My brother’s not on this board (well, he could be but I wouldn’t / don’t know it), so he can’t reply or defend himself here. As with all things, there’s at least two sides to every story, and here you’re of course only getting mine, FWIW and take it with the usual grain.
Brother, #4 of 5 siblings, married long ago. Wife is high-energy, very outgoing and outspoken, opinionated, engaging, emotional, gifted and talented, wears her highs and lows on her sleeve, and she’s quite attractive, someone who turns heads. Brother is quiet, closed, subdued, calm and level-headed (well, we’ll see about that), and quite cerebral. He’s very smart. Brother is also narcissistic - you can’t tell him anything new, it has to be his idea for it to be worthy, and while sometimes he asks for advice, he won’t really listen to or heed it.
They had two daughters and a rocky marriage. Brother soon became quite jealous, possessive and suspicious of Wife. Brother said he couldn’t trust her, but the reasons he shared were not substantive enough to justify his jealousy and suspicion. Wife would become frustrated with him and she began to lash out at him, physically lash out, early on. I sincerely believe Wife is the one who started the physical abuse in the relationship. I don’t think she is to “blame”, however, since I directly witnessed the dynamic there and Brother was very nonresponsive to even the simple requests - like asking him to warm up a baby bottle. Brother wouldn’t respond - it was baffling, really. Wife would hit Brother out of frustration (not with me there). I can truly understand and sympathize with Wife. Shortly after, Brother began to retaliate. It got violent.
Completely and utterly unacceptable, I’d tell him, back in the days when we used to talk. You have to change things. Wife hitting you, that’s not entirely in your control, but You Cannot Hit Her. (BTW, there’s no history of physical violence between our parents, although Father was verbally abusive towards us kids)
Over the years the beatings and violence got worse. Brother has been arrested several times, and he’s navigated the legal roads to get most or all incidents expunged from his record.Brother has, over the years, been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He has been arrested and detained in a mental institution. Once, I and two other siblings flew halfway across the USA to meet him, to help him get released, and to also help and talk with him since things (his marriage violence and his anger management, mainly) were really getting out of hand.
In one incident, Brother ran out of the house half naked on a not-warm day and threatened a teacher and her class full of grade school kids at a nearby school. He got arrested for this too, of course. Brother has refused treatment and any prescribed medications for his bipolar disorder, to the best of my knowledge. He says he’ll force himself to “control himself”.
Brother and Wife finally divorced after many years of abuse, largely because Brother had stuck stubbornly to the notion of “marriage is forever, for better or for worse” - when things are good, they’re really great, but when they’re bad they’re really bad - he would justify. It was Wife who finally filed, and she left him. Good for her, I say. It was good for both of them.
Wife often tells me that Brother has fallen very behind in support payments. He is not supporting his kids. But that’s another sad story.
At a Thanksgiving 3 years back, the entire family, spread across half the nation, got together. Brother was there, but neither Wife nor their girls. Brother got verbally abusive towards the family on several occassions. On one, I’m driving my car with Brother, our mother, and my wife. Some truly trivial thing set off Brother, and he got verbally abusive, loud, vulgar, just really ugly. Now I’m a Marine Corps veteran and ugly language doesn’t bother me one bit, but in front of my wife and our mother? Unacceptable.Maintaining my tone and volume of voice I calmly told him this, but it didn’t matter. I tried talking calmly, I tried yelling - I never lost my temper, I was varying my delivery to see if any of it would register with him. None of it did.
Mother engaged Brother’s angry, nonsensical ramblings, and that only served to propagate the ugly, nonsensical tirade. It wasn’t complete nonsense - his tirade was tangentially connected, but in the end it made no real sense, making mountains out of mole hills perceived but not real.
It was ugly, the things Brother said about and to all of us, not just in the car but in the house with most of us there, too. There was no reasoning with him, no discussing anything rationally, and I didn’t. A few times I was concerned he was going to get violent but it never did. That Thanksgiving was quite ugly. It was a scar on that family reunion.My mother, who lived near Brother back then, had shared with me the times when she was fearful of her own safety when with him.
He has threatened my (our) own mother!
Fortunately, Brother still lives halfway across the country from me and my wife, and we have chosen to start distancing ourselves from Brother. There’s no helping him, and while I truly hope he finds peace and happiness, he’s the one who has to choose that path. We cannot choose it for him. Thankfully, Mother no longer lives near Brother.
The final straw for me and my wife was a few months back when Brother, visiting together with his daughters a nearby sibling, lost his temper and got verbally abusive again. Brother’s daughter’s boyfriend was there and he was truly scared, not having experienced any of this before.I wasn’t there when it happened but Brother threatened his own daughter (who is 17), saying that he would snap her F-ing neck.
That’s the final straw for me. Over the years what Brother has said or done gets progressively worse and worse, and the family talks about it, we talk with Brother about it, but in the end nothing gets done and a few years later Brother does something bad again. When does it end, this escalating ugly behavior? Does someone have to get seriously hurt, or worse?
To us (me and my wife), threatening his own daughter (and our niece!) was enough and we cannot continue any sort of relationship with him. We’re cutting him off, totally. To not do so would condone his behavior, would tell him that we accept how he lives his life. I cannot do that. So, no contact, no dialog, no emails. No relationship. Sometimes Brother replies to a group email about some family event. I don’t reply to him. Sometimes I share happy family events (like my son, the dancer, recently performing at Carnegie Hall - yeah!!), but I don’t include Brother in that family email.
If I were to see Brother at a family event, I would be cordial, polite and short, and then would mostly avoid him.
The rest of the family don’t agree with my decision, not fully anyway. They think I’m being too harsh. I think they’re helping to (at least slightly) enable his behavior. While the family understands my thinking on this, they don’t agree with my decision to cut off Brother. Frankly, I’m concerned for my wife and her safety. I don’t want her to be at risk from this hothead.
If a total stranger had done this to my niece, it would not be condoned. Why accept it from a family member?
I’ve shared my concerns, rationale and decision with our kids. They’re in their 20s, so what they do is their decison. Since Brother lives far away, it’s easy to not see him often. But so help me, if Brother were to harm any of my kids, or my wife… … …
That’s it. I pit my brother, who has anger management issues.
Look folks, I realize there are much worse things out there, and some may read this and think, hey what’s the big deal, he hasn’t physically harmed anyone? To me, this is bad enough, this is serious enough.
Sorry this was so long. I really tried to keep it brief; there’s so much more to this story but nothing really new, only more details to enrich what I’ve said here. Theseare the essentials.
Thanks for listening.