Blowing Sunshine

Toxic family? Oh yeah. For a family whose surname literally means ‘beaming sunshine,’ I feel the only way I’d be able to do that would be out of my ass. There are a lot of misinterpretations of the word family, so ‘origin family’ seems more appropriate here, because it only denotes the source of my genetic material. Oh yeah, and my dysfunctionality. That’s inherited. Nature or nurture? Both. It was certainly never a ‘family’ in the traditional sense.

There are a number of personalities that the children of toxic parents develop. With seven of us, we exhibited the full panoply. Clown, little dictator, escapists – a couple of those, those that acted out and became next-generation addicts, the pretender – “nothing wrong here, everything’s perfect.” And me – I was the little mouse that ran and hid. It took me years of therapy and learning on my own to overcome the scared mouse personality.

Mother always said, “You don’t want to open Pandora’s box,” and it wasn’t until long after she died that I figured out the real meaning. ‘Don’t go looking for skeletons in the closet’ would have been a better interpretation. Heaven forbid you should find out family secrets. In this and most dysfunctional families, the primary directive is: you don’t talk about the family – and all its nastiness. ‘Don’t talk about fight club’ – same thing. Later, when I was grown and had become quite philosophical, I decided that Pandora’s box should absolutely be opened. Let those demons out so they can perish in the fresh air and sunshine. Then families wouldn’t be manacled to the hurtful behavior they have inherited. Call it breaking generational curses or whatever you want. Each generation should be free to make their own way.

For all of our adult lives, the siblings continued the pattern of criticism and judgment. The family motto should have been ‘you’re never good enough.’ After our parents died, the older sibs took relish in condemnation, as if it were their familial obligation to the younger ones. And if they couldn’t find something wrong with you, they made it up and spread it around. Thank heavens for psychotherapy. One of the first things it taught me was to ‘walk away – refuse to play.’ Over the years my interactions with these people have grown less and less. Of course I got criticized for that, too. I came to despise the often repeated, “But they’re your family.” Family has taken on a completely different meaning for me. The best thing is to make your own ‘family’ out of people who have shown you trust and respect unconditionally. I guess that means my dog is my family. Seriously, though, my new (and only) family is very small, consisting of my spouse, grandchild, and one or two foster mothers along the way.

The end result is this: I took all that shit I was forced to eat over the years, digested it, then detoxified it, so now I can turn it into sunshine and blow it out of my ass! After all, all dark things wither in the sunshine. It helps to have a petalite crystal in your hand – it’s a breaker of generational curses.