Weaponized Indifference

The silent soul killer

Weaponized Indifference

With a lot of estranged people I’m in touch with, there was an effort, no matter how frail, on the part of the person being cut off, to get back into the good graces of the person leaving. They let them know that they are missed, and that it was deeply painful to be cut out. I imagine this must be comforting. In my family, there were no such pretenses. The main dynamic was something I call weaponized indifference.

Sure, sometimes my father would express pain at certain points of our estrangement journey, before he would inevitably slip into a melded critique of me and my mother.  

Even though he went through the motions of being hurt, especially when he had an audience, my overwhelming experience was that of weaponized indifference. 

What that looked like in real life was 1. There would be the “last straw” incident. 2. I would attempt to set a boundary and use access to me as the consequence, ie: “If you don’t explain why you are taking me to court to have me removed as executor of mom’s will, I can’t trust you/be in a relationship with you.” (A real thing.) 3. Radio silence on their part.

Radio silence, which reads like a shrug.

The message being, I will not change for you.

You are expendable.

Each time, I mistakenly thought that they would change their ways in order to be in my life. Each time, I realized with shame, horror and humiliation that they would not, and that I apparently wasn’t even worth a conversation.

My mother and father pulled shades of this from time to time, they leveraged their weaponized indifference alternated with intense praise and attention, and always temporarily. It was the aunts and uncles, the cousins, the half-siblings, and the friends of both—that most consistently sent the message that they could take or leave me. And if connection to me required work on their part, the answer was, leave me.

They never cracked in their facade of absolute do-not-give-a-damn-about-Lia, which has left me wondering whether they ever did.

There were some cultural differences within the family in how different people within several overlapping family systems enacted shunning.

My Sicilian half-siblings, children of our sociopathic Pop, would ghost me (before we called it “ghosting”) when I set a boundary. I would not hear from them again until they wanted something from me, usually some sort of unpleasant thankless task related to our dying parents.

At that point, they would change their tune and dish all sorts of praise about how wise and mature I was.

That never lasts.

Because when you are asked to do enough thankless tasks, you eventually say no.

And then you’re on the outs again, and also a receptacle for their insults.

The half-siblings on my mom’s side also asked, and downright expected me to do thankless tasks related to our mother, who was busy drinking herself to death. When I set limits with them, they took the “high road” and accused me of theft and corruption, and tried to have me removed as executor of her estate.

This time, it was a judge that told them, “no.” (Sometimes you have to outsource.)

When I first saw their threatening letter, I called them both.

“Answer the phone!” doesn’t have the same zest when you’re saying it into someone’s cell phone voice mail, instead the way it was back in the good old days when you could imagine the person cowering next to an answering machine.

They never answered nor returned my calls.

I only heard from them when they wanted something—material things from the estate, and for me to hurry up and wrap up the complicated estate so I could give them money.

Pathetically, I told Melvin that if he wanted a relationship with me in the future, he owed me an apology and an explanation.

Pathetically, I was left on “read.”

“Pathetically,” meaning the situation contained a lot of pathos, and it was another, deeper, more painful realization, that I had been chasing the ghost of an idea of a family for as long as I had known, and that I was the last to know.

No matter how much people say that it’s your fault for breaking up a family, sometimes “the ghost’s on you.” Sometimes you wake up at four in the morning and realize that you really don’t need to feel guilty for not loving them, because they fucking hate you. These ever-tantrumming adult children aren’t my real brothers and sisters— and they never saw me as such. I was an interloper and a prop.

Instead of being the bad guy who left everyone, I realized with a start that I was the one who was abandoned.

The Shadow is a long, tall, bitch with a powerful bite.

As I have written previously, things lined up so that I was low on pretty much everyone’s list—my cousins all had siblings, the ones with siblings were still closer to the other cousins than to me, my half-siblings were all closer to their own self image and each other than to me, my parents hadn’t planned on me when I was born, and were old and tired all through my growing-up, leaving me feeling like a permanent outsider, or a party guest that accidentally turned up as everyone was cleaning up and getting ready to go home.

This created a self-image of being deeply flawed, which gave rise to negative behaviors on my part and a reluctance to trust people or join in on anything fully, which basically cemented my archetype as the low-status person in any group, basically until I got married and started my own family. And even now, I get triggered by small things and imagine that my husband and children are excluding me, and I have to spend a bit of time practicing coping skills, getting back into my own present, and soothing my sad inner child. They spend their share of time showing me I matter and I am invited.

But I’m not even sure I will ever heal from this, to be blunt. It’s kind of better if I don’t think of it in those terms, because if I do I will spend a lifetime wondering what was wrong with me and why am I flawed and what can I fix.

Better just to live my life with the wounds and holes, and learn to patch them with self-love and new experiences.