On Interpersonal Badness
I’ve been doing a bad job blogging. It’s summer! My concentration has built a nest outside my window. Also, I am terrified of looking at my email right now. It’s reached that point of saturation where I am paralyzed by fear and wonder. Sorry – just need an email break, it seems.
It was my birthday recently. In the morning, I took a walk around a lake. It was meant to be a jog, but halfway through I was like fuck it, happy birthday, Harriet’s knees. So it became a rather pleasant walk instead. During the walk, I thought about how I’ve been dissatisfied with my writing. Not the quality, but the lack of sitting down and doing it. I looked back on what writing has meant to me over the years. I’ve loved it, it’s a talent and a joy, but it’s also been a coping mechanism, something to lose myself in when I can’t deal head-on. These last few years have been very focused on learning new ways to cope, so maybe it’s no surprise that writing took a back seat. Maybe I needed all my energy focused on moving forward instead of inward. And maybe now that things are better, I can go back to writing without the fervent desperation that IT WILL SAVE MY LIFE. Maybe I can tolerate discipline in a way that seemed too constraining before, when I really needed my arms and legs free.
So I’ve been trying to sit down and write a little bit each night, in absurdly expensive notebooks with absurdly expensive pens. I’ve been letting that take precedence over blogging, because it’s been a long time since I’ve done writing that had no hope or dream of readers, that wasn’t going to become public moments after I’d finished it.
As a result, I haven’t been thinking about blogging much. I’ll get back into it again, I figure, but it’s a little cool on me right now. Also, most of the blog topics that pop up have to do with my work, and I’m still figuring out how or if I want to keep writing about that. It’s a pretty big risk, and I don’t know if it’s one I should be gambling with in the current economy.
ANYWAY. NOW I HAVE AN ACTUAL POST FOR YOU. A few ideas that have been rolling around.
You Are Worthless, Let’s Be Friends
A friend of mine is going through a thing right now. He’s got a friendship that’s on the rocks. It’s been a long-standing, very good friendship in the past, which is the only reason it’s currently on the rocks instead of severed and done with. But the shit that put it on the rocks is obscene and squicky, and continues at a wild pace, so there’s no hope at the moment of talking it out or finding a solution. The water is just too creepy to even begin wading into.
The other friend, squicky friend, is being less than diplomatic. Zie extended an olive branch, but that olive branch was dipped in radscorpions. You know this interaction. “You are worthless, let’s be friends.” It’s when somebody ostensibly reaches out, tries to connect, makes an effort, forgives and forgets, apologizes, etc., but within that attempt at reconciliation they belittle, mock, and insult you tirelessly. If you get duped the way they hope you do, best-case scenario, then you are appalled at your horribleness and in awe of their ability to forgive such a one as you. Or, second-best case scenario, you take the bait and start insulting back. They clutch their pearls IN FURY, claim you have just proved everything they said about you, and can now tell everybody that your friendship ended because YOU are such a mouthy asshole. Worst-case scenario, you don’t get duped, and wonder why the fuck this person wants to be friends with you anyway, since apparently you are cold and unfeeling and have never exhibited a shred of decency in your life. If you’re so worthless and hurtful as a friend, why do they want to hang with you?
This is what my friend got from his squicky pal. It was a whole boatload of reasons why my friend is an awful, awful person who doesn’t truly understand friendship or family or love or loyalty. BUT IF YOU WANT TO CALL ME SOMETIME, MAN, I think I could overlook all that. I’m pretty messianic that way.
Luckily, my friend is not a dupe, though it’s hard to skip the bait on this one. While talking, he pointed out to me that he obviously has all the power here. This squicker wants to be his friend, but hasn’t got anything to bring to the table. Because zie hasn’t got anything worthwhile to offer up as a friend, zie is barraging him with attacks in the hopes that he will crumble and get vulnerable and confused. If my friend was such a bad friend as zie makes him out to be, zie wouldn’t want to be friends. And if my friend is not such a bad friend, then zie wants him back in hir life and has admitted that zie has no way to reciprocate, nothing of worth to give back. Hir offer is on the table, and it’s all gross and mean. I mean, put a fucking bow on it, yeah?
This was a pretty familiar dynamic in my marriage. Flint once regaled me with how I hadn’t tried hard enough to save us, hadn’t done my fair share, wasn’t willing to open up. He said, “I think the only thing you’re good at is working really hard.” I was pretty messed up and believed a lot of things he told me, but I just could not wrap my head around that one. He had meant to insult me, hurt me with that, but for fucking real? He took a compliment, said it in a nasty voice, and expected me to suddenly discover that working really hard was bad, and I was bad for doing it.
As I started the process of leaving him, the paradox of an abusive relationship became more obvious as he escalated his attacks. I was worthless. I never tried. I couldn’t love. I wasn’t sexy. I didn’t understand him. I was stupid. I was unable to understand how relationships worked. I was selfish. I was a nag. I was… hey, where are you going? Don’t leave me! I love you! Come back! I need you! It should have been obvious to me what was going on, because why would he want me so much and pursue me so diligently if I was such a worthless fuck-up? Instead, I believed that I was everything he told me I was, and I would only be worse if I left him. I would be those things AND alone. And maybe I could find some redemption by swallowing everything and saving this person who needed me so, who apparently couldn’t live without me. Maybe if I made him good, I would be kind of good, too, by association. Witness the dupe.
If somebody is investing time, resources, and energy into convincing you of your own worthlessness, that same somebody has revealed to you that they have a lot to lose if you don’t believe them. They’re protecting their own loss of power. Which means they perceive you as somebody who can take that power away. If somebody is putting in the work to knock you down, it’s because they’ve got something to fear about you if you’re standing up.
“Fear” and “power” are big words that make it sound like there’s going to be a Rocky battle. But it’s not like that, usually. The thing you could take away from another person if you live with worth and happiness could be something you have no interest in, something that’s entirely in their own minds. My friend and the squicker, for example. If my friend is a good and decent person and doesn’t want to talk to the squicker, then it stands to reason that there’s something unpleasant about hir. If my friend is a BAD AND HORRIBLE person, then the squicker is just fine, and needs invest no time or energy in self-reflection and terrifying realizations of existentialist nightmares. If my friend refuses to take the bait, it’s harder to credibly paint him as bad and horrible, and the squicker will have to come to closure and resolution on their own. Losing a self-image as the rational, righteous party when your life is spinning into squickiness is a pretty bad blow; losing a friend when you need one the most – when the squicky is tearing at you – is also pretty bad. By refusing to believe in his worthlessness, my friend has taken a lot away from the squicker. Nothing he necessarily wants, but he didn’t want the shit to get squicky in the first place. The squicky isn’t his bag, and that’s exactly why he’s refusing to hold it.
I’ve been trying to remember this in tiny bad interactions, with rude service staff or customers, or even trolls. There is something about my refusal to feel bad and back away that is frightening. Not to everybody – there’s a whole world that could care less – but the people who make an investment in silencing me have done so because they have made a cost-benefit analysis. Whatever it takes out of them to silence me is going to be less than what I will take from them if I don’t shut up.
A Field Guide to Being Heartless
One of the reasons my bear and I clicked when we first met was due to our family history. I have cut off wide, wide swaths of my family, with no desire to ever speak to them again. The door isn’t locked shut, but it does need some magic words to ever open again, words like “I am sorry for what I did, which I can describe specifically, and I will attempt to make it up to you, using methods I will also describe specifically.” I don’t truck with unspecific, generalized apologies that admit to nothing, and vague reparations that are fundamentally meaningless, since how can you repair something you don’t even admit happened? So, the details is what I would need to let my family back in my life, and it’s not something I ever expect from them. I’m okay with that.
My bear has also cut off members of his family. He’s also open to the idea of reconciliation, with similar expectations of what that means, and similar expectations of that shit never happening in this lifetime.
I know the cold cut-off isn’t for everybody. I admit I don’t fully understand why, but I suspect that if I did understand why, I wouldn’t have been able to cut my family off. My family didn’t provide me with anything worth staying for, and even during the best of times, I wasn’t loved or unabused. So there has never been anything for me to miss, or anything to go back for. If there had been, I’d probably get why cut-offs are so hard, because I wouldn’t have been able to muster one.
There have been plenty of times in life when I wish somebody had given me some real details about what an experience is like. Rape, especially. I didn’t realize just how fucked-up and shitty the day-to-day dealing with friends and triggers was going to be. I knew things would be tough and there’d be PTSD and maybe strangers would ask me ignorant questions, but not my REAL friends, and it won’t be THAT tough, and I can get through PTSD, and rape jokes, do I have to stop laughing at those now? So, in the spirit of that, I want to give people some tips on what the cold cut-off is like.
