Latest / The Spiritual Shitshow Podcast / The Sadness that Comes with Family Estrangement and a Path Towards Healing

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The Sadness that Comes with Family Estrangement and a Path Towards Healing · The Spiritual Shitshow Podcast

• 0:00
  There is a particular kind of grief that isn't always talked about And there's never a real ceremony or funeral for.
• 0:09
  This type of grief doesn't always have people bringing food to your door or flowers, or there's not a clear ending that everyone can understand.
• 0:19
  Sometimes it is the grief of someone who is still alive.
• 0:24
  Sometimes it is the grief of family estrangement, of realizing that the relationship you needed, hoped for, or kept trying to earn may never be available to you And sometimes the deepest grief is not only what happened, it is grieving what never got to happen.
• 0:48
  The mothering, the sisterhood, the mentorship, the safety, the unconditional love, the feeling of being wanted, protected, celebrated, and fully seen by the people who were supposed to see you first Welcome back to the Spiritual Shit Show.
• 1:07
  I am so glad you're here.
• 1:09
  Today I wanna talk about claiming your own story without the guilt, shame, fear, or old roles attached to it.
• 1:17
  Because for many of us, telling the truth about our lives can feel dangerous I know for myself, I carry the role as people pleaser.
• 1:26
  Maybe you play the role as peacekeeper or healer, the one who always has to do the right thing.
• 1:35
  Maybe you learned that your needs were too much, your emotions were inconvenient, or your truth would hurt someone else.
• 1:44
  and if this resonates and you understand what I am saying Then you might also feel that when you're trying to heal, you may find yourself editing your own story, minimizing it, second-guessing it, gaslighting it, wondering if you are being too emotional, too harsh, too sensitive, too dramatic, too much.
• 2:04
  Or you catch yourself listening to the old mental patterns.
• 2:11
  There you go, playing the victim again.
• 2:14
  Or you're hearing the voices from the past echoing louder than the whispers of your heart.
• 2:22
  And I want to offer this gently Your story does not become less true because someone else is uncomfortable hearing it And as always, I am creating these podcasts because this is exactly where I am in my journey.
• 2:37
  And a lot of these things I share, I am needing to hear it too And so what I want to say to us is Your story does not become less true because someone else is uncomfortable hearing it.
• 2:52
  And your feelings do not become invalid because someone once taught you to doubt them For a long time, I thought healing meant getting rid of certain feelings, getting rid of the sadness, getting rid of the anxiety, getting rid of the rumination, getting rid of the part of me that still wished things could be different.
• 3:11
  And over and over and over, I heard from my family, Just let it go." I have done so much work over the years, therapy, somatic work, deep self-reflection, journaling, fire rituals, cord cutting.
• 3:24
  I've seen every healer I could possibly see, and I have done all the plant medicines.
• 3:29
  And honestly, that is the frustrating part Because here I am again today sitting with all of it.
• 3:37
  And they say what you resist persists And that is annoying because sometimes you're like,"I have already looked at this.
• 3:45
  I have processed it.
• 3:46
  I have cried about this.
• 3:48
  I have literally done all of the things.
• 3:51
  Why can't I let it go?
• 3:53
  Why is it still here?" And I have a friend who really truly understands my story, and she's always reminding me to give myself grace, and she's saying,"This sadness just may be with you always, Julie, and you're gonna have to be okay with that And that is what I'm learning, that perhaps the goal is not to get rid of these parts of ourselves, or the sadness, or the pain, or the story.
• 4:20
  Maybe the invitation is to stop abandoning them, stop trying to push them away, stop trying to let them go.
• 4:28
  and I'm curious if softening can happen when we create enough internal safety to say,"Okay, this part gets to be here, too.
• 4:40
  The sad part gets to be here.
• 4:42
  It's valid.
• 4:44
  The angry part gets to be here.
• 4:47
  It's valid." The part of you that still longs for love, that may never go away.
• 4:55
  Just give it a seat at the table You do not have to exile any parts of yourself in order to become whole.
• 5:06
  And if you are estranged from a family member, or even emotionally estranged while still in contact, I wanna say this clearly.
• 5:14
  It is hard.
• 5:16
  It is painful.
• 5:18
  It is strange.
• 5:20
  It is hard to accept.
• 5:22
  It is hard to understand, and it's not just as simple as we'll just block them, or yeah, but look at your family, or yeah, look at your life, or yeah, but look what you get to do.
• 5:32
  The pain is still there.
• 5:35
  Yes, sometimes distance is necessary.
• 5:38
  Yes, sometimes boundaries, you need to have them Sometimes no contact and blocking is the most loving, self-protective choice you can make for yourself.
• 5:49
  For me, I know when I was dealing with this particular family member, it was like drinking poison.
• 5:56
  Anytime they texted, it was so toxic.
• 5:59
  I would be out for three days, and that's all I can say.
