The issue is that one of my sisters is undiagnosed mentally ill and has harassed me by phone for many years. I have told her not to call or leave messages because I do not listen to them. I have blocked her email and have had to block her texts. By harass, I mean she will phone bomb my phone with messages that are rambling, abusive and full of self-pitying statements that she is the victim of my horrible treatment. She will leave anywhere from three to six to ten messages in a row, and they become increasingly aggressive and mean. According to her, my non-existant responses are abusive.

I used to think I was a bad sister, but recently I found out that she was arrested for stalking an ex boyfriend, and that information made me think that I am not the only one she harasses. I Googled her name and found the arrest and another past arrest in the local police blotter. I also found out that my mother and other sisters recently blocked her from their phones. Which is what I did, as well.

Needless to say, I did not invite her to my wedding. But I feel bad about [not inviting] her teenage kids. We were close when they were little, but now they live mostly with their dad. I don’t think there is time to try to contact them before the wedding because I don’t know their dad’s address, but I am wondering if I should reach out at all? Even though my sister is sick, I don’t want to get in the middle, and I am afraid they don’t understand why they were not invited. Also, my sister — in one of her nasty calls — said that if I try to contact her children she will get an order of protection from me.

Wanting to be the Best Aunt Possible

Dear Aunt,

When one is a teenager and one’s mother is mentally ill, there are certain family functions to which one simply won’t be invited. One may try to be stoic about such things, but they sting.

Later in life, when her teenage kids are adults and begin having their own problems adjusting to work and relationships and feeling anxious and depressed themselves, they’ll get into therapy and start talking about their mother. Perhaps this wedding to which they were not invited will come up in conversation, and they will see what happened — why their mother could not be invited, and by extension why they could not be invited either — and maybe they will begin the long process of building compassion for everyone involved.

But you know, as I write that — and I thought I could be steely and objective about this! –  I really wish you could get a message to the kids now, before the wedding, if that can be done discreetly, and just explain, however such a thing can be explained, that you love them and think they are great kids and wish they could be there. You know? Just to say you love them and you’re sorry they can’t be there? Is that crazy? I just think, imagining how it will feel years later, if you could do this, it might eliminate some future bad feeling. I am no expert in manners, and weddings seem to be full of manners, so there may be some transgression or unforeseen consequence in what I am suggesting. It’s just that if I were one of those kids, I would appreciate knowing how you feel. It would eliminate some of my confusion and fear about where I stand in the family, what with my mother having all these conflicts with others.

These kids have feelings. Don’t they deserve to know something like the truth — maybe not all the grisly truth, but something like it — to know that they matter and that they aren’t being ostracized because of their mother’s unpredictable and disruptive behavior? It’s not her fault she’s mentally ill. Her kids may feel the whole situation is grossly unfair.

In their filial loyalty, they may turn against you for a time no matter what you do. If so, you will have to accept that. Remember what you have learned living soberly, that in protecting ourselves from certain evils, in making healthy boundaries, we will hurt people’s feelings now and then, and not everybody will think we’re swell, and sometimes all you can do is try to be kind and hope for the best.

Let us hope when you see your sister’s children one day, you will be able to talk as adults, and that you can say to them how much you wished they could have been there and how difficult the circumstance was. And let us hope that they are able to give you some signal that they understand and do not hold it against you, that you and they all know how hard it is to live in a family in which alcoholism, addiction and mental illness travel like colds among the members.

But for now, you are planning a wedding and doing your best to make it come off smoothly. For now, you are one of the survivors. Make it a good day. Rejoice in your good fortune.

Now, if she were as kind and selfless as he, I would give them my blessing. However, she has a devious, controlling side that she has used, in combination with his naive kindness, to secure him as her lifelong mate. On a day-to-day basis, he is constantly made to apologize to her, as she finds fault with the most harmless guffaw or, heaven forbid, a difference in opinion. Recently, she forbade him from going on his own bachelor party because she suspected he would cheat on her, costing him thousands in plane and hotel fees in the process. She has used her cunning to manipulate him over the years, to the point where he feels like he has no choice but to marry her.

How can I save my friend? I have stopped confronting him on this because his wife-to-be is so shrewd and smart that she has altered his fundamental thought process: He BELIEVES she is a great partner now, a real catch, because she has told him so time and time again. Deep down, somewhere, I know he knows that he’s settling and that he could do better; he’s made this much clear by putting off her very public and repetitive pleas to get married. Is there any hope for him? There are other close friends of his who feel the same way — what can we do?