First, you gotta stay cold. The whining will go on FOREVER. They will call you directly. They will email you. They will put EMERGENCY in the email subject, and you will find the EMERGENCY is Why Are You Doing This To Me, You Selfish Brat. They will leave messages. They will call you at work, because they are just so worried, are you okay? If you respond to any of this, even just to say “I AM NOT TALKING TO YOU,” all you have done is show them exactly how often and in what ways they have to harass you until you respond.
After the harassment, there will be niceness. Honeymoon. You will get gifts. Concern troll gifts. My dad, he wanted to buy me a coat. It’s so cold out there, I don’t know if you know that. I am worried about your health YOU STUPID BITCH here I don’t want you to get sick now I AM GOING TO PUT YOU IN A MENTAL WARD. These will be patronizing gifts meant to guilt you about how much they love you and how you are unable to care for yourself properly. Also, there will be checks. With the checks will be little check-ins. Did you cash the check yet? I see you didn’t cash the check yet. Did you get it? Could you just tell me if you got it? I know you don’t want to talk right now and that’s fine, you need space, but just let me know if you got the check? Or when you’re going to cash it? That’s all. Can you not even do that? Really? Are you that immature? Do you need help getting to the bank? Because I can drive you. It’s just a check, for chrissakes, you can’t even take free money?
After that phase passes, there will be a period of radio silence. It’s not over. It’s just a break. When it revs up again, it’ll be through third parties. My coworker saw you at the cafe. I hope you’re not drinking too much coffee. Here, your mother asked me to give you this trinket from your childhood. She seems really upset. I don’t know what happened between you, but I think she’s been through enough, don’t you?
If you can chop your way through that, there will be mostly silence. Except on birthdays, or Christmas. Then there will be passive-aggressive cards and gifts and FUCKING CHECKS.
Let’s shoot forward a few years. Let’s assume the cut-off has worked and they’ve stopped trying to drag you back. Here’s some shit you’ll have to put up with:
You Should Really Forgive and Forget
Strangers, friends, acquaintances, anybody who hears that you have an estranged family member will tell you to forgive and forget. They will tell you that family is wonderful and really more meaningful than whatever you’re going through. Also, bonus round, but WHEN YOU GET OLDER YOU’LL UNDERSTAND, double bonus round, BUT BY THEN THEY’LL BE DEAD AND YOU’LL REGRET IT. After dealing with this shit for years, I’ve found it’s best, for me, to not respond. Maybe give them an mmm, oh, that’s interesting, but it’s not worth it to explain my circumstances or refute their assumption of my personal feelings. If they cared about my circumstances, or my personal feelings, they would have asked.
What people are telling you when they have this round-up toy spiel is what they are capable of. They are not capable of cutting off their family. They are not capable of imagining a life without forgiveness. They are not capable, perhaps, of imagining your life. They are not capable of separating the word “family” from “blood relations.” They are not capable of conceiving of happiness without traditions. These are not bad things. It’s just them, the way they prefer to live. You live differently. The only thing is, you probably don’t go around accosting strangers and advising them to cut off their family, and if they don’t, they’ll grow old and regret all their years wasted placating and living in fear. So, stay that way. Don’t be that asshole. Just understand that other people don’t have the strength to live as you do, and you do not have the strength to live as they do, and that is all okay, as long as they shut up sometime goddamn soon.
You Are Capable of Leaving Me and I Am Terrified
You will get this from partners and from friends. They know you are capable of cutting off people you love very much, people you are supposed to be with forever. There is a line and it can be crossed, and after that, you are gone from their lives forever. They never seem to hear the, “You could always make amends,” part. Just the, “I am not speaking to you anymore,” part. Some people can’t handle that. A surprising amount of people can’t handle that. They can’t handle the fact that if they were to call you on your birthday you would not be pleasantly surprised and decide that it was really all so long ago anyway. They can’t handle the fact that if they blew into town you wouldn’t have an obligatory cup of coffee, or if they got married you wouldn’t call just to say congratulations. They can’t handle the fact that you wouldn’t friend them on Facebook, or ask other friends how they’re doing.
They can’t stand the fact that you could erase them and still manage to exist in the world, without them.
A friend of mine from college had cut off her family, too. She told me about an argument she had with an insecure, needy, hurtful boyfriend. He was pretty much entirely in the wrong, and when he had run out of arguments, he lashed out using her family. “I guess I just get scared,” he wheedled, “Because you cut off your family, I feel like you could cut me off, too.” She didn’t miss a beat. “Yeah,” she said. “I could. If that bothers you, we shouldn’t be dating.” She and I laughed about it later. As if it was supposed to hurt us, the idea that we could protect ourselves, that we could cut out the riffraff. I mean, she had cut off her ENTIRE family — a boyfriend was supposed to get her shaking now? Get a better ultimatum, man.
Flint tried to use this, too. So did an ex-girlfriend. During fights, they’d spit out something about how I can’t deal with family since I don’t have one. The truth was, I couldn’t deal with abuse if I wasn’t having it. If family meant what they were doing to me right then, then yes, I could not understand, would not understand, and would not participate. And that was fucking unacceptable to somebody who needed me to collude in their madness. They knew that if I made the choice to cut them off, it would be complete. We wouldn’t fight. They wouldn’t have any access to my feelings, my thoughts, my experiences, anything they could use to hurt me or know me.
When people say these things, try to cut me down for exercising my ability to define my boundaries, they are letting me know that they want to reserve the right to hurt me in specific ways. They are letting me know that if I stopped being a part of their life, they would lash out and refuse to let me go. They are telling me they expect this of me, they need this in place if they are to continue being my friend. They need to know that I will let them hurt me as a price for any love we shared. They are telling me that this is what they think love is.
This is something that comes up over, and over, and over. It amazes me how much casual abuse people put up with and expect as a baseline in relationships, any relationship. It amazes me how angry people are when you place your baseline higher. It reflects on what I said above: if you persist in believing you are worth enough to have a higher standard, you take away from others the easy belief that this is just the way it is, and everybody has to accept it. You also take away from others the privilege to abuse you when they feel it’s right and necessary. People want to maintain the belief that the abuse they’ve resigned themselves to is normal and okay, and the abuse they subject you to is the only dividend they get out of that miserable cycle.
If you let it be known that you can and will cut a person off, you are unequivocally stating that you think your own sanity, health, and happiness is worth more to you than theirs is. And you suddenly learn how many people wish something far less for you.
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Word! I’m in the same boat – I haven’t spoken to large swathes of my family for years. One of my sisters I would like to have contact with, but since she’s still involved in the vortex of suck that is my blood relations, I have had no contact with her either as she doesn’t respect my boundaries WRT our parents. It’s just not worth the angst. You are spot-on in this analysis of how people say hurtful and abusive things to keep you in the decaying orbit of their dysfunctional gravity well. I said no to the abuse from my family, and I’ve also cut off two long-time friends for the same reason.
You are the best!
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I wish I could cut my mother off. But she hasn’t been bad enough, lately, to make it worth the person that would make me. Not a bad person, just a different one. So I pretend, and it’s hateful. But it also upsets the rest of my family less, and them, I love. But I’ve just started a relationship with a man who cut HIS mother off when he had his kids, and when he was telling me about it I realised that I am really, really looking forward to the day when I can cut her off. Or she dies. All I know is, my life is better when she’s not in it.
Trouble is, there WERE good times, and I WAS loved (sometimes). And so the equation doesn’t quite balance. But I do get that cycle of contact, gift, contact, silence in miniature, because of course she thinks she should be more important in my life than she is. Maybe she should have thought about that before she emotionally abused us all and essentially (I believe) drove my father to suicide. When you reaction to that is ‘shit. Wrong parent’, there’s something fucked.
You are Worthless, Let’s be Friends reminds me of all the middle management in my last job. The middle management wore suits and talked about how important they were. The CEO wore the same top every day for a week, socks with sandals, and knew everyone’s names. If you’re truly important and powerful, you don’t need to patrol that that carefully.
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Oh, yes. I cut off contact with my entire family several years ago because of severe lifelong abuse and neglect, and everything you said in this post is spot on.
And when I’ve cut off damaging friendships I’ve had those accusations thrown at me – which has made me even less inclined to stick around.
Over the last two weeks I’ve had two people ask me about my family (I have a physical disability, which means that I’m constantly infantilised and seen as a perpetual child who must have family around to look after me, and it is seen as acceptable to ask me the sort of questions that wouldn’t be asked of any other 36 year old. And when I said something brief and non-committal about my family not being safe for me to be around, I was told “that’s not a very nice thing to say about your parents.” I shit you not, direct quote.
People find it more unacceptable for me to have left, than for my family to have abused me in the first place.
