OK. Heres the reality, I have a LD (I have been diagnosed by a professional about 3 months ago) I have known for a while that I might have a LD, however its like my parents turned a blind eye to it. Even now that I have been diagnosed, its almost as if they are tryng to pretend that it hasn’t happened, and I sometimes get the feeling that they are even disappointed in me because of it.
This is causing me great distress, as I have two younger siblings (a brother who is 12, and in private education, and a sister who is 15 and equally doing exceptionally well at school.) I myself am 20 (female) and have been in a full time job for the last 18 months or so, and am very proud of myself.
After i left school, I didn’t feel i would amount to anything, as my grades were so disappointing and what made matters worse was that my mother agreed that my grades were disappointing and that I could have done better. So you can imagine how happy I am to be able to hold down a full time job, and re-build my self confidence which i thought would be lost forever.
My point is, is that since I have not continued further education, (something which both my siblings will almost certainly do) my parents don’t really seem to have an interest in anything I have to tell them, as they value education.
I am not the kind of person to compete with my siblings (because i know full well i would lose every time), but i feel like my parents are phasing me out, and its actually starting to make me feel very depressed/suicidal, and dampening my confidence.
Well, I have exactly the reverse problem! My brother was born premature and had a number of severe health problems, in Northern Canada in 1948 so services were minimal. He survived and even became quite hardy, and is very intelligent and competent — has a professional career in air traffic control and security services — but the first few years were hard on my mother and she got it into her head that she always needed to help and protect him. Then the school messed up teaching him reading and she had to do it herself (which is why I’ve known about effective methods since childhood) but he got a bad taste for anything to do with school. I came along two years later, pretty much normal, and I was always deemed to be able to take care of myself. If he even passed his school year, he was praised to the skies; I came home with an A average and was roundly criticized for the one B+ on my report card. He got to live at home and had his school fees paid; I was expected to take out student loans and pay them off myself. Even as a child I realized how blatantly unfair this was but there has never been anything I could do about it.
I gave up fighting the whole mess. There is really no easy solution to the situation where you get put in the position of family goat; if you try to get together with the family you know they are going to put you down, for no action of your own but just because you are the family goat; and if you avoid them well you have no family. My case is so extreme that I mostly avoid them, not estranged but not close, and the longer I avoid them the better they treat me — actually almost polite the last few visits.
If there is any way you can get people in to family counseling there are counselors who try to straighten thiese situations out. If however the family are perfectly happy as they are and think that you are the problem, you can only wait them out.
Meanwhile, work hard on your own things and develop a group of friendships with people who accept and respect who you are. Get your own life the way you want it, and speak to your family from a position of strength.