How Spending the Holidays with My Toxic Family Almost Did Me In

It was hell and I’ll never do it again

W ith aging parents and practiced guilt, boundaries can be difficult to manage. But at some point we have to ask ourselves; what’s the cost and is it worth it? If your family is anything like mine, the answer is no, it’s not worth it. The cost may be your self-worth, self-esteem, and twenty years of weekly therapy.

What Happened When I Tried Again

I spent three weeks with my family and I haven’t been able to get out of bed for a week. I can’t work. I can’t work out. I can’t do anything other than eat potato chips and chocolate. I don’t even like potato chips.

My therapist is on speed-dial. Okay, there’s no more speed-dial, but she’s the first person on my favorites list and that’s just sad.

I almost lost myself completely. I stopped caring, even about my personal hygiene. I thought about using; I’ve been clean and sober for thirteen years. My mind went to some very dark places and stayed there, for weeks.

The Quick and Dirty Backstory

My family is unhealthy. All of them, you ask? No, just my immediate family. I’ve uncovered a cousin or two that are healthy and kind; and, of course, the dysfunctional family members hate them.

Maybe my family is so screwed up because they are all active addicts. They’re all alcoholics and most use either prescription pills or other forms of drugs to chase their scotch or vodka or fine wine. So much fine wine. As if the finer the wine you drink, the less of an alcoholic you are. It could be they have mental illnesses on top of their addictions, or perhaps their addictions are masking otherwise healthy individuals. It doesn’t matter and I’ll never know.

I grew up being abused to a critical level. Physically, emotionally, sexually, all of it. I grew up broken and beaten, every ounce of trust torn to shreds. I even followed in my family’s footsteps for a good long time, until I got clean and sober and went into therapy. I broke the chain and for that, I am unwelcome, misunderstood, and despised. Villains don’t like mirrors.

But though I have changed, they have not. Mostly I stay away. I spend as little time with them as possible; I talk to them infrequently and I never stay with them, or so I said in 2002 when I stayed with a sibling for a month in France. Who would have thought a month in Paris could be like a horror movie of pain and despair?

Thanksgiving 2021

I hadn’t seen them for two and a half years and Jewish guilt runs thick. My sibling tells me she has an in-law apartment just for me. I’ll have my own keys and can come and go as I please. I’ll barely see them (her or her husband), she assures me. And I bit, like a good little bunny approaching a food-laden snare.

Even though I had a comfortable and abuse-free place to stay, inside my campervan.

Instead, I spent three weeks being called names and screamed at, an inch from my face. Her open maw of putrid cigarette and marijuana breath formed a thick cloud of disgust as my nausea roiled.

One day, during my first week there, my sister called me an idiot seven times (in both English and French) before I lost count.

And it’s not just limited to me, she also has road rage (as well as just plain rage/rage), screaming obscenities and hurling insults at unsuspecting drivers.

In addition to lobbing a barrage of taunts in my direction, both my sister and mother abuse their spouses as well. My mother’s positive affirmations (sarcasm intended) consist of all the ways he is a failure and how he can’t do anything right. All screamed louder than a dying animal caught in the jaws of a fleeing pterodactyl. And while she’s berating him, he’s waiting on her hand and foot. Literally. The man cooks for her, does the dishes, brings her endless martinis — the list goes on. And this exact scenario is repeated verbatim by my sister and her husband.

Set-Ups

It didn’t matter what I did or said. I was set up to fail.

“Have as many packages as you want delivered here, we don’t care at all.”

2 weeks later…

Screamed in my face: “We’re sick of all your packages. You’ve had eighty thousand packages delivered here. You are single-handedly paying the salaries of all the Amazon drivers. We buy nothing.”

Fact check: It was three packages in two weeks, two were from Amazon.

Fact check: They spend their money on cigarettes (two packs a day at $10 each), alcohol (two bottles of fine wine a night), and pot (an ounce a week). Oh, and pharmaceuticals, too many to count.

My sister “confides in me” too — another set-up.

