This was beautifully written. But I swear you're not at the boundary yet. You haven't been safe for long enough to know how much better you're capable of feeling. Eight years isn't long enough but there will come a point. I have similar nightmares, right down to red clay stains on my knees and humidity that chokes me and family who want to live in a different reality and don't understand why they can't have me and their delusions both. I'm happy now, though. Secure in my innermost being or whatever. I spent my entire life feeling like I'd been split open and all my guts were hanging out and I just had to go through life holding my guts in my hands, trying to write and work and have a life while my innards were spilling everywhere. Like I was somehow continuously bleeding out but never dying. I thought that was going to be me until I died.
I turned out to be wrong. I thought the damage was permanent because nothing seemed to help, not therapy or sedatives or writing it out. But it turned out, I just had to be truly safe long enough. It took a long time. I won't pretend that it was a totally passive process, I was always thinking about how bad I felt and dissecting the abuse and reading books about trauma psychology and writing stories that would never see the light of day, and that was all part of how I processed the shit in my system. I can't say, do what I did, because who knows what was helping and what was just passing the time. I don't know what the path is for you but I know there is one. The sickness rests in the belief systems that developed under abuse, and people don't change much but beliefs do, and I think that's the key. You just have to keep on keeping your distance from the people who take you right back to that place just by looking at you.
Sorry to be oversharing. I literally can't contain myself around other survivors.
Oh sweet person, I have so much love in my heart for you. This path you walk is one we all have to walk alone, but I like to think we are walking them together, in parallel, criss-crossing. Maybe in our dreamscapes we escape together. Maybe your Alabama connects to my Indiana and we sometimes get out of the woods. We find bodyworkers and therapists and loving friends and we voice that it was monstrous, never funny, and together we grieve the people we could have been and try to love the people we have become instead and can never not be. We hold the lines we can hold and live. I'm sorry you're going through this now and bottomlessly filled with rage that you went through it then. ❤️
Thank you for writing this. The more people see other people go no-contact with their families who destroy them, the better. When I did it, people looked at me as if they'd just watched me push my mother off a cliff or something. "She gave you life!" they said, and I said, "yes, she did, but it's not hers to destroy."
I went no contact from my family in 2006. This letter resonates so deeply with me. You are always doing the right thing when you love from a safe distance (or paraphrase Prentis Hemphill). Always.
*to (not or) paraphrase Prentis Hemphill - ‘Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.’ They are a wonderful follow on IG.
I only love my mother from a very distant place where the infant I was before she began destroying me lives. I'm taking care of her in her old age this year, and this is how I do it: I pretend she's someone else's mother who left her with me until they come back. It's the only way.
Interestingly, 2006 was the year I went no contact with my family, too. It was so hard to explain to people back then. I made sure to tell people so that others could realize it was an actual possibility.
I wish you so much love and care. This is so painful and you are a very brave person. You are definitely not an asshole. When a parent wants you to live inside their delusions, to fit their desires, rather than recognize the reality you went through and the damage they did through their actions and inaction, that is also itself abusive. And if you can, it is possible to reframe your boundary not only as an act of love for yourself but also for your family. A part of love, possibly the most important part, is to care about their emotional/spiritual self and the development and growth of that self. To give into the part of them that wants to live in a delusion is not really an act of love. It's a kind of peacemaking that comes at a cost to everyone involved. To hold a boundary is to believe in the possibility of their becoming a better person. Of course, you do it for yourself, as you should, because you 100000% deserve better, as any human would. I just don't think it's necessarily as unloving an action as we often feel it is. Healing from childhood trauma takes so long and is complicated. Trauma at any age is awful, but when it's happening while your brain is still developing and at the hands of people who were meant to love you, it's just so much and reverberates for a very long time. Yet I do believe it's possible for the weight to lessen and the ghosts to visit less frequently, with less intensity, even if it takes a really long time. As long as you make a commitment to care for yourself, wherever you are in whatever moment, whatever that means, I do believe things will get better. Sending you lots of love.
Being a child who is alone, scared, and in need of love—abandoned, as you put, is terribly painful, the kind of pain that stays with you. Maintaining your boundaries and choosing yourself—that child—is courageous and difficult, and loving. Thank you for reflecting on this so openly, and cracking things open for others.
Thank you for writing this honest and powerful piece. Your short stories have such impact because of the tension between the largeness of suppressed emotions and the smallness of what people are able to communicate. Now I see the connection to our shared experience of childhood traumas that we could scarcely articulate to ourselves, let alone to others.
I went no-contact with my abusive mother in 2011. Best 10 years of my life. But I still have nightmares too. I reached a similar point in therapy a few years ago, as you do in this essay -- "should I stop looking for the bottom of the barrel, because there won't be one?" It got better, though. The PTSD is still there, but the rest of me has grown larger around it, in a way that's only possible when one does cut off contact with abusers and their enablers. It's a smaller piece of the mental pie. You'll get there.
