Ever Completely Left Your Family? How Did You Do It?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Has anyone here, for whatever reason, decided to completely end contact with your family? I’m talking about your entire nuclear family. What was the final deciding issue? Was it huge or small, or did you finally just decide these people no longer could be a meaningful and good part of your life?

If you did do this, how did you go about it? Did you write a letter? Simply disappear? Make an announcement of some sort?

How did it turn out? Did you ever regret it? Are you still glad for it? Was it a struggle? Ever go back?

If you don’t feel comfortable posting here, you can email me at sdmb@taoweb.net .

2

I’ve never done it, nor could I imagine cutting off all ties with my family.

But one of my step brothers completely cut off all contact with his parents, brother, and sisters. He was in his late 20s when he decided to do this. He spoke with one sister over the phone to let her know that he would be cutting off all communication with them. He never gave a specific reason. He just said it went back to childhood, and that was all he was going to say.

Nobody heard from him for about 20 years. He then started making contact with his sisters and brother. Then eventually his parents. I guess it’s all worked out now.

But it was Hell for his parents and siblings for those 20 years. And I’m not sure what he gained out of it either. If it was “worth it” to him. They missed so much of each others lives.

Sometimes a little distance can be good when things are stressed between family members, but to cut off all communication forever, or several years seems
extreme.

But eveyone has to live their own life.

3

I’ve never done it, but my SO has. His parents divorced when he was about 8 or so, and the father stayed here in Hawaii while his mother moved to the mainland (some place in California–he thinks). His sister is supposedly up there too, last time he checked (meaning over 10 years ago).

He gets very agitated when talking about it so I’ve refrained from talking about it to him already. Apparently there are very hard feelings against his father, he doesn’t know whether his dad is still alive or not. From what I was able to extract from him in the short time we talked about this subject, his father got a new wife and I guess he felt rejected. From age 18 he has been on his own.

He didn’t seem to feel equal animosity towards his sister and his mother, but he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to contact them, either. When I’ve asked him about at least trying to contact them, he gets very vague and distant.

He’s said a couple of times, “I live on my own and that’s that.”

Now, to me, someone who has a sickeningly sweet concept of how a family should be (my parents are still together after 46 years of marriage, they rarely if ever fought; I have 4 sisters, all of whom turned out okay mentally, and are relatively successful. We call each other almost daily, end our conversations with “I love you”, etc.), his indifference completely bewilders me.

A few people suggested I stop nagging him about resuming contact, because after all, what if there was a good reason for him not wanting to contact them? I’ve resigned myself to accept that for the time being, but it saddens me, because I really would like to let his family know of the two new additions to their family (a 3 year old and a 2 month old).

OTOH, when I draw up plans for parties, I don’t have to worry at all about leaving out an invitation to his side of the family. :stuck_out_tongue:

I need to know the reasons for his mindset. I will be watching this thread with interest.

4

I apologize in advance that I’m going to be vague and cloudy in places. There are of course some things I’m not going to discuss on a very public message board.

My relationship with my parents was always difficult. My father was distant and withdrawn with a violent temper. My mother – well, my sister and I are convinced she has some undiagnosed mental condition that probably requires medication. Her grasp on reality was never very good. I spent most of my teenage years severely suicidal and frightened.

When I was 13, my sister ran away and got away more or less for good. She had many of the same experiences I did with them. She was 18, moved to the nearest large city, where she crashed on friends’ couches.

When I was sixteen, things started to get worse between myself and my parents. I came out as gay, first to my friends. My mother found out by reading my hidden journals and listening in on phone conversations I was having. She told me that she knew gay men, that we “preyed on little boys” and wound up “old and alone,” assuming we “don’t die of AIDS.” I was losing most of my friends at the time, and it wasn’t what I needed to hear. Also, I didn’t know gay men besides myself, so I assumed she was right. I had the knife to my wrist that night.

Things deteriorated for me both inside and outside the home. My former friends had outed me at school, and I was having problems there with not just the students but even more often with administrators. I had a stormy relationship with my first boyfriend. And at home, things were becoming rapidly unsafe. To be blunt, I was becoming afraid for my life there. And one day when things got particularly bad, I made plans to run out. I even looked into getting officially emancipated by social services, but I was too afraid to go on record with some of the worse things that had happened on our house – scared of the court case, and afraid of what would happen if the court didn’t believe me.

