Dear Annie: My grandmother is in poor health and is not expected to live much longer. Grandma never liked my mother, and consequently, is not close to me. When my parents married, Grandma selected the photographs for the wedding album, and not one picture included my mother. Can you image the effort involved to do such a thing? I always feel like a stranger when I see her side of the family.
When I married three years ago, I was hurt that two of my paternal aunts not only didn’t attend the wedding, but did not even send a card to wish me well. When I told them how I felt, they repeated it to my grandmother, who in turn said some rather nasty things to me. I have not seen or talked to her side of the family since.
When Grandma passes away must I go to her funeral? I love my father very much and realize I should have been there for him, but I have tremendous resentment towards his family. Tell me what to do. FRACTURED FAMILY IN OHIO
Dear Ohio: Go to the funeral, not only because it is the classy thing to do, but because it would mean a lot to your father. You don’t have to speak to the relatives you dislike. Pay your respects, and then leave. You won’t regret it. —ANNIE
Gabby's Reply
Dear Fractured: Thanks so much for writing. It speaks to many families.
Whenever there is a conflict between two there is always a third party who has a vested interest in the friction, quite often they do it covertly; most always they are unaware that they are using their highly developed, extremely powerful, non-verbal leadership-communication skills. This person most always pretends to be an ally. That is to say, the friction couldn’t have taken place if your father had said to his mother at the very beginning, "Either you work out your differences with my fiancé or I won’t be in communication with you till you do."
In a loving supportive family it's the child's [in this case, your father's] responsibility to bring in someone the clan finds compatible. For your father to have married your mother reveals that he disrespected his mother; by ignoring her advice he brought her spiteful sabotaging wrath down on himself and on you. For your mother to have married into his clan reveals that she disrespected her own family; she submitted them to the abuse of your husband's mother.
Most always the seemingly innocent third party (in this case your dad) unconsciously sides with one of the adversaries (your grandmother) and is supporting her in treating you abusively rather than putting himself on the line by saying, "Clean it up Mom or I’ll recess you—until you get therapy—for life if that’s what it takes." Yes, your father needs an equal amount of counseling.
You actually have more than one third party. Your "paternal aunts" are also addicted to gossiping divisive abuse. Notice the result they produced by telling your grandmother what you said, knowing full well she doesn't like you? Communicating so as to get another in trouble is both unethical and abusive, it's called sabotage.
You have inherited a problem that your father refused to resolve through to mutual satisfaction. It appears that your father went against his mother’s wishes (marrying your mom) and you are suffering for it. If he did it because his family's line, that lineage, was in fact so unethical or so damaged as to be considered incurable then you should know why he ignored and thwarted her. On the other hand, if your grandmother knows something you don’t and he disrespected her, then he invalidated and thwarted the wisdom of his own mother, for which there is a lifetime of consequences. Keep in mind, in terms of leadership, he is the one who turned his own mother against his daughter.
One problem for you is that you don’t know if grandmother’s reasons for not liking your mother have to do with a legal, ethical, moral, or another valid issue, or, if her reasons are based upon spite, prejudice, or bigotry. Perhaps she’s simply a control freak that needs to be gotten out from under. Because you don’t know the source of the friction between them you have yet to make an intelligent conscious choice as to whom to play with in life. In my day bigoted, biased, or prejudiced parents would often try to thwart their child's mixed (social, religious, or racial) marriage and so familial disobedience was a courageous act of integrity; it's based upon the premise that interacting with (rewarding or empowering) bigots or criminals (within ones family) begets a lifetime of messy problems.
You say, " . . . nasty things . . . " but not whether they were true.
I'm concerned you can't see that your husband has allowed/supported his mother in treating you with such contempt and disrespect? This reveals that he too has similar issues within his family. That you would bring your fiancé (now husband) and his mother into your family, without him first having estranged himself from them, is not a gift of love.
You ask for advice. This is your opportunity to estrange yourself from your entire family, all of whom are clearly addicted to abuse, and to start a new lineage. That, or continue to teach your children to relate as only you know how—which is to put up with abuse. Even in your letter you have unconsciously taken sides with one of the adversaries (your father), whereas they all need an equal amount of therapy.
There is a way for you to give all concerned an ultimatum to fulfill whatever requirements you desire in order for them to be able to continue to be in communication with you. For example: To each you would write,
- "I need to know that I am not the cause of the abuse I experience within this family. I have failed to inspire respect and an experience of being loved and valued. Towards this end I intend to estrange myself completely from all interactions with everyone and immerse myself in therapy/counseling/coaching until I feel I can interact with you in a way that feels good. I need to hear from you, and all the others, that each of you have attended 25 sessions of family therapy and that you have cleaned up your relationships with everyone before I’m willing to engage in any communications with any of you."
Goodness knows to what extent a part of your grandmother’s "poor health" has to do with her integrity, and in fact the collective integrity of the family. Her abuse towards you continues to have undesirable consequences for everyone, but especially for her.** For you to submit yourself and your children to such abuse will continue to have undesirable consequences. For you to continue relating with any of them will reveal that you have been lying—saying you want harmony when the results of your leadership-communication skills prove otherwise.
The sad part is that you will continue to damage your children; your job is to model for them how to extract oneself from an abusive relationship, else, eventually, they too will be writing to an advice columnist. No longer will you be able to say you didn't know you were empowering abuse.
To answer your question: It's tantamount to suicide for me to go to an event in which I'll most likely trigger someone's abuse (stink-eye/shunning). Why would I consciously choose to be invalidated and abused? Ah, I know. I'll do it so that I can innocently trigger the abuse, causing them to mistreat me, and then I'll blame them and make everyone wrong. For you to attend such an event would confirm your addiction to abuse, to abusing and being abused (setting it up to be abused is abuse). Mo betta to hang with people who love me and each other, yes?
Readers might wonder why I don't advise you to ask your grandmother why she treated you so disrespectfully. I don't because of your addiction to being incomplete; such a conversation would support you both in being even more incomplete. A person committed to being complete would have resolved this through to mutual satisfaction years ago. Be aware of the false acknowledgment, Grandma: "If I've been abusive, I'm sorry." —covert denial. With aloha, Gabby
* Each of us have the exact same amount of support skills. Some use their leadership-support skills (albeit unconsciously) to thwart so as to cause those around them to stay stuck in mediocrity (i.e. the spouse of a couch potato); others use their support skills to uplift and forward others. And, others unconsciously use their support skills to cause those around them to crash and burn. The test for what your intentions have been is to look at the results those around you are producing.
** When a person of integrity is rude to another it bothers the person of integrity, so much so that they then clean up the incident through to mutual satisfaction. When a person who has accumulated a lifetime of perpetrations refuses to clean up an abusive communication they go unconscious so they don't have to accept responsibility for having caused the friction. They unconsciously keep communicating abusively hoping someone will be sharp enough to support them in cleaning up the first abuse. They accumulate so many incompletes (out-integrities), so many communication breakdowns, that it begins to cost them their aliveness (no joy and happiness) —eventually it begins to effect their health; it appears that your grandmother's "poor" health began with abuse number one [most likely a childhood incident] which she has yet to acknowledge or clean up.
Show these communications to everyone concerned.
Check back occasionally for minor edits (last edited 11/18/11)