This "He can live in that reality. But he cannot live in that reality and have me live in it too." hit so hard.
For different reasons, I've chosen to not have my own father in my life. It's causing heartache for my brother but he wasnt born when my dad did the things he did and sadly, the reality he has been told is remarkably different to the one that I grew up in.
Thank you for sharing this. For writing this so beautifully. I'm sorry for your pain. Words help - you and and so many others. Thank you.
Everything that isn’t destructive heals…very slowly. Your work. Your adventures. And perhaps, the love of someone you want to spend your life with, and do.
Growing up in a similar family I relate to every observation you make here. It’s all true. Get yourself some sage and burn it weekly. Also, congrats on the screenplay. Looking forward to that.
I appreciate this. It takes alot of time and work and safe friends to get over not being safe in family of origin. I have said to my therapist a bunch of times that i feel like a haunted house filled with ghosts. You know, this was my normal for most of my life, crippling anxiety, fear, copious prayers and meditation to calm my body down. It was my normal. Yeesh. So terrible. It took therapy to see that this was not "just me" and "the way i was" but my body was filled with these ghosts of things done to me that were moving around. And i mean, not just disembodied memory but something bodily, i could feel the history in my bones. I would feel exactly what i felt when i was 4, all sort of somatic cptsd stuff, twitching. I think i understand revivals now. Maybe demons are past abusers and we need help casting them out? I dunno. I do know these memories are tenacious and mine are departing one by one. What a relief but it does take time and learning to kind of accept these emotional flare ups or get up from a bad nightmare and just breathe. Easier said then done. But it can be done. You are courageous in facing this stuff. Thanks so much for your candor.
For me, it was my brother. My siblings. My cousins. The neighbors. But mostly my brother. I recently published my first book, loosely (or not so loosely) based on my marriage. There were literally about 4 lines in the book about my brother. He went ballistic and disowned me. How can you disown someone you already have no relationship with? BUT what was funny, was that at the time I was writing about my family, specifically my brother. I became terrified that he might actually destroy me if I ever told anyone about our childhood. Anyway, brave you. I was with you the whole way through this story. With tears in my eyes. Thank you.
I went no contact with my family in 2003. I want to say “it gets better” but if it did for me that may reflect my privilege more than anything else.
You feel like an asshole because you were told that people who had boundaries or who enforced boundaries were assholes. It’s a sign that what you are doing is the right thing for you.
This was beautifully written. But I swear you're not at the boundary yet. You haven't been safe for long enough to know how much better you're capable of feeling. Eight years isn't long enough but there will come a point. I have similar nightmares, right down to red clay stains on my knees and humidity that chokes me and family who want to live in a different reality and don't understand why they can't have me and their delusions both. I'm happy now, though. Secure in my innermost being or whatever. I spent my entire life feeling like I'd been split open and all my guts were hanging out and I just had to go through life holding my guts in my hands, trying to write and work and have a life while my innards were spilling everywhere. Like I was somehow continuously bleeding out but never dying. I thought that was going to be me until I died.
I turned out to be wrong. I thought the damage was permanent because nothing seemed to help, not therapy or sedatives or writing it out. But it turned out, I just had to be truly safe long enough. It took a long time. I won't pretend that it was a totally passive process, I was always thinking about how bad I felt and dissecting the abuse and reading books about trauma psychology and writing stories that would never see the light of day, and that was all part of how I processed the shit in my system. I can't say, do what I did, because who knows what was helping and what was just passing the time. I don't know what the path is for you but I know there is one. The sickness rests in the belief systems that developed under abuse, and people don't change much but beliefs do, and I think that's the key. You just have to keep on keeping your distance from the people who take you right back to that place just by looking at you.
Sorry to be oversharing. I literally can't contain myself around other survivors.
Yeah I second that! Happy for your healing progress.
Oh sweet person, I have so much love in my heart for you. This path you walk is one we all have to walk alone, but I like to think we are walking them together, in parallel, criss-crossing. Maybe in our dreamscapes we escape together. Maybe your Alabama connects to my Indiana and we sometimes get out of the woods. We find bodyworkers and therapists and loving friends and we voice that it was monstrous, never funny, and together we grieve the people we could have been and try to love the people we have become instead and can never not be. We hold the lines we can hold and live. I'm sorry you're going through this now and bottomlessly filled with rage that you went through it then. ❤️
Thank you for writing this. The more people see other people go no-contact with their families who destroy them, the better. When I did it, people looked at me as if they'd just watched me push my mother off a cliff or something. "She gave you life!" they said, and I said, "yes, she did, but it's not hers to destroy."
Wow. Love that kind of tough survivor talk. Thankyou.
I went no contact from my family in 2006. This letter resonates so deeply with me. You are always doing the right thing when you love from a safe distance (or paraphrase Prentis Hemphill). Always.
*to (not or) paraphrase Prentis Hemphill - ‘Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.’ They are a wonderful follow on IG.
