I’ve been told by my therapist directly to not share anything more about DID with my sister.
It’s not like I was talking about things freely, but I had started to open up about the others slightly. Now I’ve been told to shut that line of communication down.
The reasoning is valid. My sister is impressionable, gullible, and attention-seeking. I mean to say this with as much neutrality as I can muster. She is working hard to heal from her past, but her life to this point has been overwhelmingly reliant on excuses and being excused for her actions because of myriad “reasons” (from “I’m too stupid to know that,” to “Pity me,” to “I was never taught that as a child so how can I be expected to learn it as an adult?” etc.). The worry is that if she investigates DID much, she may begin to try and see if using the diagnosis works for her as an excuse. After all, trying hard at things and doing the difficult work of healing is tedious, and look, her sister with DID gets to stay home from work all day and do nothing, who *wouldn’t* want that reality?
Well me, for one. But that’s really not the point, is it.
The point, as ever, as forever and always and until the end of goddamn time, is that my sister’s needs/wants/thoughts outweigh my own in terms of importance.
Things are never going to be fair, are they? I don’t get to have a sister who can listen to my issues, understand them, and show a kind of support that is equal to what I show her. Because my sister’s issues make it so that for every thing she hears, it gets buried away in hopes of being potentially useful to her some day. I don’t mean it is nefarious on her part, I am sure she doesn’t see it the way I do, she is just trying to make sense of her world, and in her mind, all things relate to her.
I actually do agree with my therapist’s assessment. I agree that the less my sister knows about DID, alters, and inner landscapes the better — for both of us. It’s really me that my therapist is looking out for. She knows that if my sister started to “develop” alters in an attempt to see if it got her attention, I would be suicidal. I worry that this sounds as though we are conspiring to not accept her reality if DID were her diagnosis, and trust me, that is something I’ve worried over too. But she is my sister’s therapist too, and she says she really, really does not see DID as what’s going on with my sister (and I know my sibling pretty well too, I can say I am relatively sure).
But can you see how this whole thing just hurts?
I had only begun to open up, just slightly. Let her know a few things. I was careful that they were negligible things, not too important because I was (and remain) afraid of ever being vulnerable. I had started to think, maybe one day I can be honest about my inner life with her. Maybe I won’t be so alone, maybe this is safe, maybe this is positive.
And of course now it’s shut down. Because her precious psyche can’t handle the reality of my psyche without it, I suppose, impressing upon her.
Back to silence and mistrust.
Back to completely alone.
Back to taking care of my little sister’s world and keeping mine hidden deep inside where it can’t distract me from my job…my job of always putting her first.
My therapist said that in a perfect world, all this tumult (including of course the return of BPD behaviors mentioned not long ago) would mean she should move out. But she also said, she didn’t think my sister could handle moving out at the moment. That if she did, she would likely revert back to addiction and all manner of old behaviors because her support and structure would be ripped from under her. So she stays.
She stays because of her, not because of me.
Always, always, her needs first.
I want to cry because I matter so little. Of the two people who remain in my life –myself and my sister –I am still the least important one.
I love her a lot. I’m not mad at her. I know she needs the things she needs. I just need things too. I need protection, validation, someone to know me, love me, listen to me. I don’t have any of those things. I am those things for her. I’m not a person, I’m her family.
I’m not a person.
I’m her keeper.
I’m not a person.
