family over everything

Another one of my unpopular opinions is based on an article written by a lovely human about blind family loyalty. To give you an idea of what the article is about, I have the following:

It’s not socially acceptable to put distance between yourself and your family.
But it doesn’t have to be socially acceptable for it to be the right thing to do.

I completely 100% believe that you don't have to stay close to your family if you would cut your friends out for things your family does.

But, Catherine, Friends Come and Go But Family Is FOREVER

Well, hear me out. This is against the societal whirlpool and I've been swimming against it forever and I have a lot of feelings.

I'll say it one more time. If you would cut your friends out for something someone in your family did to you, you should not show them that loyalty. They don't have to physically beat you for you to need to leave.

Like Leisa, who wrote "I Don't Believe In Blind Family Loyalty" mentioned above, my parents never beat me, they never emotionally abused me, they supported me and my two siblings in full in all my endeavors. They held me when I cried, they were at every recital, graduation and event I asked them to be at, they took me on trips and taught me the value of the dollar and how sacrifice is how all of us really show love. My dad threw a plastic cup at me once when I had a panic attack he didn't understand and my mom gets passive aggressive and selfish sometimes when she's angry, but neither of these are actual deal breakers.

My brother is a recovering drug addict and my mom is 13 years sober. My sister had some struggles in high school but is very private about her mental health issues and my dad is a stage three colon cancer survivor. I have been in inpatient and outpatient mental health programs for generalized anxiety/depression and I've made plans to end my life twice. None of us are perfect and all of us have learned to cope in one way or another.

So what is my point, exactly?

My sister recently told me she doesn't feel comfortable around me, that I smother her and I want more things from her than she wants from me. My brother made up a drinking problem for me that I don't have so that he could get out of a military function he didn't want to attend and keeps bringing up the joke again. My mother recently lost her only sibling (my uncle) to alcoholism and told me that I need to forgive my siblings because she feels vulnerable about losing hers. If I had friends who told me to forgive people who tell me I make them feel uncomfortable and that I have a drinking problem, I would tell them to leave, frankly. And the issue is that, these are not my friends.

There comes a lot of guilt with this because we are conditioned societally that our families are everything. It's not a bad idea, in theory, but there are an unbelievable amount of tropes in literature and film about families and a lot of them are really really really dysfunctional, including the dysfunctional family trope.

I would like to bring up Transparent as an example. This family goes through a traumatic event (the father comes out as a male to female transgender much later on in his life) and the family spirals with the coming out in different ways, all of them not healthy and all of them while struggling with the trope of "well they're my family so obviously I can't leave".

As a human who stems a lot of their decisions from their gut and from things they have learned from books, this rings so wrong in my head. And it's totally a violent vicious cycle of guilt and societal construct that makes this all feel super crappy.

as follows:

I want to be close to my family because they raised me and saw me a lot of my weaker points but I've also kept a lot of things from them because I felt like they wouldn't understand and they didn't but at the same time, they should understand right, like they're my family, that construct should stand that when I need them, they'll be there but they haven't been there all the times I've needed them but they have been there for the important things, so I should want to have them more in my life than I do but like

Anyway.

I want to say that for all of you out there who believe that you don't owe your family as much as you think you do just because they raised you (lots of people raise lots of other people in better ways than parents do), that you're not wrong, your family didn't have to treat you badly for you to feel that you do not need to connect them more than you feel obligated towards.