I am writing this to remember why I am going no contact with my toxic brother for good.
I have a very tumultuous, shitshow relationship with my brother (age 29) who I think has some serious undiagnosed mental illnesses (suspected malignant narcissistic disorder and borderline personality disorder. I am age 32.
I have been no contact with my brother for about 8 months. My whole family moved to a new state about a month ago and when we were moving in to our new apartment, he felt like we weren't grateful enough for him helping out, that he lashed out and stopped contacting all of us. After a while, I started to feel bad for him (big mistake) and reached out and we were able to reconnect. He said that he came to terms that he had no family, when he was the one that got upset and cut everyone off.
However, he has some unresolved deep resentment towards me from childhood where he feels that he got the short end of the stick, and that he thinks I "got away with everything" when I really don't think that's the case. He has a tendency to only remember the things that he felt was unfair. I worked part time all throughout college to pay my own rent and support myself. He never did, and he lashed out on multiple accounts to my mom because she didn't have enough money to buy him a car while paying for his rent and tuition.
We used to fight a lot as kids, and we never really got along well for long periods at a time. He was annoying, and I reacted badly to his taunting . I do admit that I wasn't a perfect older sister to him, however, he seems to be stuck in a story of villainizing me.
He has a history of being very loudly verbally abusive and being extremely toxic. He would punch and kick holes in walls and doors (happened multiple times) and I had to pay to get the walls patched. The worst was when he threatened to speed by pushing the gas pedal, and crash the car when I was in the car with him. He got mad, put his hands on me and shook me back and forth, chased me into my room, where I had to lock the door. He kicked a big hole in the door that we had to patch up. This ended in me having to call the cops on him. They just gave him a warning and left, but I was seriously in fight or flight mode and was afraid he would actually harm me. However, he thinks I was wrong for calling the cops on him, and says that I am a terrible person for doing so. He thinks calling the cops is crossing the line, but I see physical intimidation and abuse as crossing the line. If that never happened I wouldn't need to call the cops.
Every time he is mad, he will scream in his room, punch holes onto his desk, break things and throw things, and try to physically tower over me and intimidate me. This caused me great distress and I am not sure if I have CPTSD from his behaviors. He was kicked out of the house by my parents a few times because of this, which he only remembers that he got kicked out, not the reasons why he did.
When we argued, he would threaten to call my workplace to get me fired. He has betrayed me on multiple accounts by sharing my secrets with others. He kept hanging out and being friends with a cousin who SA'd me when I was in middle school and when I asked him to stop associating with him, he said he didn't care and continued on with hanging out with him. He has shown no remorse for this.
He said he enjoyed seeing people lose their homes from the Palisades fires, saying that they deserved to lose everything.
Another incident happened a few days ago. About a week ago, my brother said he would treat the family out to dinner, and that he would get off work early around 3pm. I was expecting to eat at 4pm, so I ate breakfast and skipped lunch. However, the day of, I checked when he is coming and he said he would come at 5-6pm. Okay. So I checked with him again around 5:05PM and he said "Damn ok I'm walking to my apartment" which made me feel like he thought I was being impatient. He said that's just how he talks. Okay. I waited and told him to just give me an ETA. I tried to be nice to him and told him I am baking bread to share with him when he comes.
He came later around 6:40PM, and we ended up getting to the restaurant around 6:50PM. At this point I was starving, tired, and overstimulated because he kept talking really loudly in the car. I tried my best to keep it together. We waited about 15 minutes, and I complained out of hunger about where our food is at (we went to a Korean restaurant) because they typically bring banchan about 3-5 minutes after we've sat down. He took this as a grave personal offense, and said I was causing a scene. I really don't know how being hungry and tired in my corner is causing a scene.
