Deciding to walk away from a dysfunctional relationship, especially one with your family, and the narrative that you have spent your entire life believing in, can be a heart-wrenching, difficult process.
Although it might have been a fabricated and gaslit story, it was the only one you have known all your life.
Perhaps, even when it no longer serves you, something about it still feels like a familiar home.
When combined with the values you hold dear — that of love and loyalty, walking away, dropping the hope you have invested, could feel like a kind of soul-death.
In the face of such a complex picture, we must not take the juncture lightly but tread it with the deepest compassion we can summon for ourselves.
As humans, we are naturally inclined toward ‘loss aversion’ — a psychological phenomenon where the pain of losing is often felt more intensely than the joy of gaining. This instinct can make the thought of severing familial bonds seems daunting. We may fixate on the memories, the shared moments, or the hope of what could be, rather than the day-to-day realities of the price we have to pay to sustain the dysfunctional bonds.
Complicating matters further is the ‘sunk cost fallacy.’ This is also very human — it is when we continue to sustain the pattern just because of all that we have invested in it — time, hope, love, resources, all the energy you have poured into trying to fix…
