Rarely, you must turn your back on the family you came from — in order to save yourself.
It is one of the most painful moves a human being can make: giving up your family belonging.
Now, one moment before anyone celebrates and settles comfortably into victimhood, I want to stress — this is a very rare situation.
Why rare? Because turning away from family runs 180 degrees against the normal current of a normal child's mind.
You see, as a child you are programmed to see your mother and father as the best, most protective thing in the world.
And in most cases, that's true.
But not always.
I'm not talking about abuse or criminal neglect. Those are terrible things, but their evil is visible and explicit — relatively easy to recognize and guard against.
I'm talking about damaging moves of the more hidden kind.
For instance: when a parent treats the child as an extension of himself, whose purpose on earth is to glorify, magnify, and justify him — the parent.
For instance: when the criticism hurled at the child, day and night, long ago crossed any sane border and became a terrible process of shrinking and belittling.
For instance: when the parent tries to control every aspect of the child's life (including when the child is 37), usually by means of guilt or money.
And then the son or daughter arrives at a miserable life junction: they must choose between the unbearable on one hand, and the "bad but possible" on the other.
In plain words: they must decide whether to stay in contact with someone who is destroying them psychologically — or turn away, and make peace with the cold loneliness imposed on them, perhaps until the day they die.
And I repeat — it is hard for us to think this way about the families we came from. It isn't natural. It isn't our default. We want to love and honor the people who made us. We want, and need, to lean on them.
But if this is how things stand, then the faster you understand you have no one to lean on, the better off you will be.
The faster you internalize that your joy and your peace of mind depend on you alone, the better you will play your role on the stage.
It does not mean you can't be happy. The road there will simply be less comfortable, and longer.
Good morning. And strength.