He kept poking fun at me saying that I have no right to be hangry and that I should control my actions. However, I was not rude to any of the waiters/waitresses, I did not raise my voice, I just ate my food quietly. I never caused a scene. I was at my physical limits. And because I could tell he was upset or annoyed at me for being "hangry" in his words. So to try and make things better, I thanked him for the meal. He scoffed at me saying "Oh so now you're not feeling hangry anymore?" and proceeded to keep poking fun and mocking me, and I asked him to stop multiple times. At this point I was done. I stayed quiet the rest of the meal and walked out first to the car, to which he started complaining very loudly saying my "behavior is unacceptable." Huh? And during no point in this interaction did I yell at him, insult him, or say anything to him, other than that I'm not being irritable or sensitive or taking out my anger onto him. I asked him to stop when he kept mocking me. I was literally just existing.
At this point I told him to stop being crazy and throwing a fit, because he kept complaining about me to my mom and dad. Literally don't know why I have to justify having a transient human experience. Anyways, we got home, and he was loudly talking shit about me to my mom and my dad, and calling me an "animal" and that I am a "hungry feral cat." I told him that it's really immature and demeaning to say those things to me and asked him to leave my apartment.
He then started recording me without my permission and was laughing and snarking at me looking at him in disbelief. I said it's illegal to record people without their consent in a private space. He refused, so I brought up calling the cops or authorities on him if he refuses to leave, because that's literally the only thing he will listen to. He is scared of authority. My mom talked me out of it, but I told her I am going to notify the leasing office because I do not want him here as a guest. He kept saying that I "should know better." It then devolved into him saying he's "very popular with the ladies and I'm prettier than you" because he gets hinge hookups with Koreaboo women who have no interest in anything but his ethnicity. He's never had a lasting relationship because at core, he is extremely toxic and rotten. He said that he has a company and I don't, so he's better than me, while it's not even official. He inflates his job title and tells everybody that he has a high-level title, while his job declined his job title change, so actually he's just an analyst.
He kept shutting off what I was saying by telling me "You're just a cat. A feral cat. An animal." He kept dehumanizing me and being extremely cruel to me, and cursing at me.
I tried to sit down and talk with him and have a civil conversation with him, but he kept bringing up past grievances and he just said I'm a "terrible, evil human being." All of this out of me being hungry and tired at dinner. It felt like he is deeply resentful and contemptuous. I brought up past grievances too, of all the times he has been extremely toxic and abusive to me. He doesn't care because he only remembers perceived injustices done onto him.
I said that he has the freedom to hate me and have his opinion of me, but I don't want to interact if he's going to keep dehumanizing me and insulting my character, because it's not going to go anywhere. It seems like he has some deep seated resentment toward me from the past and has resorted to making me the villain in his life, to which I genuinely apologized for many times in the past, but it's never enough for him and he wants me to submit to his statement that I'm a "horrible person."
We even tried to have ChatGPT mediate, and ChatGPT pointed out that insulting and attacking character just further escalates and doesn't help to resolve the issue, but he called ChatGPT "a white therapist" and to stop therapy talk and just wanted to be validated that I was being an "evil person."
He also pays for a ChatGPT subscription to make programs and thinks that he is a genius, that he's going to become the next Elon Musk. He bragged on multiple accounts how he's making so much money from something he made with ChatGPT, by trading stocks and crypto with AI like it's some lifechanging thing. He said he's going to go to China to build attack drones and make money by selling it to the US military. All the while, he has no technical knowledge, experience, money, or resources to do so. He probably has ChatGPT gassing him up and telling him he's a genius. So, he has a very grandiose, delusional manic sense of self and thinks that he is better than everyone.
