Anyone else deal with going NC means not seeing nieces and nephews or other kids

[poetandpunk]

I'm wondering if anyone else has had to make this difficult choice. I am currently NC with all three of my siblings. They each have children of their own. As a result of NC, I am sadly not able to have relationships with my nieces and nephews. Because if having a relationship with the kids means I have to interact with their parents, and that is not an option.

My siblings have completely smeared me to their children as the selfish, horrible aunt who dropped them and doesn't care about them at all. It's the furthest thing from the truth. I miss my nieces and nephews very much but I am not willing to continue a relationship with their abusive parents. The reason I finally went NC with my brother is he sent me a screengrab of a group chat between my siblings. My two sisters were talking about how I have shown no love or care for their children and how horrible and selfish I am and how they are glad to have me out of their lives. 

Personally I find it interesting that they are so willing to smear me in that way to kids, as they both have used their children as 'bargaining chips' to get me to break NC. 

If one of them decided to go NC with me, I couldn't imagine smearing them to my daughter. I might say, 'Aunt So-and-So has made some choices to stay away from family and it is important to remember she might have a good reason. We miss her.' 

It's also interesting to me that my siblings don't realize responding to me in this way just confirms and affirms my choice to go NC! I don't really think it's ever necessary to malign or smear relatives to children, even if they are awful. You can just say, 'We won't be seeing Aunt or Uncle because we think it's best for now.' 
Any one else have to let go of relationships with nieces and nephews or children in order to maintain safe boundaries for yourself?

[Blueberry Pancakes]

Yes, me too. It seems to be a common collateral loss. I feel like when we go NC with our sibling, they effectively lose the perceived control they had in our relationship. To respond by putting up barriers and becoming a gatekeeper between us and their kids is an easy way to feel like they still have some control over us. I feel like my sister is angrily lashing out and using it to punish me. I bet she also feels like she won by keeping her kids. I think however it just shows how PDs use their own kids as tools regardless of the carnage.     
 
My sibling is also doing the same things you describe with the smear campaign. She is instilling her desired narrative into her kid's heads. I have been NC for 3 years and the nieces and nephews are becoming young adults. All they have heard about their Aunt is hateful. I have zero credibility and there is no way to un-do the lies. I feel like this is one way that PD siblings are so destructive. We have to give up having nieces and nephews because we cannot tolerate PD siblings.   

[Jolie40]

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[IRedW77]

It sucks and it's unfair, but you have to protect yourself and your own kids. It's maybe not a bad idea to keep sending cards and gifts for birthdays and holidays IF you think that won't add to the drama. Even if your siblings intercept them you've still done as much as YOU can do.

I can't speak to this specific situation, but I can speak to the reverse. My dad always told me, once I was old enough to have adult conversations with him that his brother (my uncle) was a sh**.  I always took that with a grain of salt because that wasn't MY experience with him. About 10 years ago I decided to visit my uncle after not having seen him since I was a teen. He retired to the islands and my wife and I went and stayed with him. He spent the entire visit pumping me for information and sh**-talking my dad. On the last day before we left he took us around and made a point to show us this amazing hotel—for the next time we wanted to visit.

My point is that kids will believe what they remember and experience from you regardless of what your siblings tell them. And when they're ready they'll probably come to you and form their own opinions. Just do your best to support your nieces and nephews at a distance and be there for when THEY want you. It may take years, and that's awful and unfair, but they'll come around on their own.

You also my find them showing up sooner than you expect if you're the sane one of your siblings. If they wake up to what's going on you may become a refuge.

I'm sorry, it's awful, but do your best. You have to protect you and your own kids before you can do anything else.

[Hilltop]

My sibling went NC with me, really when I was early 20's, I still don't know what it was all about.  She now has four kids, I don't know them at all.  I  do know one of them heard my sister talking about me with my mother and asked about me.  I was then for the first time in 20 years summons to my mothers house to meet her kids so that my nephew could meet me.  I declined.  The absolute arrogance of her to think I would come running after 20 years because her child wanted to meet me, amazed me.  I knew after I made her child happy that I would be discarded again, ignored and forgotten about, my feelings completely ignored, as long as she made her child happy, no one else mattered.  She didn't think she should amend our relationship prior to me meeting her children.

It is sad, if I saw them on the street I wouldn't know them.  At this stage I don't want to get to know them, there is too much water under the bridge and I would rather enjoy seeing my close friends children grow up.  I sometimes wonder if my mother wasn't around doing her triangulation thing that my sister and I may have had a chance to renew our relationship in later life.  I don't really know her now as she doesn't really know me.

I do not send anything to them, if I don't have a relationship with their parents I don't feel comfortable forging a relationship with them.

[poetandpunk]

Hi everyone! Thanks for your replies. It sounds like you all know what it's like.

It's tough because my siblings use their children as bargaining chips.

When I went NC in 2014, I sent my nephew a birthday gift and card. He wrote back an email which I am fairly certain his mother ACTUALLY wrote, aka my PD sister, and it said something like, 'I don't want gifts. I just want to see you.' Which is what no eleven year old ever says or thinks!

