Want to feel brave but also want to cry.

[wantmorepeace]

After one pissy text from ubpd sibling, I felt good because it didn’t bother me. After another plus an email to me and my daughter,  I want to cry and that makes me want to cry even more because I was happy about not being bothered.  Not responding to them but I’ll share with this board how upset I am at having to deal with this stupid self- righteous nastiness and that I brought it into my daughters life too.

[CC43]

Hi there,

It's sad that your sibling is acting out and being mean.  I could tell you that it has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with their stress, jealousy, inferiority complex and feeling aggrieved by the world.  To a pwBPD, it's "normal" to put other people down, in a vain attempt to feel in control or superior, or just to hurl their inner nastiness onto other people.  The pwBPD in my life would send nasty correspondence to relatives, to "punish" them and "teach them a lesson," when reality was, she was acting like a total brat, and the "punishment" and "teaching them a lesson" should have been coming her way!  (Note the delusional thinking pattern here.)

If a relationship with your sibling is too painful, you might consider going Low Contact and sending your sibling's emails and text messages directly to the spam folder.

Look, untreated pwBPD tend to generate drama everywhere they go.  They also tend to create no-win scenarios.  For example, they might get themselves kicked out of a living situation and demand that you house them indefinitely.  If you refuse, they'll accuse you of being selfish and irresponsible (see the projection there?).  But if you relent, they become an extremely difficult and entitled roommate, making your own homelife miserable.  So no matter what you do, it's a lose-lose situation for you.  And that is why boundaries are so important.  If your sibling is being mean to you, then you have every right to ignore her and not to respond.

I've often posted here to imagine the messages as Spam, because they are Spam!  If a spambot wrote you a message accusing you of being a horrible person and ruining the bot's life, you'd think, that's ridiculous and delete it without much further thought.  I'd say, try to do that with your sibling's messages.  You need to reclaim your mental bandwidth--and save it for YOUR life.  Let your sibling deal with their life, on their own.