The bloodroot are blooming and estrangement is liberating.

 

    It's always exciting when the bloodroots are blossoming because their blossoms only last for about two weeks in early spring and then they're gone. The leaves last basically all year though and they are really beautiful too. I love the wobbly shape they have. 

    The bloodroot is a native plant to this Appalachian region and the Cherokee (ᏣᎳᎩ) people have been using them for dye for thousands of years and still do today. I went to the Qualla Arts and Crafts Co-op the other day and looked at the beautiful baskets there that they have dyed with black walnut ink, bloodroot and yellow root. 

    On a completely different note, I want to write about abuse and family estrangement again. I recently received an email from a friend of my mom's who I haven't seen since I was a little girl. We haven't been in touch with their family since then either. 

    When I started using Mailchimp to send out my newsletters about my art, I had a mailing list of about 200 people in my gmail account. I occasionally sent out newsletters to that list just through my regular email.  There wasn't any way to add it to Mailchimp without putting every single email in individually. There was, however, a way that I could just automatically transfer every single email in my gmail account. So I just decided to do this instead. It was easier, and I figured that there were probably people on there who might be interested, and if people weren't interested, they could just unsubscribe. So, as a result, I have a whole bunch of people on my newsletter list who did not sign up and I don't even really know who they are. Somehow some of my mother's friends from way way back ended up being on there. 

    When two of my mother's friends on this list started emailing me at the same time, I got nervous. I am estranged from my mother and it felt like she was trying to reach out to me through them. I even asked one of them if this was the case. She said that it wasn't. Recently though, the second one suggested we connect when she comes to North Carolina this summer. I then went ahead and told her my concerns. 

    It seems obvious to me that it would be uncomfortable for me to visit with my mother's friend when I am estranged from my mother. Doesn't that seem obvious? I feel like it is. But I guess that didn't occur to this woman. She wrote me back saying that she is sad that I'm estranged from my mom and, "Aren't all families a little dysfunctional?" 

    I want to start talking and writing about this because there is so much confusion out there about this issue. For the most part, I have had so much support in my life about this. The vast majority of people in my life have been completely non-judgmental and have even praised me for having healthy boundaries. I think this probably has to do in part with the fact that I work in mental health. People who work in mental health know first hand the damage that dysfunctional families wreak on people's lives and well-being. They are actively helping those people heal, not encouraging them to go back to those dysfunctional relationships. One of the most helpful experiences I had leading up to becoming estranged from my mother was that I was working closely with a client at CooperRiis Healing Community who was in his 50's. He had a toxic relationship with his mother that was an ongoing source of pain for him. I remember thinking; 'This is what happens when you don't cut those ties! You end up in an inpatient program for people with severe mental illness in your 50's!' 

    When I began to cut ties with my family, something incredible happened. I did not expect it. I went to Penland School of Crafts for a concentration in encaustic painting for 8 weeks immediately after I talked with my mom about needing a break from her and it was so indescribably incredible, the feeling of a weight leaving my life. It was as if my life opened up finally into the life I was always meant to live. I cannot emphasize this enough. It was so profound and so beautiful. This just continued for the next three years. After Penland, I made huge banners for the Wild Goose Festival that summer, which I absolutely loved doing. Then I went to Ireland for art school at the Burren College of Art, which was an absolutely amazing experience. Then I came back to Asheville and got a studio and created beautiful huge paintings that I loved and that were consistently selling to total strangers for thousands of dollars. It was so incredible the feeling of my life finally opening up for me after years and years of depression and struggle. 

    What ended up happening was that my dad came to visit, uninvited, and I agreed to meet with him. I regret this now. I think it was because of this visit that I began to go downhill. I had a very emotionally dark and difficult winter after this visit. I struggled with panic attack feelings that lasted all winter long. I reconnected with my family without really thinking it through and without working with a therapist and without really being ready. It was another three years before I finally decided to disconnect again. Now it's been about 4 years since I disconnected the second time. This time feels different. This time I don't feel like the world is finally opening up to me. I just feel normal. Being disconnected from my family feels like the most obvious thing in the world. The feeling of being connected with them for those three years in between felt so weird, like trying to fit into old clothes that didn't suit me anymore. I have grown and matured and changed and it was as if I was expected to just be the exact same as I was before.

    None of my family members asked me about why I had been estranged. None of them seemed to be interested in doing any repair work. It was as if everyone expected me to just sweep everything under the rug and jump right back into the dysfunctional dynamics that I had participated in before. What's strange is that I don't think it occurs to any of them what one does when they go to graduate school for clinical counseling. I wonder if they know that every class is like group therapy. We talk openly about our family dynamics and history. We're required to be in personal therapy. We write papers about our family background. It's an open conversation and I have been talking about my father's abuse and my dysfunctional family openly with everyone in my life for many years now, including my teachers and classmates. Also, we are encouraged to learn about and have healthy boundaries, be assertive, and learn how to do repair work. None of these things are present or respected in my family's dynamic. In fact, it's the opposite. I get shamed or ignored when I attempt them.

    Repair work is hard, but it is essential for healthy relationships. The alternative is sweeping things under the rug. It doesn't work. It festers. The issues don't go away. That's how you end up with fake relationships.

