A
female
age
51-59,
anonymous
writes:Hi there, I'm curious as to what everyone would do about this (if anything)My brother was divorced from his ex wife about 8 years ago. They have one daughter who is now 10 yrs old.The trouble: he is obsessed with her and it's making him sick, ruining his finances, his love life, and his career. Not to mention his relationship with the rest of his family and probably with his daughter, too.At first he was obsessed in a 'I still love her!' way but after 4 or 5 years of that he has switched to being obsessed in a 'she is the devil incarnate and I must spread the word about her everywhere!' way. Both are extremely horrible to deal with. All he ever talks or thinks about is this woman.I should say that his ex-wife is a nasty piece of work. Really. We were all quite relieved when he and she were divorced, since we all believed that this would be the end of my brother's depressive cycles. We thought she was pretty emotionally abusive and she absolutely alienated him from the rest of us and said awful things about him to me, personally. The two of them have fought over every single aspect of the separation, child custody, and money aspects of the divorce. They are still in and out of court to this day and my brother told me last night he is on the doorstep of his second bankruptcy. He is also having to go into military court because his behaviour at his place of employment has deteriorated. He has been in and out of rehab. He has never had another relationship outside of his obsessive one with his ex. He gets emotionally upset to the point that I believe he has overdosed twice. (Once for sure, the second time I'm not sure of.)I live 3000 kms away from him. He's a grown man of 39. I can't deal with helping him anymore or even listening to it any more. Anything I suggest he brushes off like I'm a complete idiot because I just don't understand how it is for him "Nothing's fair!" "She's a psychopath who has thought of everything!" "The world hates me because I'm a man!" blah blah blah. There's no getting through to him.So.. does anyone have any experience with something like this? I hate to totally write him off but the drama is never ending and it's not improving in any way whatsoever.
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female
reader, chocoholicforever  +, writes (29 September 2011):
I can understand how you feel...your brother is clearly dysfunctional and is ruining his life, and possibly that of his daughter as well.
The question is what do you do? clearly you've tried very hard, for a very long time, to help him to improve his life and his mental welfare because you love him and you can see that he's on a very destructive path. But realize that in the end, you can't change someone else. You can't heal someone, only that person can get themselves healed. It may be that you've been trying too hard to help him and becoming too emotionally invested in wanting him to change for the better. This is when you need to step back and emotionally detach from the outcome that you want to see (which is whatever you believe he should be doing with his life), because if you invest too much of yourself emotionally into him you're going to be devastated and frustrated when he still doesn't change despite all your effort. And this doesn't help the situation, it just makes you feel worse and thus makes your relationship with him even more strained and could affect your own health too.
A different situation is if you're already trying to distance yourself from him but he keeps seeking you out and trying to get you to feed into his dysfunctionality. If this is the case, then you should uphold your boundaries and not allow yourself to get sucked into his rants and scheming to get back at his ex. If this means you have to cut off contact completely, then so be it, because you have to thwart his efforts to get you to play into his games, by making it not worth his energy.
Your brother probably needs psychiatric help but he has to take responsibility for it. You can only do so much. You can give him feedback on what you observe so he has that information. You can take him to a psychiatrist if he's so depressed he can't get out of bed. If he's overdosed, you of course can and should intervene by taking him to the hospital. But beyond those short-term interventions, what he does with his life in the long term, and what he chooses to do with the information you give him, is out of your control so you may need to emotionally detach yourself from wanting to see a certain outcome (of him getting better) because it's not good to make your own emotional health dependent on something that's beyond your control and also so that you can continue to maintain some relationship with him and be there for him in a way that doesn't negatively impact you.
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