When is it okay to give up?
When is is okay to give up on making a situation work?
I legitimately ask, as I’ve pretty much given up on most “immediate” family in recent months. As an American federal civilian employee, I found the rhetoric of my immediate family crazy enough to warrant cutting them out of my life. I can’t get beyond their clear contempt for my livelihood. Despite conversations regarding how a certain admin’s policies are making my life worse, I have been told constantly not to complain because it could be worse. So I have “given up” and no longer interact with them. There have been further conversations prior to this, but I don’t think it’s necessarily important to the conversation.
I ask this legitimately, as I am feeling guilt over it, despite the fact that I no longer feel dread or anxiety about it. I haven’t visited immediate family in over 2 months now, despite living within walking distance.
At what point should one continue making attempts to repair to maintain relationships, even familial, and when is it okay to end them?
You are allowed to "give up"(your words) whenever you want.
It sounds like you are suffering a lot, and that you have tried many times to compromise or be "the better person." But I'm going to tell you right now, there's only so long you can mask. There's only so long you can contain yourself, and keep yourself from serving your owns needs at the behest of others.
You deserve better. You deserve to live your values, fully and authentically. Your life and how you live it matters, and people that do not allow you to live that way, do not have a place in your life.
Now that that is out of the way. Going no-contact with family is very hard. We put a lot of emphasis on the biological family. However, we can have community and contact outside of our families. We can build trust outside of that, although it may be difficult at first. My therapist has told me that it is completely okay and reasonable that I would go no-contact with my family, and that it is not forever. This is what helped me allow myself to take care of myself. No-contact was the only way for me to heal and take care of myself. My own family said I was "incompatible" with them once the political shit hit the fan, so to speak, which I guess I agree with them at this point.
I actually felt infinitely better finally admitting out loud and having the conviction to protect and take care of myself, instead of constantly living for other people. It truly felt like a weight lifted off of me. And I do not feel bad about it. I was suffocating. I was killing a part of myself every time I acquiesced or conceded, just to keep their discomfort levels down.
You can do it, too! You deserve it. If you want more advice, let me know :)
Your time is now. Take care of yourself now.
As much as I was trying to make the question open ended, I do appreciate your response, even as hard as it might be for me to accept. I thank you, and appreciate you for it. Thank you.
I add this as a comment since I don’t want to turn the whole post “political”. I can edit if I accidentally caused that, I did not mean to.
The conversations with family feel very much like gaslighting. One on one, they agree with me, that the actions taken don’t match what they want, but when I talk with them as a group, they immediately turn to “well it’s because X or Y won’t fix it”, despite that clearly being against what they told me privately.
I just want to work my 40 hours, and go home. I never once was told I was defrauding anyone until about 6 months ago when things shifted, included my immediate family’s views of myself. Apparently I’m a grifter that doesn’t want to work.
Is my career enough to cut them out? Is that too extreme? Am I just overreacting?
Only you can judge that. No one can judge that for you. Anyone who does is out of line.
It's your life. You are allowed to have your own identity and values. If other's can't respect that, it's your choice entirely how you want to respond.
Do you have a therapist? This is the kind of question that I have taken to a therapist before. It helps to have someone whose responsibility is to be an unbiased guide through this difficult terrain.
I did have a therapist, prior to my current position due to not transitioning insurance fast enough out. I should have probably looked into transitioning it better than I did, but I didn’t. I don’t want to say bad things about who I was seeing, since I had less than a year’s worth of appointments with them, but I did feel like they were dismissing family and employer related issues.
I think that’s why I’m wondering. When should I be okay with moving on? I can always find another job, but that’s not necessarily the correct choice?
And then, for someone unable to find access to such resources, what should they do?
It can always bother you to cut people out. But as @skybrian mentioned; cutting off doesn't have to be forever.
You have to weigh the balance for yourself if it's worth the effort; if the guilt is worse than the benefits of cutting off..
I cut my parents out 7 years ago. 0 regrets. I miss my dad sometimes, but my mental health benefits and safety of my children far outweighs that.
I’m not gonna have the time or memory to write out the entire message I want to give you, but answer is to echo the above: you’re the one living your life and you get to decide. When you set boundaries and another adult breaks those boundaries, you stop interacting with them until they’re willing to respect them. They’re an adult.
I know it’s easy for me to say because it’s not my family, but remember: friends are the family we choose. Surround yourself with supportive people and it’s much easier to lose the toxic ones.
I’m sorry you’re having to go through this AND the current political climate.
I have no particular insight, but I’ll make the perhaps obvious suggestion that giving up on talking to them can be partial or temporary. You stopped talking to them for a while, but maybe someday after things get less crazy, you could try again?