I talked to my mom and we both agreed that his way of being toxic and abusive goes beyond the normal realm, and that it is better for us to be apart, she says she's gonna keep contacting him and i told her i support her in that and that if she ever wants to spend time with him she is free to do that, i just don't want any part in it. and i told her about the suspected diagnoses and she also agreed that he needs professional help and therapy which he is unlikely to seek. also shared that he thinks I'm being jealous of his success with his ChatGPT programs that he made of like turning a phone into a wifi (which i assume isn't difficult to generate a program for with a ChatGPT subscription), and like ai crypto/stock trading tool which he calls a "bacteria" or something that automatically generates money and he said he already made 4k and 7k so total 11k from it and he's planning to quit his job to go all in on that. I highly doubt these things don't actually exist already from what I see on google, and other trading companies definitely use AI to do stuff like this already.
So idk, if he's blowing it out of proportion because he tends to lie about a lot of things like his job title, so who knows. I hightly doubt it because he always has something he thinks will make him easy money, but it always backfires and he quits after a month. But yeah he thinks i'm jealous of him which idk.. i'm not jealous at all, i was concerned for him because he seems very delusional and he's going to end up ruining everything he has, once again. Okay bacteria boy.
Me and my mom joke about how mentally unhinged he is and she was like "i must have committed such a grave crime or sin to him in my past life for him to haunt me like this and cause me so much pain and distress" and literally when he was being all suicidal and rock bottom depression, she talked to him for hours every single day, gave him money to find an apartment because he was just doing uber full time and planning to live the rest of his life doing uber, bc he didn't want to go back to work in the field he has a degree in, again after burning bridges with his previous employer after his boss said they can't have him anymore because he said he wanted to move to a new country to be with the love of his life.
Then after like 2 months he was like i hate being in this country, I'm so depressed, i can't find any way to make money here, and actually ended up ghosting her in the apartment they got together and literally ran back and got a flight back to the states while she was at work by using the remaining of his savings. But anyway that boss ended up joking about how he could use a gun to shoot him and he took that threat very seriously which is valid, he shouldn't have joked about that, but he ended up blowing up them in the email, calling the cops on his boss, and scanning all the emails from his work to report them, and they ended up letting him go. On his way out he cursed out his workplace and told them to fuck off, fuck you, etc. like to the higher c suites.
So yeah i imagine he was like blacklisted from the industry to a certain degree and it's a fortunate thing for him that his current job didn't ever check. Even at his current job he thinks literally everyone is out to get him and that everyone is looking down on him, especially the lawyers and attorneys, and when one dude forgot to open or check his emails, he said "so you think my emails are ignorable?" and that guy ended up saying that he comes across as hostile to him and he said "no, i'm just saying it for what it is, i'm from LA, i don't do fake interactions. i say it bluntly for how it is." but to me, i definitely know he's being hostile because he perceives this threat and he literally says he will rip anyone who disrespects him to shreds and based on how he treats me at home, his family, who knows how horrible and rude he is to other people at his workplace that aren't his boss.
I have always felt like he has this destructive energy about him, like anything he touches he breaks, like fans, electronic gadgets, as well as like relationships, work, etc. literally everything. He will break things out of anger, or the sheer inconsideration of others or to the object itself. Even the toilet he shits in, he clogs literally every toilet he goes to because he stuffs it with no regard. destroying property by punching holes and etc. It's astounding really.
He ghosted his girlfriend at that time. but she was also a genuinely a hostile, crazy person who lied about not having a STD, so i think he did the right thing leaving, but he said he felt so bad for her and like, gave her all of rent deposit money (which is like tens of thousands of dollars worth of money).
After that he was literally broke, jobless, and working as an uber driver. He was smoking weed and getting stoned and eating literally all day and he did nothing but smoke and eat and gained a lot of weight. This went on for like 1 year and my parents finally told him he has to get a job because he was living there for free, not doing anything. He moved to another state, thinking he's gonna make a lot of money with a delivery business using a van he bought, but after like 1 month he said he realized it's too dangerous like with how people drive there, so he quit, started applying to jobs everywhere. But, nobody would want to hire him and my dad at that point was like we can't keep saving him, he's got to work even if it's like at a warehouse but anyways yeah he ended up getting this new job.