My sister agreed to take me in, at least for the first little while. I made very elaborate escape plans. Then, while trying to help a friend escape a similar situation, someone announced my plans to my parents. He felt it would be better if we just “patched things up.”

After that, I knew it was unsafe to go home. My boyfriend let me stay at his place and make phone calls. I borrowed $20 from a friend (which in 1995, was enough to get you from downtown in my hometown to downtown in the big city).

My sister taught me the basics of survival on my own. It took me a long time to absorb the lessons. I was on welfare for awhile, then got my first real job as a waiter. Then there was a time when I was unemployed and couldn’t get welfare because I couldn’t produce all the paperwork from my last job (which they never sent me), so I was eating out of garbage cans for awhile. That was rock-bottom. After that, I got back on my feet, first with a telemarketing job, then as a canvasser for Greenpeace, then as a clerk.

I didn’t speak to my parents at all for nine months. Since then, we’ve had a strained relationship at best, although the last few years, I have actually gone to visit them a few times on the west coast, and will be again this week.

My father’s actually made overtures and building a relationship of some kind, though after 18 years of living in the same house and never having a conversation, and then almost ten years of y living on my own, I doubt we have much to work with. My mother acts as if none of it ever happened. I sometimes think she doesn’t remember my leaving, and just thinks I left for college. Assuming she believes the things she says, her memory is a liquid. Anything that presents her in even a slightly bad light gets erased (I used to think I was the crazy one until I got independent verifcation for some of her acts and remarks). However, I haven’t felt in danger the few times I’ve returned, so at least that’s changed.

Sorry for the long post. I figured though, you wouldn’t be asking if you didn’t need to know all that, though.

5

I’ve been 1200 miles away from my nearest relative for 6 years. The only person in my family with whom I have a relationship is my youngest brother. We didn’t used to have any kind of relationship until around the same time I moved here. He flew across the continent to be at my wedding and has visited me several times on vacations - but he lives 4000 miles away from the family for similar reasons. They are all emotionally draining, ignorant, opinionated people who are in no position to look down on anyone, but they do it anyway, and always have.

As you may read elsewhere in the SDMB archives, my father beat me up at random for 14 years, and I was on my own at 16. He was a little Hitler to start with, then he learned how to drink, which made for just lovely times all around. My mother took the kids and left him in 1976. I only saw him two more times after that, both of them bad. He died a couple of years ago, in such an unusual and gruesome way that I consider it karmic payback. Only one brother and my sister were at his funeral, and nobody from his “other” family even bothered to talk to them.

My mother got cancer and died 8 years ago. At that point, what remained of the family glue dissolved. My other brother got involved with a shrew who made him miserable until he grew the balls to leave her this year. Our relationship has deteriorated to the point of negligibility due to distance and him having become a person whom I wouldn’t have as a friend on a bet.

Right around the time my mother was dying, I met my wife. An opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge presented itself to me, and I grabbed onto it with all my might. Now I’m far away, and my sister has developed some animosity about me that I haven’t the slightest clue about, and she hasn’t spoken to me since I left. She won’t answer her phone or e-mail. Whatever your problem is, screw ya if that’s the way you want to be. I don’t have any space for anybody’s emotional baggage and other crap anymore. I put up with it for too long as it is.

I haven’t seen any other relatives since my mother’s funeral. They were cold, distant, judgmental people when I was there - no evidence that they’ve changed. If I’d turned up on any of their doorsteps, they would have wondered what I wanted. See above paragraph for kiss-off monologue, and good riddance.

My wife and my new life far away from all that negativity and garbage has saved me. It was entirely worth trading one for the other. I haven’t regretted it for a minute, and I can’t think of a reason to go back there. I did go back once, after my Green Card arrived, and it was so depressing I can’t adequately describe it. Here I was, all changed and healed and better and looking forward to my life for a change… and there they were, doing exactly the same thing they were when I left, except for my best friend, who was now a crackhead.

Goodbye family, goodbye country, goodbye history, I am done letting you wear me down. I fully intend to enjoy the rest of my life. I’ve been doing a pretty good job of it so far, without the soap opera of my family and their bullshit dragging me down. So if you get to the place where you realize that your people are bad for you and you can’t see it being any different, ever, you too would be wise to get the hell out of Dodge. I don’t actively hurt about it anymore, but there is this vacuum in my life that’s never going to be filled. That old cliche, “life’s too short” is exactly right. Get your own version of happiness and don’t let anybody mess with it, whether their blood is in your veins or not.

