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results. If your abuser is not open to looking at what he has done to
damage you, continues to abuse you in the same way he did when you
were a child, or presents a threat to your children, you may need to
continue your separation from him or even divorce him. (For more
information on this, refer to my book Divorcing a Parent.)
On the other hand, if your abuser has shown some capacity for
understanding your pain and some willingness to take responsibility
for her actions however small that capacity and willingness may
seem there may be hope for the relationship. This is also the case if
you have noticed that your abuser has been open to your attempts at
setting limits and boundaries.
Before you reconcile, ask yourself the following questions:
1. Am I strong enough to be around this person without losing
ground in my recovery?
2. Can I maintain a sense of emotional separation from this per-
son when I am in her presence?
3. Am I strong enough to set appropriate limits and boundaries so
that I do not allow myself to be abused again?
4. Am I being pressured into reconciliation (by other family
members, by my spouse, by guilt, or by my religious beliefs)
before I am actually ready?
5. Is this person ready to reconcile with me? Is she still angry
with me for being angry with her, for not having seen her for
awhile, or for bringing the abuse out in the open? (If so, she
may need more time to heal and forgive, no matter how forgiv-
ing you might feel.)
If you can t answer yes to items 1, 2, 3, and 5 and no to item 4,
you may need to wait a while before attempting a reconciliation.
Facing the Pain and Confusion
of Emotional Separation
Emotional separation often involves emotional pain. It can be painful
to face the truth about your parents, to question their beliefs and the
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234 Breaking the Cycle of Abuse
lessons they taught you, to stand up to your parents, or to disagree
with them today. Separation brings losses and even though they are
necessary losses they are still painful. You may have to give up the
false hope that your parents will one day be the kind of parents you
have longed for and deserve. This can be especially painful.
Emotional separation can also create internal conflict. You may
realize that taking care of yourself and being true to yourself will
necessitate going against your parents wishes and beliefs. This may
cause you to feel you are being disloyal to your parents. You may vac-
illate between such conflicting emotions as wanting to recapture a real
or imagined sense of family closeness and a desire for revenge or
compensation from your parents. At one moment you may feel like
you want nothing to do with your parents or other abusive family
member and at another you may worry that your parents may disown
you. It is especially challenging to distinguish between the negative
internalized messages of your parents and the healthy messages of
your true voice.
Emotional separation involves the ability to hold the tension of
two opposites. While it is important to face the truth about your par-
ents mistreatment of you and allow yourself to be angry with them it
is also important to realize that your parents were themselves mis-
treated. And although it is important to understand that you didn t
deserve the way you were mistreated, neither did your parents.
Whereas your parents were not responsible for what happened to
them as children, they are responsible for what they did to you.
You will find that you will continue to grieve over the losses of
your childhood throughout the separation process and this will be a
significant part of your healing. Your parents no doubt experienced
losses in their childhood but were not able to grieve over them. This
contributed to their repeating what was done to them. By facing your
grief you reduce your own need to abuse others.
While emotional separation often takes time and the support of
others, such as supportive friends, family members, therapists or self-
help groups, those who have been able to complete these steps report
feeling like they have finally taken the reins in their life.
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chapter 14
Facing the Truth about
Your Family Legacy
We respect our ancestor s achievements by standing
on their shoulders and seeing further, not by crouching
in their shadows and seeing less. . . .
Donald Creighton
We must let ourselves feel all the painful destructiveness we
want to forgive rather than swallow it in denial. If we do not
face it, we cannot choose to forgive it.
Kenneth McNoll, Healing the Family Tree
At the beginning of this book we discussed how the legacy of abuse
and neglect gets passed down from generation to generation. In order
to truly break the cycle you must learn as much about your family
legacy as possible because only by being clear about what you are
dealing with can you truly overcome it. Knowing your family legacy
will provide you the wisdom you will need in order to avoid repeating
the same mistakes your ancestors did. It will also help you spot any of
the family tendencies in your own children so you can offer them the
help they will need.
The other reason why it is important to know your family legacy
is that it will provide you the necessary empathy you will need to for-
give yourself and your ancestors for the harm you and they have done
to others. This is especially true of the harm your parents have done to
you and the harm you have done to your own children. Once you have
put your own pattern into the context of your family history you will
be able to take on an entirely different perspective and this new per-
spective can be nothing less than life-transforming.
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