Family Dysfunction

What do you do when your family is dysfunctional (not your husband and kids but siblings and parents)? For me, it was separating myself from the dysfunction so it wouldn't touch my kids or affect my life anymore than it did when I was a child (when I had no choice). Separating for me meant moving away and staying away from family functions because faking relationships with people I have no respect for just isn't in me to do. I don't fake it. It has also become about protecting my daughter from bad stuff that happened to her last year with family. Many reasons with all the same goal - protecting my kids from that cycle of dysfunction.

That's not to say that I feel that way about all of my siblings or parents...there are a few I wouldn't mind seeing. However, "blood" doesn't mean instant relationship for me and there are a few that don't mean a whole lot to me. Blood isn't always thicker than water, even when it comes to parents. I don't know if that makes me cold or if that makes me sane. I think sane. You can only be hurt so many times before you stop allowing it.

Even separating myself from it doesn't keep it all out. I still hear things here and there. There are still liars lying to take the heat off of themselves while their viciousness gets directed at other weaker family members and they'll try to take other family members along for the ride. Great attention diverter! You have mentally ill individuals who remain mentally ill and don't (WON'T) get help or take responsibility for themselves while lashing out at the weakest links in the family tree. Some people need to be evaluated for manic depression and bi-polar disorder. No names though right? Huh.

You have family members taking sides based on one side's lies and then already hurt relationships getting damaged further. You have family members who are made to feel unimportant and not worth knowing. You have miserable people spreading their misery...share the wealth I guess. It's screwed up.


Everybody messes up. I've had my share of mess-ups, but the difference is, I grew up. I made a conscience decision 13 years ago to grow up, to make better choices because I wanted something different than what I grew up with...different than the choices I'd made in men up to that point. I wanted a family and I wanted a family without the only dysfunction I'd always known. I didn't want kids raised in dysfunction. Sometimes, it seems like some people never do (grow up) and dysfunction is what they create and live in all the time. When their dysfunction starts to bring the heat down around their ears, they cause chaos elsewhere to divert the attention away. Pretty manipulative.

There are two sides to every story. Something to take into consideration. There are going to be exaggerations or things said to make one person look better over the other but I think a person's basic character (or lack thereof in this case), the one you've known since childhood, doesn't change that much. They just learn to hide it from the ones they need to and take it out on weaker individuals around them (spouses, siblings, and in some people's cases, kids).

Some people overcome the dysfunction they grew up with. Some stay muddled in it. Some learn how to be vicious because of it or maybe they were just born that way. Who knows.

When you have a large family like mine is (was? not much of a family anymore), there is a huge age span between the oldest and younger siblings. That means that older siblings grow up and are out of the house or at least teenagers in their own world before getting to really know some of the middle to younger siblings or experiencing firsthand the mentally ill behavior or outright viciousness of some. They don't see the lies or the violence (rage). They don't know.

I have my opinions about people in my family. Some family members are even lucky (or unlucky) enough to know what those feelings of mine are, lol. I have a right to those feelings based on my own experiences and relationships with particular family members and I will never be told not to talk a certain way or not to do something in terms of my relationship with any individual family member. My feelings, my relationship, my right. All family members should have that right to deal with their individual relationships with an individual family member on their own without interference or threats from others, especially when the reaction to that communication is blown out of proportion and based on another sibling's lies!

I've wrote a little about family dysfunction before. It's why I put myself up for adoption, lol. I've still available for adoption, by the way, lol. Family dysfunction stinks.

I don't think I'm done yet. There's more to say, but I'll leave it to another post. There is lot to say about mothers and daughters and even sister to sister. I could probably write a book. Like I said, it is why I live 200 miles away and will never move back "home" again. My home now is with my husband and children.