Their Life Is a Mess and THEY BLAME YOU

Even if you made it through the damage caused by abusive or neglectful parents, there’s a good chance another relative — a sibling, cousin, or someone else in the family — absorbed the household chaos and their trauma-driven behaviors keep ricocheting back onto you. When is it right to try to help a suffering relative, and when is it wiser to protect yourself and refuse to be pulled into their turmoil? Today’s letter comes from a woman who asks to be called Cassie. She writes: “Hi Anna — I’ll give you a bit of background about my sister and me. Technically she’s not my sister but my cousin; she’s older and my mom helped raise us together. Alright, I’ve got my little pencil here to mark things I’ll revisit on a second read, but here’s what’s going on in my life now. Her mother abandoned her when she was a baby, so my mom raised her while we lived with my grandparents. When my mom remarried, my grandparents decided to keep my cousin. At 16 she ran away to follow a boyfriend and ended up living with our aunt, who didn’t have a stable home. She stayed with us again for a while, but ran away once more after my mom asked her to clean something. She had a string of boyfriends, became pregnant but miscarried. Eventually we were living in the same city again; my mom even helped her get a job at her company, yet abusive relationships persisted. Later we discovered she’d also been abusive toward some of her partners. Right now she has three children from three different men and is living with the last one. I moved away for work, got married, and now have a one-year-old. We used to talk a lot, but lately our conversations revolved almost entirely around how badly her boyfriend treats her; she never said anything positive about him. I’d lie awake thinking about how she’d tell me she can’t stand to sleep next to him and only does so for money, yet each time she spoke she ended up asking me for cash and I’d send it — secretly, because my husband and I are trying to save and stick to a budget. One weekend my husband said we could pay for her and the kids to visit, so she came. The whole evening she talked about the boyfriend’s mistreatment and showed photos of the woman he was cheating with, but when he called she would coo ‘baby’ to him. I didn’t challenge it — it just struck me as odd. We had a friend over, a bit of a joker, who flirted with her and she seemed to encourage it. While we were sitting there she said she preferred her boyfriend to this ‘piece of crap’ — that’s how she referred to our friend. To be honest, I snapped.” We ended up arguing so heatedly that my husband yelled for me to sit down and calm down. Every time she said another hurtful thing — that I was taking out old grudges on her, that I meant nothing to her, and so on — she suddenly decided she would take the kids at midnight and storm out to find a ride. By then I’d calmed down considerably and my husband and my cousin tried to stop her. At one point she accused me of thinking I was superior because I have money. My husband followed her, soothed her, and brought her back. I approached her and apologized, and told her that the stories she tells don’t line up with her behavior. She said her boyfriend makes her call him ‘baby’ and forces her to post pictures of them together. I should add that for the last year she’s said she’s ill — that she’s dying — so that weekend was her way of saying goodbye. She told me she can’t talk to me because I’ve changed; I answered that of course I’ve changed — people grow. She accused me of ignoring her at my wedding and said I didn’t make her feel welcome while she was there. She never apologized for the things she said. I’ve been trying to support her as best I can while working 12-hour shifts, being a mom and a wife: I updated her résumé, looked for jobs for her, even while I might be laid off from my own job in a few months. We have our own worries and problems, yet I didn’t feel I could burden her because she has enough on her plate. I don’t know what to do. Am I unreasonable for feeling she’s been manipulating and using me, not truly caring about me? Am I selfish to feel this way if she might be dying? Am I wrong to want no contact with her anymore? I regret how I reacted and it still bothers me. Should I cut her off to preserve my peace and sanity, or try again? Regards, Cassie.”

Cassie — that’s a wrenching, painfully familiar family trauma situation you’re describing, and I’m sorry you’re caught in it. Let me reflect back what I’m hearing: your cousin’s mother abandoned her as an infant; your mom helped raise her but family instability left deep wounds. From her teenage years she was running away, chasing boyfriends, and living in unstable homes. Those early abandonment experiences can create lifelong injuries — not just emotional, but changes in brain development that make trust, stability, and self-regulation much harder to learn. People sometimes adapt and build satisfying lives despite that, but the absence of those early secure attachments can produce patterns like the ones you describe: impulsive fleeing, unhealthy relationships, and frequent crises.

That running-away pattern in adolescence is a common response to severe relational trauma. It isn’t usually a calculated choice to hurt others; it often reflects a survival strategy driven by deep fear and dysregulation. When someone is so wounded, they can appear utterly lacking in care for others, and it’s easy to assume they simply don’t value decency. But the truth is more complicated: their nervous system has been shaped by abandonment, which makes ordinary coping and perspective-taking much more difficult. That doesn’t excuse harming people, but it helps explain why their actions don’t line up with our expectations.