6

Well, I’ve cut off half my family and keep the other half at arm’s length, so I semi-qualify for this thread. :stuck_out_tongue:

As far as I’m concerned, my father and his side of the family no longer exist.

Let me set the stage. These are very negative, very draining people. They will literally sit around all day, complaining about how they’re too dumb and stupid to do anything (“I used to like to crochet, but I’m too stupid to pick it back up,” for example, but on every topic). They are also worshippers of manual labor. Anyone who does anything inside isn’t really working in any REAL sense of the word. They shouldn’t even get paid for it. I’m a creative and computer type, so you can imagine how much crap I got. I had the nerve to go to college in a family of high-school dropouts (though I’m a college dropout :p), so of course I was “gettin’ above my raisin’” cause I had all my “book larnin’.” I’m “lazy,” too, by the way, because when I visited up there as a kid (my parents divorced when I was 3), I didn’t leap out of bed with delight at the prospect of spending my weekend clearing brush or building stuff.

In other words, I’m the exact opposite of just about all of them and naturally I caught a lot of crap whenever I’d visit.

And they were (and presumably still are) very negative people. When I got a job in California and moved out, they were busy telling me it was good I was taking the job, because I needed to fall on my ass, cause I was way too cocky. I’ve always been “cocky,” because when I know stuff, I actually speak up and say so, rather than going, “Oh, I don’t know anything about that, cause I’m too dumb.”

I also feel I should mention what happened the last time I visited them. I was leaving town, heading out west, and probably wouldn’t see them for a while. So my father spent that visit outside cutting down trees–he lives on wooded property–while the rest of em ignored me. I felt loved. I wound up watching movies while everyone ignored me.

Did I mention this is one of those families where sons are expected to go have a fistfight with their fathers at some point? That’s all I heard growing up, “If you don’t like (decision I made/whatever), we can take it outside.”

Anyway, we’d traded letters back and forth off and on when I moved to GA. I’d usually say something to my father like, “Hey, there’s this cool blues club called suchandsuch you should check out when you’re in the area,” (he travels a lot and likes blues music!) and the reply I’d get would be along the lines of “Oh, I’ll be sure to check it out, but you wouldn’t want to go with me, cause you’d be embarassed to hang out with your old man blah blah blah,” despite my never having said anything or done anything along those lines. And it was like that for E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.

You might think this was some kind of contentious relationship with lots of fighting. Not so, as far as I know. They’d always blurt these things out and my reaction was usually, “Uh…alright…huh?”

So the letter exchange continued for a while and then I got this letter saying, basically, that keeping in touch with me was too much work and I obviously didn’t care about their letters ("Uh…alright…huh?), so I’d just have to let them know if anything interesting happened. I replied saying “Uh…alright…huh?”, but I’d be glad to. Since it usually took me a while to write a letter (I was working miserable hours at this point and wanted to spend my time off laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and recouping), I asked if they’d consider getting one of those email station thingies (like the ones they sell at Best Buy for $50) so it’d be easier to stay in touch and because they’d mentioned “maybe lookin’ into gettin’ a computer, though we’re probably too dumb to figure it out, hyuck hyuck.” If that didn’t work for them, I suggested the public library they wander into from time to time, since they had public computers and even a few basic courses. I just figured it would be easier for us to stay in touch that way and since they mentioned it, it seemed like a good idea.

Time passed and I got an answer. Well, I got a 6 page letter ripping me apart for telling people how to live their lives. Who was I to tell people how to live their lives? I was just a stockboy in a bookstore. How could I be too lazy to keep in touch with them (nevermind that keeping in touch with me was this great burden that had to be put down)?! On and on and on for pages. I never get mad, but I was so mad I was shaking.

Unfortunately for them, I’d just had something of an epiphany. I just realized that no one who made me miserable belonged in my life. I’d decided if someone was dragging me down, I didn’t need them around anymore (I was cleaning up some former friends at the time and busy analyzing my life and rejecting what didn’t fit me anymore).

Because I’d finally come to the conclusion that I rock. And I’m not sacrificing my mental health on someone who’ll drag me back down.

So I sent them one last note, nicely saying that I was not aware I was such a tremendously bad person and, since I was such a terrible person, I’d excuse them from contacting me for the rest of their days. And if I ever saw them again, it would be a billion years too soon.

