Posted 6/11/2016 2:50 PM (GMT 0)
As someone who has a past history of crippling anxiety and someone who has family members that suffer from it to different degrees I thought I might comment from a different perspective.
First I want to say I wish you well through your battle and I hope you find more understanding from those around you. I can't know what those around you think and feel but my sister sounds very similar to what you are going through. Our family background has been difficult to say the least with our Dad causing most of our anxiety and low self esteem issues growing up. Alcohol abuse played a major part also. I always thought of my sister as one of the more fragile and sensitive siblings growing up and her damage was more visible and apparent to the rest of us. From an early age since she was the youngest I think she was treated unfairly by most of us brothers and sisters and talked down to. I think this carried on through our adult lives and none of us really gave her a fair shake with things she was going through. Most of us thought she was always a bit of a hypochondriac which I know she was always annoyed that we believed that. For us it was always easier to put her and her problems in a category that made it easier for us to deal with and understand. The truth is we always believed our condescending advice to her was an expression of our love; we all do love each other, but I now realize we fell short most times with her partially because we were so damaged ourselves. We had no way to know how to help her when most of us struggled in living our own lives, though our lives might have appeared to be closer to the norm. I say appear because I know most of us had our own internal battles with anxiety, low self esteem and just coping with life in general without allowing alcohol or other problems to totally destroy us. I think my sister has always been an unintentional easier target for us to project a lot of our issues on. Clearly we did not know how to handle her er visits, 911 calls, her perceived and sometimes real ailments.
My turning point came at one family get together where my sister was able to express to me privately the pain it causes her that most of us still treat her the way we did when she was younger. That we always talk down to her and it is almost like we gang up on her in those ways. I took her words to heart and started to observe how we treated her and started to realize how horrible we actually were; even though we are not horrible people. We just were repeating what worked for us most of our lives. I am so glad she was able to pull me aside and open up the way she did. In the past she may have expressed it in other ways; usually anger, that would always lead to everyone arguing and of course just giving her more advice as to how she should toughen up and how we were giving her advice because we LOVED her so much, blah, blah, blah.
I have slowly tried to be more patient and understanding with her. I've come to realize that she has been trying hard to overcome her issues and that she has made strides in many areas that us family members refused to see because we had been stuck in that horrible family dynamic. Slowly I have tried to talk positive about her when around other family members, though sadly I found it hard to do at first because picking on her faults with others was such a part of our habit should we discuss her. She was a part of our joking and biting comments that we would frequently have. Very sad indeed. I am not outwardly defending her much, I am just trying to introduce some positive responses where there were none before. I have seen some positive changes in the few years of doing this. I realize I can't just tell my brothers and sisters that we should treat her better, no one likes to be told how to act. But little by little I am trying to get them to see my sisters positive strides and perhaps show some compassion for her struggles instead of the usual judgemental nonsense that we normally engaged in.
Soul, I wish you the best with your struggles. I'm sorry you have to deal with being treated unfairly by those of us who truly do not understand or those of us who find it easier to be rough on some with problems rather then showing compassion. Sadly, many of us fall short in so many ways that we don't always realize.
All the best...Jim