Brothers Drug Use, My Pattern of Avoidance

[BlueOak]

This isn't for any particular reason other than to talk for the sake of talking or healing it. It's been a rough week. Advice is welcome, skip to the end questions if you are low on time.

Since my brother has been going through a rough spot. I've felt the same pull on me a lot recently, and ghosted things again, only for a week. I don't have much guilt or shame for ghosting in me anymore, so I don't need to hide from that in the pattern itself. I also have no partner that I am skipping out on that needs me, so there is no painful consequence.

My brother is still an opiate addict at 40, and he started before he was an adult. My 70-year-old+ mother still finances his addiction, so he doesn't kill himself. It's about as toxic a relationship as you'd imagine. She drives him to get his drugs and gives him the money. He had been working for a good long while but recently lost his job, and his girlfriend, so she's paying for all of it now not just petrol and the extra he'd usually need to get by.

My father is a broken man, he's less angry now than he was most of the time but he lives in a pit of despair (mostly self-created). As a kid, we used to argue every day and then I would get a physical punishment about once a week, hand, cane, or belt. So my abuse was never the unpredictable rage others experienced, for me it was routine, and for years I could think of it as normal. It was like being raised by an angry, narcissistic 6-year-old who did nothing but get into shouting matches over small things. Such as the TV control being in the wrong, spot, the door being open, you saying the wrong word, or leaving a cup on the kitchen sink. Just ridiculous things. I remember watching Bender in the breakfast club say this is what happens to him when you spill paint, and I thought well, no to me that happens when you leave the door open.

I learned to shout back at first, and that led to the physical abuse, honestly, though the enraged daily shouting was far worse.  At 6 I was repeating to him what he was saying to me, that's the earliest I remember the volatile arguments, I mean, a full-blown temper over any small detail like spelling mistakes at primary school, never a simple disagreement. That was the hardest bit of deconditioning I had to do: not taking every small thing like it was the end of the world or a threat I was about to be hit for.

Why do I say this? Well, I find it good to write these things out. Especially when life is tough and maybe someone has an insight I haven't thought of. It also explains my brother's initial choice to escape into drugs and my ghosting pattern. If I am not in life, I am not affected as much, computers were always somewhere that was certain and predictable. This escapism was why I loved fantasy time as a kid and eventually computer games. I assume my brothers escapism was similar. 

Over the many years, I've/we've tried all the things I know in relation to my brother. Love, sympathy, acceptance, denial, anger, pretending, getting him in rehab (expensive) and even using the police. We've experienced everything you imagine from an addict also.

My dad and I don't often talk, as you can imagine, but he did say something today. He was talking about suicide and the helplessness he feels, I told him he doesn't see my brother; he sees the addict, and he replied that he'd never seen my brother, only as a kid, because he'd always been on some kind of drug. I realized that he was right.

At what point is the person just the person? If that's what they've been all their life, that's what they are. So I realized in my head that, at this late date, I'd still be excusing it all somehow. My brother is and will always be an addict, while my mother is alive, until she or he dies.

^

1) How would you deal with a ghosting pattern if you found yourself in one often and were tempted to do so? 
2) What would you personally do regarding the family situation, bearing in mind that it's been almost 30 years?

Also, I am broke and trying to restart a career, so large expenses are out of the question. 
*Go easy on my mother's codependence also, it's understandable given the environment. I don't excuse her enabling, and believe me I've talked at length with her but I do understand why it happened.

Edited April 15, 2024 by BlueOak

[Javfly33]

1) I´m not sure what you mean by 'ghosting pattern'. I think is good to entertain oneself with things that one enjoys. 

2) Run if you can and don´t look back. 

[BlueOak]

4 hours ago, Javfly33 said:

1) I´m not sure what you mean by 'ghosting pattern'. I think is good to entertain oneself with things that one enjoys. 

2) Run if you can and don´t look back. 

Yeah. It's time I moved countries or planets :).

Ghosting is somewhat like avoidance. It might be ghosting a partner because you are going through a tough period, whether it's related to the partner or not. Dropping all contact rather than engaging with them.

I'm not permanently in a ghost pattern but I have my moments still. This week was a harder week than usual, so I appreciate the reply.

A healthy mind picks and chooses their career, a person running a ghosting pattern will pick a career with less care and then try to spend 60 hours a week there to avoid life. Ditto gaming in solitude, drinking themselves to distraction, or any activity that takes them so far away from everything or everyone else, that they bury themselves away from the world.

It's difficult to see sometimes because someone could do these things because they love work, or they want to live in solitude in nature.

[Javfly33]

23 hours ago, BlueOak said:

Yeah. It's time I moved countries or planets :).

Ghosting is somewhat like avoidance. It might be ghosting a partner because you are going through a tough period, whether it's related to the partner or not. Dropping all contact rather than engaging with them.

I'm not permanently in a ghost pattern but I have my moments still. This week was a harder week than usual, so I appreciate the reply.

A healthy mind picks and chooses their career, a person running a ghosting pattern will pick a career with less care and then try to spend 60 hours a week there to avoid life. Ditto gaming in solitude, drinking themselves to distraction, or any activity that takes them so far away from everything or everyone else, that they bury themselves away from the world.

