How to Break Bad Family Luck

Just do the opposite of what my parents did

In Melbourne there lies a woman; dead at 76,

although she is still alive.

She survived 23 years of abuse in an arranged marriage until she finally left. But even so, she had checked out of life long before that.

That woman is my mother.

Never too far from a couch with her prayer book in hand, she is often heard saying that we don’t create our luck; luck is something we are born with.

“Successful people have something called family luck, and if God wanted us to have it, we would have it too,” she says repeatedly.

Not wanting to turn out like her, I constantly contradicted her. I tried to create my luck with Shopify stores, blogs, and YouTube channels but failed because I had no guide.

I often left the country searching for a normal family but always returned empty-handed.

I read books like David Goggins’s Can’t Hurt Me and Katriona O’Sullivan’s Poor with an urgency to find answers from others who were brought up in hell. But all I kept thinking while reading those books was geez, they had it easy.

Every person I’ve observed who is successful has become successful because of their family. They have all had at least one loving and guiding parent, inherited work ethic, and had a safe space provided for them to be able to study.

People like O’Sullivan and Goggins who didn’t have that family model had an outside role model from an extended family member or someone they could call family.

So my mother was right.

Whenever someone says we create our luck, it is simply not true. Luck is generational and inherited.

But does that mean I might as well give up now and sit on a couch for the rest of my life, too?

This is my advice on how to break bad family luck.

And if you don’t believe in luck, my advice will work for you too.

All You Need Is Love

There is always a lesson in the shit that happens in life; you have to find it.

My parent’s migrant story is not one of success. Their arranged marriage was not based on love; they hated each other. I never once saw them sleep in the same bed or kiss or be affectionate.

Everyone ate whenever they wanted in different rooms, never at the table, and never together.

If you fall out of the sky like I had, sent to observe neighbors or TV families like Full House to learn to behave, it’s hard to know what to do when you land.

I loved going to my friend’s house next door and eating dinner at her place. They didn’t have much, but even the sausages and cabbage were delicious because it felt like a home.

When I saw my friend’s parents kiss each other, I thought it was weird because that only happened in the movies.

Lesson: Where there is love, you can achieve anything. I don’t mean only couples love but circles, peers, groups, and within. If you don’t have love, you have already failed. Quit while you can still find love elsewhere.

This lesson seems obvious to me now, but I had some horrible relationships. I would never break up with abusive boyfriends even if I knew they were rotten. I never thought I deserved better and always pushed away good people. Thanks to my abusive father, I hated myself and thought I was the worst of the worst, and that was all I deserved.

Now, I know that if I cannot find anyone to love me, then cliche as it is, I need to be the one to love and take care of me. I have no choice.

Nobody can take care of and love you more than yourself. You have the power because you know exactly what you need.

Don’t Say It Whatever You Do

It doesn’t matter if you think it, don’t say it, especially in front of kids. My mother instilled in us, from a young age, the mentality of giving up.

She believes to this day that not only did God give us the life that he did, but he also didn’t want us to try.

My father also used to say that we were all good for nothing and useless, and whenever something went wrong, he would yell in Greek that we were all cursed and that nothing good would ever come to us.

They both accepted they were born without family luck rather than making an effort to find it. They ended up in Australia alone, leaving their families behind in Cyprus, and after they separated, neither of them married again.

Without a role model, I had my work cut out for me. So, I just did the opposite of what they did.

Lesson: The most powerful thing you can do to break or contradict bad luck or negative thoughts is to shut up; even if you believe it, never say it. Then, it will never come true.

Whether you believe in God, in the Secret and its power of manifestation, or whether you believe in bad luck or not, there is much power and destruction in our words.

I always remember the movie Beetlejuice; if you say his name three times, he comes to life.

Saying all the stuff my parents said out loud was as bad as putting a curse on my sister and me.

It has taken me a long time to shut up and not speak negatively aloud because it is like any other addiction that needs to be broken, but now I have finally learned to zip it.

I don’t talk about my sad family history to everyone with an ear because, first of all, not everyone is equipped to hear wrong, and secondly, I was reinforcing the past, the feelings of being unloved and victimhood. That’s no longer me.

Maybe we were born with rotten family luck, but

Just like rules, bad luck was made to be broken.

Help Others Rather Than Blame

My father used to blame others, such as his parents, for his so-called bad luck, not ever crossing his mind. It could have been because he beat the shit out of three women. My mother came from a poor family in a village in Cyprus, and nobody wanted to marry a poor person, so she blamed her beginnings.

I understand blame because my parents set me up for life believing that good only happens to others, and of course, I blame them to an extent for the outcoming of my life. My father is not even an example for this part of the article because love never lived in him, but even if my mother loved her parents, she still indirectly blamed them for her poverty. When she was not blaming them, then she was blaming God.

I know that she doesn’t mean to, but that is her way of justifying her poverty and her outcomings. I am a religious person, too. God has given me the strength to keep going through the years of my breakdowns on the couch, and I am pretty sure he would want us to fight until death.

Fighting for something better than what we have is a way of showing appreciation for not only the bodies God gave us but also our free will. And even if you are not religious, there is a takeaway there.

Lesson: Once we start helping others with our trauma rather than blaming others, we will notice that the blame begins to fade.

I started writing about my experiences online so I could help people, not thinking that it would make me feel good, but it did. I made my first few dollars online. I succeeded at something because I started reaching out to people and strangers and leaving comments for them. It didn’t matter if they replied because I found my luck, well, some of it.

Trauma exists so we can become shields for others; shields that are heavy-duty, not heavy with duty.

Always Ask For Help

That was something my mother never did, and neither did my father. My mother probably because she never felt she was worthy, and my father, well, he was a narcissist.

I never asked for help either, I always battled life alone and I didn’t succeed online before because I had nobody to help me. Now I deliberately put myself in situations where I need to ask for help.

I ask anybody for help and even if they don’t reply, I know I have done a good deed for myself because, unlike my father, I have lowered my ego, not myself.

Lesson: Asking for help increases your luck because you humble yourself and remove ego and arrogance. Once we do this, good things will happen. We don’t know everything and we were not meant to survive alone. Even a lone wolf eventually goes back to his pack.

If you do not ask for help, life will be very hard and lonely.

As an abuse victim, I ran on survival mode my whole life. I never stopped to ask for help, and that meant I never stopped to enjoy anything. Just like the lone wolf, it was hard to notice the good things because I was always looking for dangers.

Survival was not our choice but we are the chosen ones.

We have the power to help and be helped.

And know…

There is nothing wrong with being alone for a while if you are being productive about it. A lone wolf elects to be alone for the purpose of finding a mate and a place to have a family.

Bad luck and loneliness are not destiny, they are temporary.