Misadventures with Angry Alcoholics, Bullies and Narcissists: Black Sheep at Christmas? Making Christmas Better ...

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Black Sheep at Christmas? Making Christmas Better ...

THE BLACK SHEEP CHRISTMAS

When the holidays come around, being the black sheep of a family can sometimes be trying, especially if you used to spend some of the holidays with certain members, but are no longer invited, or you no longer want to invite them.

So creating memories with others for the holidays is a big transition which may not feel comfortable at first. You may feel sad, or even devastated for the holidays the first couple of years. But then eventually the holidays can be just as fun and meaningful as before, maybe more so. They will be different, with different people that you want to share your time with and make memories.

In this post I have a few stories told to me, or written to me. These stories give you ideas of how memories can be made and possibilities for the holidays.

I was surprised when I first started going to Al-Anon just how many black sheep there were. A lot! And CoDA had a fair number of them too. Estrangement from parents, or parents from children, like school shootings and being addicted to cell phones, seem to be the direction America is going in.

The reasons for parent/adult child estrangements run the gamut. The following are stories from survivors of abuse, and how these particular people resolved the whole "Black Sheep Christmas" debacle. I also share a video about scapegoating (which a lot of these stories feature) at the end by psychotherapist, Les Carter. Then there is some further reading on how to handle a toxic family which seem to contradict with how most of the survivors in these stories handled it.

Note: for survivors reading this, if you are new to estrangement, these stories should help you to see that you are not alone and give you hope that you can recover from either horrible family Christmases that you no longer want to be part of, or Christmases where your family has ostracized you and they no longer invite you because you are being punished. Please also note that you can find happiness out of situations where you are being scapegoated or feeling like a black sheep who doesn't fit in with your family, but it will take work and a lot of time:

first story:
* "My family fights all through the holidays, every holiday. Everyone is ripping each other apart. Then my father starts drinking too much. I just don't want to be there. I started my own tradition with just my two children, no others. It is peaceful, quiet and warm. We keep the lights off, light candles, get some nice scents going, my children get their instruments out and one of them is a harp. We sing Christmas Carols. Such a contrast from what I grew up with."

second story:
* "I was molested by my alcoholic father when I was growing up, and after I had my son, I didn't want him molested too. I was ostracized right after I told them I didn't want my father near my boy, and I never saw any of my family members again. It was very hard the first couple of years. Then I met some people at Al-Anon who were in the same boat I was in, and we started our own Christmas tradition, five of us, and we have been together for Christmas for 23 years now! We have so much fun. Our parents have all died now, and in the last 6 months I was told that I still have a brother and sister alive, but they are estranged from each other over our father's Last Will. I thought about contacting them, but did not want to be involved in the war between them. I feel that my fellow black sheep are my real family. In some ways I feel like it was the only family I ever had in any real sense of the word. My family's cohesion was based on a lie. My son is part of our Al-Anon Christmas and doesn't know any different because he never met any of the blood relatives. We are proud that we are black sheep. For some of us, it kept us alive, being away from abuse, molestation, an angry alcoholic parent, you name it ... "

third story:
* "I was in an accident and taken to a hospital by my drunken alcoholic mother right before the holidays a couple of years back. She was so drunk that she left me there and then called me the following day asking where I was. I told her 'I'm in the hospital, don't you remember?' She answered, 'Sure, sure, I remember', and then drives to an entirely different hospital than the one I am in. Then she throws a fit with the staff, insisting I am there and that they are hiding me, and leaves in a huff and goes off to a bar to calm down, and gets so inebriated that she can't drive me home when I am discharged. Then she calls me up a few days before Christmas, wanting to be with me on that day, making dinner together, singing some songs at the piano together, and says she has some great presents for me too. She picks me up early and she has already started drinking at 8:00 in the morning! Then by 9:30 she is pretty sauced and starts swearing at me, telling me I should jump in a pool. It is snowing outside. By 11:00 in the morning she is totally passed out on the sofa snoring really, really loudly until about 4:30 in the afternoon she starts reviving. No dinner. She is too hung-over to make it, so we eat cheese and crackers and I make her some coffee. Then she spikes another cup of coffee with whiskey. At first I felt worried for her when she was passed out for so long, but then I felt I was in Christmas Hell with no escape (she lives in suburbia and I don't have a car). No Christmas dinner. I look out her window and see all of these families taking a walk, smiling, hugging their kids, while I'm inside with someone passed out all day. I decided then and there that it was the last holiday I would spend with her. A neighbor knows I spent the last couple of holidays alone in my apartment, and now invites me over for dinner, and gives me some nice presents for the home, potholders and teacups, things like that. Very thoughtful. Such a nice family. Like the families I saw walking that day outside my mother's. I don't really have a mother any more. She's been lost to drunken-ness. The bottle is her daughter now. Oh, yea, and my Christmas present from my mother? It was all booze! All of it! I left it there. So thoughtful! I guess she wants me to be like her! No way! I enjoy being with my neighbors."