I am so glad you are blogging again.
You are the best!
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“If somebody is putting in the work to knock you down, it’s because they’ve got something to fear about you if you’re standing up.” – I need to print this out and tape it to my mirror. Or have it tattooed on my forearm, or something. Thank you for stating it so perfectly.
You are the best!
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I can write a whole long comment…but I will just say I have been there and done that. Especially about the family part. I haven’t spoken to my mother in over 3 years. I get the “well she is your momma” all the time from various people. DH finally stopped with it when I explained that he doesn’t know what it is like, he has a decent mother, so he really has no opinion. The birthday call you talked about made me laugh though…my mom hasn’t wished me a happy birthday since I was 16…so I guess she thought after I stopped talking to her that calling and wishing me a happy birthday would be meaningful. It wasn’t. Like you said, she was just looking for an opening, I am sure. I didn’t give it. I am happier for it…it also gives me a perverse sense of satisfaction that now she knows it won’t be that easy.
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Shit, I don’t have a bad family, and I’ve always totally understood cutting family off. I don’t think being related means that they have to be an abusive ball and chain forever attached to you. You don’t owe horrible people anything just by virtue of them being of similar DNA. Ridiculous.
You are the best!
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Thank you for this post. You’ve given me lots more insight into my best friend’s experience of and with her blood relatives, and also, to be honest, my own.
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Thank you for sharing this much personal info. I didn’t have to cut off all or part of my family, but I did have to spend the past four and probably the next forty years in therapy learning how to call them out on their emotional abuse disguised as concern. It’s not an easy road. I hope you feel safe within your chosen family.
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I often use the “I appreciate your input” line to deal with the unsolicited advice that I ought to somehow deal with my uncle the molester differently. For one thing, it kind of shuts people up. They’re not sure if what they said had any impact, but they would sorta look like a chump to keep talking about it.
The thing is, I kind of have a big thing about not lying too. So a friend of mine who knew this asked me “isn’t that response kind of a lie?” But I don’t think it is. Because I do appreciate their input. It tells me where they stand and how much I can trust them and what kind of boundaries I need to maintain with them. I mean, if you think I should be all happy about spending Thanksgiving and Christmas with my abuser just in order to make things easier for the rest of my family and not make anyone uncomfortable, then I know how you view me and how valuable I am in your eyes. That’s some really fucking useful information to have, and I appreciate it.
You are the best!
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“You Are Worthless, Let’s Be Friends” is a perfect description of an old internet “friend” I have thankfully escaped.
She ran me into the ground, but the moment I started asking her to change some of her behaviours because they were hurting me, I was a tyrant. When I upset her it was my fault; when she upset me it was also my fault. When I cut her off, all of a sudden she loved me and missed me and needed me. But what she loved and missed and needed wasn’t me; it was the convenient emotional punching bag I represented and her self-image as a non-abusive person that my departure threatened to dent.
You are the best!
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On why the cold-cut can be so hard: there are some family situations where it’s relatively obvious that there’s no love there whatsoever. But in a lot of cases there is one family member who is genuinely (if problematically) loving, or a dependent younger sibling that you felt responsible for, or some sort of similar complication(s). In my case, I stayed for my grandma, who really did love me and whom I never could have devastated by cutting myself off from the family. By the time she died, I had kids of my own, and I thought I owed my kids the experience of feeling themselves to be part of an extended family (to the extent that I could give them that without putting them at risk for abuse, which was a really exhausting watch to maintain). It’s only been since my kids have gotten old enough to form their own negative opinions about my family (and to notice what a bad space my family puts me into) that I’ve finally begun shutting those connections down. They don’t need that crap, and, it turns out, neither do I. But, god, it took me a hell of a long time to get there.
It impresses the hell out of me that you’ve figured out so much of this at such a young age, I gotta say. When I read this post, I thought, did my dad cc that last email to Harriet, that she can describe it practically word for word???
You are the best!
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Scribbler: I suspected it was stuff like that that keeps people around. When I get in a maudlin space about how I missed out on so much in my childhood and adolescence, I remember that if I’d had a better life, better experiences, it would have been harder — if not impossible — to leave the abuse. I wish I’d had love, but I know love would have kept me in a dangerous place. So I’m bittersweetly thankful for everything I missed out on.
I don’t think you can actually credit me with “figuring out” anything when I was wrong. I made some choices, but there were a lot of specific circumstances going on that helped me out. Being young was one of those. I was too young to have kids to tie me anywhere. I was too young to have had my dad co-sign loans, or loan me money, or be paying for my schooling, all shit he could have lorded over me. I was too young to have a job my dad could try to sabotage. The only thing my dad had on me was shelter (which was sleeping on a mattress on a concrete basement floor, with cracked windows and flooding and no plumbing), and food (which was a sometimes thing). I knew being homeless would be worse than that, but it wasn’t as scary as it could have been if I’d had grown up with a warm, neat house and regular meals. And, too, I knew being homeless would be a scary, abusive, traumatic experience, but after living with my dad, I felt I was probably very prepared to live that way; I figured it might even be better in some ways, because it would be more honest, less intimate, less emotionally manipulative. Basically, my dad had managed to strip my life of almost everything good, so I had almost nothing to lose, and everything to gain.
And I didn’t make the decision, at first, to cut him out completely. That was way too long-term. I was in survival mode, which was minute-by-minute. The first minute was telling him I wasn’t coming home that night. The next minute was asking him to go to a family therapist with me. The next minute was refusing to tell him what my problem was (since I knew he would just dismiss it, belittle me, twist it, or shout me down, and because I needed something to get him to come to therapy — don’t come, you don’t get to know why I left). The minute after that was my dad calling me a spoiled white brat, and the minute after that was me telling him to go fuck himself and hanging up. And then there were weeks of just waiting to see if the cops would come, if I’d find a home, if I’d be able to finish school, if he’d find me. Suddenly it was a year or two later, he was still sending me shitty emails, and I decided, okay, I can think about you long-term now. And long-term, well, apparently you want me back, and apparently this is your A-game. Sad, man. I’ll wait till you’ve got something better to offer.
At some point, “waiting” went on long enough that I realized it was never going to happen, or, at least, I had to move on with my life as if it was never going to happen. That was when I made the decision to cut him off. You could say he made that decision, by refusing to respect my needs and boundaries, though I also made that decision by refusing to compromise. But, in the end, it wasn’t a conscious, thought-out decision; I took it one day at a time, and at the end of a string of days, I realized it was time to put a name to what had happened, and stop waiting.
You are the best!
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Harriet, thank you for explaining something I’ve been chewing on for years, but was never able to codify. I have been fortunate in that I’ve never experianced a Family situation such as you and your readers have described; been intellectually aware of it, known it happens to people I know and love, but it took your bare knuckled, concise description for me to get a handle on it. This will allow me to help my loved ones deal with this refuse without asking the wrong questions, or making a stupidly silly comment. Knowing is half the battle, now I can DO without stepping on land mines, and hopefully, actually HELP them. Again, THANK YOU and Brightest Blessings to you and yours.
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And Happy Birthday! And many HAPPY returns of the day.
Long may you blog! Long may you prosper!
(seriously, I learn loads here.!)
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I have to echo what Tomas said. You have this unbelievable, rare gift of writing in such a way that some of us who’ve never truly been through shit like this–abuse, rape, discrimination, whatever–to such a destructive degree can begin to understand: not to fully empathize, but to understand the ways of thinking and the reactions and maybe a little bit about the needs arising from such situations. I hope with this understanding to be able to help loved ones in these fucked-up situations. (And that’s hope in the solid virtuous sense, I expect to be able to, a hope that I can grab onto–not a tentative well-maybe-kind-of-if-things-happen-right hope.) Thank you, as always.
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This post reminds me of another recent post on LiveJournal:
http://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html
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First, thanks SO MUCH to CER for linking that LJ post. For anyone else feeling the pull of curiosity, it is called “How to keep someone with you forever”, and is as potentially triggering as you might think it sounds. It’s a cold-blooded, point-by-point description of what the poster calls “sick systems” — i.e. abusive relationships, and it is absolutely worth the read if you’ve the inclination and the time.
Secondly, I want to hug this post SO HARD. I read through, and have been coming back to read comments, and it just feels so awesome to know, to see that I am not the only one. That I am not crazy for cutting ties, that it was okay to do so, that it made sense, and that I don’t have to explain shit to people who won’t get it. Thanks, Harriet.
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My former lover contacted me via email several months ago after he’d found podcasts of spoken word I’d performed in which he recognized references to our terrible relationship. He was full of criticism and conciliation as before and when I didn’t bow to it he was finally pissed off enough to quit writing. “Enjoy your victory” were his final words. After reading your post I understand the dynamics more clearly and I think I will indeed be enjoying my victory. Once again thanks for sharing your insights.
