I'm the trustee for my disabled aunt, who hasn't worked for over 30 years due to severe anxiety. It's a gut-wrenching, challenging job for me because she's mentally ill, but not obviously so, and I don't always know how to treat her. She has a college degree, she's a good artist, and she can pass for a perfectly functional person at first glance. But if you look a little deeper, you see a messy picture. She lives in a filthy condo packed full of junk, she has no friends, and if she doesn't get what she wants, she lashes out as fiercely and as viciously as a cornered animal. I've heard her, as an grown woman, say to her own mother, "I hate you and I wish you had died instead of Dad."
The hard part is that I know that she's mentally ill, that she has anxiety, that telling her to just relax is like telling somehow with diabetes to just produce more insulin. She also has a host of other health problems, and is in the process of having her knees and hips replaced.
But at the same time, when she says the cruelest and most hurtful thing she can think of, is that simply mental illness? Does she get a free pass to hurt people whenever she wants? It's not like she doesn't know that she's trying to hurt someone, because if one hurtful tactic doesn't work, she's intelligent enough to try something else. She knows exactly what she's doing.
For example, when I was younger I used to get upset and defensive when she would tell me that my mother was no-good. Then I got a little older and started disregarding her opinions on the matter, so she tried other tactics. She would tell me that I was selfish. That my best friend confessed to her that he didn't like me. That my nieces don't like me. That my father is a no-good drunk. That I come from bad genes. That I was brought up without any class. That I'm spoiled. When all of that doesn't work, she'll instantly start crying because of all of her health issues, and beg me for sympathy. If that doesn't work, she'll go back to anger. She will never, under any circumstances, admit she was wrong, nor will she apologize, nor will she accept responsibility for any of her actions.
One night I tried to get her to admit that she was at least 1% responsible for the rift between her and her twin sister (my mother). She went through a litany of reasons why she was not responsible for any part of it. She was brought up to act that way. Her Dad was sick when she was young and that screwed her up. She hates my step-dad. We went in circles for over an hour, and in the end she was unwilling or unable to admit any responsibility for anything. She is beyond reproach for anything.
What sucks about the situation is that I have to treat her like a child, because she is unable to act like an adult, and that feels very condescending. It's not natural for me to treat adults like children, and even with children I try to teach them responsibility for their actions. She can't be taught anything, so I constantly have to remind myself that she's not an adult but that she's not exactly a child either. It's hard for me to take her verbal abuse when I have agreed to be her trustee for free, and paid over $2000 out of my own pocket to hire lawyers to handle her disability case. Like hell I'm selfish! Like hell I don't do anything for her! But it doesn't help me to explain that to her because she either doesn't care or isn't capable of understanding.
And what about her outbursts? Every single lie, outburst, nasty personal attack or bad decision she's made was not a choice but rather the result of mental illness? I don't know enough about the subject, but it's hard to accept that she has no ability to make choices. It's not natural for me to treat her, not quite as a person, but as a special type of person who is never responsible for their hurtful actions. That's not something I have much experience doing, and it's very draining.
What's especially hard is that her constant attempts to hurt me whenever she feels like lashing out have greatly diminished the amount of sympathy I can muster for her. She's bitter, alone, and nasty, and I can't even feel sympathy. All I feel is pity, and that doesn't feel very good.
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