And I may have said, “I hope you don’t take it amiss if I tell you to sod off and die,” maybe. I was upset.

Anyway, I got one letter from them, which I threw away unopened, and haven’t heard from em since.

7

Let me chime in and also suggest that you forget this idea, and not just “for the time being”, but for good and all.

I don’t know about “good” reasons, but be assured there’s a strong reason. And you never know… perhaps if you knew it, you wouldn’t be so keen to introduce the little ones. Who knows?

Imho, bad guess. There’s obviously a reason he gets “agitated”, “vague”, and “distant” when you talk to him about this, and it’s not likely to be some feeling of rejection stemming from a remarriage.

We all have families, we can’t choose them. Sometimes there’s violence. Drugs. Betrayal. Mental illness. But I believe there’s an inherent and profound need in people to be loved by our families. To never feel that love doesn’t erase our need for it, though it is not impossible to make the awareness of that need retreat to a very dark corner. To feel that love, then to cut it off utterly – that’s a hard thing. A very hard thing in this world.

I have started and erased several paragraphs here. But for various reasons, I just can’t tell my own family’s story. And that’s hard too, you see. Never saying. Biting it back. But there are other people’s stories involved, and I don’t really have the right to tell them. Believe it or not, there are those who can hate a person for not making the decision your SO has made.

Please trust him on this. My guess is, as long as he thinks you haven’t given up on the idea of a reconciliation for him, he’ll never open up to you about whatever’s behind it.

8

Oh yeah, I have lots of experience with this subject. My dad is a big man, with a very bad temper, and being from the OLD south, lots of predjudices and a chauvinistic mentality. He’s also a genius, to the extent that he cannot relate with us mere mortals very well, and he has an obsession with controlling everything and everyone he has contact with. He’s violent, a child molester, and a master manipulator. The last time I was in the same room with my dad, he, my brother (who was 26 at the time), and I were at my house. I was doing laundry or something, and my dad was having a conversation with my brother. I began to pay attention to what was being said, and my dad was severely scolding my brother for something he had done. I never have found out what it was that he did. My dad was telling him that he wanted him to go down to the courthouse the next day and file for a name change. My brother was such a scumbag that he (my dad) didn’t want him to have the family name. !!! It was right at that moment that I decided I didn’t want anything to do with my father; we’d never gotten along, and I had spent a couple years here and there not speaking with him, but this time, I knew, it would be a lifelong decision.
It was very awkward for the first few years. I really didn’t speak to anyone, because, while everyone knew my dad was an asshat, nobody really wanted to come out and be upfront about it. Especially my mom- talk about disassociating . ‘Rictus grin, let’s pretend we’re a perfectly normal family. Nothing to see here, folks.’
After about 4 years of having NO contact with anyone, one of the more normal members of my family, my mom’s sister, moved to my city. Since then, we have spent alot of time together, and she has become almost like a surrogate mom to me. My mom was never really a “mother” type, so this is new for me. I like it. Having such a good relationship with her has helped to reestablish contact with a few other family members, but some I still haven’t talked to.
The 4 years of No Family At All were somewhat difficult, but since there was never the “normal” attachment and devotion that most families have, it was more normal, I guess, than weird. Holidays and birthdays are hard. It’s especially hard when you have children, and you have to explain why, when their grandfather is clearly alive, they have no contact with him.
Definitely there are families in which your participation costs you your dignity, self-esteem, and maybe sanity, and your best bet is to move 3,000 miles away, change your name, and have face-changing surgery. This is ok, and is not an offense to who you are as a person. However, my advice, from someone who has been through it, is that if you can hold on to one or two family members, that you can trust, it makes it a WHOLE lot easier. You will almost surely grieve and mourn the loss of your family if and when you decide to do this. Having SOMEONE that has known you all your life, knows your family and can understand your decision, boy, I really can’t stress enough how much better it is than going it all alone. I hope you have those people, and good luck whichever way you go.

9

My grandmother’s older brother left the family. He up and moved away to Texas and as far as I know, never came back for a visit. Had a family and everything.

I don’t know how he did it, but he forgot about everyone, too. One of her other brothers went to visit him once and at one point the guy goes “Who did you say you were again?”

I think he did it because my grandmother’s parents were really hard on him or something. Not abusive, just really negative and stuff.

