Sometimes people are just too toxic to keep in your life, and when you get away from them, the word ends up a much better place. Check out these stories from people that got away from the worst kind of people.
Even His Siblings Were Abusive
“I have a friend who struggles with depression and anxiety, and his mother is constantly telling him he’s worthless. He has a decent job that gives him around $60,000 a year, has no vices, and is generally well loved by his peers and coworkers. His mother’s vile comes mostly because he will not let himself be the family bank, and he disowned his substance-addicted brother for constantly stealing from him. At a family gathering this summer, she started an argument with him and attempted to slap his face; he grabbed her by the wrist to stop it and she told him she would call the police and have him arrested for assault. She also tells him that she wished the aforementioned brother would have beaten him, even more, when he was a child; she knew the abuse was happening and did nothing to stop it.
I have made it no great secret that I believe he should cut that toxic growth out of his life, for good if he has to. There is absolutely no benefit in nurturing a relationship like this; family or not.”
A Man Escapes His Abusive Father
“I loved my dad. He has, on various occasions, hugged me, told me he loved me, told me he was proud of me, taken me out for ice cream, gone to the park and played ball with me, talked to me about my interests, and when I was older, talked to me about the birds and the bees. He didn’t punish me for drinking when I was 20 because I had the sense to not drive, and call him and tell him that I was staying the night somewhere because I had been drinking too much to drive home.
He has also, at various points, choked me, punched me, told me I’m worthless, implied that if I left I’d be unable to make it on my own, told me that no other family would put up with my nonsense, and completely ignored a crisis call from my school when I was suicidal, and kept me in the closet under the stairs.
Abuse isn’t always a constantly awful experience where your abusers are a constant villain figure, complete with twirly mustache. There were good times in there, and times that things seemed normal.
As a child, though, ultimately I feared when the bad version of my dad would come back. As a teenager, I fought tooth and nail whenever I got the opportunity. As an adult, I pitied him until his dying day, after I made the decision to cut him out of my life completely because I ultimately knew that he needed me more than I needed him.
It’s a mindbender. It never isn’t, and I’ve never known someone who’s been through abuse that didn’t feel mind bent, but the bottom line is that if you need someone out of your life for your own well being, then that’s just what you need to do, no matter what.”
A Mother’s Behavior At Her Sons Wedding Is Deplorable
“I no longer talk to my mother. She went completely off the deep end at my wedding, even ‘booing’ my wife and me. She destroyed her bouquet and said we gave her a lesser one.
She crashed the bridal party’s spa appointment to get hair and makeup done. When we were announced at the reception, she BOOED. She destroyed favors, she told my uncle whose wife of 40 years just passed away, that she’s burning in hell. I found out about a lot of this after the fact. Our families spent the entire day running interference on her, so we didn’t get the worst of it. Bar none, she acted like the lowest of the low, something slightly above that first amphibian crawling out of the primordial ooze and calling itself a land dweller. If there was anything she could do that was destructive, she did it. The last thing she said to me was, ‘I hope your plane crashes’ as we left the next morning for our flight to Australia. I haven’t spoken to her much since, and not at all in the last 15 years.”
A Person Is Better Off Without His Mother
“As someone whose mother is currently incarcerated for abusing me as a child, yes, sometimes you need to cut them out, no matter how close. Most people don’t have to ever think about cutting their mom, or any other family member, out of their life, so it’s easy for them to say, ‘Family is family, no matter what they did to you.; This is the gist of what my grandma, my mom’s mom, has said to me many times. It used to make me feel guilty, but you know what? No, blood does not give people a free pass to screw your life up and continue to screw your life up. Yeah, it can be hard for some people to cut family out, but in the end, if it makes you feel better mentally and helps your well being, then it’s the right thing to do.”
No Family Is Better Than Family That Hurts
“I haven’t spoken to my parents in over a year.
I took some time off work on disability to get my mental health back up to where I needed it to be and stayed with them for a few months. It was the best I’ve felt in years. I was eating healthy, talking with a regular therapist, on the right track with medication, and exercising. Well, my mom is a control freak and without getting too much into detail, it bugged her that I wasn’t doing things her way. One weekend, she was out of town visiting my aunt. She wrote me an email that said I was getting kicked out with five days notice. I tried to discuss things with my dad but he wouldn’t even acknowledge me when I brought it up. He avoided the conversation completely. The most helpful he was while staying there was helping to arrange a U-haul. When I was packing it, he watched me load everything while washing my parents’ cars.
I moved into my older brother’s basement suite. I lived there for a few months, but my brother is a drinker. One night I hear him yelling at my 13-year-old nephew, making him feel terrified. I stepped in between them and told my brother to step back. He was wasted and punched me in the face. I moved out when I could. He has tried to text me and doesn’t understand what he did wrong.
I have another brother but he is also a drinker and an avid ‘white powder’ user. Due to this we never had a relationship. I tried to be there as a brother for him growing up but he has never cared to get to know me. He only cares about himself.
