Am I Being Thrown in the Garbage?
Refinding Your Self-Worth in the Face of Estrangement
From An Estranged Mom:
Dear Kathy, I am so weary. I dedicated my life to raising my four living kids. Now I am not worth knowing or seeing. My goal, now, is to find courage and an answer for me to silence this rejection and pain path. I am an intelligent, educated woman who has been reduced to begging for crumbs of kindness. I am done begging. So be it!
Wishing to Silence and Find a New Path
Dear Wishing,
I am so sorry to hear of your deep pain at the rupture between you and your children. I can only imagine that, with the holidays approaching, the pain feels even more intense. This loss is crushing, and it has reduced you to begging. You want to be done! You want to silence your rejection and pain. I completely understand. If only they made noise-canceling headphones for this exact purpose! Since those haven’t been invented, I will offer another path: a journey of self re-discovery.
This column will address loss and growth from the perspective of the parent, but it applies equally to any family member facing the need and desire to develop and change in the face of estrangement.
You used the powerful phrase “Am I Being Thrown in the Garbage?” for the title of this letter because that is how devalued and discarded estranged family members can feel. This strong blow to how you view yourself is real and valid.
The Choice After the Sting
You were inspired to dedicate your life to raising your children. You are educated, and you can identify that, somewhere underneath your pain, is the capable and intelligent woman you know you are. You lost focus on her in your dedication to your family.
Rejection stings—I am not sure there is a choice about that initial pain. The choice comes after the stinging subsides a bit. That’s when you have an opportunity to ask a new question: How can I move from beneath the pain, rejection and devaluing to finding myself again?
What Internal Barriers Will You Encounter?
You may find that you feel insecure, have developed poor self-esteem, your skills are rusty, and you lack the confidence that you deserve a path beyond parenthood. Your engaging with these feelings and concerns will likely be uncomfortable, but worth going through in order to chart a new path. Your parenting was real, valuable work, and now it is time to move on to new challenges.
The Courage to Pivot During Estrangement
1. Beginning Your Recovery (Wound Care)
“The first step in true healing is the commitment to being gentle with yourself. You are not responsible for the pain inflicted upon you, but you are responsible for your own recovery.”
— Ijeoma Umebinyuo
Steps to Start:
Identify and Begin to Understand your feelings.
Untangle your thoughts from the wound of the rejection.
Identify the faintly visible outlines of the first healing steps.
What am I feeling? Pain, loss, anger, denial. I am not in the Tidal Wave, but I am, for sure, in Rough Waters. Recovery will involve working through this crisis of your adult life. Initially, it makes sense you wind up focusing on the unfairness—and there is plenty of it to work through. But after a while, you may feel like our letter writer—ready to be out of the rejection and pain. Unfortunately, there may be more pain along the way. The path of reclaiming your life will not necessarily be straightforward. It will require patience, understanding, setbacks, and lurches forwards. This process can be dizzying and discouraging, but it can also be vitalizing, offering growth at a time in your life you might not have realized it was available.
2. Reaffirm Your Identity
“A refusal to choose is a choice in itself. Choosing to live by another’s script is choosing to live without yourself.” — Dr. Gabor Maté
We form our identities as we develop. You constantly create a narrative of who you are to yourself. As a parent, you claimed your role as your children’s mother or father, and it became central to who you were. You pictured your children remaining central to your life. When they don’t choose that, you are left without your main purpose. If you were charting your course on a map, you have lost your coordinates, or your guiding star(s). You are left having to do what a navigator does: refind your way. Look for your North Star. Rechart your course.
So, where do you turn at the holidays, or really any day, when you are looking to be seen, recognized, and heard? If being with your children is not possible, what options are available and could connect with your interest and energy?
What interests or even dreams did you set aside when you became a parent? Could you retrieve any of those and take a fresh look at that desire or aspiration?
It takes a lot of maturity to be a parent, but perhaps some parts of you didn’t fully develop. If you postponed some of your own growth in order to parent, you have underdeveloped aspects of yourself that will potentially flourish with attention. Do you know what some of those parts are? Could they be watered, refreshed, and cared for in new ways?
How do you begin to recover? The first step is recognizing the need to shift from your hurt and turn toward possible growth. This is difficult, because hurt can make you feel less capable of restarting.
Choose healing toward reaffirming your identity.
Gather support.
Know you may feel lost at times as you try to chart your new course. Accepting this will help you know that, just because you have gotten temporarily lost on your new course, it’s normal.
Make sure you have help and guidance where you can find it: support groups, church, yoga, or spiritual communities.
3. Step Up to New Beginnings
“When you’re feeling powerless, and hopeless, and fearful, take a tiny next step.” — Glennon Doyle
This third step is the active pivot toward a life defined by your choices, not your loss. It affirms your stepping into a new chapter, willing to experiment with new ways to express who you are. We can’t always see ourselves when we try to picture ourselves in our mind’s eye. It helps to try things out. After you have identified areas where you would like to grow, seek venues or settings where you can begin participating in activities that interest you. This will take courage, but it will bring reward.
Consider this equation:
Rejection + loss = humiliation.
Trying something new = humiliation + growth.
In other words, both paths contain a measure of painful humiliation, but trying something new also contains the opportunity of seeing yourself grow. Since you are choosing this new path because of loss, your accomplishments may feel bittersweet. But most of the time, bittersweet chocolate tastes better than no chocolate at all!
So, Dear Wishing, as George Eliot wisely reminds us, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” Your pivot is not a failure of love, but the important act of loving and reclaiming your independent self.
Best,
Kathy
I would love to hear from you. You can respond in the Comments section, or write to me @ ksinsheimermft@gmail.com
This is Column # 12
I know how this feels, I too feel I have been discarded. But I watched family members basically pretending their mother was dead rather deal with their difficult relationship and I noticed, they really didnt have malice in their hearts towards the parent they have rejected. They are drowning in the expectations of being a perfect parent, protecting their child from everything remotely negative or troubling and barely keeping up with laundry, working, meals and demands of a young family. Most of the time, thoughts of their discarded parent weren't even there and when they were it was with loss - for them it is a death, a choosen sacrifice, they "killed" their parent in order to focus every effort on their day, today only, because that's literally all they were capable of.
It didnt feel good to watch this.
Pain delayed is still pain, eventually their forceful child will know, not only did their parents lie about the grandmother being alive, they purposely kept the child from knowing their grandmother's love. 💔
Pain delayed gets you eventually, your mother or father is fundamentally part of who and how you are.
Many of my questions about why I am the way I am came from asking questions of my mother and father. I came to see them this way as flawed adult children themselves, people who were also just coping from day to day, doing their best with ultimately no idea how to be a good parent. With this knowledge, I see how remarkable they really were.
So no, you weren't discarded, you were removed as an inconvenience, a difficult truth, a reminder of a painful childhood and don't belong in the trash.
I have committed to 2 things:
Self improvement (not new at all, just a continuation)
Enjoying myself and my life as much as possible 😌
The people who choose to live without me will eventually have whatever it is they are avoiding thrust into their faces and perhaps its best if I'm not there to blame when it happens.