Sister and Magical Thinking

[Hepatica]

What are your thoughts on people who exhibit NPD symptoms, AND tell you they are healed of all pain from their childhood from abusive parents, because they were prayed over?

I have an uNPD sister who has said this to me countless times, always when I set a boundary about her request for me to do something for my abusive parents, telling her being around them is very painful for me, which she responds, oh they don't bother me, that she cannot do the thing she's asking me to do, because of her pain.
In this case she says she is healed of emotional triggers regarding my parents, but relies on opiates for her migraines and chronic pain. (This may have changed since doctors do not give them out freely anymore.)

It would be like this.  Me: Sorry sis, I am not willing to do that. Being around our parents is still quite painful for me. And then she says she is healed of all that because she was prayed over and it is a miracle but she doesn't have any after effects from our toxic childhood. Five minutes later she pops a percocet.

It literally drives me bonkers. It is like she is using her faith as a way to manipulate me. Look, I respect all faiths, but I am not sure anyone can heal a childhood's worth of physcial and emotional trauma, at an evening prayer group, or all of us would flock to do this. Even my good friend, a Christian, tells me that my sister is manipulating me with this kind of story.

I am NC now with my sister, but when I think of this it seems to me that she is more manipulative than I ever really understood. She wants to sacrifice me to be around our still raging and unhealthy parents by discounting my boundary and my explanation. I loved her very much growing up, but her magical thinking gives us nothing to work with. I really had hoped we'd have been there for each other as adults. I know. Naive.

[treesgrowslowly]

Hi Hepatica,

I am so sorry you're dealing with this. Ignoring your boundaries is a big problem in any relationship but it does hurt more when it is a sibling.

Your post about her reminds me of something I just learned about this past year. It's called spiritual bypassing. If you Google it several articles will come in and you can decide if maybe that is what is going on for her. Maybe it is, maybe it's not.

Either way, you have 100% rights to your limits and boundaries with your parents. She has the right to her own decisions about her level of contact with them and so do you.

I agree with you, years of relational trauma are not wiped away quickly by any one practice or prayer session  or even  therapy session.

When / if she is ever truly healed she will no longer try to control you or your decisions and she will fully respect your limits and if she heals, she will then understand the value in letting others choose their path without trying to manipulate them.

True healing involves a lot as you know.

I would not argue with her about her ideas though. Her path is hers to walk.  you can't fix her or change her beliefs. She has to do her own work.

Trees

[sandpiper]

It just sounds like a mechanism that an NPD would devise to avoid dealing with their stuff.
I've been NC with both my sisters for years and the more time passes, the more that I start to see that ensis actually has a lot of the same traits as our mother, who had a lot of NPD traits which were probably mostly learned from her own parents.
I'm a cancer survivor & I chose not to have children as a pregnancy would have been so risky and I hated the thought of leaving DH alone with a small child and his batshed crazy parents. Ensis tried to convince me to ignore the risk by Louise Haying my way through the pregnancy. She dismissed it with a bored shrug and said 'Well, if you're worried about the cancer recurring, just don't create it.' This from a woman with a post-graduate degree in health science. Teaching it at a large and well accredited university.
The lack of empathy and her utter dismissal of science, in favour of magical thinking - and trust me, my specialist had told me that he'd had several patients with the same tumour as me which had proliferated during their pregnancy - was just staggering.
I'm coming to a place where I think all of the PD behaviours are just weird ways of coping that we picked up in childhood to cope with the trauma. They worked for a child's mind and they kept us safe but if you hold onto that stuff and persist with those ideas in adulthood, instead of dealing with the monsters in the basement and developing an adult's set of coping skills - this is what you end up with.
It's maddening dealing with it.
Like I said, that's the saner and more functional of my two sisters. She's normally all for the evidence based science but not, apparently, if it's a tumour that's likely to kill her sister in under two years.

[NarcKiddo]

The glib solution (were you still in touch with her) would be to say:

"I'm afraid you are the one who will need to do xyz for them. It's so wonderful that you are healed and able to do so. Maybe one day I will be healed too."

I totally agree that it is unlikely her version of events is the truth but if that is the only way she can cope, it's on her.

[Amy-Rose]

Interesting.
Mine is forever on a trauma and healing rampage. She's been doing it for years and I've seen no improvement at all. I think some of it is for attention and other bits of it is an escape root out.

Spiritual healing doesn't also involving talking like therapy does. I sometimes wonder if most of their trauma is more about what they've done to others than what's been done to them.