TRANSCRIPT
I would like to follow up on my video breaking from your parents with some thoughts that I’ve been having lately. Many times, actually, I’ve had these thoughts and feelings that when I hear people telling me about breaking from their parents, when I hear people telling me about thinking about breaking from their parents, I’m often surprised at my emotional reaction. I mean, I’ve broken from my parents. I haven’t had contact with my parents, and now it’s been more than 10 years, aside from the occasional email with my dad, which usually just leaves me feeling kind of disgusted and reminded of why I broke away from him in the first place.
But the thing that surprises me is when I talk to people who want to break from their parents or are in the process of breaking from their parents, I often feel sad. Sad and sometimes even a little bit scared. And what I think is, gosh, I know how absolutely valuable it has been for me in my life to break from my parents. So you think I would be happy for them. You think I would say, “Oh my gosh, you’re doing a good thing, this is a great thing,” or even from a maybe a selfish place one could say, I would think, “Wow, I’m going to have more allies, people who will mirror my experience.” So why don’t I just feel happy and excited when I hear that people are breaking from their parents? And that’s the question that I’d like to talk about here.
I also think as I explore that question, it brings up for me why I basically pretty much never recommend that people break away from their parents. I do say it can be healthy in general that people take distance from their parents to learn about themselves, to learn about their parents, to learn about their relationship with their parents—maybe the healthy sides, certainly the unhealthy sides. But when it comes to actual specific people, meaning when I talk to specific people, I pretty much never say, “Listen, I think you should take distance from your parents.” Basically, what I think it is, is I say it as a general suggestion for life that it could be healthy. It could be healthy; it could be a learning opportunity. I also think our world would be a better place if more people, or lots and lots of people, took distance from their families of origin. It would help our world evolve. But when it comes to specific cases, specific people, I don’t want to recommend it.
And I think this really connects with why I feel so sad and uncomfortable when I hear people talk about breaking from their parents. And I think the reason is, is I know, first of all, how absolutely and incredibly painful it is to break from your parents. It has been hell for me. It has been probably the most painful thing I’ve gone through in my adult life. I think about having been broken up with by girlfriends who I was totally in love with and how horribly painful that was. Well, this is worse. Breaking from my family—far more painful, far more protracted.
I also think when I’ve broken up with girlfriends or girlfriends have broken up with me, when I’ve taken distance from very toxic friends, sometimes when I figured out these people are not that healthy, what I found is the world is generally pretty supportive, pretty understanding. Just like when I hear women, especially—I hear this not infrequently—women who are victims of domestic violence in their partnerships with their husbands or boyfriends, and they break away from their husband or their partner, the world is often very supportive. They say, “Good, that’s a good thing. You’re taking an empowering move. You’re taking responsibility for yourself. You’re setting boundaries with a very unhealthy person.”
But what I’ve found—I’ve seen it in myself and my relationship with my parents, and I’ve seen it with lots of other people—when people take distance from their parents, especially from both of their parents, the world is generally not very supportive at all. And then I think about my family system, my greater family system, beyond just the unit of my parents. My family system was downright pathologizing of me for breaking away from my parents. Nobody supported it in my family, and these were family members who even knew how toxic my parents were.
The irony also is that my parents were already long since divorced when I took distance from them. When I broke away from my parents, my parents were split up with each other. They didn’t even like each other! Yet my mother very much took my father’s side when I broke away from my father, and my father very much, very loudly, took my mother’s side when I broke away from my mother. Even though my parents had broken away from each other, the irony being my parents came together as adults. When they got together in a couple, they had a relational contract as two adults. And when they broke away from each other, they broke that contract with each other. They broke that contract with me.
They got married, and they had me in the midst of that contract—till death do us part, they said. And yet that’s not what they did at all. They both cheated on each other. They both did horrible betrayals of each other, and then eventually they quit the relationship. They broke apart my family’s system. Yet when I, who was a child, a baby when I came into this family, I never made any sort of relational contract with my parents to stay close to them. When I broke away for my own healthiness, I never did any cheating on my parents in any way. In fact, I was devotely committed to them. Well, when I broke away, whoa—completely unacceptable, incredibly painful, incredibly confusing for me.
So when I hear people talking about breaking away from their parents, even though when I see their parents might be very disturbed people and I see the real potential for healing and health in the people who are breaking away from their parents, I still think, “Whoa, you are heading for the waters of hell. This is probably very likely going to be extremely painful for you, extremely confusing. You may be entering a world where you get no support from society.” We live in a society that profoundly supports people staying close to their toxic parents, forgiving them, loving them anyway—all the things that I was taught to do as a child. The things that I did and became very good at doing as a child, which killed me on the inside, killed my spirit, killed my self-esteem. And yet the world, my family system, the school system, my greater society—all the people I know, my friends, my friends’ parents—they all supported me staying in the system. And when I broke away, it was very, very uncomfortable.
Even nowadays, when I tell people, “Yeah, I’ve broken away from my parents. They were extremely toxic people,” often question, “What’s wrong with him? He must have real problems. Why would he do that? Why doesn’t he know how to forgive? He must be a very unhealthy person.” I feel that. So when I hear people talking about breaking away from their parents, I wonder to what degree do they have the strength to really do this?
Then I think about another thing that I’ve seen, another thing that gives me concern when I hear people talking about breaking away from their parents, and that is that I’ve seen some people that actually crash and burn emotionally, socially, after they break away from their parents. They literally just cannot handle the independence of being outside of the family system, no matter how toxic their family system was to them. A lot of people are still much more dependent emotionally, unconsciously, even financially on their parents, and they just have a very, very hard time dealing with life outside of the family system.
