TW: Abuse
Okay y'all let's get real.
I'm gonna try and write this without using too much lingo, forgive me.
Almost a few years back now, I went fully No-Contact with almost all of my family, but specifically my parents. Honestly, I won't go into the details here -it's not part of this story- but it was a long time coming and an incident finally pushed me over the brink, and I knew that I wouldn't be able to live a happy life with them in it, so I left.
Since then I've made quite a few positive changes in my life that no longer involve them. I've started therapy (I'd been all my life, but now without their influence), I'm on medication, and I'm happier in general. I've also taken more...extreme measures, such as moved without telling any of my family the location or address, and changed my name (my FULL NAME). It felt like an exaggerated reaction at the time, but honestly, upon hearing about others who have been in similar situations as me, I found my actions were not in any way new.
When people are going though hard time, they look to communities or other validations of their pain. For me, this was looking at the deep dives of Estranged Parents forums.
These places are forums for parents whose children have cut them off or gone NC. Without ranting too much, that means that these forums are usually populated by abusive parents who "have no idea why their ungrateful child left them".
You know what? I'm just gonna full on quote here
For several years now I've followed blogs about narcissists and other abusers, written by victims of abuse. They're powerful tools for recovery, and powerful testimonials to the impact of emotional abusers on other people's lives. What's been missing is the abusers' perspective on the abuse. The narcissists I see online don't write about their relationships with their children and close friends; they hardly write about their own partners, except as props in the narcissist's ongoing drama. I assumed that there was no way to get the abusers' side of the story, that abusers are smart enough to not incriminate themselves in their own blogs, and like hell would they get together with other abusers to discuss abuse.
I was wrong.
The keywords to find abusers' support communities are "estranged parents" and "grandparents' rights."
(This and further quotes/images come from Down the Rabbit Hole
The world of estranged parents' forums)
Reading this blog has been the equivalent of a child in those stories where someone else does a whole bunch of heinous stuff and the child gets blamed for it, but in the end the Real Wrongdoer is caught and the kid gets sweet vindication for all the times they told the world that they had done nothing wrong. Reading these quotes and stories was just added validation that what I had been through was bad, was terrible, was unacceptable, was something that wasn't normal.
Look at this. Just look at it. Showing this off is like, I feel, the equivalent of someone showing off a new car they found if they're a collector, or someone showing high scores in the video games they play. Ugh, it's just....perfect.
That's because I've lived this. I've lived this, and no amount of telling someone about it from my side will ever make full sense of the issue. Yes, you can be fully told over and over and over again by your friends and loved ones that everything you went through was horrible, that you were right and valid to cut off contact with your family, that they respect your decision, etc etc, but real or imagined, you feel this twinge of judgement. You feel like saying you shut out your family always raises eyebrows and an undercurrent of:
"Well, that's a bit extreme, isn't it"
Every. Single. Time.
And it sucks. And I can't make it not suck.
So seeing this, seeing this has been....helpful. Originally I wanted to show it to other people in my life, and that's how this blog was pitched to me.
But, I presented this blog to other people, and, to be frank, it really really creeped them out.
I'm not here to opine about their reactions, though, and I'll admit, I was so excited to be understood that I was hella zealous to show this off, even with it's major content warnings.
I'm here to talk about how this affected me.
Once I felt seen, I began the process of reading this entire blog. I read it all in nearly a day, and then I read it again. And again. And again, and again. I read passages, I read affirmations, I read the memes that these awful people shared back and forth. I read their testimonies, I read the analysies, I read metatext, I read it all.
And I felt....so sad, after awhile.
I can't exactly describe it, which is why it's going on this blog, but after the initial high of being seen wore off, I was just tired. I'm going to try to pick it apart as I write this:
The biggest reason I've always felt so judged, even when supported, is because it's only been my side of the story. I can show the scars, the trauma, the writing, the communication, but at the end of the day it's only my word. We as a society exist in such a state of "Family Matters No Matter What" that even though everything I've gone through was so damaging to me that I felt my only way out was to leave without a trace, I still feel judged because I didn't just keep them at enough of an arms length that I still kept in contact until the day one of us died.
See how these people, these "estranged parents" think, allows me to know it's not just my side of the story, that I actually was in a situation for which these people are remorseless, that they weren't "Just doing their best", and that they do not wish to apologize for their actions. Showing this, though, presents a new problem: it's too much for the unfamiliar.
That sounds so edgy to say and I apologize for that. I'm serious though; that's been my experience. We as a generation have so much of a shared experience of shitty parents, yet there seems to be a level of "acceptable shitty" to share. We have memes about parents not apologizing, about having to be our parents' therapists, about bad correction techniques. But for some reason, showing them this?
That's too far. That can't be real. That challenges even their worst notions of a shitty parent.
And that? That's not even that bad. But that doesn't get to be a meme, that doesn't get to be hugged out in community support. That's not a shared experience. That's weird and you shouldn't show it. That's private.
And maybe that's what makes me sad. I get to see the other side, see it, feel validated, but that doesn't change how this experience is still so.....isolating. It doesn't feel as liberating as you would believe. Like yes, as I said before, I do feel better overall, and that this was a necessary step, but I didn't have anyone cheering for me. I didn't have some sort of Fight Song Anthem playing.
And that's why reading the blog hurt, after awhile.
I don't know. This isn't to say that my friends and loved ones don't care about me- far from it, they are my truest support system. But there's just....a wall. Almost all the time, that's okay, and will continue to be.
But I guess for the purposes of hashing out these feelings, I have to say the words "They just don't get it" unironically, and I hate doing that.