to join the chorus of those cheering on LW1, i’m going to say something that might seem super harsh but it’s also true:
sometimes boundaries are the kindest thing possible because sometimes you need to step back and let people fail for them to actually get to the solutions they need.
i know it’s going to feel awful to do this. you are primed and ready to do the opposite. you’re supposed to be the solution, and you’re supposed to be Superman who can swoop in and stop that runaway train one-handed so it doesn’t crash into that bus full of nuns! but… you’re not actually Kal-El, Last Son of Krypton here. you’re not a superhero. you’re you, and you’ve got to do what you can to keep yourself safe – because you’re not a fictional character who exists to be a hero and save people.
but your brother is on a trajectory to something that is ugly, and you aren’t able to fix it. your mom isn’t able to fix it. if you were able to fix it by now, you would have, right? he wouldn’t be having these problems because you would have already sat him down, stepped through his internet history, figured out what’s up, and found the words to reach into his brain and flip the switch from “oh no” to “a productive member of society”.
stuff that’s beyond our control is genuinely terrifying. humans crave agency, to the point where we will happily blame ourselves rather than admit we can’t do anything to change something. (yeah, that’s a sentence you may have to sit with for a second as you think about how it can apply to you and your relationship with your family. oof, am i right? but i say it like the yoga teacher says namaste literally translates to, with a twist – the anxiety in me recognizes the anxiety in you…) your brother’s behavior is genuinely out of your control. fixing this problem is out of your control.
the thing about help is that before accepting it, you have to realize you need it. so in an odd way? you stepping back is actually being more helpful than you might think, and more helpful than your mother may say. there’s a problem and you can’t fix it. you’re being used as a bad solution to the problem, and you’re not actually able to solve that problem, only get caught in the fray and give your mom the illusion of “it’s all sorted” so the problem gets worse and worse and worse… sometimes you can’t just put up a single two-by-four and say that a house is all fixed after a car drove through it (followed by two trees and a neighbor’s trampoline which gained the ambition to try and be a wrecking ball in the hurricane winds). if your friend told you to come on in for a sleepover at their house that was like this, completely falling down and unsafe to be in, would it actually fix the house to put up a single two-by-four? would it fix the house if you came in and pretended it did? no, right? it just means that your friend still sleeps in an unsafe house, and now you do, too. the problem’s gotten worse.
looking your friend in the eye and saying “i’m not going to step foot in that. it’s not safe. you need to call a contractor to fix this, because your house is falling down” is something that feels so very cruel in the moment, but… it’s actually kind. you’re not ignoring the problem so it grows bigger and bigger.
ignoring the problem so it grows bigger and bigger is exactly what your mom has done to get everyone, including you, in this fix to begin with.
your friend might be very upset that you can’t accept their hospitality. they might be angry you insulted their home. they might blame you like saying you’re the only one who has a problem, so why can’t you just get along? (but you very much aren’t. your mom’s been informed that there’s a problem, your mom *knows* that she doesn’t have public support on her wild idea here because she did this whole secret squirrel act with your company’s secretary! if it really was “only you who has a problem with it”, your brother would still be in his sports teams, and she wouldn’t have chosen to lie to get the answer she wanted at your workplace!) they might tell you to never visit them again if you’re going to pretend that you’re better than them. (you’re not being a snob for no reason: you’re looking out for your own safety!) they might get all *kinds* of upset.
but they won’t get to pretend their house is still standing pretty and pristine after the car, the two trees, and the trampoline with ambitions. they won’t get you enabling them to continue treating this major problem as not a problem whatsoever, and recruiting you as an accomplice to sitting back while the problem gets worse and they don’t feel the need to do anything about it.
yeah, they need help. they don’t want to admit it. but you can love them by not going along with the idea that they don’t need help whatsoever and that you should instead revel in how the problem gets worse and worse.
remember: if you could have fixed the problem… you already would have. this isn’t you abandoning your family. this is you declining to continue hurting them by normalizing all of this as totally okie-dokie and not something your mother needs to find any other solutions for.
you don’t have the qualifications. it’s time to call the contractor and their construction crew. it’s time to recognize the situation is unsafe and it’s only going to be more unsafe if you try to fix it, because you just don’t know how! admitting that isn’t cruelty. it’s you deciding you don’t want to rub salt into the wound. yes, i’m banging this drum yet again, but if you make it into these comments, i really want you to keep this in mind!