You are the best!
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Thank you. Deeply heard and helpful.
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Wow. Just wow. Harriet, I don’t know if you can appreciate how amazingly good you are at describing awful, painful human experiences in ways that can actually help real people understand and deal with them. Most people write the conclusion; you take people through the steps so that we can recognize them, and ourselves, along the way.
I’m inexplicably fortunate to have avoided the cold cut-off with family, but I lost two friends in a short span years ago for different reasons. One cut me off, only for me to realize afterward how lucky I was that her toxicity was not in my life anymore. The other I cut off after she reacted with a violent outburst over, of all things, a political conversation. She tried to contact me not long ago after years of silence. I kept calm, wished her well, but reiterated that I had standards for friendship behavior and did not wish to re-establish friendships with people who did not meet those standards. And hung up.
I think cutting off toxic people gets a bad rap. I wish I’d had the courage to do it before.
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I hate the “forgive and forget!” meme. The only person I need to forgive is myself, for being the dupe. Anyone who pulls the kind of shit that has resulted in my cutting them off does not deserve forgiveness until they can sincerely apologize and point out what they did wrong to me. Anything less, and they haven’t done anything worthy of forgiveness.
So yeah. To all of your post.
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You have this unbelievable, rare gift of writing in such a way that some of us who’ve never truly been through shit like this–abuse, rape, discrimination, whatever–to such a destructive degree can begin to understand: not to fully empathize, but to understand the ways of thinking and the reactions and maybe a little bit about the needs arising from such situations. I hope with this understanding to be able to help loved ones in these fucked-up situations
I wholeheartedly second this. Thank you, Harriet.
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If somebody is putting in the work to knock you down, it’s because they’ve got something to fear about you if you’re standing up.
I second nettle (way upthread). I need to get this tattooed on me or something.
You have this unbelievable, rare gift of writing in such a way that some of us who’ve never truly been through shit like this–abuse, rape, discrimination, whatever–to such a destructive degree can begin to understand: not to fully empathize, but to understand the ways of thinking and the reactions and maybe a little bit about the needs arising from such situations. I hope with this understanding to be able to help loved ones in these fucked-up situations
Thirded.
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I love your writing, and I would like to offer you as many Internet hugs as you ever, for infinity.
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My mother emailed me (from a new email address, because her old ones went through the spam filter) the day you wrote this, two days before my 26th birthday. I cut her off in 2007, after my adoptive family (who lovingly rescued me from my parents’ home when I was 19, and continue to be wonderfully loving and supportive to this day) convinced me that I should invite her to my B.A. graduation and small gathering afterward, wherein she threw a temper tantrum. A subsequent call to her on Mother’s Day revealed yet another tantrum. Fault for her bad behavior: Mine.
My friend, showing up to my birthday celebration last weekend, gave me the gift of referring me to this blog, which is by far some of the greatest, most intelligent sentiment I’ve ever seen put down in words, and I am by nature a writer.
In response to her email, I told her in no uncertain terms not to contact me ever again, again. That there would be a restraining order and harassment suit filed if she did. I said it because she’s kind of an idiot, and seemed not to understand. Her response? A six-page email on my birthday full of hilarious things like, “I’m never going to stop contacting you because I love you. Have me arrested! It’ll give me a break from your abusive jerk of a father!”
In response to that email, out of fear of having to in the future be forced by my abusers themselves to remember once again how much they treated me like absolute crap, and how long I let them do it, and how many avenues they’ve exploited to continue it (such as creating fake Myspace profiles to try and lure me into online friendship when all other avenues of communication were met with a massive i-Brick wall), I had to delete my Facebook, my Myspace, create a new email, make new secret profiles, and ask *every single person* that I kept as e-contacts not to tell my parents or ANYONE else a) where I’m moving to, b) what my phone number is (who wants to change that AGAIN?), c) what my new moniker will be, d) what my new email is, ETC. just because someone stuck in a sick system, who “totally gets now” why I cut my dad off years earlier than her, can’t fathom that she’s such a toxic part of my life that simply finding an email from her causes symptoms of PTSD. She loves me.
Because I let some anger loose about being violated again: “I can tell you’re really unhappy.”
Sending: links to this, and How to keep someone with you forever, and Not All Vampires Suck Blood, and:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/health/20mind.html?_r=1&em
http://lifeinthesecondhalf.blogspot.com/2009/10/toxic-parents.html
Sending because, even though I feel I don’t owe her anything, I’m all about knowledge changing people. And if she changes, great for her! I won’t care. I already told her the “magic words” I’d need to hear to be willing to maintain contact years ago, knowing she wouldn’t budge from her seat of agape and perfect health; she didn’t believe I’d do it. She’ll bring me back into that fold, she thinks.
Then: print i-Harassment, delete old email address, file restraining order.
I always knew I’d cut my parents off completely someday, as early as the age of 3. I’ve only been happy when I’ve not been with them. I still spent all of my young life while I was living with them trying desperately to get them to be loving, healthy people worthy of keeping around, hoping against logic that they would change for the better as they instead worsened.
Thanks for a cathartic post: I can’t wait to show my 15 year old sister, who I raised from infancy, that still unfortunately lives with my parents. Now I can send her email for a minute because it won’t matter if those totalitarian creeps find the old contact information they’re already exploiting. And they wonder how I manage to find all the mortar for these brick walls…
You are the best!
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SERIOUSLY. FUCKING SERIOUSLY.
I cut off half of my family when I turned 18. My life has been so much better for it. And random strangers who think they have the right to give out their ignorant opinions can GO TO HELL. ‘Forgive and forget’, my ass.
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I suspect some of those “well-meaning” folks don’t or won’t understand the difference between a family tiff and seriously toxic behavior. Yes, if you stop speaking to your sister because she once made a snotty remark about your boyfriend, and neither one of you wants to be the one to apologize first, and she gets terminal cancer, and your relationship was otherwise pretty normal before that, you probably will regret refusing to speak to her before she dies. And yes, even people who have wisely cut off toxic relatives may have mixed feelings and guilty feelings when that relative dies, in no small part because abusers cultivate exactly these kinds of feelings in their victims.
That in no way excuses pushing people to drop their boundaries so somebody else can be happy with their decision.
You are the best!
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Wow, that’s great. It takes courage I’m sure. Speaking as someone who finds the whole cutoff scenario hard to imagine, being one of the lucky ones who has good relations. Years ago I was the person telling someone to forgive and forget, they’re your family after all, but who was I to say that? Bravo to you and all readers who have made those decisions, the rest of us well meaning friends have to realize you know better than us what you’re doing and why. That being said I have encountered people who are too petty and quick to cut people off for disagreements or minor slights, without calling out the offending party. It’s important to let those people know you didn’t appreciate what they did. If they’re real friends, they apologize and make amends. But abusers you’re better off without.
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: I’ve known people like that, too. And I’ve found myself better off for their quick decision to cut me out. I kinda consider it a win-win if some asshole decides not to be an asshole to me anymore.
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Point taken, that makes a lot of sense as well. The more I think about this the more I realize the many times in the past I’ve been “had” by manipulative people, and the times I’ve had the sense to see something was wrong and pulled away myself. Glad I stumbled across your writing, it’s brought something to a conscious level that needed to be there.
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I’m not a direct victim of familial abuse, and I want to point out how important this post is for everyone, regardless of our histories, for connecting and enriching while promoting one another and respecting boundaries.
Hearing your stories (commenters too!) helps me understand what some folks go through, so that I can better avoid bullshit insensitivity.
Your candor is inspiring. Keep it up!
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Harriet, what a brilliant post. I’m going to send a link to a good friend of mine who is still hoping and praying that her hideous and toxic family will change. It is so heartbreaking to see an otherwise intelligent person reeled in with some pathetic little bait and then when she’s on the hook, so to speak, the wack comes. She is so convinced that ‘family’ is worth it. It makes me real mad.
I think the difficulty must be when a person has no other experience or model to compare with, that emotional, psychological and/or physical abuse must seem normal and acceptable.
We had a long conversation on forgiveness. She’s rather Christian. I’m not. My view is that ‘forgiveness’ is rather a superior and immodest thing to do. Better to be humble and leave stuff like that to God is my take. I have huge difficulties with the whole ‘forgiving others’ thing. I let go, don’t go for revenge or anger (after a while!). To me forgiving implies that it was understandable what was done and that and apology made it OK.