After that I decided that birthday cards and gifts weren't safe to send because I would get hoovering replies. It really upsets me not to be able to love and celebrate my nieces and nephews, but I know what will happen.

Not only that, but my siblings use their kids as bargaining chips in the most horrible way. The reason I went NC with my brother is because he sent me a screengrab of a family text chat. In it, my sisters were saying how horrible I was for not having a relationship with their kids. Ages ago my parents sent me messages saying the kids thought I was horrible.

I have to let that go. I cannot control what they think. I will not compromise my boundaries or entertain relationships with their parents, which is sad but true.

My husband has always said to just wait until they are older and they will remember what I was like and want to reach out on their own terms.

Well last month my nephew, who is now 18, sent me a message on Twitter. He was 11 when I went NC. At first I was intrigued and excited. Then I re-read the message and I realised it was my sister that sent it. Even though he is 18! She's trying to use him as a puppet despite the fact that he is an adult now.

It's just disgusting.

All I can do is hope that one day these kids might come to me on their own terms, separate from their parents. That might not happen, who knows, but I've come to peace with that.

It's hard though.

[Hepatica]

I have lost contact with my sister's children and it's another loss for me, because I love those kids. But they grew up and began to act out the dysfunction embedded in my FOO family system, in their own unique ways. As I began to recognize this, it was so sad for me. One is so self-righteous and lacking in empathy and the other is showing similar strains of this and also follows in the footsteps of his mother and abuses prescription meds and numbs out on pot. He is also unnervingly calculating, which gives me a very bad feeling.

The toxicity that I've observed in my FOO - my parents and my sister's family - is heartbreaking. It is like a invisible gas that envelops the air they breathe and eventually transforms them. They don't believe it is there. They believe they are fine. They even believe they know better.

Pointing it out is like screaming into a void. I tried to tell them in late 2016 how I've felt. I tried to set boundaries. But they do not seem to understand, or choose not to understand. They are content in the lives they create for themselves because it is familiar.

I don't want to live that way. I have found pushing past my comfort zones increases the quality of my life every time I do it. So I have sadly let go of any relationship with my sister's children because it frankly breaks my heart. She held her children back, and has kept their lives under her scrutiny -all so she can rake in supply from them. And they don't know any better. They never moved away to see what they were capable of. Each of them is brilliant too. So much charm, charisma and smarts. They could have been acting in plays, going to business school, anything they wanted. I think resentment will build, for adhering to keeping their lives so small because of the insecurities my sister instilled in them, and it will hit them one day. I fear they will throw that resentment on the outside world, instead of healing it within themselves. My sister views the world as sh*t and lives in fear. I worry that they will believe this view as well, and perhaps they already do.

Maybe I will be that weird aunt they will seek out one day to try to understand a different perspective, but I have to admit, I think that is magical thinking.

[IRedW77]

Maybe I will be that weird aunt they will seek out one day to try to understand a different perspective, but I have to admit, I think that is magical thinking.

You need to distinguish between magical thinking and wishful thinking. It's a distinction with a difference. Magical thinking is making up a story that you are deluding yourself into thinking is real.
You know the difference. You know that it may be unlikely that any of them make it out, or that it may be a long time before any of them do.
But you HOPE that they do. There's nothing wrong with hope—especially if it IS wishful thinking. Wishes do come true sometimes.
It's especially ok to wish for something that you know is unlikely. You're not deceiving yourself about anything. You're just keeping hope alive and keeping yourself ready to fill a role if there is one.

You know it's unlikely for now. But if it does happen you know that you will be there for them. And every day that goes by you learn something new about yourself and what you've been through and how to deal with it. So the longer it takes for them to show up, the more you'll be able to give them when they do.

[GettingOOTF]

Yes. Some are very young so I'd need to go through my sibling to see them. One is an adult. I leave her alone unless she reaches out, which is only on my birthday and she does that privately. I don't want to put her in a difficult situation with her mother.

I did notice that the last time I spent time with my eldest niece she said really awful things to me and they were things her mother and the rest of the family say about me too.

Things like abuse, PDs, addiction etc. are inter generational as children learn from their parents. I hope that as she matures we can have a relationship but right now it would only be inviting more drama in to my life.

[Call Me Cordelia]

It's so hard when kids become collateral damage. My kids are separated from all their extended family members, including some other children. But the truth was that even when we were in contact the relationships were not very positive anyway. The loss, in reality, is not much of a loss for them. It's more difficult to come to terms with the IDEA that they don't have cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles. The loss is greater for the kids who are still growing up in dysfunction.

There are a couple of families of cousins who I wonder if it would be "safe enough" to be in touch with on DH's side. I suspect it might be. However, right now, I just don't want to even deal with it. They live very far and we don't have much of a foundation to build on other than, "Do you see what I see?" It's still relative to the underlying dysfunctional dynamic and at the moment just isn't worth it. If it doesn't work out well for whatever reason, it would be more grief to have to take that step back. If at some point in the future DH and I did decide to try with certain people, the adults would go first before we brought kids into the relationship. But our kids are young. I never had a relationship with my extended FOO that wasn't filtered entirely through uPDM&F, and I've had nothing from any of them other than the odd Christmas card ever.

