TRANSCRIPT
Someone recently asked if I could make a video on how to make it through the holidays: Christmas, your birthday, perhaps Easter, when you have broken from your family, broken from your parents. How to survive emotionally.
And I’ve had to deal with that a lot over the years. I think about it most poignantly though, going back now 20 years. One of the first times that I really strongly broke from my parents, had no contact with them, and went through Thanksgiving and Christmas away from them. And it was incredibly painful. It was like I was suffering. I felt lonely. I felt hurt inside. I also felt terribly, terribly guilty, like I was doing something awful.
Also, another big part of what I went through was feeling incredibly empathic, specifically to my mother. I could feel how much pain and torment she was in because I had broken from her on this holiday. And yet, there was another part of me that knew that what I was doing was healthy.
I also saw it most clearly intellectually that the reason I was feeling her feeling so much was because that’s what she had trained me to do as a child. She had required me to do as a child. It’s like she’d put a microchip into my psyche, into the part of me that had feelings, that she could press the button and I would feel her feelings more loudly, more overtly, more consciously than I would feel my own. And that made it incredibly hard for me to break from her at all.
But it became most poignantly painful for me during the holidays. And I did the same with my dad to a lesser degree. He had implanted this in me, but just not as deeply. I felt guilty about breaking from him too. So the guilt, the sadness, the pain, the empathy, I went through all that so loudly with my mom. But then I also, even in spite of all that, aside from that, I felt my own pain, my own loneliness, my own sadness. It’s like, oh, I don’t have my family. I don’t have my family of origin during this holiday.
Yet there was another part of me intellectually, and this was a whole part of how I survived that first series of holidays, was by coming back to myself, by journaling a lot, by thinking about it, by walking and meditating on it as I walked, by talking about it with healthier friends. It was realizing, wait a second, I’m better away from these people. These people have done me wrong so, so, so many times. The fundamental construction of my childhood, the ways in which I was raised were so unhealthy that I couldn’t be myself. There’s a reason that I wanted to get away from them.
And so for me, it was a reminder. Yes, even though it’s incredibly painful to get away from them, it’s a step toward healthiness. And all these feelings, these are opportunities for me to deal with my history, to deal with myself, to deal with my return to a healthier self.
So in a way, all that extremely painful stuff that I was going through during these first holidays away from my family, this was a chance for me to grow, a chance for me to observe myself, a chance for me to study, also a chance for me simply to persevere, to become stronger, to be able to not react to all those feelings and run back to them. Because they had implanted a lot of those feelings in me with the specific purpose of hooking me and getting me back into the system.
And so now I had to fight all of that. All that guilt and sadness, all those feelings that I was feeling, those were the primary ways they got me to bounce right back into their system and lose myself again.
So what did I do? Aside from journaling and talking to people, a huge part of what I did, aside from just building a stronger relationship with myself on the inside, was building stronger, healthier friendships. People who actually respected me more, loved me more, honored the true me more, nurtured the true me, could listen to me more.
And talking with them, talking about my feelings, realizing, you know, when I was around them, I didn’t feel so lonely. I didn’t feel so guilty. Also, people who I could bounce stuff off of. And when I would say, oh, I’m feeling so guilty, like I should go back to my mom, they could remind me. They could even say, “Daniel, you remember why you got away in the first place? Do you remember how she treated you x, y, and z time and a, b, c, d, e, f, g times when you went back to her? It could be nice for a day or a week, but eventually she’s going to do exactly what she always did to you.”
And it’s like, oh yeah, exactly. She’s going to treat me like garbage again. She might treat me nicely just enough to get me hooked back in when I come back, but eventually she’ll go back to her own old ways, which were always there. And it was a reminder.
And by the way, even after this early period of breaking away, those painful holidays, after a couple years, a couple years of holidays, I did go back to her, did go back to my dad. And guess what? Eventually they treated me rotten again, such that I needed to get away again.
But a key thing that I found is, as more years went by, more holidays went by, more birthdays went by, first of all, I started to see patterns in my feelings and patterns in their behavior. And the more I worked on it, worked on my deeper traumas, primarily to heal my traumas by grieving them, to figure out what had happened to me historically once upon a time, and to work out those ancient painful feelings. Not that I’m a complete, completely healed person by any means, I’m not. But I healed a lot of that stuff.
And the more that I healed, and the more that I saw the patterns of what had happened and were still playing out in relation from my parents to me, the easier it became. Also, the stronger I became, the stronger and healthier I became inside myself. The more that I loved myself, the more it became easier to deal with those painful holidays.
Now that’s not to say it’s totally easy. Nowadays, I still have twinges of pain, twinges of sadness, twinges of that old empathy for certain sides of my parents. But I also know that now, being much healthier, it’s a lot less painful for me. Also, just because I’m much more of an integrated person now, I love myself a lot more. A lot of the damage that they did to me is resolved, it’s healed.
So in a way, it’s like I can enjoy the holidays much more for the holy days that they are. No, no, I’m not talking in any religious sense, but as a time to honor life, to honor the beauty of life, to honor the beauty of certain traditions, even non-religious traditions. Or let’s say my birthday, to honor the birth of me, that I don’t have to honor my parents, all that painful stuff, all that painful history on my birthday. I can be much more focused on the truth of me and have a social circle around me of people who also honor me.
And my man, on the bigger holidays, can honor truth and reality and healthiness and healthy relationships and healthy behaviors. And so what I found over time, over years and years of healing, especially having gotten through those first early years of horror, especially going back and forth from my family, back and forth, now it’s been more than 10 years, more than 11 years away from my family, profoundly away from my parents. It really has gotten easier. Still little twinges of pain at times, but much, much easier.
So basically, the healthier I’ve become, the easier it’s become. The more that I’ve realized the unhealthy patterns from my parents, the more I have taken more distance and built a healthier life for myself so that I can survive those more complicated times away from them.