I’m tired of fighting with my sister.

If my sister trusted me, I could just tell her my perspective and she could compare it with hers and ask questions to clear up any disparity.

My best friend said she trusted me because we have so much good history, and this is the first time I have lashed out at her, ever. And we’ve been working on our repair and reconnection skills recently and for going on 11 years.

My sister and I started with bad, and have very little good social interactions.

Though the good ones were the most recent, the other night I got lashed out again, triggered.

Because she lashed out at me triggered, and that’s been our pattern since we were babies.

In my state of healing now, it’s hard to have her cuss at me without getting angry.  I have to really work hard at holding onto my “loving mother” brain that sees the hurt behind the anger.

I can’t earn her trust, she has to choose it, the way I have been choosing to trust her so I could give her my whole heart, or at least that was my goal to now. 

But she believes I have to earn it.  And she also believes that I am abusive and untrustworthy. Which I proved, out of my hurt and feelings of rejection and outrage.

So I can never earn her trust.

That hurt to understand, again, because I chose to trust her, and I thought she did the same.

And in this loving space I am in writing this, in this space where she’s my hurting baby sister, I’m still afraid I’ll lash out at her again for rejecting my most recent bid for connection.

Being autistic for me also means figuring out I did something worse than I meant to about a day or so too late.  In this case.

So I feel guilty. And anything she says to me when I feel guilty will make me defensive.

I need more loving memories of her to hold onto. Like a Patronus.

We grew up beating each other up, but she remembers it as her finally having enough of my abuse and defending herself.

I was trying to explain to her how it triggers me when she pulls away and shuts me down, while already triggered by her passive aggressive behavior back in March, in the upstairs room…which triggered me into a meltdown that I couldn’t stop.

This is not to blame her. To explain why I was triggered. To process the trigger with her so it doesn’t set us off anymore.

I didn’t know I was going to lose it again. 

Until I was too lost to remember my system with Keith to help me calm quickly.  Also, I could have taken deep breaths. I could have done so many things, I couldn’t think of any of them, because it was too late.

But she can’t hear that because I don’t want to hear about how I traumatized her and Violet anymore.  I don’t see trauma in her pattern. I see emotional distress that I already learned how to navigate, and for three months I have ached to navigate it with her.

But I reached out with sarcasm, thinking I was being playful.

In this headspace, I see a mom who hasn’t learned how to help her kids feel safe while she’s panicking, who feels shame, and blames me because she doesn’t trust me to help her navigate that, or anyone like me.

I was that mom until I got stranded at the airport in Portland early in the morning with eight year old Aiden and 4 months old Dylan.

She’s never experienced anything like that.

Hopefully, most people don’t.

I think my job is to get to know my healed story so well, her victim story can’t trigger me anymore.

In my healed story, I see two normal humans, stressed, hurting, angry, and feeling rejected and abandoned…acting just like two normal humans under all that act.

That’s what humans do.

I’m not upset that we’re both human. 

I’m not hurt that you don’t see my love for you when I’m showing you anger, disappointment, resentment, irritation, disgust, or whatever I reflect at you in response to what I feel in my real time.

Which is not your real time.  We process differently because we process separately. We can’t get in sync until we work on processing together.

She doesn’t have my skills.

She can’t make herself trust me, so I have to earn her trust.

The only way I can do that now is to get to know myself so well I believe wholeheartedly that I can reliably anticipate my emotions, before they take over.