Personal Story and a Lesson that I Learned from it
When I was a child, my older sister and younger brother and I were all very afraid of my father. He was quite strict and all of us were afraid to make him angry. He never hit us, but he could yell very loud and when we made him mad, we always felt very bad for disappointing him. Sometimes he would say things to us like "I wish I never had a child like you." Later in life, he realized that he never should have said those kinds of things to us and we forgave him.
One day, I overheard my little brother (who is two years younger than me) cursing at somebody and using language that my father would have become very angry about if he had heard it. Because we were so afraid of disappointing my father, I knew that I could get my brother to do things for me (or stop doing things that bothered me) just by threatening to tell our father about what I had heard him saying that day. Anytime that I wanted something from my brother, I would say "Give it to me or I'm going to tell Daddy what you said" and my brother would have no choice but to do whatever I wanted him to do. I remember that this gave me a feeling of power over him and sometimes I would pretend I was going to tell my father even when we were not arguing about anything, just because I had the power to make him be afraid of...
He said "Go ahead and tell him already…it's better than having to be afraid all the time…I don't want to have to be afraid of my sister for the rest of my life…just tell him and leave me alone." That made me feel very bad. I never realized how miserable I was making my brother and I felt very bad that he had to be afraid of his own sister. I realized that we are family and that, if anything, I should be protecting my younger brother and not threatening to do something bad to him all the time. The truth was that I was never going to tell my father, but for some reason, it had become enjoyable for me to hold that over my brother's head. So I told my brother that I was sorry for all the times that I scared him in the past about it and I promised him that I was never going to say anything and also that I was not going to threaten to tell my father about it ever again. When I saw how relieved he was I felt even worse; it was almost like my brother had been held hostage all that time by his own sister. He never knew if today was going to be the day that I told our father; and if we had any kind of argument during the day, he would be terrified…
