Trying to come to terms with family rejection.

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Hi,

Recently the holidays have made it difficult not to focus on the fact that I have been rejected by most of my family with the exception of my two sisters and one cousin. Unfortunately my two sisters and the one cousin I get along with very well live in other states so I dont' get to see them as often as I'd like to. While I realize that I can't be everybody's best friend, I noticed that my younger sister, who is an NT, is well liked by the other members of my family. It feels like there should be some kind of connection between myself and other family members but there just has not been. I have made efforts to reach out to members of my family but it just seems to go nowhere and there is a lack of interest on the part of family members. I can't make my family members like me or make them interested in me but I just feel like something is missing in my life because of a lack of family connections. Has anyone else experienced this? If so, how do you cope with lack of acceptance by family members?

I have a half-sister who is a trouble maker and who doesn't like me. She has deliberately excluded me from family get togethers at her home. She's a NT. I have another half-sister (who's a NT) who plays along with the first one's games. They actually exclude me and my step-sister (who's a NT) both from family activities. It has to do with who our fathers were and money. I don't let it bother me anymore.

The rest of my family are not like that but we are all spread out across the country and don't get to see each other often. My family's not a close family anymore.

I use to celebrate Christmas in a commercial sense for my children but I don't celebrate it at all anymore because they grew up and moved away and I'm Pagan so I have different holidays to celebrate. I don't like to travel during the holidays either. So I spend holidays alone too. I have things to do and I don't think about it as much.

Have you thought about volunteering to help in food kitchens during the holidays? That's a good way to spend it with other people and help them out.

That sentence really hits home. My parents are long dead but I have three siblings. All they know about me is my 'normalcy act', and although I have always felt being a family should involve feeling comfortable just being myself around them, over the years it's been made clear that that just freaks them out, they can only respond to my aspie-ness by addressing it as a problem, something that disturbs them and needs to be fixed.

This has led to a great distance between us, because I am just keeping up the same phony act with them that I do with everyone else, and I feel like there's no communication, no real connection at all. They're just another bunch of NTs who I have to lie to all the time. It really is tiresome.

My feeling is that they've created this mental image of who I am, this set of expectations that they are determined to project onto me no matter what I do. It used to bug me alot, but I choose to focus on doing my duty as part of the family and just be thankful for the fact that they do accept me, as long as I act normal. It's better than nothing. And I figure as long as I keep up the relationship, there's always the possibility that things will change someday.

Part of me wants to warn you about that kind of thinking going nowhere and part of me wants to commend you for nevertheless remaining there.

My three siblings know what they can expect from me and what they cannot, and they also know I will do what I do no matter what they think or say ... and that is my own version of "doing my duty as part of the family".

That was very well put LeeJosephO.

I don't bother much with my family now as I always felt an unsaid, 'you're not really one of us'. As a kid I was the youngest of five, and never felt part of the family. Like I was a nuisance. It helped my siblings to have me to pick on. Never had much self confidence because of that. Holidays exacerbate the feelings of not belonging but I made a conscious decision about ten years ago to not bother with them as I'll never be able to get the warm, family feeling that I imagined other folk get. Now I don't see them very often I realise they're not very nice anyway, narrow-minded, don't accept anyone who's a bit different, be it religion, colour, sexuality...glad to be away from that attitude really but the downside is that if I've ever been in need of help, I've never had any from any family member. 'You're on your own, kid' is the message I got from them. So I have a few friends now who accept me as I am with no put-downs. I don't think it would be worth the effort of pretending to be like them to be accepted, so I don't try any more.

Not rejected by my family, but I have a very distant relationship with them and often don't speak with them for months. When we do communicate there is zero emotional connection and my mom is always on eggshells.
My brother, sister, mom and dad are all close but I'm not part of it.

My own situation is/was about the same, and my mother died not wanting me coming around because my presence made her so uncomfortable after I had told her she would be dead if she listened to the doctors who performed the surgery that actually did kill her.

I have been rejected by my younger sister who is about 22 years of age and carries very bad chip on her shoulder and is very self-absorbed. My parents seem to favor her over myself and my younger sister who I am very close to. Meanwhile, my sister treats me like a dish-towel and acts as if she is better and smarter than myself. Anyway,my dad, tried handing her the phone on Thanksgiving so I could say hello but she ran away like a scared 4-year-old.

My dad is very close to her but is extremely distant with my younger sister and myself and really doesn't seem that enthused when I get things like good grades and get accepted into good colleges.

My mother has schizophrenia and so she is off in her own world but is untreated and has a history of poor social skills and so she talks to me any way that she wants and has even admitted to mentioning that she doesn't love me. On top of that, no matter how high I go, she never seems satisfied and often compares me to herself or my younger sister in making themselves sound better than I am.

In response, I am having to lay down some pretty tough boundaries with them about their unacceptable behavior and it's not going to be easy.

I dropped everyone in my family about 10 years ago after my mother tried to get me kicked out of grad school. It was the best decision I ever made, but I've never figured out what to say when people ask me about my family.

As of today, I recently set my boundaries with my mother and sister and told them that it just seemed that every time I would interact, someone would get hurt. So, I told that I think I needed to take a break from contact for a while because of those issues. You know what? I feel icy calm writing those e-mails since they don't seem bothered about what they do to myself and many others.

I have a toxic grandmother who pretends to be a sweet little old lady until you really get to know her. There are some old bitter people in this world who have had a lifetime to become master manipulators. And sometimes these are your family, the people who are suppose to love and care for you but they are sometimes the people who treat you the worst. With family like that, thank the Gods we can at least pick our friends.

Epona my family is so similar and I have a similar position in it. After a few years with little contact, and spending time with other people, I began to see my family very differently and now like you I don't want to fit in.

My main problem I feel is knowing what to do with the people I meet who want to talk about family. I don't admit to having children, and at holidays there is just my husband and me. I don't like to ask them questions about their family, as part of a "normal" conversation", when I don't want to answer them myself, and the whole thing makes me feel distressed.

I feel fear when I think of the future with no family, I have to admit.

My adoptive family completely rejected me after my adoptive dad died when I was 11 (I'm 36 now). They e made it clear that I am unwelcome in their lives, and have even gone so far as to convince my son's adoptive family that I'm "dangerous and unstable; violent tempered" (meltdowns).
Friends lose sympathy when they see that my circumstances haven't changed much in the years I've known them; I've even had people assume that my problems with keeping housing / jobs are due to drugs, not something as simple as aspergers.

It's a lonely life, and I'm not doing well in it.

You might be doing incredibly well. Aspergers is an invisible disability. Don't give in to shame, go
with what you really know about yourself.

You might be doing incredibly well. Aspergers is an invisible disability. Don't give in to shame, go
with what you really know about yourself.[/quote]


What I "know" about myself is, desperate as I am to have some sort of family, the best I will ever have is pets. Animals have always loved me in a way that humans refuse to. It's still horrid and embarrassing to know that I'll never be able to accept love from a human.

I just recently tried to explain that I have AS to a partner, and his response was essentially that I'm a hypochondriac who "looks up life instead of living it", that I'm "like an alien studying the human condition" and that I'm "suddenly embodying" AS because I read about it.

...so he basically said I'm autistic, but I'm not REALLY autistic, just faking it.

I hate people