by Jamye Waxman
Certain cultures (like Hispanic and Asian cultures) place family in the category of “be all, end all.” Life without family is unfathomable and unquestionably not okay. This makes it even more difficult to imagine a split with someone in that core unit.
A familial break up can be devastating, heartbreaking, terrifying, and isolating. Ending a relationship with a family member can make you feel like Dorothy after the tornado, uncertain of how to find your way back home.
When you decide to cut ties with a person in your family, it can make you question your entire history. If you’re breaking up with someone who helped you navigate life before you understood how to do things for yourself, you may feel like you’re doing something wrong by not finding a way to make it right.
On the flip side, breaking a bad relationship pattern with a family member can be a relief. Finally some huge weight is being lifted off your shoulders. You no longer have to feel like you are sinking to the bottom of the ocean with no way up. You can breathe again. This can feel liberating, empowering, and scary.
Some family members never get with the program. It’s worse when the people we feel are doing us wrong are our primary caregivers. If we are luckier, they are distant relatives whose lot in our lives isn’t going to impact much more than a family reunion. This luck of the draw (meaning the family you were raised in) can result in emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive relatives as well as unaccepting family members who will go so far as to push God’s will on their gay, lesbian, queer, trans, or questioning children, cousins, or siblings.
Familial relationships end for all sorts of reasons, including miscommunication, the desire for independence, divorce, the creation of new families, and enmeshment.
If we get into a difficult family situation, we can try to find a way to work within it or find some other group we can call family. And sometimes, in building our own safe familial unit, we have to dump some of the heavy load. Although we can’t choose our blood family, we eventually get to choose if, and how, we want to deal with them.
The Intricacies of Familial Splits
Today, we live in a world of full of connections. We not only stay connected in person via air, train, car, and bus travel, but our families can also be a part of our lives through social media, video chat, text, and phone.
WHAT DOES FAMILY MEAN TO YOU?
“The ones you go to the mat for. The ones you pick up their call whatever else is going on. The ones you bail out without complaint, or call AAA and use up your tow allowance for. They are the ones you escort home from danger, hold hands with in the hospital, return their emails, buy gifts for without a seasonal motive, update in your contact list, and don’t lose touch with. The position is somewhat hereditary, but can be earned.”
“Family is a unit of people that are genuinely there for one another.”
“My related family has taught me that ‘family’ is love without condition or judgment. No matter how many crazy or dumb things I have done they’ve always been there and made me feel loved and supported. I hope to always do that for my husband, daughter, and family of friends and students.”
“Not always blood . . . family are the people who cry for/with you, celebrate with you, understand you, and love you despite your neuroses. The ones who are still standing after any storm has passed.”
“Those I love most; all of them friends. There is no one in my dwindling blood family I would want to know if I didn’t have to.”
In my opinion, connection is something we have too much of, which makes it harder to completely disconnect when things aren’t going well. If we shut off our phones, log off of our profile pages, and stop checking emails, our closest friends and immediate family will usually notice and check in to make sure that we are all right. And when it feels like the only way to escape our family is to be chosen as part of Mars One, the idea of disconnection from a family member can seem impossible. But just because you were born into a family doesn’t mean you’re stuck with them for life. Sure, you can’t remove them from your family history, but you can alter the present story.
This familial shift can be a tricky thing to navigate. Especially because we’re told families, and definitely parental figures, do the annoying things they do because they love us and not because they want to hurt us. So what we may see as something done to hurt our sense of self, they may see as something said or done to protect us. For example, telling us that they don’t like our boyfriend or girlfriend may be their way of saying, “We think you can do better because you are better.” However, we may hear, “Once again, you screwed up a big, important choice in your life.”
We don’t always see things clearly, definitely not during our teenage years when we often see their actions as cruel and unusual. While they may not see themselves as intentionally malicious, we don’t care what they think. But, if we can stop the negative thoughts, with time and communication, we can figure out our family member’s intention. And once we are clearer, we will have a better grasp on what we actually need to do to make the relationship work, or not work, any longer.
Even bad relationships work on some level; if they didn’t, we wouldn’t be so invested in feeling bad about them. They work on feeding our insecurities, or perhaps our deeply held beliefs around how we think other people see us. They work to keep us down, because sometimes it’s easier to be kept down instead of being held up to our own higher standards. If we rely on what others think of us, we don’t necessarily have to expect too much of ourselves. It’s not a great frame of mind to be in, but sometimes it feels safer to go with what you know than what you might learn about yourself if you jump out of that comfort zone.
Real-Life Break Ups
“My mom left my dad when I was a baby, so I didn’t actually know my father. And it was really my grandmother who raised me. She walked me down the aisle for my wedding and passed away two weeks later.
