Hi,
I’m 19 (turning 20 in two months) and my brother’s 21. To put this simply, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that he’s manipulative and emotionally abusive, like the title says. He says the most nasty things to me; about a week ago, when his girlfriend and best friend were over, he got really pissed off at me because I told him his domestic abuse jokes weren’t funny. He seriously told me to “Get back in the kitchen!” (which we were already in because I was putting away clean dishes) and kept verbally battering me. One of his favorite topics is that how I don’t have a job. This has been something I’ve felt very guilty for in the past, and he’s heard me talk to our parents, but we live in such a dangerous town that they wouldn’t want me getting one anyone. My brother has been working for the past two years and makes very good money, but he doesn’t seem to understand that because I’m not a guy and I’m not incredibly tall/intimidating it’s even more dangerous for me to work. He’s always saying how I mooch off the parents (I spend MAYBE $20 a month, max??) and I do nothing but sit at home all day (I’m taking a full load of classes, working on re-writing a 951 paged novel I plan to publish at the end of this year, I play guitar, make a little bit of cash online, etc.) Even when I tell him what I do, he still waves it off as laziness.
Anyway, when I was doing the dishes one of the lines he threw at me (yes, still while his girlfriend and friend were standing off by the side, watching and unsure of what to do) was how “doing the dishes is the only point to your existence.” And this is spoken with tone that’s venomous and also a little passive (the anger is riding more underneath his words, if that makes sense. It’s not like he’s yelling or anything). He kept saying super hurtful things like that and I kept trying to step away, saying “Let’s not get into this right now. I don’t wanna talk about it. I don’t wanna talk about this.”
It’s fuCKING indescribably frustrating because he never owns up to what he does! We’ve had kittens for about seven months; my mom and I fostered them after my ten year old cat died. That cat pulled me through a ton of very emotional toil, and to have her die so suddenly left me in a catatonic state for a few days before my mom and I took that negative weight and turned it into positive energy by fostering kittens (which, given all we went through with them, we ended up adopting). For so long, my brother has complained about these kittens. Every time he comes in the living room, it’s some comment about how he hates them or how they smell or why did we get these cats (80% of what comes out of his mouth when he’s not around his friends is a complaint).
My main point to this is we have one orange cat that always wants to go outside. He’s still very little, and in the past I would let them outside for like two minutes tops because they really loved it out there but they were also so little. My brother would almost constantly whine about how we should let these cats outside all the time; free-range kind of stuff. A few weeks ago, when I was picking him up to go inside, the orange cat climbed up our redwood tree (which is probably about 30 feet high). My brother let out a comment about how stupid it was of me to let them out and how I shouldn’t have done it. Ok. Never mind the months of comments you’ve been making.
What’s frustrating is that HIS negativity does have control over me. He’s been making such idiotic 12 year old kid-like comments to me since middle school. We’ve gotten physical a little bit in the past; there was this one time where I was holding one of the cats (the orange one. he’s a cuddler) and I walked up to my brother and I was like “Look at this sweet lil angel” and he literally shoved me away by the stomach.
I realize my brother has to grow up on his own time, but he still lives at home and it’s SO FRUSTRATING AND EMOTIONALLY DRAINING for me…. I could go on because there’s so many examples and stories for me to draw from but the fact is it’s so hard. My parents don’t do anything. My brother treats my mom the exact same way, sometimes even worse, and my dad is just passive to it (saying he’s gotta grow up on his own, maybe he’ll learn eventually, there’s nothing we can do, etc) and while I understand that, I don’t know how I can deal with what my brother keeps saying to me.