by Jamye Waxman
Real-Life Break Ups
“My dad was born in a detention camp around Germany right after World War II. He moved to New York early on, and eventually became a police officer. When I was eleven, I asked my mother if she and my dad were in love. My mom gave me some roundabout answer that basically amounted to no. My mom and I would literally sit in the living room while my dad was at work and pray for him to be shot in the line of duty.
I learned a little later on that the reason my mom would never leave him was that he threatened to kill her if she ever tried. With him being in the police force, he had her convinced that there was no way she could have him arrested.
My mother did leave eventually. During the divorce, I kept talking to my dad so that he would think everything was fine. My mom moved in with me for a while, and my sister and I both stopped talking with my dad after the divorce was final. It wasn’t even a question. My dad reached out to me a few months later. I wrote him a four-page email and asked him to answer some specific questions that I needed answered. He didn’t answer any of the questions. He told me that he had problems writing and would rather talk. I insisted that he needed to answer these questions before we spoke. I haven’t heard from him since. I gave him three tries and that was it. That was 2005.
My sister was born seven years after me, so we weren’t especially close. She has very similar attributes to my father, including anger issues. She didn’t have a lot of friends after high school or college. She wrote off friends. Held grudges.
I always got the impression that my sister could do without me. The final straw was when she wouldn’t pick me up at the airport, even though I tried to fly in at a convenient time for her and her husband.
That was the end.
I don’t like holding grudges, but for me it was always about improving my life. With my father it was for past transgressions. With my sister it’s like why would I subject myself to her current abuse? Part of me thinks that if I reach out to them, especially my dad, that he won. I have more pride than that. It’s sad because there’s a lot to be said about forgiveness, but I guess I could do both, forgive my father and sister but not carry on the relationship with them.” —Ryan
Family relationships might be uncomfortable, but sometimes there are conditions that come along with the break up. And these “sacrifices” can be worth the discomfort of having to deal with the ex-family member every once in a while. Especially if you’re bearing the discomfort for someone you really care about. For example, if your ninety-year-old grandmother cherishes the fact that she can have all the girls come together every month for a visit, then you can grin and bear that one day a month with your “evil” stepmother. Or if your sister is getting married and she still talks to your dad but you don’t, you can find a way to make her big day about her and not a big deal for you.
It isn’t your decision if your child wants to have a relationship with a grandparent that you can no longer stand to be around. Maybe there’s another family member who can act as a go-between to make sure your child gets to have the grandparent experience. Or maybe you can act cordial long enough for a drop-off and pick-up. When the relationship isn’t about you but you have to be involved, it can mean a lot to others for you to suck it up sometimes.
Whatever happens, if a family member tries to talk you out of the break up, here are some things you can say to them:
1.I love you. This isn’t about you, and I prefer to not make it about us.
2.I’m willing to talk about this with you, as long as there is no blame or accusation.
3.I have to do this for myself. It’s not my intention to hurt you in the process.
4.This is my experience.
5.I’m willing to give you the space you need to process this situation, and I’m open to talking this through with you when you are ready to accept my decision.
The best way to deal with family is to deal with yourself first. Start by observing how you react to your family’s accusations or insistence that you and your attachment find a way to end this “silly fight.” Once you have the self-awareness to understand your reactions, you can determine if and how your emotions played a role in the break up. You may also want to find a way to remain grounded. Going to the gym, practicing yoga, or meditating are all ways that can help you stay level-headed during a time when you may feel anything but. Keeping a journal during the break up process can help you get a better sense of how you were feeling throughout the experience and give you a chance to continue to monitor your feelings and thoughts.
Truth is, you may feel relief, joy, or excitement around the end of a relationship that has caused you a lifetime of pain, frustration, fear, or anger. And if that’s the place you get to, great. But a lot of times when it comes to familial break ups, it’s a sad, hard place—especially once you realize what you thought was a forever is instead no more.
CONSIDERATIONS FOR THE BROKEN UP
For this chapter, I interviewed Dr. Joshua Coleman, parental estrangement expert and author of the book When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along. Although his advice is geared towards a split between children and their primary attachment figures, it can be used in any familial break up.
1.Adult children sometimes need or want space for their own growth and change. Sometimes they just need to feel separate. Either way, giving your child space could be very useful to their development.
2.Be respectful. Listen and be interested in what your child has to say. If you can see their desire for change as a growth opportunity, you have the potential to be closer down the road.
3.If your family member ends contact with you, express empathy. Tell them, “It’s clear that you need this, and I don’t want you to feel guilty about it. I know you wouldn’t do this unless you felt like it was in your best interest to do so. When you’re ready to have contact, I’ll be here, and the door will always be open. If there are things I haven’t addressed yet, regarding your hurt and what you’re upset about, please let me know.”