10

If your family wanted to find you, could they?
What steps could they take, like tracing credit card usage or using the police?

11

If you are over the age of consent, and you don’t want to be “found”, you don’t have to respond to any move on your family’s part to track you down.

How likely is it that they would hire a private detective to locate you? IANALawyer, but I don’t think that any regular citizen can request a record of transactions made on your credit card. A person doing so would have to be with the police or an investigator, and would probably need a court order.

If they reported you missing and you were found by the police, I believe that explaining that you would not like to have any contact with them would be sufficient. It’s not a crime to divorce yourself from your family.

12

Sorry, I should have said that he did mention stuff like, “well he wanted to choose her over us.” and related statements.

I probably haven’t mentioned it for about two years now.

The thing is, Thingol, at the beginning of our relationship, I could tell that our weekend family get-togethers was something strange to him. Nearly 5 years later I still have to nudge him so he doesn’t sit in the corner and fall asleep (or at least pretend to sleep).

There’s a bunch of other family dynamics that I’d also rather not talk about out here, but let’s just say sometimes I suspect it’s not entirely NOT his fault too. Or maybe he is the way he is because of what happened (or didn’t).

Gah, I’m just working myself up again. :frowning:

Thanks for replying.

13

Pretty much ditto.

I have family I’d like to speak to, but won’t because of differences of opinion with one family member. Once that person has used up their time here, I’ll attend the funeral and work on picking the threads of those relationships back up again. If the relationships are salvageable at all.

14

I would so love to disappear from my family and never been seen by them again …

Not everyone grew up with The Waltons or The Brady Bunch.

My father has always been very distant with me, in fact until I was old enough to know about where babies come from I used to wonder who that man was that lived with us, I seem to remember my mother telling me I had to call him Daddy (he’s my bio father BTW).
My relationship with my mother can only be described as spectacularly bad. She would tell me “children should be seen and not heard, sit down and shut up”
I swear many people thought I was deaf and dumb or mentally impaired until I was a teenager. I believe (like Hamish) that my mother has an undiagnosed mental illness. She is a “screamer” - everything upsets her and she screams hysterically about it. Fold up a newspaper and leave it on the table - she’ll lift the roof off the house. Forget to put the milk back in the fridge after you - she’ll crack the windows. It goes on and on and on. Day in, day out. We’ve never gotten on, we fight nearly every day of the week, and always over some mundane happening like me leaving my shoes where she can see them. I’m worn out from it, mentally, physically and emotionally. And I just want it to end, I want away from this house, these people, this life.
And I’ve tried to leave, but other forces were working against me - the housing people refused to rehome me, the social welfare people sneered at me, the doctor busted her arse laughing at me …
I fear for myself, of what will become of me in the future.
I have no intention of ever getting married or having children Families are what the devil made when God wasn’t looking …

15

For some reason, some of your stories, while terrible, give me hope that my parental relationship isn’t as bad as it could have been.

My parents are still together. I have three brothers and a sister. I was born very late in the game, so even the brother closest in age to me is 8 years older. As such, I have a very tiny relationship with him, and none at all with the other three. One of my brothers is estranged, and no one has heard from him in 12 years now. We assume he is not dead, but we’re not really certain of that.

Each of them has systematically cut ties with my parents, thanks to the treatment they’ve received from my father. He’s a manipulative, angry man, and was a raging alcoholic for most of my formative years. I have suspicions that there was a lot of physical abuse of my older siblings.

My mother was a wonderful influence until I was 16, when she had a stroke. I suspect she’s had a tough road, and while no one will tell me anything, it’s pretty obvious that her sharp mind was severely damaged. I see very little of the woman that encouraged my sharp sense of humor and propensity to question everything. She’s a shell, and it’s very difficult to see her like that.

As such, my familial relationship is understandably pretty strained. I speak to them about twice a year on the phone – they live in Illinois, and I in Phoenix. Not completely severed ties, but pretty close.

As I get older and prepare for the arrival of my first child, it becomes more of an issue. I’d like my baby to know her grandparents, but even that’s chancy. I remember when my eldest brother left his young daughter with my parents to watch for a week’s time. According to my other brother, our father flipped out when the little girl (5 or 6) accidentally knocked over a lamp, breaking it. He yelled and screamed at a 6 year-old girl until she cried, and told her she was going to have to pay for the lamp. Her dad, my brother, was pissed about his lack of self-control, but it was pretty typical for us growing up.