I'm with you here. If I were in OP's shoes I'd lay it straight with them and then say something to the effect of "get in touch when you're willing to acknowledge my reality and help, not just give platitudes."
Setting out clear boundaries is not something I have done. I assumed they would be able to “figure it out”, but that’s a stupid assumption now that I think about it.
I plan on setting clearer boundaries moving forward, but I guess the bigger question still lies: are those boundaries enough to give up on a relationship? Or is that just a step in the process of removing someone from your life?
Part of the reason I completely cut my parents out was that I knew that
My sister can still tolerate them, because while they still have significant trouble respecting them, she has immense will and has been able to enforce hers properly.
Setting boundaries is a good first step. I think it's important for everyone to have them, though I suspect not everyone needs them to be explicitly stated as such.
And the thing about well communicated boundaries. If they're not willing to respect them, your relationship is more one-sided than you realize.
I will admit that there was a temporary pause after a certain President’s inauguration. I believe I visited around the middle or end of February, but not since. That visit was the most stressful I had been, including all of the other stuff going on for myself professionally at the moment.
The answer
It is never to early to give up! This applies to everything in life. You never have to buckle up, hunker down, get back on the horse or get through a rough patch. Trust your gut, your gut feeling is real and something many of us has learned not to listen to and trust. If something feels just a little bit iffy: get out!
As others have said: you can always go back (or at least try to get back, after all there are other people involved).
The nuance
It reads to me like there are some people in this situation that you would like to have a real active relationship with.
Maybe you can find ways to do one on one activities as you describe that they seem kind of fine in person but turn into a mob when grouped.
Maybe you can connect with your mother over hiking or your father over art or your siblings over golf or whatever. Just finding one on one activities away from home and in new settings could shift things towards better relationships, could be worth a try! But still do trust your gut!
The story
My mother was in many ways a great person, what she managed to accomplish considering her family history is astounding, the radical growth she went through to give herself, me and my sister a better life is awesome, inspiring and something I could never match (thanks to her enormous growth there isn't that much room left to grow). Still, she was a terrible mother to me and my sister when it mattered.
My sister went no-contact several times, before she committed suicides in large part because of the traumas that our mother could not help her with or caused.
I went very-low-contact several times and when I was going to be a parent I had a long grueling process to decide whether I should let my mother know or cut her out completely. In the end I decided to let her know, because I didn't want to deprive my child-to-be of their roots.
It was not easy to have my mother in my life, or my daughters life. But we tried and I fought and I regretted my decision, changed my mind and kept trying different ways.
Ultimately it got easier the older my daughter got, and they could have their own separate relationship towards the end.
I could do an enormous job when my mother got worse and worse and ultimately died a few months back.
I did all this work: to have a relationship with my mother, to fight for the granddaughters/grandmother relationship, to take care of my mother when she was dying for two connected reasons:
The conclusion
Trust your gut, do what you can do, try different things if you want and have the energy to do them, try to not have too many big regrets.
Ultimately it is your life and you can't live it for others even if they get upset about it.
I understand, I've had similar aggrevations with family members and am still learning how to navigate these topics in some relationships.
I've learned to try to reach an understanding of what can be discussed and when/where it can be discussed for me to feel comfortable with the privilege of access I allow the other party, and them for me. I see an ability to control that sort of topic in discussion as a form of respect and think of it as an essential factor for people to connect over their shared humanity rather than their subjective beliefs, as those might otherwise create too large of a distance for a familial connection.
If this can't be reached, I've had to cut off that privilege to people that meant more to me than I would have liked them to in those moments. If someone cannot control their ability to interject sensitive subjects into your interactions, there is an issue that has to have a tangible plan of resolution to justify the work it will take to overcome that obstacle.
Thank you, I do appreciate your response. I feel I might need to set “clear” or “solid” limits in what I allow, and try that as a possible way to keep the relationships from “falling apart”. I think I’ve tried that in less, “serious” or “firm” fashions before, but this might be the point to make it more an official line not to be crossed.
In my experience, people react more positively and take better stock of their investment in the situation when the person setting boundaries makes it very clear that these are the points at which they themselves will disengage with the people who cross said boundaries, rather than telling people not to cross the boundaries. People who need to have a boundary put in place have a better response to the removal of the carrot than the presence of the stick, so to speak.
The people in your life who know how much you matter to them will respect your request, either now or in their own due time. The people who recognize your value will have an effect on the people who don't, and change will come in how they treat you.
A book that was good for me was Boundaries by Cloud and Townshend. It has a Christian framing, but unlike many Christian help books, the guidance is soundly rooted in psychological best practices.
I'd like to shared my experience here too, maybe it will help.
In the past I think I've gone quite heavy on the "sever" route with freinds who are toxic or I believe they've got so far I can't help them.