fourth story:
* "I was ostracized from my entire family in my twenties. I felt like I wouldn't survive, but I did somehow. Since it was very uncomfortable to live in the same town they lived in, I moved to the east coast. I heard about Al-Anon after a couple of decades of living here. I don't know why it took me so long to discover it. I started thinking about how so many people in my family were alcoholics and thought I would give it a try to see if there was anything in my alcoholic family to explain my own upbringing! I found people just like myself at Al-Anon, people with no families. Does alcoholism breed shunning? Maybe it does, I thought. Then I met this fine woman sitting next to me. We are like twin sisters, don't you think? We have celebrated every Christmas, every birthday, all the holidays together. Then we decided we should live next door to each other so we could help each other in our old age. It's nice to feel you have a twin sister in the world, even though we are not biological twins. We both went through a remarkably similar experience. If I hadn't left the west coast where my family lives, I would have never met her!"

fifth story:
* "I fought like hell not to be my mother's black sheep. I felt like I did everything a son could ever do for his mother. But she was determined that I was bad. During my childhood, she hired someone to make a playhouse in her backyard for all of us kids, and when I was only 14, made me live in it, in all kinds of weather, away from the family. I was a really good kid, never gave her any trouble, but she still couldn't see me in any kind of positive light. She would celebrate my sister's and brother's birthdays with wonderful parties, and on my birthday she would tell me I wasn't good enough for a birthday or a party. I tried to commit suicide, ended up in a hospital, then in foster care. My foster family saved me. When I became an adult, my mother never tried to contact me, and when I ran into my brother on a street once with his friends, he spit on me and told me I was no good and that he was glad I wasn't around any more. It was then that I realized I had no family. I told my foster family what happened, and they accepted me as one of their own. I spend all of my Christmases with them now. My blood family eventually had to move, so I no longer see them on the street or hear about them. My brother is on Facebook and I sometimes look him up on there, without putting in a friend request, and it seems we have nothing in common. He's kind of a tough guy with tattoos and leathers, and races cars, and I'm an intellectual whose favorite place is the library. I have never been able to figure out why my mother turned on me. I don't believe she ever will explain it to me in a way I can understand. She would always be angry at having the question put to her and answer it with "You are - " kinds of things that would change from one day to the next, always negative. In the beginning I would get defensive and try to explain what I really thought and felt, but she was totally closed to it. There wasn't a speck of doubt in her mind about what she was believing. What can you do about that? And then I started to only listen. No input on my part, just listening. It was about trying to see if I could get some understanding of the problem between us, but it got worse because the answers got more and more ambiguous. Then I gave up altogether, and felt stuck as her "changeling that lives out back." I never felt she knew me at all. The blessing in my life is that my foster family understands me and loves me, and maybe that is all you really need in life. I certainly came to that conclusion. Having similar DNA isn't always enough to make a bond, I have discovered. I am blessed to have a foster family."

