe for perpetual dysfunction and unhappiness.
Yes, but I also think siblings should behave kindly and fairly and benevolently toward one another. If you lose that “should,” you lose the other one.
There are no winning solutions to this, whichever way you go. Good Luck!
Screw those guys too!
This pretty much sums it up from my perspective too. As my wife says, there are life givers and life suckers. Life’s too short to allow yourself to be consumed by a life sucker.
I have a brother (#2) I thought about ending contact with; but in the end I just decided to not go out of my way to see him. I talk to my two other siblings (sister and brother#1) regularly; but it’s not worth the effort to intentionally try to include or exclude him. I just leave it alone until I have to deal with whatever shit he’s pulled. He’s basically a lying, manipulative, stealing sack of shit.
It all began after our mother died. She didn’t have much but I made of list of keepsake things that might have sentimental value for us to split up. Half of the items on the list were in his possession already because “Mom said I could have it when she was in the nursing home.” :dubious: He took a framed picture of himself and my other brother that was about 50 years old and took out my brother #1’s picture and replacement with a picture of his wife from about the same age. Does that make sense?
I could go but it’s starting to piss me off. His wife is just as bad as he is.
When my wife-to-be met my family for the first time, his wife actually said to my girlfriend: “I got the best one.” Who says that? What a raging bitch.
Keeping toxic people in your life for any reason at all is a recipe for dysfunction and unhappiness. A nod to Qadgop - doing so to please others is especially bad I’m sure.
But NOBODY in the world deserves guaranteed access to you, NOBODY EVER.
I still have, as far as I know, a mother and a sister. But we’ve been completely estranged for 27 years. It was a bad situation. Somebody even died. I want never to hear anything from them ever again.
I am absolutely sure that there are people whose families should never see again.
Mine did. Then after a few years of being an asshole, had the common courteously to get himself killed on the road.
Kind of a great relief, actually.
Do you like the sibling? I think you should ask yourself if said person is someone you’d want to hang-around with in the first place. If that person were a co-worker, would you want to spend any time with them outside work? If not, then why give them a pass just because they are “family”?
I had to put some space between me and my brother after our father died. Bro has a long history with anxiety issues, and with mom and dad no longer around to help him, he fixed sights on me. I already have a family and my own responsibilities. He is very needy, and is always take, take, take with no giving back to me. I felt my tank getting emptied, and sometimes my wallet, too. We have almost nothing in common. I learned that in a healthy relationship, sometimes there is give, and sometimes there is take. You dont keep score, but you know when you are always the giver and never get anything back. When that happens, it is a responsibility, and not a relationship.
Now I interact with him on my terms. He is always asking me to come visit him (20 miles away) and cannot come to me (doesn’t drive, fears busses and cars). I go see him only when it works for me, which is infrequent, and he complains. In my case, I needed to establish some space, and boundaries, and it has worked for me.
I realize I may get that call someday that he was found dead in his apartment, or somesuch other demise, and there is a chance I would not have spoken with him in some time. I accept that risk as part of my establishing space, and boundaries.
I have a burning desire to cross-stitch this into a pillowcase, complete with those cheesy little flowers and doves bearing ribbons and shit.
Well every situation is different.
In my case, one person cutting another person out of their life completely changed a major part of our family forever. It confused and disrupted several lifetime relationships that have never really recovered.
I get it. Sometimes you have to say goodbye because it’s just too “toxic.”
And as I said, every situation is different. I just wanted to share how one person’s action can change a family.
I have a brother and a sister whom I love very much, and I have no doubt that they love me very much.
However, they, along with our parents (who are now deceased) have/had VERY conservative opinions and fundamentalist Christian beliefs, which I no longer share. My husband is a Buddhist, and I am a non church attending Christian, and we have raised our children in a very different environment than I was raised in.
When I interact with my brother and sister, they feel it is their obligation to point out my errors and bring me back into the safety of Correct Doctrine. I have no desire to change them, and I have no desire to change or justify my own beliefs, so I find anything more than limited interaction with them very emotionally draining. So, I limit our contact to very short visits and very superficial conversations. If they try to steer the conversation toward politics or religion, I gently tell them that I love them but I don’t feel those conversational topics will be comfortable or beneficial for anyone. And I redirect the conversation.
My husbands mother is the same way, and he calls her once a week to check in with her, but has to have the same topic-limiting boundaries with her.
Its sad, but its the only way we can have a relationship with our extended families without constantly having to defend who we are.
I wish you luck with your siblings.
It sort of comes down to the value you place on your own mental health, I think. There is a boatload of mental illness in my family alongside the run of the mill dysfunctions of addiction, etc. The result, for me, is I rigourously defend my mental health.
I won’t/can’t do toxic relationships, get involved with drama whores, participate/spectate dysfunction, dancing with codependency, etc, etc. Sorry, I just can’t do it, out of fear it would be my undoing, in the end.
Yes, that means I puposely put distance between me and my family, both physically and emotionally.
I had been traumatized by events in my life separate from these circumstances. So it was almost an intuitive survival thing, looking back.
Smartest thing I ever did though. A real life saver.
I have a cousin my same gender and age. We have tons of pictures together, from our childhood and teenage years. People assume we’ll be supermegagoodfriends.
I can’t stand her. She’s a traitorous bitch; what little brainpower she utilizes is always spent looking for ways to cheat, she can’t even comprehend that sometimes it’s actually advantageous to play by the rules (ex: if you pay your rent in black, it’s not a deductible; if you pay above the table, it is one).
Conversation with my mother a while back, re. my desire to eventually purchase Grandma’s flat:
Mom: blahblah but I wouldn’t want you to become estranged from your cousin… wait… you have been stranged from her from years, haven’t you? But you’ve never told her.
Me: specifically, since the day after Barcelona was given the Olympic games. But you’re right, I’ve never told her.
I go to family meetings of which she’s a part, I communicate with her re. Grandma’s care, I say “please” and “thank you” and pass the salt, but there’s no risk she’ll be invited to my house.
Since October 17 1986? Why, one of you was supporting another potential host city?