I won't lie, there's definitely more I could have done. I think there is always more someone can do to be honest. But the way I saw it, and it's horribly selfish, is I've tried to help this person many times, they've not accepted or even attempted to get any better, they are actively making my life worse, I need to cut them out.
It fucking sucks for the other person. I think about it sometimes, because people's behaviour like that always has a reason, it comes from somewhere and it's because they don't want to deal with the root cause that they act in toxic ways. But there comes a time when the relationship is voided by their behaviour (even if they may have genuine reasons for it). At least in my opinion.
That said, family is more difficult, I've not had to directly cut out a family member, but I think I would treat it similarly. Although I admit it would be a lot harder.
Sorry to hear you are going through this, it's not easy but I hope in the long run it's OK!
These things are always intensely personal and thus vary wildly from person to person and situation to situation.
I have generally been of the belief that if you want to change someone's mind on something, or you want them to come around on it, it takes a very long time of being slowly exposed in reasonable discussion to opposing viewpoints.
Most people can not or do not want to do that, and to be clear reasonable discussion must be possible from both parties. Sometimes that means not discussing something until further down the line, sometimes it's never possible.
I do also believe that people certainly don't change if everyone reasonable around them exiles them. A core factor of just about every cult is looking for people who've been abandoned by everyone else, for reasonable reasons or not.
All that said, I think the most important thing you've mentioned is:
That doesn't sound like something that's ever going to be easy to get to reasonable discussion, and more importantly, you don't need to sacrifice yourself for any of this.
I've stuck around people who've made poor choices and been happy to see them turn things around/become more reasonable/regret past behaviors/etc, and I like to think that being a stable influence on their lives helped, BUT I also drew very clear boundaries for myself on where I would say "ok...I can't help here, what happens happens." You don't need to bother to tell them that if it's only going to escalate things, but it's absolutely vital to recognize when your attempt to help is harming you and prioritize yourself, because you sure as shit won't help anyone if you go off the cliff with them.
This has led to other people who I no longer see, and some of that may have been my fault, because god knows I'm not always right, but that's the way I've learned to handle these things. I know it is often much harder with family, because duh, but it also makes those personal lines even more important, and the difficulty of the discussion much higher.
I hope some of this helps. For what it's worth I've literally never seen a screaming match at Thanksgiving end in "my gosh, you know what you're right!", and even better approaches take a lot of time. People often need time to reflect and think things over and observe for themselves, and if you want to give them the information to do so, good on you. If you think that's just not something you can do in a healthy way, there's nothing wrong with that.
I will also say, in most cases there's nothing wrong with ignoring their beliefs if it's not outright hostile, especially when it comes to family. A lot of people have decided, more understandably lately, that association with the "unpure" is akin to support.
People, relationships, and especially family is FAR from that black and white. If you decide you do miss your family, and feel better seeing them, but that it's just easier to not talk politics, then that's also a legit option. One that's existed long before our current situation, and existed in much worse ones than this.
I think that this is a question that no one can answer for you. I live abroad, far away from my parents, for example. The main reason is my mother. My parents “raised me well”, provided for all my needs, and might even bail me out financially if I am struggling. That being said, my mother is a very controlling person, and I have had hundreds of conversations with her about it, but she just doesn’t get it. She won’t change. The only way for us to not fight all the time and have some kind of relationship, is if I live abroad and don’t tell her much about what is going on in my life. I also avoid talking about certain topics with her, because she will stand her ground even when she’s objectively wrong. I don’t know any more details about your family situation, but it may be possible for you to just “do your thing” and “keep it to yourself”. Is that ideal? No. Do I often have to keep quiet and pretend that I have no opinion on a subject when my parents start rambling about things that I wildly disagree with them on? Yes. Does it bother me? You bet. What can I do about? Precious little. You can’t change the family that you’re born to, and you may depend on them or still feel obligated towards them because of the blood tie (which is a normal feeling). I find that (and I think that this is true even outside of the family), the less I share with my parents about my personal life, the better. This includes work. That makes it easier to at least keep in touch with them when it matters.
This is an essentially impossible question for another person to answer, even a therapist, and especially a random stranger on the Internet. But talking this out with a therapist or a friend can help get you to clarity.
I say it's an impossible question for another person to answer because, in my experience, for me, making a decision about continuing or discontinuing a relationship with a friend or partner or family member that feels right is about soul searching and connecting deeply with my gut feeling and intuition, and understanding all the nuances of all my experiences with that person over time. Only I know all that information about all those experiences and I only I can connect with my deep, inner feelings like that.
I empathize because it's such a painful situation to be in. To stay in the relationship or leave the relationship is painful, and to not know what to do and be in between is also painful.