I’ve had a painful experience with my family. It’s a long story, but I cut them of for a year. We’ve always had a good relationship so when my sister approached me, we talked it out etc, etc and I could let it go. But…there’s always a but, I can never forget. Meaning not that I think about it, only there are now situations that I would not go into anymore, because I now know what even my blood relations are capable of when they feel justified for whatever reason. My friend thinks I should just forgive, they’re family after all. I tell her I don’t do vulnerable real well, so will not be able to drop my guard on certain issues again. And I don’t need to in order to have a relationship with them.
The whole ‘family’ thing gets me really riled up. Family has nothing to do with DNA. That is of some biological interest. Nothing more. It’s where you get the color of your eyes from, your big bum etc.
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: Forgiveness is such a difficult concept. I feel like it’s often presented to me as, “Decide what this person did to you is okay, unconditionally, no matter how they’re acting now or how they feel about it, and be their friend forever and ever.” And I really can’t get down with that. I don’t think forgiveness obligates you to line up for more abuse, and I think anybody who does believe that isn’t actually talking about forgiveness — they’re talking about marytrdom, and that’s immensely prideful and arrogant.
I forgave my mom for not being around in my childhood. I forgave her because I understood what had happened to her (drugs), and that addiction wasn’t something she chose or wanted. But the reason I have a relationship with my mother is because she made amends, she changed, she became a person who brings goodness and health into my life, and that means I want her there. I forgave my father, too, because I understand that he’s acting out what happened to him as a child, and I understand that he carries so much pain, grief, and anger to continue acting that out upon the people he loves the most. I forgive him, because I could have been him, and because I feel sadness and pity for the boy who grew up into such a scared and angry man. But I don’t have a relationship with him, because he hasn’t changed. He has made no amends, he has never admitted to what he’s done, he’s never made any attempts to stop being abusive, and he continues to blame me for his behavior. There’s nothing good or healthy he can bring into my life. So, while I forgive him for what he has done, I’m not willing to let him continue doing it to me.
The definition of forgiveness I have most been able to accept and deal with involves letting go of the right to retaliate. Under that concept, I can accept that the past is the way it is, that it can’t be changed, and that making somebody else suffer for the past is to continually be living in it. So, I let go of the right to retaliate against my father for the childhood he gave me. I let go of the right to retaliate against Flint for the adulthood he gave me. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to allow either of them to continue giving me shitty moments in my life that I need to forgive. I have a right to protect myself from abuse — forgiveness doesn’t require me to continue to be abused, it only requires me to forgive myself and others for the abuse that I wasn’t able to escape.
Louise Armstrong has a good quote about forgiveness that I should dig up somewhere (Louise Armstrong being the woman who kind of “broke” the family incest taboo in the 80s writing memoirs about her abuse). She says that forgiveness is a beautiful way of containing the rage of oppressed populations by fostering the unholy impression that forgiveness is a form of power, that to have it makes you powerful. She also says that the concept of forgiveness that is sold to oppressed populations — namely, the “forgive and forget and we’ll do it all again tomorrow” brand — hinges upon the belief that your oppressor gives a damn. If you forgive them, they’ll abuse you. If you don’t forgive them, they’ll abuse you. If you watch showtunes, they’ll abuse you. They don’t really care what you do, because they don’t really care about you — they care about abusing you. But forgiveness, the rotten concept of it, gives you a way out. You are a powerful being. You are more than them. Better than them. No matter what they do to you, you are continually made better than them for taking it. Which is how you start one of those “abuse cycle” things — you get somebody so abused that they think they can no longer do wrong, that they’re worth more than other people.
When I see somebody who thinks forgiveness means the obligation to be abused daily, I don’t actually see forgiveness. I see a desperate bid for power, for martyrdom. As in, if they just hurt me bad enough, and I keep forgiving them anyway, everybody will know once and for all that it wasn’t my fault, that I was a nice person, that I didn’t deserve this. Somebody who snaps back would deserve it. Somebody who gets angry would deserve it. But my side of the ledger has five thousand plus signs on it — nobody can ever say I deserved anything mean. It was all their fault.
I’ve had friendships end because the other person had so many plus signs on their side of the suffering ledger, it was like they got a free pass for everything, ’cause they were so angelic and all. What I saw was somebody who refused to ever take criticism, responsibility, or action (and often got passive-aggressive in the meantime), but in their mind they were insufferable sweetness and light that could do no wrong. When I say forgiveness is a fake kind of power, I really mean it — I’ve known some people who wield that shit over people, letting everybody know that they are “better than” because they are abuse sponges, and so they don’t have to be culpable for anything. They also don’t have to work at anything resembling a relationship. I need more substance in relationships than that — I need somebody who can get angry and let me know when I’ve hurt them so we can honestly work towards difficult amends, instead of somebody who will quietly grimace and then let me know that they’re far better than me for their ability to grimace. That’s the least amount of work you can possibly put into a relationship, and it’s good enough for abusers, but it’s not good enough for me.
You are the best!
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I cut off my family, easy as pie, but I think it was only because I found a new family to abuse me. After many years of living with this new family, I have been convinced by them that I am a worthless, horrible, cruel, stupid, selfish creature, one that my previous family deserved to hate, and I need to work extra hard to be even a halfway-decent human being. If I leave this current family, I will be not only worthless, but now alone.
Now that I have read this, and http://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html, I wonder. Maybe they’re wrong, and I should stand up for myself. Maybe that would be frightening, but ultimately the best decision I could make for me, for my health and sanity.
But…
…but what if they’re RIGHT?
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I don’t truck with unspecific, generalized apologies that admit to nothing, and vague reparations that are fundamentally meaningless, since how can you repair something you don’t even admit happened? So, the details is what I would need to let my family back in my life, and it’s not something I ever expect from them. I’m okay with that.
This crystalized for me why I can’t figure out what it would take to allow my mother back into my life. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, as her mom and sister are dying, and they matter to me, but dealing with them without figuring out how to deal with her was baffling me. Not that I’ve figured out how to deal with her, but I understand what she would have to do for me to allow her back in, and I can see that it will never happen.
I had been spending a lot of time lately thinking about this, as she’s trying very hard to get back into my life now. I was trying to figure out what was wrong with me, that I couldn’t forgive her, even though I know her so well as not actually caring about what I think or feel, only that things look like she’s the wonderful, loving mother of her so-talented child.
Thank you.
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Wow, thank you.
This is how I’ve always felt. This is how I always said I would be.
Yet, I’ve discovered there’s something very weak inside me now that says, “But I am a worthless and unlikable person. And my bad friend is obviously not as bad as I think she is, otherwise she wouldn’t have a whole life with friends, family, and fun. Maybe I should be grateful for her overtures.”
On top of that, there’s ultimately very little satisfaction in cutting someone off. The person you’ve cut off gets to present their side of the story however they want without you being able to defend yourself. They can play the martyr, the saint. In my experience the majority of people look at you as the one with a problem. They say, “Well, obviously there’s something wrong with this person who can’t forgive. I pity the person they’ve cut off, who is demonstrably so much more mature and caring because they can forgive.”
No wonder so many people find it easier to live with the abuse. And then become abusers themselves. I wish I could manipulate others as well as my bad friend manipulated me. I wish I could do unto her as she has done unto me.
That’s ultimately why I am torn. Part of me wants to be a good person and forgive. Part of me wants to be a bad person and hurt her as she hurt me. Part of me just misses her, as if there were anything to miss…
And I know that all of this craziness…I could avoid it by resolving to do as I think is natural for me, and as I always intended. Cut her off. I let her back in a little to see what it would feel like, now I know it feels awful. Just cut her off.
I was all set to do that, because I realized I can’t forgive her. She gave one of those “unspecific, generalized apologies.” But I don’t think I could forgive her anyway, because what she did cannot be undone and I know for a fact that she will never truly change. (Why should she when she lives this charmed life, anyway? It all works so well for her.)
But as I started to block her again I said to myself, “I hate that I care enough to need to block her.”
Not only your post, but your comments are putting this all back into perspective for me. I need to cut her off and I need to let go of my perceived right to retaliate. That’s only forgiveness I need to extend.
Maybe dad should get the same treatment but it’s just too…something.
As it is I keep it superficial and brief and that works fine and has for years. It’s about my emotional health, not making a statement.
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Reading this was like therapy for me—I love what you said about forgiveness. I’ve cut my abusive family off for years at a time. They used some of the same tactics you described to worm their way back in long enough for me to realize that they just missed their emotional punching bag.
Re snapping back being equal to viewing yourself as a bad, mean person who deserved it–yes! I’ve never heard anyone so aptly describe this mental condition/cycle. Many thanks.
