My Cousin Has Taken a Turn for the Worse

My cousin (full back story here) has been doing really well. This Sunday she helped out with Sunny and seemed in a great mood.

Last night, she did not have dinner with us (and thus missed seeing Sunny's episode) because she had an "episode" at her friend's house. I don't want to go into any detail about it, but her episodes are not violent in any way or harmful to anyone except herself.

We could sort of see it coming. She'd been talking with her father. My mother and I have told her many times she has got to stop talking to her father.

There were some tickets for a sports team she really liked, playing in Atlanta. He was going with her brother (who doesn't care about sports) and an Industry buddy. Oh, but he just remembered she was a fan of that team. So did she want to go? He could tell the Industry buddy he was disinvited.

Typical evil manipulation. It might sound innocuous at first, but if you know him, it's all a scheme designed to make her feel like crap. First, that he didn't think enough of her to invite her in the first place... she was third in line behind his son and the Industry buddy (I happen to know this guy as well, and he's a total dickhead). Second, that he wanted to make her responsible for disinviting the Industry buddy. I doubt he would have even followed through with that promise, anyway. He's in love with playing power games and making his family jockey for positions in his favor.

One of her medications ran out recently, and since she's in between insurance, she has to pay out of pocket, then get reimbursed, but she didn't have the money. She asked her father for the money even though I begged her not to. He said he would pay, made her crawl for a bit, then forgot about the whole thing. My mother ended up loaning her the medication money.

It's hard for me to understand why my cousin still depends on him so much.

My mother says it's because their father -- our grandfather -- was such a very good and loving father. Everyone loved him and respected him and trusted him to do the right thing. And that my cousin thinks her own father should be the same way, but he's really the polar opposite.

But I never had a problem understanding that my father wasn't my grandfather. I realized from an early age that my father wasn't going to give me the emotional support I wanted from him, so I lowered my expectations. I tell my cousin she has to do the same, although her expectations need to go waaaaaay lower than I lowered mine. "You can have a relationship with your father later on when you get better, but right now, it's destroying you. You have got to stop talking to him. You have got to stop asking him for anything."

By the way, my cousin's mother is very sweet, very passive, very-Southern-very-lady, and long ago chose her husband over her children. My mother and I are friendly with her and, privately, have absolutely no respect for her.

My cousin is not a helpless victim in all this. She's made a lot of bad choices, especially in finances. When she moved in with my mother, we sat down together, I organized all her accounts, applied for a disability student loan deferment, told her to sell her car and cash in her 401(k), reallocated credit card limits, created a budget for her and forecast her disability income for several months in advance. She only followed about half of my written financial plan, and is badly in the hole now.

I can help her out but I can't live her life for her. On a few occasions when she starts getting depressed and talks about what a big disappointment she is to herself and everyone else, I just tell her to think about the future and work on the things that she can control and accommodate the things she can't control. Plan A didn't work? Go to Plan B. Plan B didn't work? Go to Plan C. I'd hoped to save her credit rating but that looks like it's impossible, so we need a different financial goal now.

I think the part of herself that's engaging in sabotage is the part that wants to be a princess. Princesses get everything they need financially handed to them, princesses get all the attention... all they have to do is submit to the arbitrary laws of some horrible narcissistic alpha male figure.

I'm so glad my mother is a feminist and raised me that way. This whole princess complex is inseparable from my cousin's mental illness. She screws up her finances, calls her dad for help she knows she's not going to get, he makes her crawl and rejects her, she has an episode.

Anyway, after the episode last night, she went for evaluation at the same institution that got her back on her feet. Of course they didn't admit her, because her insurance ran out. She'll be back at my mom's house later today.

The worst that could happen is that she kills herself. My mother has raised that possibility, although it's still unlikely. I'd be horribly upset, but I'd get over it. That sounds really callous, but I'm being honest. I know from experience that I'm tough in crisis situations. I've had a couple really traumatic incidents happen when I was younger, so terrible I have never even talked about them on this blog, and I know how I tend to react. I deal with them the way I have to deal with them.

What worried me now is how Sunny would react. He sees my cousin a couple times a week and really loves her.

I can't tell her "I'll kill you if you kill yourself because of how Sunny would feel" because that's just ridiculous. I know she already knows she has a lot of people that would be hurt.

There's not much we can do. I'm just going to keep offering the same advice without beating her over the head with it. I'll go over her finances again with her if she asks me to. I'm not going to ask her to babysit Sunny again (alone, that is). But I'm not going to cut them off, either.