Breaking Up With Family: The Only Way Out for the Adult Child of Abusive Parents

Family is a cult.

If you don’t believe me, give it a try. Try saying something bad about the concept of family and you’ll see just how the cult works.

It raises up like a tsunami and buries alive whoever dared to question its oppressive values.

For the ones who have a happy family of origin, built on respect, unconditional love, and acceptance, the idea of the family as a cult is preposterous.

After all, it’s your family. You’re supposed to love and respect them. It’s default.

But what if they never loved and respected you? Believe it or not, in some families the idea of love and respect is as foreign as going to the Moon on vacation.

People who grew up in a toxic family know what this is all about.

They know how it feels to be used as a tool between mom and dad. They know what it’s like to be nothing but an inconvenience to your narcissistic parents.

To be scapegoated because you’re the one who figured out that the family needs 2 rolls of tape to keep it from falling apart. And you dared to ask for improvements.

To be unseen, unheard, and unwanted one day and criticized, bullied, and gaslighted the next.

When this happens over and over again, the spirit breaks apart. And it takes the body with it. People develop a myriad of mental illnesses and auto-immune conditions as a result of living with toxicity for so long.

For example, schizophrenia is believed to be a consequence of your reality not being heard as a child. And I don’t mean the make-believe reality of a child playing with imaginary friends.

‘Mom, grandpa touched me. He told me not to tell anyone, I’m scared, please help me.’

‘What??! No, he didn’t! How can you say something like that? Your grandpa is a good man, he would never do anything like that! Don’t you ever tell that lie to anyone again.’

I mean brutal reality.

When parents deny the child’s right to express his reality for whatever reason, reality begins to change. For the worse. He no longer knows what’s real and what’s not. His world becomes shaky ground. He’s trapped in a macabre dance between his own mind and a hostile outside where nobody is on his side.

The story repeats itself over and over again until some people eventually had enough. They break all contact with the dysfunctional family.

Meet Zahra. She went no contact with her whole family years ago.

When she did, this is what she had to deal with:

1. People constantly telling her to get over it.

This came from friends, colleagues, boyfriends, everybody. And it’s immensely damaging.

It’s like asking the victim to go back to their abuser, just because the abuser is labeled mom or dad.

You wouldn’t ask a battered woman to go back to her abusive husband, would you? Well, the truth is you probably wouldn’t do it now. Because now we know better. But years ago, society would constantly encourage battered wives to go back to their cruel husbands.

‘He is the father of your children and he is a good provider.’

‘You can’t take the kids away from their dad.’

‘He’s going to change, you’ll see, hang in there, it’s not that bad.’

‘He’s a good man, maybe he just had a bad day.’

But he didn’t have a bad day. And he’s not a good man. He’s an abuser who is going to have plenty of bad days and she’s going to have plenty of black eyes.

That’s why everyone experiencing abuse, whether emotional or physical, needs to distance themselves from their abusers, no matter what we call them. Even when the abusers are mom and dad.

More and more people are starting to figure that out. And more and more people are leaving their families of origin.

With the rise in understanding psychology, opening up about mental health, and having a compassionate approach towards victims of abuse, more and more people are beginning to understand that what happened to them as children is not normal, that not every parent is like that, and they have been scarred for life.

So they cut ties.

Unfortunately, there is still massive pushback against it, especially from people who had the privilege of living in loving supportive families.

The ones who didn’t have to hear every day how their every action is flawed, are also the ones who demand that the victims of the toxic family go back to that toxicity, ‘because it’s family’.

No, Karen! Your family is family. Their family is a living hell.

But it’s not just them.

When Zahra initially went no contact she had a close friend who also had a toxic family. She was the first one she chose to confide in when she took the leap.

She didn’t expect the friend to say:

‘OMG, no! No! This is absolutely unacceptable. I know they hurt you, I know they’re toxic and I understand what you’re going through because you know my family is the same, but you can never ever leave them! No! It will hurt them and you immensely! You know my father even told me that my mother died because I didn’t give them grandchildren and I still didn’t leave! You can’t leave either!’

Umm, excuse me? So you know what I’m going through but advise that I keep taking the abuse? Just because you’re too weak and codependent to leave, I should stick around too? Sad…

The friend was right about one thing though.

2. It hurts both sides immensely.

It actually hurts a lot more to leave a toxic family than it would to leave a real family.

A loving family might even encourage you to leave if you’re no longer comfortable in their presence. They want you to be happy even if that happiness is far away from them. They give you wings to fly.

You see, that’s how love works. Love wants you to be happy even when it doesn’t benefit from your happiness.

But toxic families know nothing about it.

The adult child who is trying to break apart grew up in a toxic environment that broke his wings. He is a wounded bird who has no idea how to fly.

The toxic family system is all it knows and the ties are so strong that they’re almost indestructible.

You’d think that breaking from toxicity is like a breath of fresh air, but when you’re used to breathing in toxic gas daily, your lungs have adapted to it.

It’s like withdrawing from a drug.

I remembered when I quit smoking. It’s obviously something good for the body. But the lungs are used to the toxic chemicals in the smoke and living without them is very painful.

For the first 6 months since I quit, every morning, my body struggled to breathe in real air instead of the usual breakfast cigarette. At night, I would break into cold sweats that woke me up and made me cough until I threw up. And several times a day, every day, at any time, I would cough my lungs out. Day after day after day.

It was a brutal process.

Breaking apart from toxic families is even worse.

Because of one constant component that doesn’t let you breathe and makes you cough, cry and scream till you puke: guilt.

The more toxic the family, the more enmeshed they are. They can’t exist without you and you aren’t allowed to exist without them.

And the guilt of leaving them, especially when you know they’re suffering immensely, is unbearable.

You feel like their killer.

If you check the forums of parents abandoned by their children, you’ll see that their pain is immense. And it’s exactly the same for the child that left.

Many go back. Because sometimes toxicity is easier on the body and soul than guilt. But they both kill you.

3. It’s the only thing you can do to keep alive.

Imagine drinking poison every day. And being expected to smile and ask for seconds. That’s what Zahra had to go through with her family.

They were picking on her every move. Even her laughter was judged. Apparently it was too loud. Her teeth were uneven. The way she talked to people was too open. She’s done nothing with her life. Etcetera.

Initially, she decided to minimize contact. Only talk to them once a week and maybe go visit for Christmas and Easter.

But even that was became too much for her. She dreaded every interaction. Just seeing her mother’s name on the phone made her stomach turn. Her body cringed when her dad was physically close to her.

Her body was rejecting them by any means it could.

Eventually, she was diagnosed with lupus. And auto-immune conditions never come alone. As years went on, the diseases kept pilling on, and her health kept decreasing.

And as with any disease that’s aggravated by stress (and most of them are), her symptoms got worse when she had to deal with the main stressor in her life: her family.

She eventually figured it out: you can only drink poison and stay healthy for so long. How about if she stopped drinking the poison altogether?

And she did. She chose the last resort. Something that no one should ever have to do. But still some people, usually completely misunderstood and blamed by everybody else, have no choice but to do.

Otherwise, they’re going to die.

Conclusion:

The decision to completely break ties to the family comes after years of heartache. Decades of trying to make it work and failing miserably.

Usually, it fails because there’s just one side doing the work. The other side is ok with the toxicity because they’re the ones spewing it out.

Sometimes it fails because it reached the point of no return. And sometimes because not all things are meant to be fixed. Sometimes it just is what it is.

People who have done it say it’s the hardest thing they ever had to do. But it was their only option to stay sane. The last resort that would keep them alive.

They do it because the choice is actually between life and death. And they choose life.

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