 I hate to say this, but my sister really sucks. Aw. She's totally toxic and probably a narcissist. I really struggle with it because family is important to me and the rest of the family just kind of accepts her behavior. Is there a way to keep someone like this in your life? I'm afraid of losing the rest of my family if I set boundaries. Help. Here's some free therapy. Well, I think we talk all the time about how the term narcissist has just become the buzz phrase that if we never heard it again, it would be too soon. As humans, narcissism is a spectrum. Yes. All of us fall in the spectrum somewhere. So I think that's really important to say because to your point, that term gets thrown around way too frequently. And when I label somebody, what is that providing me as far as something to hide behind? In difficult relationship dynamics, we are very quick to jump to the cutoff, right? Because the cutoff is actually easy. What's harder is to attempt to have hard conversations to understand where they're coming from, to set a boundary within my family and risk them being upset with me. Another aspect of what happens in family systems is there's a lot of triangulation. And what that might look like is mom feels like a good sister would do X and so you need to reach out to your sister and make sure she's okay with whatever's happening with her. I actually remember a personal story where something similar happened and I remember saying to my mom, so my dad and I don't have a good relationship or really. And there was a lot of this going on where she was putting her anxiety on me. After years of trying to kind of navigate it and soothe her anxiety, I finally had a point where I was done with that. And I said to her, this is your anxiety. You're the one that's anxious about our relationship not looking the way that you want it to look. I'm actually okay with it. I've made peace with it. I've gone to therapy. I've done my work around our relationship not looking however society or you think it should look. And so I would appreciate if you actually stopped bringing your anxiety to me. I think you need to manage that anxiety because this isn't actually about me. And I did that with a lot of butterflies in my stomach and I was really nervous in how she would take it. And I remember actually being really shocked that she sat with it and got really quiet and actually said to me, you're right. This isn't about you. And so sometimes it can look different. Sometimes you make a big thing out of I need to have this conversation with my family and then you do and maybe it is surprising. Maybe they do hear you. But also just saying, you know, the story I tell myself is that protecting my sister is more important to you than how that relationship feels for me. Right. And I think sometimes as a parent that can feel like because no parent wants their child to feel like one child is prioritized over another. And so sometimes I think saying that thing to our parent can really get their attention and they might not be aware of that, you know. Yeah. Or maybe I feel like you are putting the priority on the way that our family looks to the outside. Versus what the reality is of how this feels to be on the inside, right? Which we all can probably relate to that to a certain extent. And when someone, you know, says something like what kind of person doesn't talk to their mother or something like that. I say normally when someone has come to a point with that level of emotional cutoff, it was a battle to get there. And there's a reason for it. And I think, you know, without knowing the trajectory of someone's entire story, we don't really want to judge that. We want to say every family is its own system, its own dynamic. And, you know, I'm sure all of us are doing the best that we can with whatever's happening. But it's really not for anybody on the outside to judge because you just don't know what the dynamics of a family are. I don't love the word toxic, but I know plenty of family dynamics that are in fact toxic. And so I am never going to be or am the therapist that believes like family is above everything. Blood over everything, right? You put family at the top no matter what. I actually don't believe that. A relationship is a relationship is a relationship. If it is truly toxic, then I think you should treat it as such. It doesn't actually matter to me if that person is blood or not. And so I think there's a lot of people out there that might allow treatment that they would never allow with other people because this person happens to be family. And I'm sorry, I think that's bullshit. I think that's like setting us up for being treated not well.