DEAR STRAIGHT TALK: Six months ago, my younger sister was rejected by her boyfriend for another girl. She’s still not over it. She lies around sad and depressed and hardly leaves our room except to go to school reluctantly. She’s also seriously neglecting her personal hygiene and often doesn’t bother to get dressed on weekends. Most people (including me) experience rejection at some point, but they get over it. I’ve told her she isn’t going to find a new boyfriend by lying around in our room and I’ve invited her many times to come out with me but she just gets mad that I’m not sympathetic. I love and care about her. How can I help her? — Miriam, Sacramento, Calif.
Editor’s Note: The personal experiences and ideas that the panel shares about bouncing back after a breakup are honest and inspirational. I hope they help others. When someone doesn’t bounce back within a couple of months, and especially if he or she shows signs of unraveling in other aspects of life (hygiene, grades, social life, drug use, sleep, etc.), the best way to help is to press the person into counseling (which generally involves pressing the important adults in his or her life to help make it happen). It’s been proven that in ten counseling sessions or less, almost every at-risk adolescent regains footing and returns to stability. We did a column about one such counseling study in our column of May 9, 2007 (see our website archives). Counseling works. And the earlier it is received, the better. If it isn’t working, find a different counselor. Ask for recommendations to counselors from people in the know, such as your high school counselor (who normally is too busy to manage regular clients). —Lauren
Comments
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My stepsister is in the same situation and it’s really a drag to be around her. Fortunately, I only have to share my room with her every other weekend and that’s bad enough. I don’t think I could handle it full time like Miriam has to with her sister. Her boyfriend dumped her out of the blue, so at first I was sympathetic and provided a shoulder for her to cry on as her feelings were understandable at first. However, it’s been several months and she refuses to move on. She just sits around feeling sorry for herself and expects everyone else to also feel sorry for her. I tried getting her to go out with me and meet others but gave up. She acts very resentful when I’m getting dressed up to go out with my boyfriend and accuses me of “rubbing it in.” She’s also been stuffing herself with junk food and has gained a great deal of weight. When I tried to tactfully tell her that this is going to make it even harder to find a new boyfriend, she came unglued and accused me of putting her down when she’s already depressed enough, so now I just keep my mouth shut. Her weight gain is even more obvious when she’s naked, and I can see how she’s totally letting her body go which is very unhealthy in addition to making her unattractive. I finally decided that you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped and decided to stop feeling sorry for her and let it be her problem.
Lindy
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My sister refuses to move on after being cruelly dumped by her boyfriend because she feels that the way he treated her was extremely unfair. It was very unfair, but that doesn’t change the fact that she needs to move on. She agreed to give him blow jobs because he pressured her into thinking that she would lose him if she didn’t. He also convinced her that oral sex isn’t really “having sex” and she’d still be a virgin as has been written about in Straight Talk. I’m sorry to say that I helped facilitate it as I would agree to leave our room while they did it when our parents weren’t home and promised not to tell them. But I only did it because she begged me. She was even willing to do it for him when she was nude because he wanted to see her. This totally shocked me as my sister is normally very shy about her body and won’t let anybody see her nude except for me, our mom, and her best friend. Other than us, she won’t even let other girls see her if she can possibly avoid it. Anyway, he had the nerve to dump her and told her it was because she was so “loose and promiscuous” and he couldn’t respect someone like that! The old double standard.
She can’t get over how unfair this is and therefore won’t move on. She still has his picture up in our room as well as the gifts he had given her. I’ve told her that she just needs to trash this stuff or she’ll never get over him. That’s what I did when I had a boyfriend reject me and trashing all reminders of him was a good cathertic feeling. However, all she wants to do is harp on how “unfair” he was to her to pressure her into this and then dump her because she gave in. “Unfair” has become her favorite word, and I’m getting very tired of hearing it. Even though she’s my sister and I love and care about her, I’m getting very tired of this, and it’s very unpleasant to have to be sharing a room with her. No matter how unfair something like this is, it doesn’t change the fact that you need to get over it and move on.
Kellie
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In our case, it’s our mom who can’t get over rejection and it’s driving my sister and me crazy. Our dad left her for another woman and it was 2 years before she got involved with another man, and he terminated the relationship after a short time. She’s sad and depressed all the time. The worst part is that she takes it out on us even though it’s obviously not our fault that he left her. She finds fault with everything we do and goes out of her way to finds reasons to scream and yell at us. No matter how hard we try to clean our room, she finds something wrong and yells at us and that’s just one example. She does this about everything. We do our best to just avoid her by staying in our room, but we can’t be in there all the time and sometimes she’ll just barge in and start yelling at us anyway over something she’s trumped up. We can’t have friends over, because she also treats them like dirt. We try to spend as much time away from home as we can, but then she gets mad at us for being gone and leaving her alone. We didn’t used to like going to our dad’s for visitations because we have lots of conflicts with our stepsisters who we have to share a room with. However, we now look forward to it since it’s actually much better than being around our mom. She’s our mom and we love her and would like to help her, but don’t know what we can do.
Tammy
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Girls – please for your own sakes take the time to read this website top to bottom: http://www.baggagereclaim.co.uk/
I am 36 and really wish I’d had this education in guys and my own self when I was a teen. It will help you a ton in dealing with relationships, breakups, and how to have a healthy self-love.