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: I had this social sciences teacher who had this pet phrase in high school. You know, he was blowing adolescent minds with 1984 and concepts of sociology and different forms of sci fi government and philosophy. Classroom discussion could get pretty excited as kids had their minds sort of “click” and went racing on with all kinds of concepts. And, occasionally, discussion would get mired in the hypothetical without purpose. Like, “What if you had a government that discriminated on the basis of eye color?” would turn into, “And what if that government had the technology to have NO EYES? And what if when they had NO EYES they discriminated on TONE OF VOICE but then you were able to CHANGE YOUR VOICE…” etc. He would step in with his pet phrase:
“What if a dog had a square butt?”
And we would have to discuss it. What if a dog had a square butt? What would that change? What would the world be like? The main point being, yes, it would be a different thing, but does that difference add up to anything special or exciting or meaningful?
What if they’re right, dude? What if a dog had a square butt?
I mean, what would be different in your life if they were right? You already feel like a horrible piece of shit. Would you feel any worse if you actually were one? What would really be very meaningful about finding out that you’re horrible? Would your life be any different? Would anybody’s?
You’re the only one who has to live with you. Anybody who thinks you’re an asshole doesn’t have to hang around you. So what if they’re right? Why the fuck are they hanging out with you, if they are right? If you’re such an awful person and all, what the fuck is wrong with them that they want to hang out with awful, irredeemable people all the time?
Try owning your potential for badness, man. I can be a pretty selfish, cruel, horrible human being. I’ve done it. I’ll probably do it again. But my capacity for hurting others has a limit. I’ve run into it multiple times. However, my capacity for the imaginary evilness that is me knows no bounds. The evilness that my abusers told me I had within me, it was a staggering, nightmare, Cthulu-like evil. It was unfathomable in its enormity. It was very different from the banal degree of evil I can actually, realistically get up to. But I didn’t get a chance to compare those things — my theoretical awfulness and my real awfulness — until I got away from people who were doing my thinking for me. To get away from them, I had to own the evilness I was convinced I had. Okay, I thought. So I’m possibly an evil, cruel, awful person. Well, being that person can’t feel any worse than hanging out with you every day. And if it does feel worse, I am infinitely sure that you will be willing to take me back, because if you didn’t need me around, you wouldn’t be working so hard to tell me I’m worthless without you.
So, stop fighting against your evilness. You’ve got some bad in you. It has a limit. Discover it. See if you can cope with it. Because you’re the only one that has to. Own it. You can be an awful, awful person. Everybody can. You’re not frighteningly unique. All that’s unique about you is that apparently, in your evilness, a whole bunch of people have decided you’re worth having around to shit on every now and again.
Have you seen movies with evil people in it? What do they do when people treat them like shit?
What do good people do when others are mean to them?
What I’m saying is: most horrible people don’t give a shit if they’re horrible. Most good people do. Most horrible people don’t let others treat them poorly, because they are selfish and cruel. Good people do let others treat them badly, because they want others to be happier than they are.
I’m telling you, being selfish and cruel is a godsend if you’ve been good all your life.
Take the sting out of those words. Take the ammo out. You’re horrible. Accept it. Permanently. Feel it out.
Now what? There’s still a whole life left that you’ve still got to live. Do you want to live it with people who treat you like shit? That’s a choice you can make, but it’s not one you have to make. Horrible people get to do what they want. Good people are constrained by how much they care about others. If you’re really so horrible, let them see what it’s like to live with a horrible person who doesn’t really give a shit what they want or think anymore.
You are the best!
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@Gen: I had a friend once who had a similar relationship with her mother as I did to mine. In the past, I mean — our relationships to our present mothers were very different. Both our mothers had abandoned us for a long time, and it hurt us very deeply. We’d both reconciled with our mothers. We were discussing once how that has impacted our ability to trust our mothers. She said, “I know my mother is sorry for abandoning me, because this one time she looked at me and said, ‘God, I can’t believe you turned out this way.’ ” I just kind of stared at her, horrified, but not knowing what to say. It’s not my place to give advice or preach at somebody who hasn’t asked for it. So I tried to role model instead. I told her, “I know my mother is sorry for abandoning me, because several times she told me, ‘Harriet, I’m sorry for abandoning you.’ ”
The specifics make a really big difference. I know my mom isn’t going to bail if things get tough, because apologizing for the really wrong shit you did is really, really tough, and she showed me that she can take that. People make mistakes, but if you can’t admit to a mistake, that’s a tacit admission that you don’t think it really was one, which says to me that it’s a mistake you’re willing to make again, and again, and again.
You are the best!
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:
Yes. THIS. That’s one of the hardest parts. It took A LOT of practice. I had to realize just how very, very much I needed other people to validate my reasons and thoughts and feelings for everything before I could stop getting trapped in this, and it wasn’t easy, and it’s still not, though much easier than it was.
I set up, for myself, a few ways of dealing with this.
1) I stopped acting like what my abuser did to me was invisible. Yeah, it was maybe worse than people knew, but there’s no way it was invisible. If he treated me this way, he was treating other people in fucked-up ways, too. I suspected there were more of us silently putting up with it and going along than it appeared in my isolated world. So I told myself, okay, I don’t think I need to answer the, “Why won’t you talk to him?” question, because anybody who knows him can probably figure that one out their damn selves. And if they can’t, then this is a person who is oblivious as fuck, or willfully ignorant, and I get to decide if I want to be friends with an oblivious or willfully ignorant person.
2) I let people ask me questions, if they wanted. I figured, they get to hear his side — if they give a shit about me, they’ll ask me about mine. And if they don’t, problem solved.
3) If they did ask me about my side, I offered a very brief explanation and refused to defend it. “Flint was abusive. I wasn’t happy. He raped me. He’s dead to me.” If they needed details — what was the rape was it really a rape what do you mean abuse — I got broken record, saying, “I think Flint’s words and actions speak very well for themselves. You’ve known him for years, and you’ve had a lot of chances to see the way he speaks and acts. That’s unacceptable to me. I won’t have that in my life. You’re welcome to have it in yours. But you’re not welcome to question my reasons for not having it in mine.”
4) Remind myself that I want smart, savvy friends in my life. I don’t want to be friends with the kind of person who chooses what to believe based on who speaks first or loudest. That person is a constant liability, a time bomb of drama waiting to explode all over me, and great, now I have to do this cut-off thing again.
RINSE. REPEAT. FOREVER.
It felt like a lot of coldness, and unnecessary cruelty, and like I was the most boarded-up person in the history of humankind. But eventually I got used to my new boundaries, and they felt okay, and I started to see a lot of improvement in daily interactions. No more, “OH MY GOD I STUTTERED THE BARISTA THINKS I’M A JERK,” which was a secondary benefit I didn’t know I’d accrue by learning how to stop caring what abusive people say about me behind my back.
You are the best!
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Harriet, your post on forgiveness is wonderful. It gives voice to what I’ve felt at a gut level about forgiveness. I just have not been able to articulate it as eloquently as you did.
My turn of phrase is ‘letting go’. Which is often unbelievably difficult, because as you have said, it also means letting go of feeling validated by others, especially the abuser, that you are ‘right’ in feeling what you feel. As a previous poster said, not giving ‘your side of the story’ and having others believe what is said about you.
For myself, all I can say is, that when you let go of all that, it is amazing how much emotional energy you then gain for wonderful things in your life. Hate and rage takes up an enormous emotional energy and it is quite scary how abusers actually feed and need that kind of emotional energy from you.
I would be best described as an atheist, though that description is gaining pretty rigid conotations what that means, but there is one prayer I actually use a lot: it’s the Serenity Prayer. I’ve said it over and over and over at times till I start breathing normally again!
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Thank you so much for this post. I haven’t cut off any family members (although I do live in an abusive house, it’s not bad enough that I would put myself through worse things to get out of it), but I have cut off ties with long-term friends.
A couple of years ago I was raped by a guy I was in a “relationship” (read: trying to prove I was straight when I wasn’t) with and my “friends” all decided that it wasn’t really rape because it didn’t start out that way. This was my support system at the time. So I decided, I’d rather have no support system at all that one like that.
Since then some people from within that circle have contacted me and I was amiable… but I made it clear that certain members of that circle were not welcome to contact with me and I did not want to hear or talk about them. Mostly because it’s painful.
Honestly though, that relationship had deteriorated before that incident but that was obviously the final straw. Those who were basically apologists for the man who assaulted me, and those who defended the position that I was not raped when I know a lot more about my experience than they, do not get to be in my life anymore.
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Passed this on to a friend who was being mindfucked, and just kept up the engagement.
It took a while for her to understand that him getting a response from her was the reward, and the S-R pattern was being imprinted on him.
