Member-only story
What It’s Really Been Like to Cut Contact With My Parents
It’s been a roller coaster of relief and guilt, but still the correct decision
For over a year I had the same dream, night after night after night. It’s summertime, which means my brother and I are living with our dad, because after the divorce, we spent the school year with Mom and summers with Dad. It’s the end of the summer, my brother and I need to get back to our mom’s so we can start school in the fall, but Dad isn’t letting us leave. We haven’t packed our clothes, which are all dirty, and I’m freaking out about doing all the laundry, getting us packed and somehow talking our stubborn dad into driving us back to our mother’s house, which is in a different city.
Only we don’t really want to go back to our mother’s house either, because it’s nearly as unhappy as Dad’s, just in different ways. Night after night I was trapped in that dream, reliving the unhappiness of much of my childhood. To be honest, I attributed these dreams to smoking marijuana every night before bed. Until one night, the dreams stopped. They haven’t returned.
That’s when I realized the dreams were about my brain working through trauma. I never really understood before how traumatizing it was to be ripped from one dysfunctional home and transplanted to a different…