[bloomie]

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[RAC46]

Whoa. This is a tough one. I am very close to PD sister's children, who are teens now. I am not NC with sis but when she rages at me out of the blue, I have retreated, sometimes for months. I still send cards, etc and interact with kids on social media. Now her youngest, 15, has started to display some terrifyingly similar traits as sis, and my sister has never held back in trashing me when she's having a meltdown. I fear for their futures, but I am exhausted from the decades of sibling issues, and worry that my niece will be as troubled as her mom. I just dont have it in me to keep fighting these battles, but am loathe to go NC with sis or her kids.
Have been NC with brother for five years, but his kids are grown and have also had little to NC with him, and we are still close.
This whole thing is problematic, particular as we were raised to believe that family comes first, and to always be there for each other. Both parents are gone now, which makes it easier in some ways to finally put my own needs first.  But I still have the values they instilled, and breaking free of that is unpalatable overall. It's a quandary.

[sandpiper]

I could have written Hepatica's post.
I loved being an auntie but as I did more work in T & worked on developing healthy boundaries and healthy communication, my relationship with my sisters deteriorate. I haven't seen them or their kids for well over a decade.
What I have observed is that the children are sweet when they are little but by adolescence they've absorbed enough of their parents behaviour for it to have become a part of their character.
They find partners and friends based on what is familiar behaviour and it becomes very hard to have a relationship that is meaningful & has any real intimacy, with them or their children.
I think you'll find the odd one that will get the hell out of Dodge and that one might come to value you, but everyone walks away very damaged from PD FOO and FWIW I think 90% of what happens inside a PD family is simply learned behaviour. It gets passed down through the generations.

I am thankful that at a very young age I made my own life and my own friendships well out of the destructive circle of FOO. The adult children of my friends are wonderful company and they are streets ahead of my family in terms of emotional intelligence and life skills.

My counsel would be, stay in their lives at a distance, if you can. Don't allow your siblings to damage you and the minute that they start treating their kids as hostages and pawns, take a huge step back. It only got worse when my sisters did that to me. I was shocked that they would behave in the same way that our parents did, having complained so bitterly about that themselves, but by that stage I think they'd lost all insight and there was never going to be any introspection around the damage they'd absorbed from growing up inside such an unhealthy family.

It is really, really hard but in my experience, the cycle just repeats itself and if you are stuck on that rollercoaster, nephews and nieces will just end up copying the way that their parents act and it will damage you. If I had my time over and I know what I know now, I'd move to the other side of the country where geographical distance would have made it much easier to stay well clear of that. From what I've seen from watching a few generations of my family, the ones who have built healthy families over a series of generations are the ones who have upped and moved to another continent or another state to get out of the cycle of dysfunction.

I'm very glad of my friends' children and we have much more in common than I will probably ever have with the children of FOO. Unfortunately you can't save everyone. It's a deep wound and you need to find healthier relationships to allow that to heal.

[carrots]

Yes. And I'm not even NC, just very VLC. There's a thread of mine on the PD Siblings and other Family Members board from a few years back.

I had a relationship with little nieces and nephews before I went very VLC. I put up with nasty, toxic behaviour e.g. on the part of one SIL ( a stand-in for B, though I didn't understand that before someone here pointed it out) and almost all other FOO mbrs partially in order to have contact with the little ones, and partially also the feeling that a little FOO contact was better than none. Till the Last Straw moment.

One of the children is a godchild of mine. Although I did ask if I could be sent photos occasionally and kept a little up-to-date on her progress, B and SIL managed to 'not understand'. Sent photos of my godchild's sib instead (who I'd never met before Last Straw moment).

Coached through some of this stuff by mbrs sandpiper and malini (thanks!) and my T, I have come to realise that my cptsd flare-ups are just not worth the contact. It's sad. But B and SIL as well as all other FOO mbrs are playing a role there too. I had presents for my godchild which I didn't manage to send for several years. Finally sent them now. They will be the last.

For further info, look for my old thread. I haven't the heart to write anything else, it's too hard for me still.

[sandpiper]

Hugs to you, Carrots.
It really is hard.
I have found that it has helped to position myself as Auntie to my friend's children. There is just no comparison between the emotional intelligence they have and the complete failure of that to develop in actual family. Some of the best advice that I've had is to focus on the relationships that nourish you and step back from the ones that don't.
It still gives me a lot of pain when I think of the mess that my FOO is but it's so good to have other relationships that bring me love and joy. It's like creating a garden though, you've got to work at it. I think of it kind of like being a refugee. If people can flee war-torn countries and survive massacres and invasions and then do the work to rebuild a better life, we can too. You just can't do that by holding onto the damage. 
My friends' kids appreciate my sense of humour & my intelligence...FOO didn't.
Square peg, round hole.

[carrots]

Thank you so much sandpiper. I read your post a good while ago but didn't have the wherewithal to respond. I felt very supported, your post was very helpful.