I only love my mother from a very distant place where the infant I was before she began destroying me lives. I'm taking care of her in her old age this year, and this is how I do it: I pretend she's someone else's mother who left her with me until they come back. It's the only way.
Interestingly, 2006 was the year I went no contact with my family, too. It was so hard to explain to people back then. I made sure to tell people so that others could realize it was an actual possibility.
I wish you so much love and care. This is so painful and you are a very brave person. You are definitely not an asshole. When a parent wants you to live inside their delusions, to fit their desires, rather than recognize the reality you went through and the damage they did through their actions and inaction, that is also itself abusive. And if you can, it is possible to reframe your boundary not only as an act of love for yourself but also for your family. A part of love, possibly the most important part, is to care about their emotional/spiritual self and the development and growth of that self. To give into the part of them that wants to live in a delusion is not really an act of love. It's a kind of peacemaking that comes at a cost to everyone involved. To hold a boundary is to believe in the possibility of their becoming a better person. Of course, you do it for yourself, as you should, because you 100000% deserve better, as any human would. I just don't think it's necessarily as unloving an action as we often feel it is. Healing from childhood trauma takes so long and is complicated. Trauma at any age is awful, but when it's happening while your brain is still developing and at the hands of people who were meant to love you, it's just so much and reverberates for a very long time. Yet I do believe it's possible for the weight to lessen and the ghosts to visit less frequently, with less intensity, even if it takes a really long time. As long as you make a commitment to care for yourself, wherever you are in whatever moment, whatever that means, I do believe things will get better. Sending you lots of love.
Being a child who is alone, scared, and in need of love—abandoned, as you put, is terribly painful, the kind of pain that stays with you. Maintaining your boundaries and choosing yourself—that child—is courageous and difficult, and loving. Thank you for reflecting on this so openly, and cracking things open for others.
Thank you for writing this honest and powerful piece. Your short stories have such impact because of the tension between the largeness of suppressed emotions and the smallness of what people are able to communicate. Now I see the connection to our shared experience of childhood traumas that we could scarcely articulate to ourselves, let alone to others.
I went no-contact with my abusive mother in 2011. Best 10 years of my life. But I still have nightmares too. I reached a similar point in therapy a few years ago, as you do in this essay -- "should I stop looking for the bottom of the barrel, because there won't be one?" It got better, though. The PTSD is still there, but the rest of me has grown larger around it, in a way that's only possible when one does cut off contact with abusers and their enablers. It's a smaller piece of the mental pie. You'll get there.
This "He can live in that reality. But he cannot live in that reality and have me live in it too." hit so hard.
For different reasons, I've chosen to not have my own father in my life. It's causing heartache for my brother but he wasnt born when my dad did the things he did and sadly, the reality he has been told is remarkably different to the one that I grew up in.
Thank you for sharing this. For writing this so beautifully. I'm sorry for your pain. Words help - you and and so many others. Thank you.
Everything that isn’t destructive heals…very slowly. Your work. Your adventures. And perhaps, the love of someone you want to spend your life with, and do.
I'm so grateful for your substack. Thank you for the honesty and thought you put into it.
Growing up in a similar family I relate to every observation you make here. It’s all true. Get yourself some sage and burn it weekly. Also, congrats on the screenplay. Looking forward to that.
I appreciate this. It takes alot of time and work and safe friends to get over not being safe in family of origin. I have said to my therapist a bunch of times that i feel like a haunted house filled with ghosts. You know, this was my normal for most of my life, crippling anxiety, fear, copious prayers and meditation to calm my body down. It was my normal. Yeesh. So terrible. It took therapy to see that this was not "just me" and "the way i was" but my body was filled with these ghosts of things done to me that were moving around. And i mean, not just disembodied memory but something bodily, i could feel the history in my bones. I would feel exactly what i felt when i was 4, all sort of somatic cptsd stuff, twitching. I think i understand revivals now. Maybe demons are past abusers and we need help casting them out? I dunno. I do know these memories are tenacious and mine are departing one by one. What a relief but it does take time and learning to kind of accept these emotional flare ups or get up from a bad nightmare and just breathe. Easier said then done. But it can be done. You are courageous in facing this stuff. Thanks so much for your candor.
oh my god— all of this.🔥
For me, it was my brother. My siblings. My cousins. The neighbors. But mostly my brother. I recently published my first book, loosely (or not so loosely) based on my marriage. There were literally about 4 lines in the book about my brother. He went ballistic and disowned me. How can you disown someone you already have no relationship with? BUT what was funny, was that at the time I was writing about my family, specifically my brother. I became terrified that he might actually destroy me if I ever told anyone about our childhood. Anyway, brave you. I was with you the whole way through this story. With tears in my eyes. Thank you.
I went no contact with my family in 2003. I want to say “it gets better” but if it did for me that may reflect my privilege more than anything else.
You feel like an asshole because you were told that people who had boundaries or who enforced boundaries were assholes. It’s a sign that what you are doing is the right thing for you.
In solidarity.
Love.