I can hear you swinging between thinking she ought to behave decently and feeling she’s intentionally cruel. Neither extreme really captures what’s happening. Your cousin looks like someone deeply traumatized and entrenched in abusive dynamics. The more time someone stays in an abusive relationship, the more entrenched the pattern becomes. From the outside, her calling him ‘baby’ while describing his abuse feels hypocritical, but people in abusive partnerships often perform affection to placate their abuser and avoid escalation. Real or imagined, the fear of abandonment — especially for someone whose earliest caregiver left them — can make the prospect of leaving feel like death. For some, the idea of escaping to a shelter, even with children, is terrifying in a way that outsiders can’t imagine.

There’s also trauma bonding and forms of Stockholm-like identification that complicate decision-making. Abusive relationships do more than inflict physical or emotional harm; they distort cognition and one’s sense of reality, making it hard to act in one’s best interest. That’s part of why people stay. When someone repeatedly seeks money, acceptance, and stability from you, it can appear as primitive, grabby behavior — almost childlike — because survival needs have displaced more mature relational capacities. That’s an exhausting place to be for everyone involved.

When people are living in that kind of pain and chaos they get very self-focused, but this isn’t the same as clinical narcissism. It’s a survival-centered preoccupation with immediate needs and the stories that help them cope with humiliation, fear, and shame. That’s why your cousin dominated conversations with her boyfriend’s mistreatment, why she reacted by running out at midnight, and why her behavior cycles between leaving and returning. Such patterns exact a heavy toll on those around them and can feel emotionally abusive.

About her repeated claims that she is dying: from what you wrote, I’m not convinced this is literally true, though it might be — I don’t want to dismiss that possibility. Often, however, people in constant crisis frame their suffering in apocalyptic terms because that rhetoric elicits attention and compassion. Sometimes it’s an expression of how overwhelmed and unable to cope they feel, not a literal medical prognosis. That said, the chaotic lifestyle she’s been leading likely shortens life expectancy compared with someone living more stably.

Given your circumstances — working long shifts, parenting, trying to save money and protect your household — it’s perfectly reasonable to consider that having her around isn’t healthy for you or your child. Whether you go full no-contact is a very personal decision. One option short of total cutoff is to lower contact and stay in touch enough to monitor the children’s wellbeing. If you disengage entirely, someone else will likely need to intervene if the kids are in danger. Realistically, you may not be positioned to take those children into your home even if circumstances demanded it, and they may be emotionally and behaviorally challenging due to their unstable upbringing.

Her not apologizing and creating drama at your wedding fits patterns you see with people who are dysregulated and sometimes substance-affected: they interpret events through an intense abandonment wound and lash out. Pete Walker and other trauma therapists describe this sort of “abandonment rage” where the trigger — even something as socially neutral as attending a happy wedding — evokes a disproportionate sense of being rejected and unloved.

Understanding the trauma helps, but it doesn’t mean you must tolerate ongoing boundary violations. You have every right to protect your marriage, your child, and your household. It’s healthy that you felt anger and asserted a boundary by confronting her — sometimes expressing anger is the right, healed response our spirit needs. Practically, though, you also need strategies for managing contact with someone who repeatedly creates chaos.

One workable approach is low contact combined with clear, firm boundaries. “Gray rocking” is a practical technique for dealing with people who try to provoke drama: respond in brief, neutral ways, avoid feeding emotional energy, and steer conversations away from conflicts. Phrases like “That sounds difficult; maybe we can talk later” without emotional engagement deprive the drama of fuel. Your aim is to avoid becoming emotionally dysregulated, missing work, or subjecting your child to the fallout from their crises.

Programs for family members of addicts or people who repeatedly self-destruct can be useful — they teach how to focus on your own wellbeing when someone else is behaving like a house fire that draws everyone in. I know how magnetic that chaos can feel; families often find themselves orbiting the drama for decades. After an alcoholic parent died in my own family, there was a long, painful adjustment to life without constant crisis: grief, relief, and the work of reorienting relationships. It can take many years to heal and reorganize family life after chronic instability.

In short: you didn’t do anything wrong by getting angry. Setting stronger boundaries is appropriate — raise them at least a couple of notches and take changes one day at a time. If you want a practical, short-term plan, consider moving to lower-contact interactions, practicing gray rocking, and prioritizing your family’s stability and financial health. Keep a line of contact open enough that you can check on the children’s safety if needed, but protect your emotional energy and your household. If you have trouble enforcing limits, look for resources and support that can give you scripts and strategies for difficult family members. You’re handling a brutal, complicated situation as best you can; trust that protecting your peace and your family’s wellbeing is not selfish — it’s necessary.”