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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP I have posted before, but I think I may understand deep down what you are feeling with the relative too. You have no support. You thought maybe you had some connections in your family, but in reality they all are part of the dysfunctional dance and if you don't play your part then you are nothing. Nobody defends you or stands up to the abusive nut for you.

That is what I found in my own family so maybe i am projecting. I have an abusive mother. Sure there are these big beautiful photos of extended family and our family fake smiling at events, but it is a loose quilt being help by loose thread and the thread they all have in common is abuse tactics, pieces falling off (those of us who distanced, but still have contact) and holes (those who are estranged). It could all fall apart completely so easily because there isn't any love there.[/quote]

Thank you for this. You are correct in your assessment of our family. I think we had that "looks happy from the outside" family until ~30 years ago, when the few sane people died young and the loose threads that held us together were gone. Now the only outsiders who might think we have a functional family have probably not met anyone beyond one of the people who is very deeply invested in keeping up a fantasy that we even have some sort of interaction with each other. We've had recent family funerals with just 4-5 attendees. It's sad and messed up, and I guess I thought that if I played along I could magically convert it to something else. But when you don't have anything else, you cling really hard to the scraps you have and know.

I really miss the one relative who understood me and who called people out on their crap. They died when I was an adolescent and I often wonder what direction our family might have taken had they survived. There has been a lot of trauma in our family (military deaths, cancer, etc.) that I see other families rally around. Ours just fell apart and I don't know what made us less capable of surviving it all than others.[/quote]

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