"My relationship with my older brother, who is ten years my senior, has been
going from bad to worse over the years," a reader wrote to me this week. "He
seems to have forgotten that we no longer live in our parents’ home, and that he
is no longer 15 years old, and I am no longer the little kid whom he bullies and
bosses around. I am now 35, married, with three children; yet my brother keeps
putting me down and treats me like a five-year-old.
"According to a recent article of yours," the reader continued, "all I need
to do to solve the problem is to change the way I listen to him. This approach
seems to put the responsibility on me, whereas the fault really lies in his
abusive language. It is obvious that the situation will not change unless he
starts to realize that he is hurting me and is prepared to change the way he
speaks to me, as well as apologizing for his past behavior. " He then asked, "Do
you have any special recipe for my abusive brother?"
I responded by saying: If your brother would ask me for advice, I would talk
to him about not hurting other people, especially a brother. However, because I
am not sure if your brother reads my column or not, and because, by the sound of
it, you don’t have much control over the way your brother behaves, the only
person I can give advice to is you. My advice to you is: control the one person
in the world over whom you do have control, and that person is you.
Bear in mind that, technically speaking, when your brother speaks abusively
to you, what is coming out of his mouth is just a bunch of hot air, which
happens to make various sounds, and these sounds have no needles or arrows in
them; all it is, is hot air. You now have to make a choice as to how to decode
this air and what interpretation to give to it.
The choices you have are:
To decode it as a hurtful message, especially if it reminds you of the time
when you were a helpless child and unable to defend yourself. By using this
interpretation, you have now taken the hot air and turned it into arrows that
hurt you. This causes increasing resentment towards your brother. As a result,
you may even develop physical symptoms, such as ulcers or high blood pressure.
On the other hand, you can choose the option of deciding that the hot air
that comes out of your brother’s mouth is nothing more than hot air. Just as it
is not your fault if your brother burps as a result of the food he eats, so too,
it is not your responsibility or your fault that the words that come out of your
brother's mouth are abusive -- it is his problem.
Most of the time, people who go around abusing and finding the negative in
others, are in essence unhappy people who have a lot of problems of their own.
They want to transfer their problems on to you. You have the choice: to take
them on board, or to say "No, thank you."
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