sixth story:
* "I grew up with a mother who was constantly telling me she wished she had an abortion when she was pregnant with me, but that it was illegal at the time. She brought up abortion a lot, too much. I felt her gaze on me after she talked about abortion, and if I looked at her, she'd have this little half smile on her face. Sick! I came close so many times to taking the bait, but I was mostly speechless because I knew she would break out into a rage and hurt me more, so I felt really, really sad and alone when she'd mention it. But eventually I stopped feeling anything about it. I felt numb. I asked my brothers and sisters whether she had ever said anything to them about wanting to abort them. No, they were spared that. So that was how I learned I was the scapegoat. I guess scapegoats are the abort-able ones. Then I got pregnant and she insisted I abort my baby. Really insisted on it to the point where it seemed insane and twisted. But because I didn't want to incite her rage I'd let her lecture, but I didn't respond. Then one Christmas she told my son that she and I had considered aborting him. Nothing was said about that she was glad he was in the world, in our family, and alive and healthy. Nothing like that! He was deeply upset on a day meant for joy and celebration, and being part of a family. What ever you think about abortion, it is not a topic that should be raised with your kids or grand kids. It is a terrible message. And my mother lied about my wanting to have an abortion anyway. Lies aren't good for children either. Since then, I am spending my holidays with just my son and husband. She is trying very, very hard to induce guilt by playing the victim, but when you see your kid go through the same pain you did, it legitimizes how you feel and how cruel it is. No more."

seventh story:
* "My family is so embarrassing and miserable that I can't be around them on holidays. They use the holidays to go to church and act pious, then to be hypocritical afterwards. They drink too much, get into arguments with each other, insult each other over politics, cry over money issues, spill things all over the furniture and rugs so that the livingroom gets stained where things have to be constantly replaced. There is usually someone throwing up in the bathroom too, so Christmas can be gross, at least in my family. I have seen everything from fist fights to my aunt screaming that she would kill herself with the knife she had in her hand. Some kid always gets injured because the adults are too busy hurting each other. The presents are always things we don't need and either take up precious room in our houses or end up in the trash. I got to a point where I had absolutely no desire to be there. None. I send poinsettias on Christmas Eve, and spend the day working in a soup kitchen. So much better than a day wasted with a family who can't behave themselves. Bad for kids too. A couple of my family members said I seem different from them, like I got switched at birth. Good. I wouldn't want to be them."

eighth story:
* "I walked on eggshells so much at Christmas, between trying not to upset my mother, to gray rocking through so many conversations that I was a nervous wreck that I barely said anything for fear of saying the wrong thing. But if I didn't talk she would be upset about that instead. There was no winning when it came to a peaceful Christmas. She'd pick on me about something even if I was sweet to her: she would complain that I didn't bring something to eat to pass around, when the day before she told me she had so much food that she'd probably throw out at least half of it. Or she would pick on me about the clothes I was wearing, or that I wore the wrong swimsuit to a summer party years ago. The negativity was constantly grinding away at my resolve to be happy and thankful for being in our family. One day we had a falling out over who knows what. She kept saying, "You know what it is!" and "You can't be so dumb as to not know how you have wounded me deeply." Which I heard from a psychologist I was seeing was gaslighting. When I really understood what gaslighting was about, I realized I had probably never been in my mother's company once without some gaslighting going on. I got to a point where I was literally feeling like I was going insane, because everything was about my mother manipulating responses from me, and the constant judgments of my character which, at this point, seemed to be presumptuous and inappropriate for adult conversation: "You aren't good enough," "You are causing me stress," "I know your thoughts better than you know them", "Why can't you ever think of others?" - when all I was doing was thinking about her most of the time and how to relate to her. The more I backed off, the more she gaslighted. I finally told her I couldn't take her gaslighting any more. And then she became enraged and flipped it over on to me, and called me "a gaslighting queen". When I rolled my eyes, it enraged her more because she knew she wasn't talking me into her perspective. And after she flipped so many things back on to me and tried to make them all my fault, I stopped talking. I started shaking uncontrollably in her presence instead and all she could do was laugh at me and make fun of me over it. Then she finally said that if all I was going to say was "I'll think about what you said", because I literally had given up my resolve to be heard, she started screaming at me that I would never be invited to her house again for the holidays. She kept her promise and my first Christmas of being alone I was terrified and crying all day, in a fetal position on my couch. It caused me more pain than I have ever had in my life to the point where I seriously thought about suicide, and it went on until the next Christmas where I was alone and sad again too, but relieved all at the same time. Kind of two contrasting feelings. The pain eventually went away very slowly over the years. Anyone who is willing to put their daughter through that much pain, and where the rejection is so deep and complete that they don't care whether I live or die, it became more of a character issue for me, like who is she that she would do this? I would sit and ponder over whether she had wanted to make me disappear throughout my life, even when I was a baby. Did she want to put a blanket over my mouth and smother me with it? Or give me poison food? Or when I was in the hospital, put something deadly in my IV? Had she tried those things and they failed? So she became 'scary Mom'. She has always been very cold. But she is a little too warm and ingratiating to friends and people she barely knows. The more I became a non-person in her life, the more scary she became and I didn't want her in my life either. I suppose it is mutually rejecting at this point, but it grew for me over time, where for her, it was a split second decision. As far as I'm concerned, she set the tone when she picked Christmas as her 'choice day' for rejection. I met a mother who was absolutely devastated at losing a daughter to cancer and went through her Christmas inconsolable over the loss. I had a mother who was happy to lose a daughter over nothing and was celebrating Christmas with her other kids as though nothing had happened, or maybe it was 'one to go, who do I choose next to go?' I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised. Mom even told my aunt that I was dead to her. That's what triggered me into thinking about my mother wanting me to die my whole life. Maybe she was just trying to find an opportunity to get rid of me and she found something she thought might get her off the hook, to blame me without telling me what it was so that she can make up something later. She's the kind of mother who would cry to all of her friends about how I decided to become estranged from her, rather than the other way around. The woman who lost her daughter to cancer was so shocked that a mother would do this to her own daughter. I showed her the evidence because I don't think she quite believed that some mothers are that evil. Now she and I are spending a lot of time together. When there is a loss, God fills it in, I think. People say that you never get over losing a parent. But a parent like my mother? My Christmases are now stress-free."