And so that’s a big reason also that on a specific level, I rarely tell people, “You should get away from your family,” even when I see their family can be very toxic. I like to think that people need to be very, very strong. They have to have a lot of internal resources and external resources—often really good friends, allies, work, things like that—before they’re really ready to handle the absolute hell that is coming when people break away from their parents.
So I think about this now. I wonder also when I feel sad when I hear people talking about breaking away from their parents, do I also feel sad for the sake of their parents? Because I know…
That myself breaking away from my parents. My parents were really sad about this. I think they still are very sad about it. I think in many ways it broke their hearts. At least that’s what they think. At least that’s what they’ve said. That’s been the message that they’ve shared with the greater family system, the world, with me, that I broke their hearts by breaking away.
But really underneath it, what I see is not that I broke their hearts in any way. In fact, it was the opposite. They repeatedly broke my heart by rejecting me, abandoning me, violating me, mistreating me, treating me like a person who didn’t really count very much. So in one way, they broke my heart. But on a deeper level, I think what really happened—and I think this is the real key and what I want to talk about here right now—is that I didn’t break my parents’ heart by breaking away. My parents’ parents broke their hearts when they were children by doing all the things to my parents when they were little that later on, a generation later, my parents ended up doing to me.
My grandparents, my four grandparents, broke my parents’ heart, killed them emotionally, crushed them, broke them down, stripped them from whole sides of their healthy selves, didn’t allow them to be who they really were, traumatized them, traumatized them terribly. And my parents couldn’t face that on an emotional level. They couldn’t deal with it. They couldn’t get away from their parents. They were still looking for the rest of their lives, their parents’ lives, for their parents to love them. And when that didn’t work—and it never did work, and it never could work because my grandparents were too sick, too troubled, too limited—they were broken by their own parents going a generation earlier.
So when it didn’t work for my parents to get properly loved and nurtured and cared about by their own parents, they turned their unresolved childhood needs that their parents couldn’t meet unto me. And they looked at me as a parent figure who was supposed to take care of them, nurture them, love them unconditionally in the ways that their parents didn’t and couldn’t.
And when I broke away from my parents because I realized how sick they were for me, how stunting they were for me, how they killed my self-esteem, how I would never be able to be a full and happy and healed and healthy and productive and useful person in the world as long as I was close to them because they would always crush me down and break me. When I broke away from them, it opened up their historical wound that their parents did to them, and it brought back to them, to their mind, that feeling that their hearts were broken, and they blamed me for it.
But the truth is, I had no responsibility to heal their hearts, to heal their broken hearts. But they thought that I did, and that’s why they felt that I had committed a sin against them and against the family system by breaking away. My job was to be loyal to the family system at all costs. I was to be loyal to the family system before I was to be loyal to my own self. That is how my parents trained me, on pain of rejection.
And when I broke away, yes, they felt their hearts were broken. But deep down, I knew it. I hadn’t broken their hearts because it wasn’t my job to fix their hearts. But I see this with other people when they break away from their parents. Oh, their parents can feel so rejected. It can break their hearts, and I do feel sad about that. I don’t like the idea of anybody feeling pain.
I also think of myself as a therapist. I worked as a therapist with many parents who had problems with their children. That’s kind of a normal thing for therapists to deal with. And I always tried to help parents reconcile with their children. One of the basic ways I tried to help parents reconcile with their children is I tried to help the parents become healthier, become more mature, have better boundaries, work out their own childhood issues so they weren’t putting so much expectation or unresolved unconscious needs onto their children.
I tried to help the parents become more mature people, more parental figures, better role models so that their children could lean on their parents more—children who were still children, sometimes children who were adults. Sometimes I tried to help the parents take better responsibility for themselves so that they could change their behavior. They could be more mature—the kind of things that made their own children less likely to want to break away from them.
Well, I think as I close this video, what I would like to share is, in returning to that subject of how I feel pain and sadness when I hear people talking about wanting to take distance from their parents, what I’ve seen again and again and again is that when people take distance from their parents, especially if there’s any degree of historical healthiness in their relationship with their parents, it is going to be very difficult. It is going to require that person who’s taking distance to grow massively, to develop better connections with other people quickly, to look within themselves, to become healthier, to become stronger, to fight for themselves.
And what I’ve seen is that can be overwhelming for a lot of people. And so for me to feel more confident in saying, “Yeah, I really support you in breaking from your family,” I often want to really have that confidence inside myself that this person is doing something that is good for themselves, that they are ready to handle that hell that is coming down the turnpike.
And so I think that’s my final message. I really hope that anybody who is considering breaking from their parents, taking extreme distance from their parents, even exploring what it’s like to set good healthy boundaries, even initial boundaries with their parents who might be behaving in toxic ways, I would hope these people are at some level ready to handle the stress, the conflict, the pain that will be coming up—that feeling of loss, that feeling of isolation, that feeling of abandonment that comes up.
Hmm, all things that I’ve written about in my book, Breaking from Your Parents. I’m actually so glad I wrote that book. That was a terrifying book for me to write. That was the first time I’d really spoken publicly in a really detailed way about what I went through. And since then, I’ve heard a lot of people who actually have responded very positively to that book, learned a lot of things, and I actually learned a lot of things from writing it. It actually furthered my process of being able to take healthy distance from my family and realizing for myself why I did it and what the value in it is and also the difficulty in it and how difficult it can really be for so many people.