Hey FAmily of origin: A post for those in recovery after no contact

Hey Family of Origin-

I went no contact because I can.

That’s really what it came down to. Not your favorite answer. I stopped trying to imagine what is being said about me. I already know how I was treated. Thousands of hours of research, education, and reflection, I have a PhD from the University of Life in Recovery and Healing My Human Heart.

As a child, I didn’t have a choice but to endure the environment you created. It was hell but you know, hell means different things to different people. People make up families. Belonging just wasn’t one of our core values. Our family valued protection of ego over the cost of anyone with a pulse.

I went no contact because there must have been something in my soul code that required me to know how to stand in the middle of rooms watching what it looks like when people don’t live honestly. Makes me sound like a judgmental asshole. But further than that, I had to experience the practices and textures of falling up through life. Somewhere in my 20’s I realized it didn’t matter what I did do or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, growth will always be a betrayal to the conditioning of addiction in our supremacist society. This was when I began to withdraw. I sensed how someone’s vulnerability would always be made into some kind of joke and humiliation would continue to be our common language of communication.

Thus life of a truth-telling Scapegoat.

I went no contact because acknowledgment is a deep and underlying issue. When I started studying systems of power (and my queer identities made sure I would), my grip on all of you began to loosen. I thought I needed you to survive. Rejection was going to hurt too much. Abandonment would kill me. In order for me to dismantle the dysfunction, I became the easy target on purpose. It was an odd finding of placement. Not knowing the world had already made me its scapegoat just by being queer. Used to taking some of the hardest hits, I wasn’t allowed to say that to you either. In a space where the minds lack emotional agility, trauma will be compared and dismissed because somebody always has to have had it harder. Space is hard to come by so I guess you could say I taught myself how to stop caring - the last thing in the world I wanted to know how to do -- just to manage coercive control being called love.

I went no contact because I needed to feel again. When I found myself thinking I’m tired of living numb, it gave me sacred pause. Numb from what, I didn’t know, but oxygen began to rush into the room. A door opened somewhere. I told myself I could always go back if I wanted but first there was something I needed to go see about: The voice calling, forcing me to face what I could not handle as a young person. This was another milestone in my reparenting journey, my queer journey.

I went no contact because my recovery process has included very deliberate, conscious and intentional nervous system repair. It’s the most disgusting, raw, agonizing, grotesque human work anyone could ever do. It’s far from love and light and a little bit of go fuck yourself.

It’s I see my light, I get why you stole it from me, and now I need to move.

The reality wasn’t me walking away. Going no contact was retending to psychological wounds that ached for air. I let my sadness and anger hold me up for as long as they could, knowing I was on borrowed time before the knees buckled. Compassion for myself would mean eventually softening. It took several months after I sent the email to you for my body to catch up. Then, one day, it hit me and there I was sobbing, doubled-over in park, forehead to steering wheel, I replayed how long your messages of “love” not only fell flat but reminded me of how many times you walked out of rooms. Rolled your eyes. Pitied yourself. Repeatedly defended your intentions. Ignored the impacts on my life. My gutteral cries- the ones I’d been holding in- gifted me authenticity. Then, I crawled. Then, I stood up, I fell back down, I took another breath, I stopped blaming myself for being wobbly. I got back up, took one step, then another.

I went no contact because it lassoed decades of energy back into my heart. Depletion and exhaustion were the signs, not the symptoms. I waited 46 years before I went no contact. I wouldn’t say I wish it would have happened earlier or later. It happened when I trusted myself enough again to remember I was allowed to stop explaining what being alive feels like to me.

Signed,

The Smutty Raven