….and to be a bit more grim…
even if you had the hours in the day to do so? given how your brother is acting and the fact you’re using feminine pronouns… if he’s been groomed and-or radicalized to act like this to women, you won’t be able to crack it as his older sister. you will become another target for it. you don’t know how to deprogram teenagers from these environments that are, honestly, cult-like – and the point of the cult is to mistreat, demean, and abuse women. those are voices that have likely tied his self-worth directly to how much of that he is able to do to women. if big sis could have fixed it by now, i know you would have. but the odds are good the voices in his ears are telling him that you aren’t someone to be listened to, or respected, or even taken seriously. they’re the ones telling him that you are a future victim for him, and until he makes you a victim too, he’s not really a man of any worth or quality. so that’s why he always needs to push more and more, to be radicalized more and more, to *hate women* more and more. you don’t have the knowledge, and you don’t have the qualifications, and you’re in a group your brother has been trained to categorically mistreat. you wouldn’t be fixing him: you would be just another punching bag for him to practice on. you would just be keeping him just in these same toxic loops and training all his muscles to stay in them instead of fight them. i realize this is grim – but it’s a thing that’s happening more and more to young men online, and i’ve seen it pick up speed. we live in a world where gamergate and the red pill are outright used, and have been since their inception, as a recruiting ground for radical fascism’s new angry footsoldiers. and, well, turning on the news right now is ample evidence about why that is a bad thing. if you had the magic words to chant that would break this indoctrination, well, i see how you have a good heart and i know that you’d simply tell us if it was something you could do! i have no doubt that you’d be buying up billboards reading “all you have to do is say Filligree Apogee Pedigree Perigee like in Bedknobs and Broomsticks and the violent misogyny will be banished right out” if you possessed this knowledge! but… you don’t. and neither, sadly, do i. (trust me, if i did, i’d be hiring so many skywriters about it too!)
not only is this not your problem to solve, as others have covered…
…this is a problem you CAN’T solve.
i know that your mother is going to push all the buttons she installed. i know that guilt is going to do its best to drown you, even if it is a millstone that never should be around your neck in the first place. i know that you desperately want to fix this, and it’s so hard to enforce those boundaries because you truly wish you could.
so remember that it’s not a matter of “won’t”. it’s a matter of “can’t”. and letting your mom pretend that you have gained the ability you don’t have is only going to make the harm worse, not better.
ganbatte. good luck. you can do this! you ARE doing this!
…and look out for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as you can. it’s a type of therapy that can actually be done by yourself and fairly effectively, too. it’s very worth looking up if there’s a workbook about establishing boundaries and working through family strife that catches your eye as something you’d like to do, as well as the free resources out there. like i said, namastanxiety – the anxiousness in me recognizes the anxiousness in you, pretend i’m doing a little bow and all like a proper yoga teacher – and i want you to specifically look up some grounding techniques for anxiety. you might think you don’t need it because you aren’t having panic attacks, but trust me – practice them now before you think you need them. you can use them to refocus and calm down at any time. i particularly like the 5-4-3-2-1 one – just a way to bring your feet back down to the ground when your thoughts are wanting to scurry in circles about how screamily worried you should be right now. point out five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste. it can all be simple and mundane – and you can do stuff to fulfill that, like deciding that you don’t want to think about the taste of your own teeth and would rather taste a nice peppermint candy instead. you just take a moment to really focus on all of those things, running through each of them, and filling your head with that instead of all the anxiety screamies. is it flawless? nah. but it helps. every little bit helps down here in the trenches.
this is an overly long comment, but hey: i’m rooting for you and if any of this spaghetti sticks to the wall, the rest of it is very worth the shoulder ache. (you’d think being disabled would inspire me to be less verbose! you would be… wrong… lol)