Do you have someone in your life right now who makes you feel seen, who listens to you, who cares what you think and feel, and who supports you? If not, maybe focusing on building those kinds of relationships is a good idea. Since it will make either choice, either outcome easier to bear.
I am an extreme introvert, and one of the big life lessons I had to learn was how to make peace with this aspect of my personality. I used to feel deeply guilty, to the point of depression, for not having the mental energy to socialize with other people anywhere near as much as they wanted me to — but guilt just drained my mental energy even more, so what was the point of feeling guilty?
Throughout my life, there have probably been a hundred or more people, including family members (my family is big), who could have been great friends, but I let our interactions lapse — not because they did anything wrong, but because I simply can't stay in reliable contact with more than a small handful of people at any time, and so I'm forced to be choosy or arbitrary.
So I just can't go through life feeling guilty for every person I've drifted away from who didn't deserve it. There are way too many of them, and I would be utterly non-functional if I let my mind wander down that path. Thus I spent a couple of hard years learning how to let that guilt go and just let my nature be.
Your situation is a lot more straightforward, though. In my case, I've drifted away from a lot of people who are absolutely lovely and supportive in every way, including favorite family members who raised me. But you're talking about people who seem to be actively and intentionally making you feel bad. If you're going to feel guilty for not socializing with certain people anymore, at least save it for people who haven't sabotaged your relationship with them.
Whatever you decide to do, now or in the future, I urge you to not let guilt be any part of it.
One of the things I strive for in my life is balance. I don't strive too hard for it, mind, but I mean more that I consider it to be the ideal state.
Nothing is perfect, but if you can find a good balance - a good compromise - then you are finding the best possible situation in the circumstances.
So in a case like this, you must balance your personal mental health with your desire to be loyal and connected to family or friends.
For me, I have learned that I cannot spend time with those who have succumbed to the decades of propaganda. Their worldview is too far removed from reality for there to be compromise, and I have learned that seeking understanding and mutual respect is a waste of time.
The only way I can survive in these times is to refrain from interacting with those who have decided to divorce themselves from reality. Otherwise, my mental health will suffer.
So the question is: Is the loss of cutting out people with whom you cannot stand to be around for your mental health worse than your mental health when being around them? I've learned where that line is for me. You have to learn where that line is for you.
It's painful to make those decisions — no matter which way you end up. Because you either have the pain of dealing with those who are divorced from reality, or blocking people you care about.
My parents were always liberal in the European sense. I have leaned socialist since about the time I've entered workforce.
I don't fault them, but while I've stayed consistently "people should collaborate", they've slowly drifted away to toxic indifference. It's suffocating. I can't stand being with them, because at this point they criticize me for caring deeply about not just our societal problems in general, but also about my immediate circumstances.
Like "both rent and house prices have consistently outpace my wage growth for quite some time now, I want kids but cannot afford them and it's getting worse" to which my mother replies "you're overthinking it" while already owning a flat due to privatization of originally communal housing.
And I've just decided to start ignoring them as well. I've never been been keeping relationships out of politeness, and I will probably never start.
You’ve gotten a lot of advice here. I have some more, but don’t feel you have to take it if you’re overwhelmed.
It sounds like you’re not used to saying “No” or maybe even hearing “No” (by hearing “No” I am referring to the idea that you seem to always want to try to make something work even though it seems pretty broken). This makes sense since you said you struggle to set boundaries. My recommendation is to research or understand what a boundary means to you. There are lots of different explanations and frameworks, some work for some people and some don’t. I used to get very caught up on boundaries as rules. But recently I have heard the idea that boundaries are something that you set for yourself. Probably because you cannot change what other people do, and you are not responsible for that (their actions). It’s still hard for me to think about that and I’m working on it. It’s not all or nothing either, you can change your mind as you need about what a boundary means to you as your needs evolve over time.
Second thing I recommend is that you do a “values” and “needs” “emotions/feelings” activity. Honestly, most people cannot name their values, needs, emotions. Ourselves as much as others. I find doing these activities, even for myself only, help me understand what I’m looking for. Help me understand my own feelings. But they also allow me to have my feelings even when I’m not that well equipped to have them otherwise. I personally use cards from this company but assume other formats and providers exist.
I hope if you get nothing else from these comments you can ponder that going no contact or otherwise limiting the damage other people are causing you is okay to do, and it may only be temporary :)
Their ideology shift has caused them to devalue you. Worse yet, they're not politely keeping their mouths shut but openly tearing down your self image/self worth and the career you've built, and with stuff that is simply untrue. This is not going to go away until they change their thinking; it's faintly possible that because of your shared past, some of them may see you as more than a stick person and that may give you some influence, but it's really up to them. I think is absolutely okay for you to not want to be around people who continually tell you you're a bad person when you know you are not.