I predict that the marriage will go one of two ways. Either he’ll snap out of it, get sick of being mistreated and break it off in a nasty divorce. Or, much more likely, his wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly benevolence will get the best of him, and his fear of hurting her will force him to spend the rest of his days with someone he does not love. He’ll swallow his romantic ambitions, as he has all of his life with her, and force himself to believe that they’re meant to be together … all simply because she told him to.

Help Me Cary!

Dear Help Me!,

What if your friend had a need to be controlled and manipulated? What if his fiancée were meeting that need? Would it be wrong of her to meet that need?

If a person locks himself in a cell because he feels safe there, is that wrong?

Do we allow our friend to lock himself in his cell? Do we blame the cell? What if the keys are right there but he prefers the cell? Do we keep running over there and opening the door? Do we insist he can’t stay in the cell, that he has to come out and walk around like the rest of us good American souls, making his own decisions, standing on his own two feet? What if he doesn’t want to stand on his own two feet?

What if a man wants a woman to run his life for him? What if he wants her to tell him what he really wants so that he doesn’t have to think about what he really wants because thinking about what he really wants would mean having to ask for what he really wants. And who the hell wants to do that? That’s scary!

What if he has a strong need to not make decisions and a strong need to avoid conflict?

Basically, relationships meet needs. That’s why we have them. There are needs for love and companionship and sex that seem pretty normal. We get that. But what about other needs?

We’re not always meeting the needs people think we should be meeting. We’re not always meeting our most admirable needs. That doesn’t mean they’re not needs. They’re just not the needs other people think we should be meeting. And, well, duh: That’s what makes them our needs and not somebody else’s. They might be perverse and pathological needs, but they’re our needs. I know it’s sad. Doesn’t it help a little bit to look at it like this?

I hope this doesn’t make it worse. I’m just trying to help.

Why not leave him alone and wish him well? Why not just say to him that if there ever comes a time when he’s ready to bust out, you’ll be there for him.

That’s one way to look at it.

The other way to look at it is that she has put him under her spell. This happens too. People become hypnotized and lost. They become dependent on others to run their lives. They get addicted to drugs. They retreat into fantasy and it’s not entirely choice; there is a malevolent force at work.

When that happens, we can say things. We can say, you’re ruining your life. We can book a hotel room and get all his friends and family to sit on chairs and couches waiting for his arrival, and then tell him, Oh, listen, I just have to drop by here at this hotel to pick up my sister, won’t you come up there with me, and then Boom! Surprise! It’s an Intervention!

Interventions are great. When else do family and friends say what they really want and what they really feel? Interventions are terrific. The tears, the choices, the driving off to rehab!

But a pre-wedding intervention would be kinda weird. Hey, dude, we really hate your fiancée. We think she’s ruining your life. We think you should dump her.

You see the problem with that?

So here’s a thought: We act as if we have repressed our desire for happiness and that’s the problem, and if we only let it out, we would be happy. But what if we actually have the reverse situation? What if what’s actually repressed in our society is not the pursuit of happiness but true tragic consciousness? What if our overwhelming social insistence on happiness has actually driven the tragic underground, so that it is the tragic that threatens to arise out of repression, so that that it is the tragic that we seek in our intimate moments, in our private moments? And what if that is why we have these problems with drugs and suicide and depression — not because we’re not happy enough, but because we have repressed the tragic?

What if not everybody wants to visit San Diego at least once in their lives?

If that were the case, if grief were the thing most repressed in society, then we would find ways to express our melancholia, our sense of the tragic, in our intimate relations.

Another way to look at your friend’s situation is to consider the possibility that he is getting ready for something but is not ready yet. Maybe his soul is getting ready. Say a fierce battle awaits the soul. We can be in a holding pattern. There is not much to do while waiting for the soul’s great challenge. So we amuse ourselves with pastimes.

Maybe she is a pastime. Maybe he is waiting.

One thing I know: We can’t change people.

I hope this helps you accept what he’s doing so it won’t be so painful to watch. Maybe if you think about it in terms of his needs, strange as they may be, you won’t feel you’re letting him down by not interfering.

Promise to be there for him if he ever decides to leave the cage.