There are times I lay in bed at night and cry because I haven’t been told ‘I love you’ by someone who meant it in such a long time. I forget what a hug feels like from somebody that cares about me. I also haven’t been in a serious relationship for over five years. I have no friends because I don’t go out much. I live in a town I dislike and work a job I’m not happy with, but I don’t know what else to do. I feel helpless with zero emotional family support. I envy people whose families call them regularly because they miss them. My family doesn’t call me on my birthday. I don’t have Thanksgiving or Christmas, and I just block it out because truly it makes me so sad. That being said, the pain of having no family hurts less than one that consistently hurts and lets you down.
I hope to meet a woman who changes all this for me and her family welcomes me as their own. Family, to me, is extremely important and if I ever have one of my own I’m going to make darn sure they know they are loved regularly.”
A Woman Leaves Her Crazy Family Behind
“I grew up in a toxic household largely centered around my dad’s insane use of substances and drinking. I grew up in a trailer that caught fire and literally exploded when my dad was cooking ‘product’ in it.
No one in my family went to college. I was the first to graduate high school. My mother made it to grade 9, my dad to grade 5. He could read a little but not functionally. Mom had a GED and dad had a forged GED.
I cut ties with everyone toxic. I just said ‘no’ one day. I haven’t spoken to my father for many years and have no desire to do so. I started cutting ties when my family began to mock and deride my decision to go to college.
I sought out stable people in my life. I married a wonderful man who helped me develop stability. I went to college, I have a master’s degree, and I graduate with my MD in may.
I could not have done any of it if I still had the immense chaos of the family I was born into, or if I didn’t have the stability of the family I chose.”
A Father Dislikes His Daughter
“My wife took her father to Japan in 2014. He has not spoken to her since. I contacted him to invite him to our courthouse wedding, no reply. I then contacted him to say that she really misses him and that he needs to get in touch. His reply was basically, ‘When you have kids, you expect them to be one thing, then they turn out to be another.’
It is infuriating, and I hate him for it. I was never a fan of his and how he spoke with her, but this just makes it so much worse. My parents do not understand how someone could do that to their own child. My wife remarks ‘you see serial killers, about to be put to death, and their family is still there for them.’
We would go to his house maybe once a month. I stopped going after a while because I hated how he talked to her. Not yelling, just condescending. She decided, as we travel all the time, that a good thing would be to get him out of the country to see how the other side lives, and as a way to bond. She said he complained the whole time about how he couldn’t smoke anywhere, and other little, easily solvable, problems. I picked them up, took them to our house, he got in his truck and drove home. They have not spoken since.”
A Mother Stalks Her Own Son
“My mother was abusive and manipulative, especially when I got out of college. She couldn’t stand the fact that I A) didn’t move back home and B) was developing a life for myself.
She resorted to name calling, insults, attacking my partners, and calling me at work. She would send me angry messages about how I am an awful son and she wished I was never born. She sent pictures of the things I had left behind in her home and said she sold them. She showed me pictures of gifts I had given her over the years smashed to bits.
In the end, I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t keep giving her another shot, and had to go dark in terms of her. She was stalking my social media accounts, and I had to change all of it, lock things down, change numbers, etc. It was an incredibly hard experience and I miss the memories of the mother I once knew, but today I’m so much better without that darkness in my life.”
It Is Like The Worst Breakup Possible
“After a lifetime of neglect and emotional abuse, my mom pulled some unthinkable stuff about a month ago that has really been weighing me down mentally and emotionally. On top of this, I am five months pregnant, so I have a whole other world of worry and attention I need to focus on. I am considering ending my relationship with her. Not because I want to necessarily, but because I think that I have to. It feels a lot like a bad breakup, and right now I am just struggling with trying to find an answer. I do not want to live my life going back and forth with our relationship because in the past when I have cut contact, once it restarted it ended up causing me a lot of damage. It’s a cycle I want to end.”
An Ultra-Religious Abusive Father
“I’m socially anxious and depressed and have a hard time doing my studies well. I have so far cut out my brother and my sister out of my life. When I’ll leave home my father is next.
I grew up in a broken family with everyone having their own issues, especially my father.
My father is a strict Muslim (the terrible, but luckily not, radical type) and he has a very distinct idea of how his life should be and how his family should be like and what I should do. Everyone in the family but him is either Agnostic or an Atheist. My sister ran away early after my father forced us to live in his homeland for six years. Luckily this forced to go to school in Austria again. She tried to come back but my father kicked her out.
My brother and my sister are now both no longer part of the family, according to my dad, because both have a kid without being married, and neither of their partners is Muslim.
He has made sure they don’t even come near the vicinity of our home and makes life terrible for my mom and me when they do; like, screaming at us for an entire week and sometimes hits my mom or me when I defend her. But luckily he at least sees he went too far then. His excuse for everything is that he’s ill; physically and mentally which is true, but he exaggerates a lot. He has diabetes, bipolar disorder, and depression. Yet those do not excuse his emotional abusiveness and other forms of abuse. He knows that my mom is too scared to leave him, so she’s his daily insulting object and when I step in, which I do, it is me. But way worse.
I cut my siblings out of my life because, as you can probably guess, leaving home as young adults, being parents and having no proper education to speak of makes making a living hard. And they hate me for being still at home and enduring my father’s abuse to go to school.