If my father ever did anything like that to my little girl, he’d be shitting a Doc Marten for a week.

So I’m not sure what I’m going to do just yet.

16

I haven’t spoken to my mother in nearly 12 years. Best decision I ever made.

I didn’t really have that bad of a childhood, actually. It was more what she did to my dad during the divorce that made me realize what a vicious, vindictive person she was. They divorced when I was in college, and I was out on my own, so there was no angst about “Who’s going to take care of me?” But if you were not completely on her side, then you were against her, and she got very cold to me during the divorce because I tried to stay neutral.

I’m not going to go into the gritty details. Suffice to say after a lackluster attempt at reconciliation through letters, during which she threw in my face my relationship with her parents (and that’s a whole 'nuther thread) I got the guts to tell her off in a letter. It was cruel, it was nasty, and I felt a weight had been lifted from my shoulders afterward.

Actually, I wish her well. As I told my sister, who is still on good times with her, “I don’t hate her. I’d have to care to hate her.”

Just because they’re family doesn’t mean they’re not shits. Fill your life with friends and other loved ones.

17

If I may, Chastain, your first priority is your baby’s safety and well-being. If you would like to gauge things, invite your parents over to your house, instead of going over there. From what I’ve seen of how my in-laws and my folks treat my children, they could set the house on fire and all that would happen is a minor “Tsk tsk, did you burn your hand?” Grandparents are supposed to spoil the grandchildren rotten. It’s their reward for raising us. :stuck_out_tongue:

18

Just to play devil’s advocate…

My ex husband left home when he was 16…I have no idea of the details. He keeps in very limited contact with his father and his mother is dead. They have never met our son and as far as I know never asked to.

However, I would like to know things about his family for medical purposes for my son. I have broached the subject a couple times but never gotten very far.

So for those where children are involved there might be some medical history or information that will be crucial to you at some point. I, personally, would take that into consideration before I cut off all contact and disappeared from my family. Yes, I’m sure if needed you could track them down but what if you could not?

And man do I feel fortunate to have had a great family after reading some of your stories. I feel for you and in some cases you probably made an extremely wise decision in cutting those people from your lives.

19

I’ve essentially cut ties with my brother and my grandfather, but remain semi-close with the rest of my family.

Basically my reasons for doing so boil down to one simple realization: blood bonds in the adult years are nothing more than pre-assigned friendships which get a lot of emphasis put on them by society and, just like friendships, should be severed if they’re simply not healthy.

My grandfather is wildly manic-depressive these days and also going senile, which has caused him to become totally irrational towards his family members to such a degree that even his own daughter won’t speak to him any more. He will go on fifteen minute rants about random subjects and how they’re all your fault in spite of the fact that he obviously has some share of the blame. When he goes senile and forgets things, its your fault for some outlandish reason. If you invite him to a party then he can’t come, but if you don’t invite him anymore he calls up and yells about how ungrateful you are.

My brother… our early relationship was entirely negative. Into my mid-teens he was a dark and violent spectre for me, constantly threatening me with violence and sometimes acting out on thost threats. In one memorable circumstance he had me pinned to the floor and started choking me to the point where I nearly passed out, all for utterly no reason except he was bored. He thought it was funny. When he hit puberty things just went downhill from there. On two occassions I had to sleep over at my uncle’s house because I was seriously afraid for my life. On one occassion I called the police from inside my parents’ bedroom with my brother shouting at me on the other side of the locked door.

There are times when I really pity my parents for being in such a horrible situation between their two sons and other times when I get really pissed off that they let him get away with so much shit that still affects me to this day.

He’s stabilized somewhat ever since joining the Navy, but he still remains an egotistical and emotionally abusive person who would rather shout than talk and order rather than listen. His reaction to my coming out did not endear us any further, but I take a perverse sort of pleasure in knowing his friends supported me instead of him. So suffice to say our relationship was sunk when I was little and he’s given me no reason to try and rebuild it.

And the subject still really pisses me off.

20

Did it back in the early 90’s, and haven’t looked back.

My family is only my mother and brother, and they both tried to screw me over on a deal, thinking I wouldn’t find out. But I did, and told them both to eff off, and that’s been it.

I really don’t miss the guilt trips, either. Last I heard, my mother’s been making my brother’s life a living hell, since I’m no longer around to emotionally abuse. Works for me.