I cut off my mom after my grandmother died. The last time I saw and talked to her was at my grandmother’s memorial service. Our relationship started getting strained when I was around twelve or thirteen, and quite frankly it went downhill from there, getting worse as I got older. My mom began telling bigger and bigger lies to get what she wanted, and what I finally realized is that she’s very narcissistic. She tries to break up the relationships of people she wants attention from. When I became a teenager and started hanging out more with my friends than my family, that’s when all hell broke loose for me. I moved out when I was seventeen to get away from it, and a few weeks later my mom was diagnosed as bipolar, but she only took meds for two weeks before she went back to her same, crazy self. My mom is not good at taking care of her health in general.
It wasn’t until I was twenty-one and watched my mom pick a fight with my aunt that I realized it was intentional. That was a turning point for me. I realized that all of these crazy stories that my mom was coming up with, these were intentional ways for her to destroy my grandmother’s relationships with the rest of her family, so that my mom would look good in her eyes. It was hard to see my mom actively trying to destroy a relationship between my grandmother and her other child. My mom did a lot of damage between her siblings and her mom.
Once I realized I was over what she was doing, I pretty much stopped acknowledging her presence unless I had to. As cold as that sounds, I would mentally cut her out of the picture as much as possible. It was pretty simple, and ending the relationship was just a formality after my grandma died. I didn’t need to say anything. I don’t even really remember much about the details about that last trip. I don’t remember saying anything specific, I just remember my husband and me leaving. And that was it. It had already ended so long ago in my brain, so my grandmother’s memorial wasn’t my ending point, is was just the official ‘I don’t have to have you in my life anymore.’
What I learned is that no matter what the relationship is, you should always have enough respect for yourself to make sure that you’re treated with respect.” —Rachel
Enmeshment Is a Family Problem
This general feeling of letting others tell us how to feel is often a result of the problem of enmeshment. Family therapist Salvador Minuchin first expressed the concept of enmeshment. Enmeshment is when people are so extremely tight knit they inadvertently, or advertently, punish levels of autonomy in the system. Enmeshment involves consciously or subconsciously being told how to feel, think, and act.1 Enmeshment may mean you’re not allowed to talk with anyone outside the family about family problems. It can also be seen, for example, when you want to do something like dye your hair purple, but your parents swear they will act as if you’re invisible if you do it. Maybe you’re forty-six and living on your own, but you still do whatever your parents say. Or you’re thirty-three and married and always check in with your family to make sure you have their permission, and blessing, to make any big choices in your life.
Enmeshment happens at any age, whether or not we are conscious of it. It can happen whether we still live at home or if our parents live on the other side of the country. And generally by the time you even realize you’re enmeshed, it’s hard to untangle. But it’s not impossible. Even the knottiest of situations can be undone with a lot of patience and small steps of progress.
Enmeshment is usually best resolved with the help of a family therapist. This outside source can show the family where the boundaries are blurred and where the relationship is unnaturally tight. Even if you go to therapy to talk about other problems, if enmeshment is a family problem, a trained therapist will see it.
If therapy isn’t an option, you’ll likely have to go full steam ahead with a break up, which will be hard to do in an enmeshed family. But it may be the only option for resetting the pattern.
However you get unstuck, doing so will show you that you have the freedom to make your own choices in life.
Breaking Up with Primary Attachments
A primary attachment is the person, or people, to whom we first attached as babies. Not only are they bestowed with the all-important task of making sure you stayed alive in infancy, they are also usually the people that were in our lives on a daily basis. This primary attachment figure could be a mom or dad, grandparent, sibling, foster parent, neighbor, or any other caretaker.
For most of us in egalitarian homes, we do all right with these primary attachments. In fact, the majority of “emerging adults” (defined as adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine) have a positive relationship with their parents as they mature.2 “We’ve done a really good job of helping children feel cared about and understood. When that works, it works really, really, well in that many people who are raising adult children believe that they have a closer relationship with their adult children than their parents did with them at a similar age,” explains Dr. Joshua Coleman, author of the book When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along.3
But, Dr. Coleman warns, the relationship can also backfire. “There’s nothing that keeps adult children close to their parents at this time, beyond whether that adult child wants to be close to his or her parents. We have raised expectations about what parents should provide, but that’s also a much bigger bat for a parent to be hit with later in life. In the same way that we’ve educated parents about child development, we’re educating children about it as well. This may cause some children to be angry at their parents later in life that they didn’t do more.”
It wasn’t until I became a mother that I really understood the sheer impossibility of being a perfect parent and I could finally grasp how easy it is to fuck parenthood up. I can see where my parents did really well and where I wish they had done things a little differently. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see how hard they tried. It’s hard to be a parent, especially when most of us don’t audition for the part and one day we just “win” the role. Even with a lot of practice, it’s impossible to be perfect.