ninth story:
* "I started to notice something was wrong when I dragged my daughter with me to my mother's house for Christmas.
But, to backtrack, I left my mother when I was 16 to live with my father. He was in terrible financial straits, poor health, and living in poverty, but she was impossible to live with. At least I was at peace and I could look after my Dad without her sabotaging it all of the time. When I left his apartment at age 19 to be out on my own, my youngest brother, Paul, came to live with me. He was only 13 at the time, but he also found our mother to be extremely difficult to be around. There were enough discussions about abuse in society at that time for him to know he was being severely abused. I actually partially supported Paul because our father's child support payments were all he could afford, but I didn't mind it. I cared deeply for my little brother. At the time, I would have done anything for Paul, because I knew what he was going through, and I really loved him and wanted to protect him.
I had two older brothers, but both of them died. One died in the war in Afghanistan and the other died from suicide when he was 16.
All four of us boys were sexually abused by our uncle, my mother's brother. My mother abused us if we asked for her help to make it stop. We all got whipped if we complained or said a word about it. The brother who killed himself was beat with her frying pan once, even on the head and we wondered if she would kill him. We probably could have had CPS take us out of that situation, but none of us realized it at the time. So, your idea to educate children in schools about what constitutes child abuse so that we could talk to a social worker would have helped all of us a great deal. My mother never should have been a mother. She was terrible! But she is also very, very narcissistic and that means she thinks she is God's gift to parenting.
Anyway, Paul was the one to discover my older brother who hung himself in his bedroom. Between the on-going sexual abuse, being passed around to other sexual predators, seeing the hanging, and dealing with my mother, he was deeply traumatized. My father cared, but he was so ill at the time, I was the only one he could go to for safety. He had been through more than my older brother and I knew if I didn't try to save him, I could be all alone over the loss of three brothers instead of two.
When I got married, my wife treated him like one of her own. She loved him!
But my mother hated that my brother and I were really close. Hated it. Narcissistic triangulation. You know that word! So she started to put doubts into my brother's head about me. She made up stories just to divide us. She gave him really expensive presents and sent him to the Ivy League college of his choice, so long as he lived with her so that she could control him.
Mind you, she inherited three million dollars when my grandfather died, my pedophile uncle got one million, and her two other brothers got nothing. When I have talked to my two uncles who were disinherited, they said that she spent all of her time with their father, making up stories about her brothers, and trying to get him to sign all of his money over to her. That is the kind of person she is!
Anyway, she hoovered my brother back into her clutches with a lot of money and continued with her smear campaign of me and it worked for her! My brother is now the entitled golden child who lives with her even in his thirties! He gets everything he wants! Because she painted me out to be the bad guy, she had to keep up the appearances that I was bad by not helping me with a thing, ever.
I lived in a small walk up apartment and afterwards I purchased a little ramshackle two bedroom house in those days, but I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to show you how the golden child role and scapegoat role got established in my family.
At some point, the golden child wasn't acting so golden, and she hoovered me back in. I got lots of presents at Christmas, huge checks, she lavished me with praise, but with me I was always suspicious. How can someone who hates you and runs vicious smear campaigns with a lot of lies say they love you? What's up with this and all of this money?
In the meantime Paul was acting like he hated me. My brother was someone I deeply loved and who I spent my youth babysitting because our mother couldn't be bothered. I made him a sandwich after school, I tucked him into bed at night, I got him out of the house when our mother's rage was through the roof. I felt like a teenage father because he wasn't being parented.
Anyway, she wasn't giving him gifts any more but throwing big checks at me. It broke my heart, so I shared what she gave me with him. When she had the slightest inkling that we were getting close again because of my willingness to share 50/50, all of the nasty insults, the derision, the rejections and abandonment all came back at me with a vengeance and I backed off from her. She didn't see me or try to contact me for Christmas, or my birthday, or any special day. She was missing from every major event in my life.
Did I care? It hurt, but just a little. I was kind of a tough guy back then. Tough guys aren't Mommy's boys, you know? I was like, 'I can take anything!' And I knew what kind of person she was, after all.
Then two years later we had a daughter, and 'the Momster' was back again, and crying her eyes out in our livingroom, telling us that she would never abandon us again, that she would do everything to change. I grew up with the notion that Ebeneezer Scrooge could change. The Scrooge story is a wild fantasy, just so your readers know. It doesn't happen. If anything, they get worse. But back then, I thought that the evil could turn themselves around. So, like a fool, I accepted her back into my life. My wife wasn't crazy about it. She had serious trepidations, didn't trust her a bit! She felt I was setting myself up again to be toyed with.