• 6:02
  It was like, it was literally every time I come in contact with them, it is poison to me.
• 6:08
  I have to block them, and that can hurt.
• 6:14
  You can know a relationship is unsafe for you and still grieve it.
• 6:21
  You can hold a boundary and still ache inside and miss them.
• 6:27
  you can understand intellectually why things are the way they are And the body, and the heart, and the soul, and you can still crave, and maybe even ache for what you have never received.
• 6:44
  And that does not make you weak.
• 6:46
  it does not make you confused, and it does not make you a victim.
• 6:53
  It makes you human.
• 6:55
  When someone has experienced abuse, manipulation, gaslighting, or cycles of being pulled close and pushed away, the body can carry the residue long after the relationship has changed or ended.
• 7:10
  If you have been in a narcissistic relationship, and you still sometimes feel the energetic sting of it all, it takes time.
• 7:23
  The mind knows what happens.
• 7:25
  The mind knows where you are in the boundary, and the blocking, and that you're not even in that relationship anymore.
• 7:31
  But the body may still be trying to make sense of it.
• 7:35
  There might be a part of you that is still craving the love, what you hoped for, the apology.
• 7:44
  There might be a version of you that is still desiring their love.
• 7:49
  You might be replaying the story, searching for the moment where it could have gone differently, or hanging on to some future hope That things will be different, that things can heal, that love will repair.
• 8:05
  And this is where I am in my journey, and this is where radical acceptance can become a profound act of self-love.
• 8:14
  Not acceptance as in what happened was okay, or, whatever it is, I need to stop feeling this way.
• 8:22
  It is radically accepting that this is what happened, this is what I did not receive, this is what still hurts, and I am still allowed to build a beautiful life And when the pains come in, when the sadness comes in, when the anger comes in, that that is okay My personal estrangement is with my sister, and I lost my mother when I was three, and then I'm estranged from my sister.
• 9:02
  So where I'm at is feeling, allowing myself to accept that I may always have a graveyard of sadness that lives inside of me.
• 9:15
  And the way I describe it is I can go and visit that graveyard, and I can cry, and I can grieve.
• 9:24
  And just like any time you're about to leave the cemetery, you hold the sadness, you take a deep breath, and then you choose to move on with your day Where I feel like I missed the mark a lot is because I kept on holding onto the shame story, the guilt story.
• 9:45
  I shouldn't f- be feeling like this.
• 9:47
  I should've moved on already.
• 9:49
  Why can't I let it go?
• 9:51
  But the reality is, what I've experienced is sad.
• 9:56
  It is.
• 9:57
  It is sad for somebody to not have a mother figure in their life, or a sister, or a mentor, or a guide.
• 10:04
  It is sad for somebody to not know what unconditional love is from from anybody in their family line.
• 10:11
  It is sad to be estranged from your family.
• 10:15
  It is sad to have family that causes you more grief than it does joy.
• 10:21
  It feels weird to be in a place where you're, where you don't really feel at home within a family unit.
• 10:29
  And the hook here is when you say that out loud, then you get the rebuttal of, But you get to have a chosen family," or,"Look at your husband's family," or,"Look at your life." And both can exist.
• 10:44
  I can have a beautiful family with my husband's family, and I can still feel sad that I will never get to experience that within my own family.
• 10:56
  And that's where the breath or the ease or the, the contact can be made within ourselves that I can hold sadness around this situation, and I may be sad about it forever, and I can accept that.
• 11:15
  I may be sad that I will always yearn for feminine support.
• 11:22
  I will always be sad that I am not close to my nieces.
• 11:26
  I will always be sad that what I desired was a sister tribe will never happen.
• 11:33
  I will always grieve that, I think.
• 11:36
  And that's where the acceptance for myself comes in, that it is okay to grieve it.
• 11:42
  It is okay to be sad about it.
• 11:44
  It is okay to desire to be in a family that you would love to be in and that will never be the reality Over the weekend, I was with my husband's family, and I was like,"Wow." I was struck by the reciprocity of it all, how they consciously choose to show up for one another, that there's effort, and there's such an ease in their family system, and they're so gracious, and everybody's doing their part, and everybody's participating.
• 12:18
  And I look at my daughter, and she's with her cousins, and she has aunts and uncles that genuinely care about her and want to mentor her, and we have all of these family experiences.
• 12:30
  And I felt so grateful, and I felt so sad at the same time Because when I am with their family, it also shows me the shape of what I never had And it can bring up the grief of knowing I may never understand this from the inside.
• 12:51
  I may never know what it feels like to be loved in this particular way by my own family, and that is the painful truth.
• 12:59
  And also, again, it is valid My heart will always recognize the absence.
• 13:06
  And I don't have to shame myself for that, and I don't have to feel guilty about it.
• 13:10
  And I'm curious if I just allow the sadness to be present, then what happens?