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My dad is always preaching about forgiveness to me when I talk about the past ways I’ve been abused. I find this very suspicious- I expect better of him because he’s gone to therapy and Co-Dependents Anonymous meetings. And the fact is, he preaches forgiveness while I’m still living with my abuser without any means of getting away. How am I supposed to forgive when I’m still living with abuse every day? Why is he not concerned enough to have me move back in with him when the abuse has gotten so bad I’ve cut myself and talked about wanting to die?
I know that when I finally move out, my mom is probably going to pull a pity party and try to guilt me into talking to her because she’s so lonely and she’s my mom and etc. The good news is, she doesn’t abuse me when I don’t live with her. As long as I only spend a limited amount of time with her, I should be safe.
To some extent, she already seems to have a vague idea that she was an abusive parent. I don’t think she understands how much this has shaped who I am today. And I’m starting to realize that I use her abuse to justify my own sometimes. And it’s true- I’m extremely high strung around her and don’t want to talk to her and get annoyed by her because I hate her, because she abused me badly enough to fill me with this much rage. But at the same time, I guess I still have to control that rage, even if she’s abusive, even if my rage is justified.
So right now I’m having to figure out how to deal with forgiveness without being able to cut off someone. I could not retaliate, but that leaves me feeling angry, and humiliated at my perceived submissiveness. My therapist suggested that when she gets on my case I say something like, “Right now, I can’t handle this. I need some time to cool off.” I have yet to try it.
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: I don’t know if you need to figure out how to deal with forgiveness. That’s like trying to figure out calculus in the middle of a tornado. Forgiveness is something that takes time, thought, growth, and space. You’ve got none of that if all your resources are spent dodging abuse from minute to minute. Forgiveness isn’t the antidote to active abuse; it’s how you get your own life back after abuse has ended. Forgiveness was something I used, after abuse had ended, to keep myself from continually revisiting the past. I needed my present and my future, but until I let go of my right to retaliate, I was consistently drawn backwards in this bad mindloop, driving myself into depression and rages while I thought about what had been done to me. Here I was with the present I had always wanted, and all I could do was relive the past. Forgiveness helped with that. It helped me understand why things had happened the way they did, that they weren’t my fault, that I could let go. None of those things would have been useful if I was still being abused. Understanding why somebody treats you like shit is only helpful if they’re not going to get up and do it again tomorrow; all the brainpower you can use to understand and empathize is going to be refocused on dodging bullets, because that’s the more important thing at the moment.
While I was with my abuser, I used the word “forgiveness” to describe a concept more like resignation, assimilation, or self-destruction. Flint would hurt me terribly, and I would spend hours trying to find some magical logic loop that would let me accept what he did as okay, let me live with it. That being said, that shit helped me survive. Until I could find my way out, I needed some way to cope with the daily reality, and if that was by invoking something I called “forgiveness,” hey, I’m still here, so it worked.
I may just be reading into what isn’t there, but I get this sense from the way you phrased this that you feel like it’s somehow problematic or bad or wrong that you aren’t able to forgive right now. That’s not something you have to do, now or ever. You never have to forgive, and if you do, it doesn’t have to mean what anybody else thinks “forgiveness” means. Right now, you have to survive. If you feel you can survive by using whatever concept you currently describe as “forgiveness,” do it. But I don’t want you to feel like forgiveness is some pre-requisite to being a healed and healthy person, or somebody who grows up not to be an abuser. And while, of course, you don’t want to be an abusive person, jesus christ, don’t expect perfection out of yourself when you’re being abused. You are going to act fucked-up because you are living in a fucked-up place. Acting normal wouldn’t fly where you are. You could try your best to be a happy, normal, healthy person, and that would just get you hurt worse. There isn’t room for you to branch out into the healthy, sound, accepting, calm person you want to be right now. Trying to be healthy and “normal” where you are would be like speaking a different language in a country that shoots foreigners.
I’m not telling you to go be an asshole and hurt other people, but I am telling you that amends can be made, mistakes can be fixed, apologies can be issued. But those are all things that require lots of time and attention to other people, and you don’t have the luxury of spending a lot of time on other people when all your time has to be spent on survival. And that can make you a worse person than you wanted to be, or imagined you could be without all this. There’s only so much you can do right now. Trying your best — always trying to get better or change — is a good thing, but don’t use the wrong set of expectations, or you’ll set yourself up to disappoint. Don’t apply the expectations of a non-abusive life to yours. People who are safe have the luxury of forgiveness. People who are unsafe just gotta get by until they’re safe again. If you set your expectation as, “I’m doing my goddamn best,” I’m reasonably sure you can hit it 90% of the time. If you set your expectation as, “Act like a normal, healthy, unabused girl my age,” you are going to feel like a failure 90% of the time.
If you’re worried about how your rage makes you feel, how it affects your life, how it makes you want to act, those are all valid things to worry about. Therapy is totally great for teaching you alternative ways to express your emotions. If you’re worried about what your rage says about you as a person, at your fundamental core, don’t. You don’t know the you without abuse. The you without abuse hasn’t even been born yet. You don’t know the you that doesn’t have to spend every minute on survival. When you’re out, when you’re safe, that’s when you get to start unpacking. Right now, what your rage says about you is that, at your core, you don’t believe you deserve to be treated this way. That’s your health shining through. It doesn’t help you in dealing with it right now, but know that your inability to forgive, to quell the rage, to stop feeling depressed or suicidal, are all signs of your good, strong health. They are signs that you are able to recognize that your life isn’t good enough, that you don’t deserve it, and you need it to change.
You are the best!
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That reminds me of a place I’ve been many times. Bear with me?
I’m not really big on “forgiveness.” All of what has been said here I agree with! But there’s no internal sense of a “right to retaliation” to let go with my dad. I never could retaliate. I was too young and when I wasn’t, he’d already stolen the ability from me.
How to say it? I can’t forgive him at all. On the average day I can say that and there is nothing behind it but acceptance — it’s a simple truth.
And it’s not that I can’t wrap my head around what he did. I’ve studied psychology since, I’ve thought about it endlessly, and I know his dad was bad to him. I know he was stressed, etc. Blah, blah, blah…
But other days I am bitter. Other days I am angry. And, god, how much I still hate him! I could run through a thesaurus full of adjectives inadequate to describe how much rage I have. I’m grateful that the days when I feel angry have become less and less frequent. It is unpleasant in and of itself. But there’s more to it than anger. Every time I start to feel … out of control anger … it makes me feel like I will never be free of my parents’ house. It’s like that anger is him inside me. It makes me afraid that someday the hatred will turn me into him — and I can’t get it out of me. I feel tainted. After all, I have plenty to be angry about and it sucks that I can’t even be justifiably angry without him ruining it.
Being around him or being in the house I grew up in… Actually, I don’t even consciously notice it, but I took a friend over briefly to pick up some mail last week. My dad wasn’t even there, but my friend stared at me. She said, “Look at you…just being here in this house, even empty, makes you edgy.” Yes, it does. Among other things.
Sometimes he does things that seem intended to subtly acknowledge his wrongdoing. Scoff! Yet even if he were to come to terms with it and outright apologize it wouldn’t matter. I’ve always believed that some things are unforgivable. I genuinely feel there are some sins for which the only just atonement is bearing them, forever. I’ll be carrying the scars of his actions the rest of my life. (Although, from time to time, I’ve been grateful for that…in odd ways for odd reasons.)
It’s not that I don’t resent it, it’s that resentment doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s just *shrug*
So my concern has long been, not forgiving, not forgetting, not establishing a better relationship with my dad, but rather… Not letting it eat me whole. All I have to do is remember the time my dad said to me, “You can’t understand. I just get so angry” to remember why.
He’d had one of his tantrums and attacked my mom. He was strangling her. I was in bed and I heard her scream for me. I jumped out of bed and ran out into the living room to see this and something…snapped. I jumped on him and starting pummeling him. He threw me across the room, called us all some names, and stomped off into his bedroom. He got into bed with Newsweek and his reading glasses. I went in to confront him, basically, to tell him how fucked up he was. He looked at me straight in the eye and said, “You can’t understand. I just get so angry.” I can’t really describe his expression. I looked back at him…and I went cold all over, because I did understand.
At that time I was lashing out physically at everyone. My siblings, my friends, myself. I’d just get so angry and I’d beat myself. Or slap my friends. Or punch my sister.
At that moment I saw my dad as…not just evil, but pathetic. I was maybe 14.
My whole life I’ve struggled with guilt at not saving myself and my mom. Hated myself for being a victim. How many times did I have the phone in my hand? Only to put it down when my dad would say, “If you call the cops I’ll tell them you’re crazy, that you attacked me, and they’ll put you in an institution.”
I’ve always felt so weak. Being angry helps with that, it helps me feel strong. It helps give me courage. But it’s dangerous. I know it could swallow me and all of my good intentions whole.