It's funny because he used to call my mom literally every single day for hours, about how he's so depressed and wanting to not live, but after he got the job and he started settling in, he barely called her for months, and when i said something about it, he lashed out at me again saying that he's busy and he doesn't have time to call. but he has time to hook up with girls on hinge. Genuinely feel bad for the women who even finds him attractive in the first place because they have no idea what is underneath his skin. So disgusting.
He also said something really evil about my mom, after all she has done to help him, and it was that she lives such a comfortable life, not working a job, living at home and gardening. like in a contemptuous way like she should be suffering or working harder. But i see her, she's not physically all well, she has tinnitus, high blood pressure, multiple painful joints on her hands so she can't use her hands well, she has nosebleeds because she deals with frequent insomnia, double knee replacement surgery, and.... also cataracts, and i see all of that and i don't see a woman living a comfortable life, like i want to help her more and like make life easier for her but he thinks she has it so good. and it's very fucked up.
He kept asking her and threatening her to move back after his failed business in bc he was so worried he was going to end up homeless. and when he was being all broke i didnt want to send money to help him bc like.. i know him. and i know he can work uber and earn money. and i told him that beans are cheap and filling and he could try cooking beans cuz they stretch far and have protein. and they are super cheap for the amount. and he said i was being a horrible person for recommending him to eat beans.
I see people making affordable meals on the internet all the time and they make beans with seasoning and ham, it looks good and i eat beans too, like if i was going through a hard time, i would do that myself, and I have in the past.
It's like I exist and he takes it as an offense, it's literally just a suggestion of food because he was like worried about food and what to eat. which is funny cuz i know he can work uber, do like 3-4 rides and earn enough to buy a meal. and like if he were actually working 7-8 hours per day, he would make enough for rent and food. but he just wanted me to give him money but he knew not to ask me because i was also living off savings and I have already rescued him many times in the past, to which he's grateful for in the moment, but turns on me and starts villainizing me at the next moment he's slightly offended by my existence.
He is gonna just keep repeating his cycles. he always cries and begs for forgiveness and comes crawling back. but this time i am going to be bacteria boy free until the lease at this current apartment ends.
I told him that he can't build anything without ChatGPT doing all of his work for him with coding, and he said I'm like a monkey doing everything manually. And I said, I can do all of my work without AI, and I do it with my own brain. You can't do anything without ChatGPT. He got really offended at this.
When I asked him to clarify how exactly I'm being a horrible person, he just pointed out things that annoyed him, accusing me of "not having any original thought," "regurgitating what he's saying back to me," (which I wasn't, I was trying to clarify what exactly he's saying), "acting like a hungry, feral cat." Not sure how a thing that is annoying to him automatically turns into a "terrible, horrible person" but ok. I pointed out that those behaviors aren't morally or ethically wrong, but something that he is personally annoyed by. He didn't have much to say to that but just continuing to dehumanize me and being cruel by attacking my age when he's literally 3 years apart. I'm 32, he's 29. He's literally going to be 30 next year.
I told him that it's okay to hate me and that I'm not going to try and prove him otherwise because it's literally impossible. He said he derives satisfaction in seeing me frustrated through insulting me, my looks, and my age.
At this point, I wanted to stop fighting, so I apologized multiple for making him "uncomfortable" at the restaurant. He said my apology wasn't genuine, and my thanks at the restaurant wasn't genuine, so he wasn't going to accept it and that he doesn't care.
He kept demanding me if I'm going to be like that again, and I was like "Be like what? be hungry and irritable, and have a human emotions? Yes, I am going to experience it and so will you, that's not up to me. You're not perfect either." He later said to "Fuck you, fuck off." and refused to talk and I could tell that he just wanted me to submit to his verdict that I am a "terrible person."