My sister also always got me into a lot of trouble because she’s basically just a junkie at this point. My brother, although 30, never realized that he’s an adult. Like a kid, he doesn’t do things because ‘he doesn’t feel like it’ and loses job after job.
Once I leave home, I will move as far away from my entire family as possible, get rid of the ‘Muslim’ on all my papers, and maybe even save up enough to change my religious name. I will not regret it, except for also having to leave my mom in the process.”
A Mothers Dependency Is Too Hard To Deal With
“My mom suffered a terrible back injury (she severed a nerve between here L3 and L4 vertebrae). Long story short, she became a product of our corrupted pharmaceutical industry. Heavy doses of pain pills turned into dependency, which turned into depression, which turned into being bipolar, catatonia, and psychosis. I handled it for about four years, had to drop out of school three times, and quit one of my jobs. I love my mom but it is such a toxic environment for just her, my dad, and me. I moved out of state and it’s been the best 13 months of my life.”
Relationships With Parents Can Be Tricky
“I’ve had to cut my parents out at one point, but not permanently. I was unemployed at the time, and every interaction with them was just complaining about me and hounding about jobs that it soured every conversation, and they made it clear I was worthless and disappointing to them, as I was now. I am now employed, we have a good relationship again, but if you’re going through some serious stuff and they are making it worse, not being supportive, then give yourself space. However, if they aren’t seriously abusive, I wouldn’t cut them off forever. I’d like to think that if I needed them, they’d be there for me, and vice-versa.”
A Mother’s Rejection Is Hard To Take
“I pushed my mother out of my life a few years back. She had (has) mental health issues that she has either ignored or self-medicated since I was a child. This isn’t why, though.
When I was young, I was taken by CPS because there was no food in the fridge, her boyfriend pretty seriously abused my siblings and me, and general uninhabitable living conditions. My father was stationed in the same town at the time, and we were immediately placed in his custody. However, the courts in California are very slanted toward the mother.
So she gets weekend visitation unsupervised with us and shadier stuff happens. She stops showing up for visits more and more until she stops completely. For almost a decade I didn’t know if she was alive or not. Finally, I proved to be too much of a problem child and I was sent to live with her. I don’t blame my dad, I was in a very poor place and he did what he could at the time.
The night I showed up she called him about the child support arrears being absolved as she was now the primary caretaker. She still had a lot of issues, and I moved out of her house after a few months to live on a friend’s couch.
Fast forward to me working through some of what happened when I was a kid, and I send her a very emotional e-mail. I felt like I put my entire heart in that message, and at the end was asking for a simple apology and a desire to move forward with a healthy relationship. Her response was that obviously I still had some issues and I should just move on like she did. I was done.”
A Man Is Angry His Family Doesn’t Visit
“I live 300 miles from the nearest relative, and no one has visited in the last nine years. I used to drive down there every holiday to spend time with them, but no one has come to see me. I finally stopped going once my dad treated me like complete dirt over a small dispute. I saw it as his way of finally telling me how he truly felt after 29 years of being his child.
It’s been two years since we last spoke, and the same amount of time since I’ve seen any blood relatives.
To make all of these matters worse, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease right before all of this happened. When I needed my family the most is when they all left me out in the cold. I lost my job, my wife, and my daughter due to this disease, and when it couldn’t get worse, my own father on his own will.
But I’m happier now that he’s not here to mentally and emotionally torment me. I can breathe and stretch my legs and believe my destiny is what I make of it because I no longer have shoes to fill and someone to judge my every move anymore. I am now my own man with my own script to write. I realize that nobody else matters as much I do to myself, and that’s how I finally got my confidence back.”
She Emotionally Shut Her Father Out For Good
“My father was volatile and emotionally abusive. There was no telling what would set him off. But when he did go off, the target and the rest of the family were in for a difficult evening. This was a long time ago, but I think it was something that occurred every couple of weeks. It was always my fault. He was completely incapable of seeing himself at fault for anything, or as being wrong about anything.
In all other ways, I had an exemplary upbringing. My father was a doctor and provided a very comfortable home. He provided a fantastic education, including paying for private school, college, and post-graduate education for all three of us.
His abusive behavior continued well past our childhoods. I was approximately 28, visiting home, and said that I was going to go out to visit my oldest friend, someone I’ve known since grade school. For some reason, this set my father off, and he started ripping into me, explaining why my friend was a horrible person and just, exploiting me.
At that point, I decided to cut my father out of my emotional life. He was still turning me into an emotional wreck every time I came home. I wanted that to stop. I would act ‘correctly.’ I would do what was expected. I would hear what he had to say. But I would ignore all of it, and I trained myself to not care about anything he said. I just shut down any reaction I had to all input from him.
And that worked. He lived another 20 years, and I think he could sense that our relationship had changed, but we never discussed it. I stuck to my new rules, and he never got to me again. If he started in on me, I was quicker to shut him down, which, of course, ran the risk of making things worse. But overall, it improved my state of mind. I think it was the right thing to do.
I don’t know if it’s in my nature, or because of how I handled him, but I see myself less emotionally reactive to things in general over time.”