When Home Breaks the Heart
Home is where the heart is, even when the home breaks a heart. Millions of adults spend decades unraveling the illusion of a happy home. We grow up with people who hurt us and people who try to protect us from the hurt in the same household. Both of those people often deny us the right to acknowledge the pain. While we struggle to understand what love with responsibility looks like, family members struggle to secure public image and maintain stability by any means necessary.
Many adults like me find no recourse but to expel our birth family from our lives in order to sort out our distortions about ourselves and the world. Instead of continuing to ignore the pain to heal the family, I chose to ignore the family to heal the pain.
Healthy isolation from family over dysfunctional contact means we choose to control our lives over controlling the family image. We live in our truth instead of our comfort. We let go of family tradition as a sacrifice for personal empowerment.
The decision does not come easy, and navigating family relationships is not fixed and predictable. I knew the point when I would never return to my home. At age 44 I made my decision silently to mimic the denial of my pain. I stopped calling and made excuses for not attending family reunions and holiday festivities. I didn’t have a discussion with family members because I wanted to make clear to myself that I did not need permission to go “no contact.” I needed a commitment to take care of myself. I needed to show, not tell.
Some adults go no contact following a confrontation. Other adults go no contact after they make a public disclosure. No contact can also be available initiated by the family to avoid shame or scandal as well as reprimand the member who speaks out. Families are complex and expansive, and we don’t know how to live with no contact until we do. It’s a lifestyle, not just a decision.
I knew I would never speak to some family members. I didn’t return their phone calls or respond to any messages. I went months without speaking to my mother and kept our occasional phone calls to a limit of 5 minutes to avoid her mentioning the names of people I despised. Some of the harm she knew about, some she didn’t. As the matriarch, she assumed a lot of responsibility for the family image. Her role as stabilizer and protector exacerbated my pain. I was not angry or vengeful. I was ready to heal on my own terms.
Over the years my nieces and nephews who knew nothing about my childhood experience began asking me when I would be coming to visit again. I just responded to them that I wouldn’t. But, I never explained why. My goal was to heal, not tell every family member why I don’t come home anymore. I didn’t want to have that conversation 20 times. I concluded that when the younger generation asked for my presence at family functions, they were not prepared to support my truth. So, I don’t offer it to them. The nephews I had shared with have left me with low expectations. Their responses mirrored the responses of their parents.
I’m not hiding. I’m living unapologetically. I have no need to explain myself to individuals. Each time a niece or nephew asks why I don’t visit, I am reminded of the secrets and lies that my family holds. They choose to withhold information about my absence. On some level, I understand, because I hid it too for 40 years.
I now live publicly as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse as the executive director of a nonprofit empowerment organization for survivors. I posted daily on FB for ten years; I have written a memoir, and have been featured in the news for my work. So, the abuse I endured is not a secret. I dropped the secret more than a decade ago. So, when I am asked to visit my hometown, I don’t feel I owe anyone an explanation, but I do extend familial courtesy by responding “I’m too busy.”
Choosing the Ugly Truth Over the Pretty Lie
Survivors who go no contact struggle to maintain relationships with whomever we can because the isolation on the healing journey can be daunting. But, finding support within the family unit just doesn’t come easy. Healing requires us to suspend our ingrained ideas about the focus on family. We set ourselves up for triggers and heartbreak when we hold too much space for family members who rarely choose the survivor over the dysfunctional family unit.
Sharing our truth with family members is not all or nothing. I told one of my nephews that I have no tolerance for the family secrets that go unaddressed. I invited him to read my work if he wanted to learn more. We had a heart-to-heart conversation about family dysfunction, but not about my specific experience. He stated his fear of walking into my truth and not being able to emotionally handle it. I supported his right to choose and he supported my decision of no contact. He does not ask me to visit my birthplace anymore. We have an understanding.
No contact is an experience of grief and loss. There is no roadmap to living no contact. Each survivor must pave their own way. The journey must be paved with truth and integrity, along with the commitment to heal by any means necessary. Continuously trying to have functional relationships within a dysfunctional family system could be denial.
Family members who wish to maintain a relationship with us will do so on our terms if they respect our intention to heal. If our interaction with them is limited to family functions, then we have to be honest about the relationship we are trying to reserve. We may be consciously or unconsciously trying to find a way to maintain family ties. Thus, we are not at the center of our healing, and healing is not at the center of our lives.
We can invite supportive members into our space without the family. We can invite a small number of supportive family members to plan a holiday dinner. Instead of seeing them on holidays, alternatively, we can plan quarterly holiday dinners with them that do not compete with traditional family days. That way, members do not have to choose us over the family they are not yet ready to release. Each family member who knows our past has a decision to make, just like us. Our decision to heal may never influence their relationship with the people who harmed us. But, we do get to decide where we place people in our lives and what information we share with them about placing them there.
Photo by Dave Frisch from Pexels