It is painful to have a family that hurts you. It is okay to not want anything to do with your family and yet be grieved by that inclination while also being pained by their hurtfulness toward you. It is okay to know they will be hurtful, to take practice in being unaffected by that, in avoiding them as much as possible, in declining to participate in the drama and yet to still be pained by it regardless.
Family is a deeply inherent instinctual need and having to deny that and seek it elsewhere to varying degrees of success is painful even if it’s ultimately for the best. Our deepest instincts are to find family and camaraderie. Family has always been part of the animal experience of survival and protection. Family has always been life. To have neither or be beholden to toxic interactions in either realm of community or blood and nuclear family is painful on a very human and animal level.
You, my friend, deserve to be honored even in your trials and tribulations. It is ok to deny those who disrespect you for erring, a deeply earth bound experience. It is okay to deny family, former friends, community access to your life when that comes at great personal expense of respecting self and boundaries necessary for your healthy existence on earth. And it is, by extension, ok to feel pain for respecting yourself and your boundaries in denying those hurtful and toxic people access to your life especially when they are people close to you.
We have been taught that family comes first because it does. We have been enculturated to accept our family as is even when that is an act of violence against us. I propose this is misguided and you do not have to accept family at all especially when they do not accept you. To let family, friend, or community commit acts of violence against you in psychological or physical nature is to deny an even more important instinct of self preservation.
It is sickening that we must choose between self preservation or family/community/camaraderie but it is essential. It will be painful and it will cause you distress on levels so deep they are almost imperceptible. Do not back down- you deserve to exist in this and any or all lifetimes in all your flaws. We have found compassion and forgiveness for people wholly evil and yet we cannot extend the same to our kin? If this is so in your realm, leave it and feel the pain but do not doubt that you are making the right choice.
Be thankful and live in gratitude for your own self love and self respect and be tender with yourself as you heal from the harm and rejection that comes for some in this trying time. You are supported and loved and it is ok to feel this way.
Carry on, know you’re not alone. In solidarity my friends. ❤️
sarahmascarah 
Posted on November 23, 2017
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