But I wanted my daughter to have the traditions of family, to meet the two good uncles and the children they had, her cousins. I was okay about sacrificing my own happiness in order to have my daughter with Paul and other members of the family.
But then it started to get really, really ugly and uncomfortable by the time my daughter was 12. She absolutely dreaded going there, even for Christmas. Paul and Mom were constantly laughing at other people behind their backs, being hyper critical, judgmental, being jerks. Every Christmas was like that. The last Christmas I had with them, the gifts were a fancy muscle car with leather seats for Paul and a couple of magazines for me. I also unwrapped a box full of expired cans of food from her cupboard. My daughter received a horror flick. That was it. It was like there were messages to these presents.
My daughter refused to go again. I told her that it was okay not to go. I understood.
So we stopped going, but Mom would beg us to come every year, trying to pry us. Neither of us budged.
Then I ended up in the hospital and she and Paul seemed genuinely concerned. So I thought that at least they cared if I lived or died, that the prospect of losing me meant something to them.
After I was out of the hospital, I seemed to feel more secure in their love and I began accepting some invites again. Not Christmas, but other family get-togethers. My daughter and wife refused to go to them, so I went alone. But after awhile these invites turned into episodes where they would pick on me. Then they both got insulting. Here I am, the odd man out because my daughter and wife refuse to be there, and I'm thinking to myself, 'Maybe they planned it this way, to isolate me from my family so they could hurt me and no one would come to my defense.'
One day I asked Mom if she meant to hurt me that Christmas by giving Paul a car, me magazines and my daughter a horror flick. She asked me if I was stupid, then gave me this little evil smile.
Then I was in the hospital again and it was life threatening like the last time. They didn't show up. My wife called them many times and even drove past their home to see if they were there. Yes, and watching television. She knocked on the door and my mother answered and told my wife to tell me that they were busy. I was close to death, and that was the message to me.
Weeks after I was released from the hospital, my wife had a horrible car accident which effected her brain. Then my father passed away a month after that. No calls. No concerns. No letters of condolence.
I literally was frightened out of my wits by the events swirling around me and the way my family was treating me. I didn't sleep for six months. I was feeling absolutely alone. In the beginning, I was in so much pain that I felt frozen. Like I couldn't move. I was shaking all over. I later learned that it was a trauma reaction. I thought about suicide, but my wife's and daughter's presence kept me alive. I called up Paul for help at one point and he told me he was too busy looking after our mother, complaining about how demanding she was, and that she had told him not to talk to me or she would make his life miserable. He said that she had actually threatened him many, many times with that, for years! I was dumbfounded! He also said that he knew I was a good guy, and that he laughed at me only because he had to go along with our mother, that she was so insecure that she would lash out, and he was scared. If he didn't go along with her, he felt he couldn't survive it.
I told him that he could come live with me again, but he said that I couldn't offer him what she offered him.
So he picked money, not having a brother and not having to work over any kind of integrity. I was disgusted! Finally, she won and I did not want to be around him regardless. This is the way these mothers get the triangulation and the estranged siblings that they want. Neither of them called. Not once, not even to ask me how I was doing. Just cruel, self centered and thoughtless.
Anyway, a year went by and my mother wanted to hoover me back again for a party, and I refused to go. She wanted me there to make herself look good with her friends, I think. Maybe to make believe she was taking care of me during the time I lost my father and my wife became disabled, all with that little evil smile of hers. She kept inviting me to all kinds of events, and I kept refusing to go. In all truth, I didn't even want to talk to her again.
The next thing that happened was that she called the cops. Once to see if I was okay. Then the next time because she claimed I stole something from her. I hadn't even seen her. Then the cops came another time over another trumped up charge. Then there was a break in at my house and some things that only she would want were missing. Then she started harassing me at work. It just kept getting worse and worse.
Finally I got a restraining order on her, and we've been separated for seven years.
I moved 4 hours north to Albany to put even more distance between us, and I got into therapy.
I spend Christmas with my daughter now and others from the younger generation. I see a lot of scapegoats where the younger generation is their focus. It's the way it should be. I also see other family, and believe it or not, they understand. The fears that survivors have about smear campaigns can go against the narcissist. She stole their inheritances with smear campaigns, and when she tried to smear my name, they were quick to step in and say, "Don't believe everything you hear!"
I am proud of how my daughter handled this. She can't be purchased like Paul can, though my mother has tried. We both came out of the pits of despair, the pits of death and the most horrible pit of them all: evil. We are both survivors.
And I am relieved that my mother can no longer hurt me or my daughter."

