Home is where the heart is, even when home breaks your heart. Millions of adults spend decades living with the illusion of a happy home. They live their lives tiptoeing around people who hurt them deeply during childhood.
While adults who were mistreated as children struggle to understand what love with responsibility looks like, family members maintain a good public image. Silence is golden.
Family dysfunction does not have a time limit.
Mental illness, alcoholism, addiction, physical, sexual and mental abuse, neglect, and domestic violence are considered normal, justified, or denied.
What was not acknowledged during childhood rarely gets acknowledged during adulthood. Family dysfunction does not have a time limit. Neither do its effects.
Clandestine relationships between children and adults can influence an unhealthy relationship with food and a negative body image.
Physical abuse produces shame and low self-esteem. Growing up with an alcoholic parent can cause an adult to become overly responsible with little self-care. These effects are interchangeable.
When the Bow Breaks
The effects of being raised in a dysfunctional environment don’t wear off with age — quite the contrary. Adults often get stuck in survival mode based on the patterns they used to survive as children. Those childhood survival patterns remain required to function within the family system.
Failed relationships outside of the family often point to unmet childhood needs. Patterns of unintentional unemployment, serial relationships, conflict-parenting, or failed leadership may create a need for personal improvement.
In other cases, survivors of adverse childhood experiences are successful in material areas of life but remain unfulfilled. They may feel isolated or alone, compromise their passion, live without purpose, or be self-critical.
Denial as a survival defense has worn off. One way or another, they come face to face with their hidden past. No matter how many memes say otherwise, they can’t move forward until they look backward.
Turning Back Time
Revisiting childhood adversity is the most significant challenge to personal development, especially if you have all the markers of adult success.
Breaking the silence of family secrets is not uncomfortable just for the person who is healing. Acknowledging the adverse effects of misguided care years later is painful for everyone involved.
Siblings, religious congregations, and family friends support silence as the best solution for everyone involved. Silence as a solution is best only if you don’t consider the emotional well-being of the survivor. It is not best for the healing survivor.
Consequently, many adults find solace in disconnecting from their birth family to sort out distortions about themselves and the world. In healing communities, the decision to disconnect is referred to as “going no contact.” There are things to know if you are considering this path.
No Contact
Adults must sometimes choose to support their healing instead of continuing to ignore their pain to support their family. Healing requires you to control your life over maintaining the family image.
Live in your truth instead of the comfort of your family. Sacrifice family tradition for personal empowerment. The decision does not come easy and must rest on four considerations.
- No one owes you anything.
- You don’t need permission.
- It’s not a rescue from the work.
- It’s not a permanent decision.
No One Owes You Anything
Do not withhold love to manipulate your family. Going no contact creates further pain if you hold your love hostage from family. Your pain exacerbates when they don’t take the bait.
If your family didn’t respond to your pain with care when you were a child, they are unlikely to do so now. Healing is about changing yourself, not anyone else.
Go no contact to give yourself a good life, not manipulate someone else to give it to you. If you have expectations that the family will change as a result of your disconnect, you are setting yourself up to be a victim.
Going no contact means you stop relying on their support, not that you manipulate them into supporting.
Allowing your family members to understand your pain and desires allows for the amendment of relationships. But understand, no matter how reasonable your request is, they may reject it.
They may continue to invite perpetrators to family gatherings, highlight the achievements of toxic family members who harm children or choose to side with the tyrant caregiver.
Family members often change for a period, just long enough to keep you sucked in. You are better off releasing your expectations, going no contact, and giving yourself a safe space to heal.
You Don’t Need Permission
You can go no contact without permission or explanation. You don’t need to make an announcement. Most people ease into no contact by increasing the time between communication.
Instead of spending every holiday with family, you cut out the two major holidays where things are more likely to trigger you. Instead of calling every day, you cut down to every other day, then once a week, once a month, and once a year.
You control the contact instead of accommodating every request to be present. You shorten the time together when you do communicate. You increasingly take back control of your life and emotions by avoiding the opportunity for family triggers.
No Rescue from the Work
The purpose of no contact is to create space to heal. No contact establishes a path for healing. It is not the healing itself. Getting away from your toxic family does not mean you are healed, nor is it enough to heal.
Healing is a lifestyle of inner awareness, alignment with purpose, and living with an open heart. If you go no contact to avoid family triggers but don’t go any further on the healing path, you are unlikely to be fulfilled.
Committing to self-acceptance, nurturing the inner child, developing mental flexibility, etc., are prerequisites for the peace and joy you deserve.
When you take the focus off your family, you must put it on yourself. Otherwise, you may find yourself replacing your dysfunctional family with dysfunctional friends and lovers.