It's difficult to see sometimes because someone could do these things because they love work, or they want to live in solitude in nature.

Right, I understand you know.

In my experience you only need to focus and work on building regular habits, attitudes and actions that go against the "ghosting patters".

For example, one of my clear ghosting patters in using drugs, I don´t have a physical dependency in the sense I need a drug to be funcional, like your brother might need, but I can clearly see from time to time I use drugs to numb and create a fake comfort chemical atmosphere.

This type of pattern slows down progress and reduces clarity on where one is in life. But mind picks up this ghosting patterns because mind Is usually about homeostasis, comfort, cyclical nature. Is not about expansion and transformation. Is something 'natural' for the mind. 

What I have done that has improved my relationship with this 'ghosting patters' is that instead of judging them and try to avoid them, reject them, completely Focus my attention, focus, and energy on the things that are anti-ghosting, in my case, last year which I was trying to improve my social circle, going out 3 days a week for a full year.

While this year ghosting patters where there but I accept them as rain in the sky, what I made sure is to focus on going out, and even though there were ghosting patters through the whole year while doing this, there was a certain transformation and expansion going on. 

Another example would be this current year, where I am focusing and going deep in Yoga practice. Is another example of anti-ghosting actions because it not only improves awareness and clarity of mind it kinda automatically has made easier to let go certain addictive or compulsive tendencies such as using drugs. So even though the mind still feels the desire to scratch the itch with the ghosting pattern, I don´t pay it much attention. I just keep myself focused. 

In other words, focus on Consciousness instead of compulsiveness, whatever turns out that to be in your situation. And compulsiveness and avoidance patters will slowly being to fall or be reduced on their own.

If you focus on trying to reduce or eliminate the compulsive or cyclical patters you are just feeding more on to them. Where your focus is, is where your life will grow. 

Hope that helps-

[BlueOak]

1 hour ago, Javfly33 said:

If you focus on trying to reduce or eliminate the compulsive or cyclical patters you are just feeding more on to them. Where your focus is, is where your life will grow. 

Hope that helps-

It does, it was insightful. Thank you for the advice and for relating it to your own experience.  @Javfly33

[Sincerity]

On 4/15/2024 at 10:30 PM, BlueOak said:

1) How would you deal with a ghosting pattern if you found yourself in one often and were tempted to do so? 
2) What would you personally do regarding the family situation, bearing in mind that it's been almost 30 years?

Sorry you're dealing with this. I know something about ghosting.

Maybe you just gotta live through the specific pain which will come out of avoiding things. The numbness, the silent desperation, powerlessness, etc.. Suffering teaches you. When you're in enough pain and can't handle it anymore, it motivates you to change - for good.

There might be a better way though. I don't know what it is.

You should probably cut yourself off from your family. It's not your burden. It's just not yours.

[TheCloud]

On 4/15/2024 at 3:30 PM, BlueOak said:

*Go easy on my mother's codependence also, it's understandable given the environment. I don't excuse her enabling, and believe me I've talked at length with her but I do understand why it happened.

If you haven't already, be fully honest, at least with your private self, on how deleterious your mother's behaviors have been/are to you.  It takes two dysfunctional parents to make a dysfunctional household.  Be honest with how harmful your father's behavior was, and how harmful your mother's was in accepting or allowing it.

Imagine you had a child, and your parents were putting that child through what you went through.  That's how upset you need to be.  Then acknowledge and work through those emotions, which are your real feelings on the matter.

[BlueOak]

@Sincerity | @TheCloud

Thanks. It's alright, that was just a rough week. Most weeks, I only have my issues to deal with, and that family dynamic is in the background. So I maintain a fairly level mood, 3/10 depression most days so nothing major. I realized I hadn't shared the above here for insight and reflection, so it was a good opportunity.

@Sincerity

I try to say that my contribution to the dynamic was not making my life more of an example to my brother, so he had a positive role model to follow. Given that he had no stable father figure, it could have meant a lot, or it could have meant nothing versus his opiate addiction, who knows because nothing else did.

At the moment, I am attempting to keep my focus on my task of becoming a professional editor, and some days it's easier than others. You are right though a change of location and distance will help again, I had that once before. It doesn't fix your own life, but I've not felt part of all this for a decade or more. I guess that is a result of and a cause of the ghosting. It's easier to ghost when I feel disconnected from the environment.

@TheCloud
Yeah, I went through that about 12 years ago, in regards to my mother, I started that process in earnest back then. She's got limited narcissistic qualities too, but they are codependent. If you were to question her identity, she'd become a rock. She was quite fierce when I was younger and could become just as angry at times because, at a young age, I would reflect my father's behavior in arguments with him. Something she was fiercely against.

These days, though, she's more of a doormat, to put it bluntly. That quality was always there, but it's enhanced, my brother is such an expert manipulator after 25 years of doing it. The whole family were manipulators, and he's better than they are now. They've been worn down to shells of themselves on this issue, where my father is an angry black void and my mother is a robot.

Like Sincerity says, it's time to take a longer break than I have and move further away, I don't have much of a life here in the three rooms I live in, and though the area is beautiful, the people in the surrounding area and I are very different.

Edited April 22, 2024 by BlueOak