A parent being imperfect, or even strict, isn’t cause for a break up. Some things that do lead to primary attachment break ups include toxicity, repetitive familial patterns, when parents go off to start second or third families, and the influence of our own spouses and partners on our relationship with parental figures.
Toxicity usually involves an abusive parent, whether it be verbal, physical, or sexual abuse; a primary attachment who exhibits dangerous behavior, including addictions to alcohol, drugs, gambling, bringing random strangers home for sex, or other unacceptable acts; or a parental figure who is extremely narcissistic, controlling, or impossibly difficult to deal with. When you feel like your life is in danger or out of control because of your primary caretaker, you need to find a way to remove yourself from the situation as soon as possible for your own self-preservation.
Before you declare a relationship toxic, you need to make sure it actually is (see Chapter Three for what makes a relationship toxic). “There are genuinely toxic relationships, and there are relationships that aren’t comfortable because they can be filled with conflict, even in healthy homes. On the other hand, the more difficult or troubled your parent is, the more uncomfortable it’s going to be,” explains Dr. Coleman.
When our parents move on to make a new life, it’s hard not to feel like they’re throwing out the old one too. A new family can make us feel invisible, or like a stranger with our own parental figures. In order to not feel left out, parents, stepparents, and children have to work hard to keep the family together.
Shona Vann, a journalist who also goes by the name Shona Sibary, explained her own split from her parents in the Daily Mail in 2011. After her father moved to Fiji to be with his new wife and stepchild, her mother left England for Canada with her third husband. “In cases like mine, it often takes years of heartbreak and a growing sense of isolation before finally [realizing] that the mother and father you once thought you knew no longer exist.”4
If the constant reminder that a parent has moved on is too much to handle, or if you feel left behind by the new relationship, you may choose to break up with that primary attachment.
Sometimes you get your own new family and decide it’s out with the old. If a primary attachment is too critical of your partner or spouse, that could isolate you from them, especially if you feel the need to protect your spouse. Or if your partner doesn’t like your parent, that’s an awkward situation that can potentially explode into having to choose between them.
Even if you’re ready to end the relationship, your primary attachments may try hard to salvage the situation. Parents, more often than children, will take the high road when it comes to trying to keep a relationship together. When they don’t, the relationship will ultimately fail. However, it’s important to give your primary attachment a chance to hear what you have to say and hold on for as long as you’re willing to try.
From your parent’s perspective, this unconditional love may be all they have going for them in the relationship, and it may be enough to help them consider changing. While I understood the concept of unconditional love in general, I didn’t grasp the concept that parents give and children receive unconditional love until the birth of my daughter. And while I may do things down the road to screw up our relationship, I will always love her with all of my heart. This is a feeling I couldn’t explain as a daughter but now have no problem understanding as a parent.
Real-Life Break Ups
“My father left when I was a baby. My mother couldn’t break up with her turbulent past, so instead the wrath of her storm rolled over me in the form of awful physical and mental abuse. A veritable Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde transformed day into night as she sank into yet another session of drinking that would continue until she eventually passed out. Her unconscious monstrous form would soften as the morning came, and an apparent complete loss of memory of the terrible things she had done to me the previous night had faded from her mind.
My earliest memories were conflicted between a loving mother, and an alcoholic demented demon that Satan took professional notes
from.
For all the terrible things my mother did to me and to others, none of it was done when she was sober. So I loved my Mrs. Jekyll and her cooking, our trips exploring the world, and fishing off piers on little more than a shoestring. When she drank she would say that one day I would walk out on her and leave her alone in the world to die. I told her I would always stand by her, and never desert her; that I was a good son. And I believed it with all my heart.
In my later teen years I did move out to put myself through school and to work, but I made sure I was close enough to go over every weekend and help her with cleaning and gardening, and to keep her company. It was a warm Saturday afternoon when I had finished raking her leaves and had come in to get a glass of water. I saw her face and the unmistakable Jekyll looking back at me. The venom flew, but this time I ducked. I had had enough. I yelled at her, “Make a choice, me or the bottle.” She looked at me with hate and told me that I didn’t get to tell her what to do. I told her that if I walked out that door I would never see or speak to her again. She spat out that I was just a coward, so I did it, I walked out that door with hot tears stinging my face, and I didn’t even look back.
In those brief minutes of our last face-to-face I had made a final choice that this relationship was at an end, and that I deserved better. I was not responsible for her miserable mistakes. I was not all the terrible things she told me I was. And as she had reminded me over and over through my childhood that she had sacrificed her life to bring me into the world and raise me, it did at that moment occur to me that she had it wrong. When you choose to bring a child into the world then you should be prepared to do everything in your power to give that child the best possible life you can.