I won’t say what you should feel or how you should handle it. I took to wearing a cross. I’m not religious, though I was raised by nominal Christians. But pseudo-Christian metaphor was convenient shorthand for me. My dad was a demon. My mom was a sacrificial lamb (not a saint, not an angel). I wanted a reminder that there was a middle way for me.
But I don’t have to be a monster and I don’t have to be a victim.
Yeah, still working on that.
You are the best!
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Thanks for this post. I’d never read your blog before but someone else linked to it…
I came to the cold cut-off in a gradual way, after decades of emotional bullying from a father whose approach to relationships is infantile. I moved away and just stopped calling. When he called or emailed there were arguments, demands that I be better as a daughter…and then at some point I realized that I could just cut him off. And I told him that. When I made it clear that no amount of demanding or railing or tantrum-throwing would make me love him or want to spend time with him, and that I could live perfectly happily without him, things did change.
We’re not talking about serious abuse here; he’s just a real asshole. So while an apology and an acknowledgement that he understands what I mean by “asshole” would be ideal, I’m not holding my breath or making it a precondition of having contact. But cutting out the tantrums is. We can now have civil conversations (as long as I don’t spend much time with him) and get along on some level.
But yes, people don’t understand that you can be that “cold.” I can’t blame some of them; they’ve never been there.
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i remember so vividly the first time someone told me about cutting off their family. i was 24. and i realized: oh — i could do that, too. i could just stop talking to my father, FOREVER, for all the reasons i knew were right, had put me into therapy in the past, had made me avoid him for months at a time only to let him force his way back into my life with abusive guilt trips. i am sure at some point i would have figured that out — i hope — but in retrospect i am so, so grateful that a friend in the midst of dealing with all that cut-off bullshit herself had the peace to talk about it like a sane decision she was proud of, because it absolutely transformed how i thought about my life.
and you’re so right — some people totally don’t get that, and are terrified and threatened by it, especially if they know your charming yet abusive family member only on his charming side.
what i struggle with are my friends who i think could be really happier if they cut someone out, and how not to be the interfering asshole who tells them what to do. i know there’s a limited amount i can do until they’re willing to break that cycle for themselves, so i try to channel that same grace and peace and just remind them from time to time how cutting out my dad was the single most healthy, important decision i made in my 20s, and that it is, no matter what people say, something you can just do, if you need to.
thanks for creating a smart thoughtful place for this conversation.
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Thank you, Harriet. I suppose the pressure to be ‘healthy’ comes from my dad… I would normally disregard what he said about forgiveness, and to some extent I already have, but it had a way of getting under my skin, I suppose because I trust him and expect him to know a thing or two because like I said, he’s had therapy and gone to Co-Dependents Anonymous meetings. I’m going to just have to accept that he can be wrong. Actually, letting go of the idea that my dad knows everything helped me recover from some panic attacks I was having. He made me feel like I was crazy because one night, I came to him crying, and he freaked out and told me I was having a psychotic break, so from then on I couldn’t trust myself and I was always afraid I was going crazy. After several months of that, I finally had to interpret what was happening when I cried to him that night in my own terms of understanding things, and that’s when the panic attacks went away.
The sad thing is, for a while things were better with my mom. We had better communication skills going on, because I’d been living with my dad so I learned non-abusive ways of interacting. Then when I moved back in with her it all went downhill.
I guess for the time being I’ll just continue to do my best. There’s lulls in the abuse and I’m experiencing one now, so I can definitely use that time for my benefit. Thank you again for your insight.
: Thank you for sharing. I’m glad to know that forgiveness is not the only thing you can do to work through your rage. I think when I’m out on my own, I may be able to afford forgiveness, but I’m not going to try to force it either. Alice Miller says that forgiveness comes naturally after you’ve worked through your rage and pain. Forcing forgiveness is just a way to keep things repressed. Good luck with your self-work, and thank you again.
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: You don’t necessarily have to think of your dad as being wrong, if that’s problematic for you. What he’s doing is right for him. It just happens to be wrong for you.
Just ’cause other people have healthy “credentials” doesn’t mean they’re your kind of healthy. Your dad is probably working to be healthy in a way that works for him, whether or not you think he looks or acts healthy. That way may not be compatible with the people around him at any given time. “Health” is also a work in progress. Just because he’s an adult and your dad and goes to his meetings doesn’t mean he’s on top of his shit. It just means he’s making an effort, and that effort can go off in a lot of wild, unhealthy directions while he’s searching for the things that work for him.
To that end, you can take anything he says to you as something he’s saying about himself (it’s a neat trick: you can do this with everybody). If he tells you that crying a lot means you’re crazy, now you know what he says to himself to make himself stop crying. He probably considers that the right thing, the healthy thing to do. There was a time when I did, too. Eventually, my concept of what was good and healthy changed, and now I think crying is way healthier than telling myself there’s something wrong with me for needing to cry. But there was a time and a place where doing whatever I had to do in order to stuff the tears down helped me survive, so it took a while to shake that habit when I didn’t need to do that to survive anymore. You’re getting a pretty good glimpse at what your dad once had to do in order to survive, but that has no bearing on who you are and what you need to do to survive, unless you find some of his techniques work well for you.
You’ve got to be the final judge of that, though. Your dad is telling you what works well for him. It doesn’t translate to you unless it feels right to you. If it feels ungodly wrong, let your dad keep his bag, and you can figure out what’s in yours. He’s not wrong; he’s just not right for you.
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Wow. Reading through this is kinda like dejavu. I had a bad breakup where the ex turned abusive once he realized he I wasn’t necessarily going to put up with his post-breakup BS. I went through the process of cutting him off and having to deal with his retaliations for it in pretty much the exact order you summarized it. It took me a couple of years to slowly understand that he had become a different person, an abusive person, and that I had hadn’t done anything wrong. Now I feel like an idiot for not being able to see it then, but then I barely had any relevant life experience to recognize it.
Well, anyway, thank you for writing about these things. It helps to know I wasn’t the only one.
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“It helps to know I wasn’t the only one.”
So much. This blog has given me a renewed vigor and confidence I’ve never quite had in this direction. Finally, some company for my thoughts, and an end to the nagging “Am I crazy or is it crazymaking?” question.
Adeleine
“In trying to make someone feel like an ass, you prove yourself the ass.”
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Thank you for writing this post. I really needed to read it today. I’m deciding to divorce my husband and was able to see most of our interactions in the back and forths you describe in your post. The only thing stopping me from springing forward is the sadness I know our 4 year old boy will feel. At the same time, knowing that eventually my husband will drag down my son the same way he pulls me down forces me to go on. Once again thank you.
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I’ve found a way define forgiveness that works for me – I think of it in terms of forgiving a debt. “I forgive you” means, to me, “I am letting you off the hook for making things right/whole.” And I find that, by letting go of the expectation/hope that the other will attempt to fix things, I release myself from needing things to be different than they are. Some things can’t be made right; some things are never okay. When I stop waiting for you to do the impossible, I am freed.
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Omg, EXACTLY!! I had similar shit go down with a supposedly really close ‘friend’ at a really low point in my life and she would have gotten away with it if she hadn’t gone too far and overexaggerated my EVIL HORRIBLENESS which was just so far out. So I cut her off, but for awhile there was really agonizing over was I really that bad? Till some real friends snapped me out of it. Now I’m just glad that toxic person is out of my life. Tell your friend he did the right thing. And go you too. I admire your strength.
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Thank you so much for your blog and this post in particular.
http://natalief.livejournal.com/1529712.html
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Couldn’t agree more. My mother cut me off 15 yrs ago because I left her freaky religion. That, after beating the shit out of my sister and I for years when we were growing up. Since then she has tried to reestablish contact and I said NO THANKS. People are so uncomfortable with the fact that you don’t have a relationship with your mother. It definitely makes them nervous, and makes them say “Jeez, what’s the matter with you?” There must be something seriously wrong with someone who doesn’t talk to her mom. Anyway, honestly, on bad days I feel exactly the same. There IS something wrong with me. But, it doesn’t make me want to reestablish anything with her. Way too toxic. It has made me question the concept of unconditional love. I don’t have that in my life, and I don’t take it for granted.
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The link to this turned up at a really pertinent moment. I’m currently trying to maintain polite relations with my grandmother, because she is very old, without being suckered into seeing her anywhere she can spring my mother on me again in another mistaken attempt at reconcilliation. My birthday’s just passed and with it a small, spiteful slew of emotional blackmail gifts from them both.
So I suspect I rather needed to read this post, especially in light of the “YOU’LL UNDERSTAND WHEN YOU’RE OLDER/JUST ACCEPT IT/MAKE UP WITH YOUR FAMILY” advice I’ve been getting from one or two people.
Thanks.
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