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Here’s a free video on abuse (in brain-educated 2024 terms) that I just released.
And here’s an easy to read article on the prevalence of family estrangement in the 2020s.
From the perspective of a CPTSD recovery researcher, here’s what I can add.
Many of us have heard the term “NC,” or, “No Contact,” in recent years.
It’s the practice of eliminating contact with one’s family in order to create physical, mental, and emotional distance which allows for cognitive reassessment of patterns, healthy individuation, and holistic healing.
In the complex trauma recovery community, it’s a near-necessity.
Due to the nature of our trauma (pervasive, layered, intertwining traumas that appear “normal” due to early exposure and our place in hierarchical family systems that support shared abuse/adaptation), we have little hope of identifying “what’s fucked,” let alone “rewiring the brain” if we maintain regular contact with the people who drafted the blueprints.
“You can bring the boy out of traumatic circumstances, but you can’t rip the traumatic relationship programming out of the boy.”
In order to keep ourselves moving forward, we have to create space from the people who’ve taught our brains to automatically respond to them in historical (regressive) ways.
On a more nefarious note, we also find that our families are overtly opposed to our complex trauma recovery.
Many of us attempt to enlist our families in our recoveries, through re-education, pleading for behavioral change, and expressing our newly-recognized experiences… And find that our efforts are not only futile – they create additional abuse.
It’s not unusual for the traumatized family to punish the individual(s) who attempt to leave the shared narratives and lifestyles of the clan. In fact, it often seems as though they try to force the healing individual into a regressive mindset.
“If we can get you to crumble back into a disempowered state, perhaps you’ll give up on questioning the family circus,” appears to be the mentality behind this abusive approach.
And, so, the individual who’s already putting massive effort into changing their brain has a new task of continual self-defense in the presence of their family.
Not only does it sting to realize their loved ones don’t seem to want them to be happy or healthy, but the cognitive dissonance and mental games can feel “crazymaking.”
With no way to get through to the family or create holistic change that benefits the entire group, and with mounting evidence that “these people are actively working against my best interest,” complex trauma recoverers find they have little to no choice –
Go No Contact with the family or Give Up on their own lives.
And with more and more of us recognizing “What abuse IS” in the 2020’s…
As well as the impact that early life events had on our lifelong mental functioning…
It’s really no wonder that family estrangement is at an all-time high.
Because our families don’t agree with the information that’s been coming out.
Traumatized Families choose to stick with their old definition of “abuse”.
The generationally-defined idea that “if you’re not being beaten, you’re in a healthy relationship,” is an insideous cultural stan that doesn’t seem to be losing its power.
With this mindset, all mental and emotional abuse is easily swept away. The accusers are labeled “soft-brained, overly-sensitive complainers.” And the abusers feel righteously indignant because “they aren’t imparting the same suffering that they received, themselves, so where’s their pat on the back?”
In this case, if you weren’t abused physically (and often), it’s unlikely that the people who raised you are going to be sympathetic to your experience or willing to change their behaviors.
In fact, it’s likely that mockery, scorn, scapegoating, further abuse, and exile await the CPTSD recoverer, as the family unit protects their chosen narratives and perspectives.
That means, in their attempts to prove that “they weren’t ever abusive,” the family becomes MORE abusive.
Which can create dangerous situations for the semi-recovered brain, as it battles with old programming versus “survival” versus newly available data and social norms that it’s trying to turn into practical life experiences.
The uprising in abuse, in the name of “never being abusive,” can be mind-boggling and exhaustive, as the recovering individual attempts to strengthen and practice their new patterns, skirting away from fearful and disempowered living… and their family unit seemingly torments them with upticks in volitility, cruelty, and antagonism that rip out the foundation they’re attempting to lay.
And so, with no ability to convince the family that they are, in fact, still being abusive, which would serve as logical evidence that they were, also, previously abusive, the complex trauma recoverer has no other choice but to remove the antagonists from their healing life.
They “Go NC” to save themselves.
And estrangement is the result.
Finally, progress can be made. A sense of “sanity” and “reason” can be found.
Which is not to say there isn’t grief in going No Contact.
The unfortunate truth is, we fight for our traumatized families but eventually find that the battle is too large for us to weather.
After finding out about CPTSD most of us attempt to bring our new knowledge, less stressful existences, and potential for healing to our families.
We attempt to “reach a hand back” and “pull them out of the trauma pit they reside in.”
But the trials are futile.
As much as our family members may truly love us…
Their self-protective instincts are often stronger.
When asked to confront their lifetimes of traumatized living (and potential abuses), the threat to their sense of normalcy and sense of self is too great.
Whether they mean to or not, they resort to Black and White thinking – pushing us into the “evil” pile while using any means possible to bolster support around their “good” way of existing.
In attempting to save them, we become the enemy.
And at that point, there’s not much we can do to convince them otherwise. All attempts to demonstrate love, healing, and acceptance are transmuted into “attacks on their way of being.”
Which results in rejection, abandonment, and exile.
… For the person who was attempting to strengthen family bonds and improve life for everyone.