• 13:15
  Instead of getting angry at myself for not feeling happy for what I do have, because sometimes what I don't have feels so much more louder in the present moment What I'm being reminded of is that we don't have to rush past and go straight towards positivity or gratitude.
• 13:38
  Yes, of course I'm grateful for my husband's family.
• 13:40
  Yes, of course I'm grateful for my life.
• 13:42
  Yes, of course I can see the silver lining in all things, and two things can be true.
• 13:49
  You can be deeply grateful for the safe love in your life now, and you can grieve the love you did not receive before.
• 13:57
  That is not victimhood.
• 13:59
  That is honesty.
• 14:01
  That is self-compassion And then this is what's guiding me towards an ability to claim the story I was afraid to really fully live within my own story because I heard so often,"Stop being the victim.
• 14:18
  You're, there you go being the victim again." claiming your story does not mean living inside of it forever.
• 14:26
  It does not mean defining yourself only by what hurt you.
• 14:32
  But what you resist persists Claiming your story means refusing to deny your experience Or gaslight yourself, or try to move through it, or try to suppress it, or not feel safe to talk about it Claiming your story means letting your life be real.
• 14:50
  It means this impacted me.
• 14:53
  I am still hurt by it.
• 14:56
  It still makes me sad, and some days it still makes me angry It's okay to say,"I kinda, I am still healing, and I may carry this sadness with me forever.
• 15:08
  I'm not sure." Claiming your story means there are parts of my past that I am not going to minimize anymore And it also means recognizing that the story is still being written Of course it hurt.
• 15:26
  Of course you would miss that.
• 15:28
  Of course you're sad.
• 15:30
  Of course you're tired Of course, you learned the role as a people pleaser when love felt conditional in my reclaiming and remembering What I'm understanding in myself is there's a pain loop, that my mind is ruminating, replaying, romanticizing what could have been.
• 15:57
  Romanticizing of like,"Well, what if I hold space for healing to happen or the relationship to repair?" And that is not ever gonna happen, and that's where the radical acceptance has to come in.
• 16:07
  And our minds are often trying to protect us, and they're trying to solve something that may not have a solution.
• 16:13
  Again, radical acceptance.
• 16:15
  Our bodies often know something our minds forget.
• 16:20
  When I sat in meditation today, my body was like,"We can move on.
• 16:25
  We can feel safe.
• 16:27
  We can feel happy.
• 16:28
  We can feel abundant.
• 16:29
  We can feel grateful, and we would like permission." My body wants permission to do all of that.
• 16:36
  What I'm noticing, it's my mind.
• 16:38
  My mind still wants the apology.
• 16:41
  My mind is, is wondering what that would feel like if my sibling apologized to me, like wholeheartedly apologized to me.
• 16:52
  My mind still goes into dreamland and desires and romanticizes about what it would like if my siblings all got together and we went to the beach, and all of the cousins liked each other, and we were cohesive together as a unit.
• 17:08
  The reality is it's never gonna happen But my body knows that.
• 17:14
  My heart kind of knows that.
• 17:17
  And so what do I do with it from here?
• 17:19
  All parts are welcome.
• 17:21
  That's where I wanna start.
• 17:22
  All parts are welcome.
• 17:24
  Do not try to move through your anger or your sadness and be okay with they may just be there forever, and that is okay.
• 17:34
  And that does not make you a victim of the story.
• 17:38
  You claiming and owning your story is valid.
• 17:42
  It's fair.
• 17:44
  How you, how you have experienced betrayal and abandonment is fair Grace, compassion, self-love, forgiveness, anger, resentment, abandonment, sadness, all fair And with all of that, I wanna offer you something that is feeling really supportive to me and it's just an ability to connect with myself, my physical body in the here and now, bringing all of my energy into the here and now And just practicing permission.
• 18:24
  Whatever wants to come up, I let it come up And I let it come up long enough until I can't feel the charge anymore And I remind myself that all parts of myself are allowed to take up space.
• 18:41
  That there's no part of my story that still needs to be under the umbrella of guilt or shame I remind myself that I can hold grief and still move forward, and I can be sad and still be safe and remind myself that I am not broken and to come home to myself over and over again.
• 19:05
  That I'm allowed to tell the truth about what I have carried, what I have experienced.
• 19:13
  That I'm allowed to grieve the family, the love, the safety, and the belonging that I deserve that I'm allowed to let that grief exist without making it my identity That peace is possible through presence And maybe the more that you let all the parts of your story be present, the less they have to shout to be heard Thank you for being a part of this journey.
• 19:43
  Thank you for letting me claim my story through this podcast holding loving and compassionate space for the messy human experience.
• 19:55
  Grief, family estrangement, pains, sadness, grieving people who are still alive.
• 20:03
  It's so strange, isn't it?
• 20:05
  And here we are In the brutal and the beautiful parts of this soul's journey