no contact with family members = bypassing healing opportunities/prioritising healing

[Judy2]

hi there:)

things are a bit all over the place here at the moment, so i am partly distracting myself by asking this, but also trying to address at least one tiny piece of the puzzle. 

in the past two months, certain symptoms have gotten a lot worse for me as a result of increased interactions with my parents.  i feel really bad that i am basically still so childish for letting them affect me this deeply - but they are one of my most prominent triggers to this day. most recently, i got triggered quite badly by them simply asking about my future plans and when i will get my degree... - and i have a feeling this lingering dependence on them, even if it is subtle, is also enhancing pressure at the moment. but i'm also stressed in and of itself trying to figure out my career and financial independence. 

i've shared this many times before, but for my anorexia recovery, a critical (life-saving) aspect was moving away, and then i stayed away for five years without visiting once, until last summer. during this time, we had a number of phone calls that resulted in similar bad reactions on my end, though. 

due to my current increase in difficult symptoms, i am wondering again if reducing contact with my parents is the only way for me to get better. i guess the alternative would be to radically improve our communication and my own stress tolerance during our interactions, but i don't even know if i want this... sometimes i don't even want to improve things with my parents - i just want to RUN. 

...but they're also not bad enough for me to cut them out completely. i like comparing myself to my brother and, for reference, he seems to be okay when interacting with my parents, or at the very least he experiences less personal conflict when trying to navigate being close vs. needing space. 

 

so i guess my question is - is it healthy to reduce contact or is that the lazy/easy way out that actually bypasses any opportunities we'd have to improve together? 

is my unwillingness to give this a try just avoidance of the growth we could achieve together if we actually wanted to? 

 

i also keep wondering to what degree i am just weird and a horrible person that acts weird for no reason vs. my parents are toxic and it is only natural i turned out this way. or something inbetween - it's hard to tell how much of what i feel is justified vs. just toxic.

Edited 14 hours ago by Judy2

[Elliott]

There's probably literally no one that escapes the parental toxicity cycle without reducing contact. You feeling bad about reducing contact is from their probably lifelong psychological manipulation they've done to you. Even people in non toxic families reduce contact for certain periods in life, it's healthy, probably necessary: they're just not made to feel guilty about it, because it's normal.

Edited 14 hours ago by Elliott