4.Embrace the kernel of truth that there is something there you need to address.
5.You can stop trying to reconnect with your child, as long as the child isn’t a minor. If the child is a minor, you should continue to reach out because you have to assume that they may be operating under forces that are bigger than them.
SEVEN
Kissing Community Goodbye
When professor and sociologist Charles Josiah (C. J.) Galpin first coined the term “community” in 1915, I bet he never imagined just how the definition would expand (his original definition referred to the social anatomy of a rural community).1 Now there are so many different types of communities, big and small, sleepy and strange. Take, for instance, the community of Gibsonton (“Gibtown”), Florida—a town that was once known for its retired freak show performers, including “Lobster Boy,” “Al the Giant,” and “Jeanie the Half Girl.”
Or Cairo’s “Garbage City” at the far end of Manshiyat Naser. The community is known as Cairo’s largest collective of garbage collectors, and yeah, that’s what they do. And you don’t have to go across the ocean to visit our very own Slab City in Southern California (a post-apocalyptic community of artistic proportions).
I love being a part of community. I belong to sex educator communities like the San Francisco Sex Information and the American Association of Sex Educators Counselors and Therapists (AASECT). I’m also part of a community of people who make a pilgrimage to the desert once a year to spend a few weeks together building a city so they can burn it all down in a few glorious nights. It’s called Burning Man, and the people in the community are known as “Burners,” and really it’s about so much more than just what is built and burned. There are new-mom communities and communities of people who hike together or bike together that I also enjoy dabbling in.
Of course, community can refer to a specific geographical location. For example, all people who live in the Santa Cruz mountains are a part of th
e same community. Or community can refer to a group of people who all live in a particular building or complex, like a senior home or a development of houses that all are accessed through the same gated road. It can be a town, a county, a country, or a universe. Community can refer to people at your University with whom you share the same major or who happen to be in your same dormitory. It can refer to a sorority or a fraternity or any other group you join where the interests of the group keep everybody together.
Community may be about religion, about attending the same church, temple, or mosque. It may have to do with what god you believe in or what god you don’t believe in. It may be about the color of your skin or the generation in which you were born.
It may be about shared goals, like Alcoholics Anonymous, a community for supporting people who need or want to stay away from alcohol. It can also be social, for example, a group of fetishists who all like to dress up as clowns may be part of a clown play community. People who proudly don their red hat and purple clothing may be showing off membership in the community known as the Red Hat Society.
Community can also go dark, as in secret societies and places where one worships a leader or belief that is very much alive. It may take on a cultlike appearance, one in which thought manipulation is part of the process. Membership may come easily in these situations, but once you’re in, you can feel like there’s no way out.
The Value of Community
Community is a collective group of people who we believe in and who have our back. We often see or think of community as “our people,” because we share a common area of interest or a common goal with this particular group. Oftentimes these people help us strengthen our identities; allow us to share in a united goal or interest; and lift us up and allow us to feel safe, supported, and well cared for. That means that when the going gets tough, community helps us stay strong. If we look at members of a community individually, we may refer to them as friends, brothers, sisters, or another intimate label that identifies them as close to our heart. As a group collective, they are so much more than that. When we are sick, they come together to make us well by delivering food, taking us to doctor appointments, and staying with us when we don’t want to be alone. When we need financial help, they rally to raise money for the cause. When we need a place to throw a party, they use their resources to help us find a space.
Communities place values on their members, just as members place value on their communities. Community can evoke feelings of commitment, fellowship, mutuality, independence, belonging, interdependence, connection, and empowerment. Community shows us the way to balance independence with collaboration. You may have felt like an outsider in your family of origin, your school, or even your body. But when you find your community, it can feel like you have found home—a place where you are understood and accepted.
On the flip side, community can be a source of codependence, making us feel isolated from the rest of the world and even becoming our only source of information and warping our values. It can make us doubt ourselves as individuals. And when that happens, community starts to fail.
Still, we expect community to help us shine. We use it to lift our spirits, feel a shared connection, show and reflect support, help us grow, challenge our thinking, and allow us to experience a plethora of love and kindness. When the connection becomes disconnection, we can feel disoriented, alone, and completely destroyed. When our community can no longer support our beliefs, ideas, and experiences, we can feel so lost that we may search a long time to find another positive outlet for support.
Community is bigger than we are. It’s bigger than family, friends, and coworkers. It may be the biggest concept we can attach to on this planet. And when something big comes crashing down, it can leave us feeling so small and insignificant that we aren’t sure where to go next.