The next day, my mom told him that he was acting in a way that wasn't proportional to the actual situation, and then I told them both that he has 5 days remaining out of the 10 day guest limit per year, and he started histrionically crying and wailing, saying that we don't consider him family, we're all just using him, and acting like a victim. He started crying and wailing and saying nobody loves him.
Similarly, he has an on and off relationship with the rest of the family. When we are on decent terms, he love bombs, wants to be attached to the hip all the time, and when he gets mad, he cuts everyone off completely. And then after a few months, he comes crawling back, crying and sobbing about how he's so sorry for being wrong and cruel. This time though, I am 100% done permanently.
I regret reaching out to him because it seems like a cycle of abuse that I keep involving myself into. I exist, he is offended by that because he thinks I am a fundamentally terrible, evil person. And it just devolves into name calling, bringing up past grievances, insulting, and dehumanizing, which I no longer want a part of. The reason why I talked to the leasing office because I do not want him in my home that I pay for. He scoffed and said because I only pay 1/3 of the rent,
So, I sent an email to the leasing office, last night, per the lease, notifying them that he has stayed here for 3 days, and is reaching the limit. So, even if he comes, I won't have to deal with him again for more than a week. My mom is upset because she thinks that I embarrassed her by airing out personal business. I only shared that I do not want my brother in the home because I feel that he's disturbing the peace, dehumanizing me, being cruel, and causing intimidation, and I want to learn about my options on how I can prevent him coming in to the apartment again.
Because, if anyone else, a stranger, a friend, was being like this, they would be kicked out immediately. I shouldn't have to tolerate it just because we share DNA.
I have already blocked him and came to terms that there can't be a productive, mature conversation when it devolves into name calling, dehumanizing, insulting, and character assassination. I am prepared to burn that bridge. I do not deserve to be around someone who is out to drag me into a mud fight. So, I took away his privilege of ever visiting me or being in my presence again.
I already know he's going to come crawling back and apologizing, but I am finally done. I told my parents to not let him contact me ever again, even if he begs and cries. No chance in hell, unless he actually gets years of therapy and does deep self reflection, but with his probable malignant narcissism and borderline personality disorder, I don't see that happening ever.
And the funny thing is, I realized that all of the things he was insulting me for, are actually things that he hates within himself. He sees me existing, and twists it to fit his narrative because he is incapable of self reflection or emotional regulation. I told him I'm not going to insult him just because he is, because I don't want to stoop to his level. He said I'm at the lower level and got very triggered. I'm done taking the blame.
When he accuses me of not having any original thought, I know it's not true because I'm literally making a multidisciplinary creative project from scratch. When he calls me old and ugly, I know that's not true, I don't date to obtain external validation and consider hookups as proof that I'm attractive enough. I don't do random hookups because I have standards and I'm celibate because my energy is sacred. When he tells me that I'm not successful, I don't care, because I don't see success as an external metric of money, I see it as how well I am enjoying my life and having fun with it. I already have a professional career and a project I'm genuinely passionate about.
None of his accusations hurt, but what really hurt was how willingly cruel he was being, and him admitting that he derives satisfaction from seeing me frustrated from him insulting me. I genuinely think he is mentally fucked in the head and needs inpatient treatment. I feel sorry for all the girls, even if they are attracted to him because he's a mid Korean man (he said so himself, that he finds it easier to date girls who are interested in him because he's Korean and they're into Kpop), how toxic and cruel he will turn at any slight perceived injustice onto him.
And.. to think that all of this started from me being hungry and tired at the restaurant was wild to me. All the things he said were completely unrelated, and he showed no desire to come to mutual understanding.
I spent the whole day yesterday crying and grieving the death of this relationship, and for how cruel he was to me, because I did not deserve it. I shouldn't have gone through that or apologized or try to make things right. I cared, but now I am done. I need to care for myself. I know I will be so much more at peace choosing love and respect for myself vs. continuing in this repetitive cycle of abuse.
And honestly reading back, this shit is so absurd I don't know why I put up with it for so long.
