If You’ve Had To Walk Away From Your Family, Read This

Walking away from a strained family is painful, yet sometimes necessary for healing. Rania Naim reflects on this journey, and Rebecca Simon’s Finding God Every Day helps guide readers toward strength, hope, and God’s presence even amid the most challenging family struggles.

Everybody talks about how hard it is to break up with a partner, someone you met at some point in your life and vowed to stay with through thick and thin, but nobody talks about the most painful heartbreak of all: breaking up with your own parents, your own family, your own blood. The first people you see when you’re born, the first faces you learn to love.

They don’t tell you that it will feel terribly wrong at first, like a taboo, and you will carry that guilt within you for the rest of your life. They don’t tell you that every mistake, every rejection, every setback and every loss might feel like a punishment or a curse because you decided to abandon your own family. They don’t tell you that it’s the loneliest thing you can ever do to yourself and that it has the potential to ruin every single relationship you try to build.

They don’t tell you that this is the kind of heartbreak you may never really recover from.

They say your parents are your backbone, the foundation of your character and they chart the course for your future, but what if they become your burden, the ones holding you back, the ones dismissing your dreams and the ones creating the most toxic environment for your mental health and well-being? They don’t tell you what you should do then, when you’re not old enough or independent enough to go your own way.

They don’t tell you how to love them when they’re making you miserable all the time. They don’t tell you how to find peace and love in a home that brings nothing but chaos.  

No one talks about that kind of heartbreak, so I am here to sum it up for you: the day you get the courage to leave and breakup with your family, the day you decide that you’ve had enough of this heaviness and misery that you did not create, the day you decide to end the war, will be the most liberating day of your life but it’s also the beginning of the most difficult journey you may ever face.

The journey of reparenting yourself, the journey of reprogramming their negative thoughts and beliefs they instilled in you, the journey of unlearning everything they taught you, the journey of figuring everything out on your own without guidance or support or a hand to hold, the journey of being for yourself everything they couldn’t be for you.

They don’t tell you that this difficult journey may never truly end and that you may never find the wisdom to fully forgive them. They don’t warn you that the wounds may never truly heal, that the scars will forever mark your soul. They don’t tell you that this is the kind of heartbreak that breaks you into pieces and you may never know how to be whole again.

This is the heartbreak that truly never heals, but it’s the heartbreak you choose. The lesser of two evils. You choose it because staying will only destroy you. It’s a bitter remedy to a vicious cycle, a desperate act to reclaim your soul, a desperate act to save yourself from further destruction. This heartbreak is the painful cost of freedom, but it’s sometimes your only shot at finding peace and a loving home.