But the moment I fall for her false camaraderie and show a single iota of vulnerability; she strikes like a ball python who was pretending to lick an innocent mouse to sleep. Jumping on whatever I say, she uses it as an example of how she’s better than me.

After I confided (for the first time) that I’d been raped, she responded with:

“So many men tried to rape me but I’ve always been better than you because I fight back. I punched them, kicked them in the balls, and beat them up. So no one ever got away with it. It’s sad you were never strong enough to stand up for yourself.”

When I told her how my abusive my father was, she said:

“That’s why I have so much more self-confidence than you and I’m such an amazing person. It’s so sad that you’ve never had any self-esteem and no one’s ever liked you.”

None of the things she claims about herself (or me) or the way she’s reacted in any situation are actually true. Most of them are the opposite. But even though projection is easy to call out by someone who’s studied psychology and been in therapy for twenty years, it’s ugly and painful to be on the receiving end of.

I Can’t Sit By

Instead of defending myself I say things like:

“That’s really mean. Don’t treat me that way. Don’t talk to me that way.”

Or I get up and leave.

In defending their spouses:

I do tell my mother to stop talking to her husband the way she does and then he always says to me: “Please move in with us so you can defend me.”

To which I mitigate with dark humor, “You chose this life.” or “She’d last three hours before I killed her, you’d last six, and then I’d kill myself.”

He laughs. She laughs. Inside I cry.

Blaming Others

I’ve always had an issue with people who don’t take personal responsibility for their part in the conflict and now I know why.

On this trip my sister confided in me that her life was destroyed the day I was born. The source of all her misery is either my fault, her father’s fault, the fault of society, or my mother’s fault.

My mother calls my sister a narcissist behind her back and my sister says the same about my mother.

I’m their confidant as though that will lure me over to their particular brand of “the dark side”.

I don’t want to be a toxic confidante.

A Leopard Does Not Change Its Spots

I tried to explain to my therapist and healthy friends that this was all my fault. That’s not blaming myself for choosing this situation again or blaming them for acting the only way they know how. It’s taking ownership.

I know these people will never change. I believe that anyone who wants to change can, but they’ve told me countless times that they don’t want to.

They’ve admitted their alcoholism and drug abuse during random lucid moments in the past. They’ve admitted they’re mean and abusive. They’ve told me they like being nasty. They love screaming at people. They don’t want to live without their alcohol. They will never stop abusing their spouses and anyone else they deem unworthy, which includes most people who interact with them.

My mother and sister are screamers on such a massive scale, they put two-year-old children having full-blown temper tantrums to shame.

And they love it. It’s their never-ending dopamine hit.

Do You Do the Same Thing?

Do you continue to visit toxic, unhealthy people out of guilt; or do you have a mean sense of “the shoulds”?

What would it look like if we all said no? Not in a cruel way, but in a firm way?

People with mental health issues like my family, whether they’re merely addicts, have borderline personality disorder, or are narcissists, need boundaries.

Boundaries

No one likes to be on the receiving end of them and they’re uncomfortable to set. But set them, we must — repeatedly.

My mother does not respect my boundaries and she never will, but that doesn’t mean I will stop setting them. She plows through each one and I freeze her out by not responding. I can’t respond.

The minute she gets her claws in, she doesn’t let go. She holds on like a drowning cat who will happily take you down to the bottom of the lake with her. As long as she’s not alone. Never alone. Even in death.

Conclusion

My takeaway is not to stay with any of them again. EVER. No matter what. Never, ever, ever. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth my sobriety, my self-esteem, my happiness. When I see them again, years from now, I won’t see them for more than 2–3 hours at a time and never for two days in a row. I never tell them what I’m doing in my life. I’ve used this strategy for years. I won’t confide in them, or trust them, or rely on them.

Everything I say will be used against me, that’s my family motto.

Does this make me sad? Of course, it does. But it makes me sadder to be treated like dirt by them again and again, hoping and praying that things will change.

They will never change. It’s time to cut my losses and move on. How about you?