We Don't Know Until We Know

I admire the person who is smart enough to have exited their toxic family cult as a young adult. To you I say kudos, kiddo, you escaped early enough to truly live your own life! Still, leaving family at any age is an excruciating decision with far-reaching consequences. A decision to abandon such a primal group as family goes against our very nature. Who does not want a loving family unit? Even when we heal fully (and we will), the twinge of longing for real parents who loved us, will always course through our veins–it is a primal thing, the need for belonging–no matter what age. So, though we heal, we will continue to long. 

And while some make it out early, many survivors of toxic family cults sadly are not able to make their escape until later in life. When we finally wake up enough to begin our excruciating exit from the cult, we’re dismayed by our own lack of common knowledge or social behavior. 

For many of us, the heartbreaking reality of our upbringing bears down on us like a December storm. When we are finally free to venture forth to events such as family reunions we were previously barred from because the “others” of the relatives were not good enough for our parents (thus, those members were shunned), we discover how good and kind and messily imperfect our relatives can be. We find they’ve always been quite the opposite from what our own cold, cruel and controlling parents said about them. We find we actually like our relatives a whole lot better in their presence than with our immediate family.

The question remains, though (and there’s no point torturing ourselves with this) why coudn’t we have gotten to know our extended relatives earlier? Why did it take us so long to “turn on” to the fact that we could leave our birth family?

Then come the negative thoughts.

I missed so darned much! My life is wasted! How can I find meaning, now that I'm half spent?

First of all, we need to remember to go easy on ourselves. At least we “woke” up! Some people never do. Wake up. Become conscious. Get re-integrated back from dis-integration. But you are doing all of that, now!It may be shocking, our newly discovered lack of social skills, because,

1. We may have missed instruction on how to treat important events such as wedding receptions and funerals.

2. We may have missed raising our family the way we saw fit (and not in the manner the toxic birth family pressured us to do).

   3. We may be too late in knowing how to contribute to a successful long-lived marriage free from angst, drama and control. Or better yet, we missed cues on how to increase our odds and choose a better partner with whom to begin a marriage in the first place.

All this we may have missed. How many hulks of wrecked marriages lay strewn around the universe because we simply did not know how to do better because we were brainwashed by a toxic family cult? 

All this, because we didn’t know until we knew. However, bit by bit the “knowing” found a way to drift onto the landscape of our lives and the process of understanding may have taken years to embed in our psyches.

Taking the view of not being so hard on yourself, let's think about it. Growing up in a toxic household means a child is systematically hardwired to never question authority, to not entertain an opinion, to not express feelings. The child learns not to feel, because to feel, to say outloud, always results in reprimand or worse. So the child shuts down and complies, because the child wants to please the authority figures. How on earth could little kid us have known then, what we know now? 

Some say perhaps the knowing comes when we are ready to receive it. Sometimes the knowing doesn’t come until later in life, it takes us that long to recover ourselves from the damage done. Better late than not at all.

No point beating ourselves up over it, now. For years we beat ourselves up for stuff that wasn’t our fault. Time to stop. We didn’t know until we knew. We know better now.