I hope this post has shown you that it is possible to survive Christmas without the family you used to celebrate the day with (whether you are feeling like "not one of them", or purposely scapegoated, estranged, ostracized or treated badly). Black sheep deserve a good Christmas, and reaching out to one whom you know may make a big difference in their lives, especially in the beginning, and to believe in human kindness again.

Again, if you are new to estrangement, not all family members buy into your parent's version. What I have seen and heard is that a lot experience cognitive dissonance at the very least, especially those families that aren't heavily into religion, authoritarianism or all living in the same town. Educated families are even more skeptical of what they hear. I have personally heard, "They are so negative! About their own child? Very fishy behavior."

I have been seeing the tide turn on child abuse. The attitudes about estrangements have been happening too, as child abuse is epidemic. The survivors of child abuse who are out working and paying social security for the older generation, do not have the same attitudes about authoritarianism or estrangement that the older generation has.

Those who have been abused are starting to drive the attitudes about estrangement. In the USA 38 percent of all families with adult children are estranged from at least one adult child. The majority of estrangements are because of child abuse. Some of them are over blended family situations where children weren't being protected from abuse from a step parent or step sibling, or where their parent chooses money and security over the safety of their own child.

As these millennials and the generations that follow lead the world, elder narcissistic complaints of estrangements to get narcissistic supply in the form of pity from those around them, will increasingly fall on dead ears. This is especially true if you have good records (this is a prod to save and copy correspondences with them ... If there is any kind of threatening nature to correspondences give them to the police for "a record").

If you are a scapegoat in your family like the people who have told their stories above,

I think you'll appreciate this video by therapist Les Carter.

To my mind, it is the best one out there on this subject, and it also goes into why

many scapegoats go "no contact" after awhile.

This video can be funny at times too, what we need at Christmas.

"The Scapegoating Narcissist: There's A Whole Lot Of Projection Going On."

Surviving Narcissism, with therapist Les Carter:

What is New?

Black Sheep at Christmas? Making Christmas Better ...

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