    I love this quote by Martha Beck, which is in one of her classes I bought online called The Integrity Cleanse, 

"So here’s the deal you guys. The only way to have a genuine, intimate, loving relationship with anyone is to tell them the truth about how you feel in that relationship and why. If you can’t do that the relationship is pretend, as you said, and it has no capacity to nourish you and it cripples you. It’s like trying to live in one of those little dog crates. It’s like you’ve been shoved into this secret and you function within that." 

    This is how I feel about every relationship in my family. Martha is the one who taught me to check in with myself all the time and learn to stop making decisions from a place of obligation and guilt, but instead to make decisions from a place of genuine desire. Living this way ended my visits home. 

    I want to say to this friend of my mom's: No. Not all families are dysfunctional. It is very possible to have a family where the members treat each other with genuine love and respect. They are out there. And the only way for that to become the norm, not the exception, is for people to start saying no to disrespect. 

    I truly believe that it is an act of revolution to become estranged from one's family. It's a form of activism. When we speak up and say, "Actually, I'm not okay with being treated disrespectfully and I have every right to walk away from this relationship and that's what I'm going to do." That is a radical way of creating a better world for everyone. I really believe that. The more people do this, the better world we will live in. Staying in abusive relationships and putting up with disrespect is the old way. It keeps the dysfunctional status quo in place. There have been many things put in place to actually force people (especially women) to have to stay in unhappy and unhealthy relationships, but those systems are breaking down and we have the freedom to leave now. I don't know why on earth I would stay connected to people who don't treat me with respect now that I am an adult and I don't have to. That makes no sense to me at all. I feel sad that people like my mother's friend think that every family is dysfunctional. I think about this episode from the Well for Culture podcast by Chelsey Luger and Those Collins. Jillene Joseph from the Native Wellness Institute says, 

“It’s interesting that we’ve hosted hundreds of gatherings and celebrations in our home and on two different occasions one of our visitors told someone else who brought them into our home, they said, ‘Is that family always like that? They must be fake. No-one can be that nice.’ And we all kind of laughed when they shared that, but when you really think about it, that’s sad that someone thinks that people can’t be happy and nice, you know.” 

    The reason that there are so many dysfunctional families in White people culture is because White culture is dysfunctional. Families are the building blocks of culture. It is an epidemic. The pervasiveness of it, does not make it okay. It's not an issue of "The human condition". It's an issue of a culture that is a macrocosm of an abusive relationship. 

    There are two things that really stood out to me about what my mom's friend said to me. She says she's sad that I'm estranged from my mother. On the one hand, I understand that she is my mother's friend and so there's sadness in the situation for her. But for me, becoming estranged from my family has been the most loving choice I have ever made for myself and it is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I am not sad at all about it. So, it's a little weird and hurtful that she would be sad. It's almost like she's saying: I feel sad, so will you go back into a situation that was profoundly destructive and damaging for you so that I can be happy. It's like if you knew a person who spent 30 years in an abusive relationship and then finally got into therapy and became stronger and started to distance herself from that relationship and eventually got out of it and got her life back and then started to really love her life and pursue her dreams and was happy and then you walk up to her and say, "I'm sad that you separated from your partner. You really should go back to that relationship." That's how it feels to me. So weird. 

    What she should be sad about is that my mom is in an abusive marriage and she's chosen to stay in that marriage for decades and allow herself and her children to be abused. That's what's sad, not the fact that I finally got out of it.

    It also minimizes the situation to say, "Aren't all families a little bit dysfunctional?" To me, that's like saying, "Well, you are over-dramatizing things. You should just be okay with being disrespected and abused. It's selfish of you to want to be treated respectfully. This is just how things are. You don't have the right to demand to be treated with respect." It's gas lighting. This is how abusive families function. It's like the building block of the abusive family. "This is normal. If you don't like it, you're being selfish. There must be something wrong with you." That is the central message of the abusive family/relationship. This email from my mom's friend felt like a blast from my past, that way of thinking, that messaging. I am so glad I don't live in that world anymore.

    I want to say this to anyone who still lives in a fucked up world like that one. You deserve to be treated with respect. Always. You deserve to feel safe in your relationships and with the people in your life. You have every right to distance yourself and even cut people out of your life who you don't feel safe around or who insist on treating you with disrespect. Your body will tell you how you feel. Of course these people will say things like, "I'm not treating you with disrespect! You're such a drama queen." But your body will not lie. Listen to your body and get honest with yourself about how you feel. When you are with someone who genuinely treats you with respect and you genuinely feel safe around them, you do not have to debate it in your head. You just know. 

    Here is a clip of Paola, The Cottage Fairy from YouTube where she talks about relationships and the need to feel safe and respected. 

Here's the link to the full video on YouTube: 

https://youtu.be/q8aczw5Ce6E?si=gxc5qnC0rOrbnyWh

    It doesn't matter if it's a romantic relationship, a family relationship or any relationship. The same concept applies. When I watched this part of the video, there is still a part of me that feels shocked. "I'm allowed to  expect to feel safe and respected in my relationships all the time? Surely that's too much to ask." This is the old messaging that I grew up with. 

    So from bloodroot to estrangement. Somehow I will learn to weave all these things together in a cohesive way. In the meantime, thanks for reading and I hope that you feel empowered to separate yourself from people you don't feel safe around.