Breaking up with community can be tough. But staying in a community that isn’t working for you is tougher.
Breaking Up with a Religious or Spiritual Community
“I left the church. I mumbled something about people changing, about needing different things, about needing to be apart in order to be together someday, about needing to reclaim ourselves as individuals so we didn’t die on the inside or end up hating and resenting each other. I wanted God to stop me from leaving. I wanted God to promise things would be different. I wanted God to beg me to come back. But God didn’t say a word. So I broke up with God. I wasn’t gentle. ‘It’s not me,’ I said. ‘It’s you.’”
—SARAH SENTILLES, AUTHOR, BREAKING UP WITH GOD2
If you have a religious affiliation, especially if you were born into it, sooner or later, you will most likely challenge something that religion says or does. Whatever it is, there will be a time in your life when you question your involvement in your religion for any number of reasons: for its purpose in your life, for its social and political views, for its exclusionary or inclusionary ways, or for its cost on your time or your wallet.
While you will be encouraged to work through your doubts by leaning on your community to find support and answers, it’s your individual decision to figure out just what God, or any other entity, means to you.
And if you can work through your doubts and this makes you feel better able to continue on the path with your religious organization, then good for you. But if you feel that it’s time to seek out some or no other spirituality, you will likely go through a process of reflection and rejection.
When it’s time to decide if you are going to lose your religion, religious influences will be all up in your spirit, trying to make it more difficult to come to a decision that doesn’t involve sticking it out. You may be subject to scare tactics trying to be passed off as truths. You may be told it’s not Christ-like, Buddha-esque, mindful, or in God’s plan for you to go your separate way. You may hear that when you walk away from God, you lose your place in heaven (a belief you may or may not choose to stick with anyway), or that a devout member sticks with their faith through the good times and bad. A break up with your religion is a highly charged and often extremely challenging decision to make.
Fact: According to the Pew Research Center, one-fifth of the U.S. population doesn’t have a religious affiliation. This includes 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics and nearly 33 million other people who opt out of choosing any particular religious affiliation.3
You’re Ending a Committed Relationship
Not only does breaking up with your religion disconnect you from a belief, but it may also disconnect you from the people who hold those beliefs. It means people who only see things through the lens of religion may not be able to see you anymore. Your religious family and friends may feel like you are testing their ability to believe. Or they may doubt your ability to understand them any longer. Either way, a break in religion can create a rift in your community and in your family too, if they are also invested in this religion. There will be some members who believe you should put your church above yourself. Their words will make you doubt your own feelings and thoughts, but it is your gut that gives you the strongest indication of what is working for you and what isn’t. So go with it.
Other times, breaking up with a religion doesn’t mean you have to break up with everyone in the religion. In a recent episode of MTV’s True Life, Nathan, a pastor’s son, leaves his Christian church, but not his Christian family, to study Buddhism.
Happy ending or not, time does heal. Leaving your church or other religious affiliation may feel like leaving a marriage, and in a sense, it is. You’ve created a union, a commitment with God, Buddha, or Krishna. And now you are breaking that vow. When you leave a religion, you may feel a sense of emptiness and a sense of fear about the future. These are fixable things. By filling your life with a support person or group, new interests, activities, and friends that engage your spirit and your brain, you will pave a new path for your next long-term religious relationship. You will be able to commit again, but it will be a new and informed commitment. And that�
�s a pretty great feeling.
FIND OBJECTIVE SUPPORT
Whenever you make a big decision, you don’t need to do it alone. To figure out what exactly you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it, find someone who understands your community and can also stay objective as you explain your ideas and feelings to them. You need the kind of person who promises to keep an open mind, listen with compassion, and accept whatever decision you make. This may be a friend who isn’t a member but knows what the church means to you. Or it may be a therapist or other spiritual advisor. Don’t share far and wide yet. Wait to tell those who are going to try to convince you otherwise until you have actually made your decision.
THE NAUGHTY-AND-NICE LIST
Make a list of the pros and cons of staying and leaving. Have that list handy when you talk with your friend or former church members. This shows you’ve really thought your decision through, and it lets everybody know that you are making a well-considered choice.
SAY IT IN A LETTER
Sometimes the easiest way to say good-bye to a large group of people is through a letter. While you don’t have to explain in detail what you’re doing (at least not in all churches), it is a nice gesture to let them know that you are taking a break from your beliefs. Thank them for their time. If you want to get specific, by all means express your reasons for leaving. If it’s a matter of values, let them know what you don’t agree with so that they can possibly rethink these issues in the future. If it’s that you feel you are being called to find spirituality elsewhere, let them know so they can leave you to find your path. The church will likely want you back, but that will be your choice to make.