I can’t get over how good this blog is that I just found. Here’s some excerpts from another winner.
My goal was never to go ‘no contact’. ‘No contact’ was a result of the decisions that “THEY” made.
I was asking for something that I needed. I was asking to be treated with equal value and equal respect. My motive was for having a better relationship based on the true definition of love, which values equally ALL parties in the relationship and the response that I got was “NO”.
This isn’t my fault. I tried and I wanted our relationship to be one rooted in love and mutuality. My motive is based in love. Their motives are based in the misuse of their power for the purpose of control.
Therefore, I don’t feel guilty; I have nothing to feel guilty about…
When a person is not heard or given the right to have a voice or if a person is consistently devalued or disrespected, then the relationship (or contact itself) is conditional. When I looked at who was the one being ‘conditional’~ when I looked at who actually held the cards and who actually makes the rules and who set those rules in place, I saw the truth about the conditions on the relationship. These are all things that I had to take a look at when I realized why I was so tired in the first place and how I realized that ‘no contact’ was more of a result of the dysfunction and not a choice I made.
And today I have realized that there is a difference between me becoming a happier, healthier person, and me having relationships with my siblings and their spouses. They are not the same thing. One does not require the other.
Maybe they are, in fact, mutually exclusive. Maybe the one has caused the lack of the other. But I can be happy and have a good life without having to repair those bonds. Partly because it is not really me who has broken those bonds; partly because those bonds were not very strong or loving, and so they weren’t contributing much to my happiness anyway. But mostly because not having those bonds doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me.
Yes, it sucks to have to say, “I have five siblings but they don’t speak to me and I don’t speak to them.” Yes, it sucks
not to be invited to family events. But it doesn’t mean I’m the one who is “bad” or wrong. It doesn’t mean that I can’t also say, “because my mother was mentally ill and narcissistic and she poisoned all my older siblings, but I was saved by my dad.”
I’ve pretty much accepted that there’s nothing I can do to fix things – the next steps are all in other people’s hands — but I ALSO don’t have to sit around and wait for them to take action in order for me to move on from this. (And not in the “you just need to get over it” bullshit sense of “moving on” that they want to see.)
Which is a good thing that I don’t need them to do anything, because they obviously won’t. But hey, that’s OK for the purposes of healing and moving on, because I don’t need the one to do the other.
