How Trump and Zooey Deschanel Helped Me Break Up With My Bully Family
“The personal is political and the political is personal…” and aren’t we all feeling attacked, on some level, right now?
TO THOSE OF YOU who are passionate about equality, who worry about today’s America and are finding it hard to believe in anything right now: thank you for caring.
Your voices still matter. Your voices helped me escape my own prison.
My personal silver lining in the Trump tornado is this: until he stood up there on a national stage doing the same things I put up with at home, I had felt too alone to do anything about it. I had decided twisted love was better than no love at all. I kept looking for reasoning in my abusers. Until I saw bullying and inequality so close to home, I couldn’t accept what was going on at home.
There are big groups of people out there cheering an abuser on, jeering at his victims. Just because their voices are loud does not make them right. Nor does it make them unstoppable.
I grew up homeschooled, the eldest of eight, in an abusive and narcissistic, fundamentalist household until I escaped on an unlikely college scholarship. When I returned, I found that my family’s destructive behavior had only escalated. I also discovered that my newfound ability to recognize and identify pathological behavior mercilessly turned their criticism and senseless, cruel attacks on me. Physical, verbal and emotional abuse, scapegoating, gas-lighting, death threats, broken restraining orders … just full-on bullying.
99.9% of it for no reason.
I couldn’t understand why my family, who were supposed to love me, could be so mean. I made excuses for them. I jumped through hoops: how can I be better, how can I change? I felt stuck, because I couldn’t accept the truth: that my love and loyalty was only enabling more abuse.
Don’t get me wrong: my family didn’t even vote for Trump. No, this was about gang-mentality, a pathology where, if you can pin your pain on something outside yourself and everyone around you backs it up, it doesn’t matter how that thing feels. It’s about attack, deflect, and blame.
When you’re not willing to do the work, it’s easier that way.
Actions speak louder than words, and I believe that my making the choice to stop speaking to my family, to walk away, to withdraw the love they took for granted, is an action that needed to be taken. Because sometimes, when you’re trying to be the bigger person, you not only set yourself up for more abuse, you encourage it.
Those women justifying sexual assault? Those senior citizens wearing ‘Hilary for Prison’ t-shirts? These KKK marches of senseless hate? In some ways I was just like them. Because by tolerating and making excuses for bullying in my own life, I had a hand in allowing and sometimes, further acting it out. By internalizing my abuser’s self-loathing, by misappropriating the dangerously enabling Biblical notion of ‘turn the other cheek,’ I was making excuses for unacceptable behavior that, in turn, hurts not only me, but perpetuates destructive cycles.
Am I suggesting avoiding dialogue with those who oppose you? Absolutely not. But when someone is attacking you, I’ve learned that their thinking mind seems to shut down. Reasoning doesn’t work. You’re not going to get through.
But again that slim silver lining shines through: in seeing just how low we can go as a country, I have also learned how many healthy, positive, well-adjusted, non-hateful people there are out there: people who are willing to take a stand against misogyny, aggression, fear and hate.
Thank you, random commenter on yet another article bemoaning today’s reality: “I don’t have any substantive words of comfort to combat the ugly, hateful rhetoric that has been spewed at us this year. But I am here with you, and I really do believe that bringing this repugnant bigotry to the light will truly expunge some of it. Maybe not all, but some. Hang in there.” Thank you, awesome person.
You, Zooey Deschanel, random actress in an interview, have reached me directly, personally. You said, “When I was growing up, I always thought the world would get less bigoted, less racist, and people would be more open-minded. For a while, I thought that was happening, but it’s been very scary the last few years. I really, truly believe that people are basically good in nature, and in the end, that prevails.” Thank you, Zooey. I feel like we’re practically friends, now.
It may sound lonely, but it is well-adjusted, honest, fearless voices like these, for progress and equality, that are my family, right now.
Today, I hope, my honesty about my own sad story can help someone else out there, someone struggling with standing up for him or herself, someone who feels they will never be strong enough, alone. I am here to tell you I have done it. I walked away and after the pain of separation, I felt a burden lift.
It was watching the same ‘might makes right’ word-twisting, lies, and black-and-white logic my family uses to justify wanton abuse now play out on a national stage, that finally helped me see through the cycle.
So how does one personally deal with bullying in a polarized population on a national level?
Michelle Obama said it best: “when they go low we go high.”
In these hard times, we must remember that. With this attitude, perhaps we can begin to address and, hopefully, treat a malaise that demands more than just walking away.
But the diagnosis, the treatment, and eventually the antidote and the healing, begins which each of us, at home. And if that home is so infected it is resistant to treatment, you must inoculate yourself, heal, and regenerate so health and newness can emerge in its place.
The world outside pathological brainwashing and abuse, anger and fear, can be a beautiful one if you can only just believe in it, and make it there. There are good, kind, fair people out there waiting for you, I promise. I’m finding more every day.
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