5 Benefits of Cutting Off Toxic Family

I am overwhelmed by the response to my post last week, 3 Signs It’s Time to Cut Ties with Toxic Family.

Like OVERWHELMED.

Thank you all for the notes and the re-shares of the post–it honestly gives me a lot of peace knowing that there are others in the same situation and we have a strong community to lean on for advice, perspective, and support. I hadn’t shared any aspect of this situation prior to this post–and it’s been going on for years!–so it was a nice experience to kind of unpack it in way with this group.

I did know that I wanted to give y’all some insight into what benefits have happened to me since I cut those people out of my life. So here’s Part Two if you will–what amazing, positive, and peaceful things you can gain when you remove toxic family members from your life.

You will give yourself the gift of more energy

You free yourself up to a more energetic and vibrant life. You no longer have to invest time, mind space, or physical energy to dealing with toxic people in your life. You no longer have to do the mental gymnastics involved in navigating how to interact with your Aunt Sandra at Thanksgiving. You no longer have to get caught up in the emotionally draining drama that always seems to come up when you get around your cousin. Your sleep improves because you aren’t staying up with insomnia over the last text convo you had with your sister. You know the one where she passively aggressively said you were a bad mom? Your stress level drops because you aren’t constantly flooding your system with cortisol. By cutting out the toxic family members in your life you can focus your attention to the people, passions, and projects in your life that light your heart on fire.

Your self confidence will bloom

When you set and hold a boundary, you learn that you can keep a promise to yourself. You learn that you can keep yourself safe, you can protect yourself, and you can practice self care. You learn that you can make tough choices, navigate hard situations, and ultimately your confidence will sky rocket. You trust yourself more implicitly because you’ve learned that you are perfectly capable of taking care of yourself. You gain a boost of independence and security in who you are as a person.

You learn that rethinking who we do life with in order to preserve our own peace and mental health isn’t quitting or a failure. You learn that it’s survival, resiliency, and most importantly, necessary. And as your self confidence blossoms, you operate with the idea that red flags are no longer red flags–they are deal breakers.

You become comfortable being the villain in someone else’s story

Cutting of a toxic family member meant that I had to get really good with being the villain in their story. I knew I was going to be the villain simply because my actions didn’t match their plans. They’re the protagonist of their own story, and as my actions began to go against their desires, I found myself in the role of their villain.

But in my version of the story, I was assertive enough to pursue the best course of action for me, the hero of my own story, and that ruffled some feathers.

Sure, I could have lived to please. I could do everything everyone else expects of me, all the time. That would make me their hero, but only until I made a decision they didn’t like or I disagreed with them — because I was always eventually going to do that — and pissed them off.

When you’re a people pleaser, you don’t live your own life, but the life others have designed for you.

To be the hero of your own story, you need to have the tenacity and the grit to be the villain of someone else’s occasionally.

Not on purpose. Not out of anger, hate, or spite.

Simply because you’re trying to find your own way forward, living a life that aligns with your goals and values, but never failing to stand up for yourself when you have to.

And I was more concerned with making sure I never failed to come to my own rescue, like a true hero.

You learn to identify patterns faster.

When all you know is fight or flight, red flags and butterflies can all feel the same. Because you’ve done the work, you can identify a toxic behavior, actions that don’t align with your values, or a potential guilt trip at lightening speed. You now know to believe people when they reveal themselves to you. You’ve stopped trying to paint a prettier picture with all the red flags and allow yourself to see them in their true form. Your intuition is now your closest ally. When something or someone isn’t right for you, your soul rejects it and warns you in countless ways. You now pay attention to how things make you feel, what emotions they bring up in you, and how your “gut” feels.

You also identify the red flag behaviors in yourself when interacting with others faster. The red flag isn’t that they shame and guilt you about not seeing your nieces, the red flag is that you lie to yourself that you can help them grow up and that this will eventually get better. The red flag is that you get so caught up in the feelings of getting a dozen roses from someone that you completely ignore the dozen red flags that you witnessed from them first. The red flag isn’t that they continue to do the same immature behavior over and over again, the red flag is that you continue to make excuses for their behavior and try to be the peacemaker in your family.

You are able to have awareness of the pattern (your own and others) and more importantly, you exhibit tremendous growth by choosing not to repeat the cycle.

You Protect Other People You Care About

This was the defining reason why I cut ties with my toxic family members–I had to protect my daughter from them. I was not willing to expose her to their trauma, toxic behavior, pettiness, immaturity, or disrespect any longer. I was not willing to put her in situations where she would see them treat her Mama, Daddy, Grandparents, and Aunt badly and then expect her to interact with them.

No freaking way.

Instead, I was able to demonstrate strength for her by removing them from our world. Instead of repeating generational patterns of just “dealing with it because they were family” I showed her that her Mama was fiercely protecting OUR family instead.

Mama was protecting her.

Mama was protecting our sacred ground. Our family, our boundaries, our home, our peace.

I was able to demonstrate in real time for her that her mama would do ANYTHING to protect our family–even if it means removing other people that we were related to by “blood.”