Who then goes NC and is ironically called “the estranger of the family.”
The worst part being? For all the backasswardness of the situation and for all of the benefits that NC offers to the healing individual…
It comes with a deep sense of loss, grief, and wrongness.
The very feelings that often underly our original CPTSD in the first place.
So, while family estrangement offers respite and relief so recovery is possible… For many, it also creates a new event to recover FROM.
The dissolution of any remaining remnant of “family.” As well as the “undue grief” that accompanies the event.
Family estrangement is not a fun, trendy, thing to do in 2024.
It’s a brutal necessity, when no other option remains.
In my eyes, the big “estrangement movement” is built on two problems.
Failure to understand “Abuse”
Failure to understand how child brains turn into adult brains.
So let’s redefine “Abuse.” ‘
Abuse (in 2024)
I just put out this free video/podcast on the topic
But the gist is, “Abuse” can take any form. Physical, mental, emotional, etc.
It simply relies on one problematic approach to relationships:
Abuse = attempting to control another individual’s behaviors rather than controlling the behaviors of oneself.
This is generally accomplished through means of vengeance, punishment, neglect & dehumanization, and/or torment.
They can be subtle – dirty looks, deniable verbal jabs, cameoflauged physical threats. Or they can be overt methods of abuse – screaming, intimidation, physical harm.
Abuse can look, sound, and feel many ways.
But the result is the same.
The abused individual loses control of their own mental/emotional/behavioral processes, and instead, these aspects of their lives are dictated by the requirements and preferences of people around them.
When an individual does not have full conscious control of their self – when their brain is set to “scan and adjust for the needs of others in order to feel safe” – they are under the control of abuse.
The abused child brain will become an abuse-controlled adult brain
It’s baffling to try to understand how some people don’t comprehend this, but…
What a tiny brain learns to do to survive… will become a significant, potentially life-defining, pattern in adulthood.
We adapt to incredible situations, rapidly, as children.
We have no idea what is and isn’t normal.
We accept what we’re told and shown.
We create behavioral patterns in response to what will keep us warm, safe, fed, and “loved” in some form.
We also create behavioral patterns to avoid whatever threatens any of those pillars of life.
And as adults?
Our brains will do the same. Repeating the same patterns. Pushing us into the same behaviors. Without any conscious awareness that this is what’s driving our responses or forming the life that we live.
In other words, our brains repeat what we learned as children.
They create lives that correspond with those early life lessons.
And even when we’re in the process of “healing” and changing our historic processes… our brains can be “hijacked” with incredible ease, throwing us back in time-space and forcing us into those historical patterns once more.
In other words, the ways we’re abused as children will continue to be the ways we’re abusable as adults.
These will be the ways that we lose control of our own brains, emotions, and behaviors, even when we have the maturity and education to “know better” and “intend better.”
Pulling it all together.
Our families deny the 2020’s, brain-educated, definition of “Abuse.”
They protect their own abuse by denying ours.
They refuse to see how child experiences create adult experiences.
They refrute any potential “blame” in forming who we’ve become.
They reject any “traumatized living” in their own past.
And, when we attempt to bring any of these things to their attention, we become a threat to their sense of normalcy and self.
Often, this comes with an escalation of the very abuse that they deny enacting in the first place.
Our brains respond historically, throwing us back into childhood mindsets and adaptive survival behaviors.
This contradicts any attempts to heal, retraumatizing the CPTSD recoverer.
They may be triggered to enact self-harm, as they enact introjected abuse from their family.
Or, they may simply find themselves living in a state of distress, anxiety, hypervigilance, etc. as their child-mindset puts them on guard for further dangers from the family unit.
This stress can easily be generalized, so the individual is in a state of fear in all circumstances – expecting abuse from everyone, everywhere, since even their family has been proven dangerous.
The cycle breaker has no choice but to exit the family hierarchy for their own mental/emotional/physical safety.
And to regain control of their own brain / life.
Which is a trauma of its own, that comes with significant grief, loss, and “otherness.”
In other words…
Family estrangement isn’t fun, trendy, or light hearted.
It’s an unfortunate experience that more and more of us share, due to our ability to re-educate ourselves in the internet era versus the instinct of others to refuse new information that would paint them in a negative light.
When we can’t find common ground…
When we can’t convince them to learn something new…
When we can’t teach them the same self-acceptance that we’re willing to offer them, even as our past abusers…
Abuse escalates.
Our awareness of abuse (how it could be vs. how it IS) escalates.
And, trapped in a deadlock, we have no choice but to go our separate ways.
Allowing them to continue their unhealed, traumatized, abusive ways of living…
While we set out for greener, healthier, pastures.
But that doesn’t mean we make that journey without mourning the loss of the people who were supposed to love and protect us.
Do you have a story of family estrangment in the face of mismatching definitions of “abuse?”
What drove the decision?
Did it come with (confusing) grief?
How do you cope?
Do you have any tricks for supporting your self through the challenges?
What do you wish a younger you would have known about abuse and traumatized family programming?
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