Heart&Brain
New member
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2009
- Messages
- 217
- MBTI Type
- ENFP
+1
It's very important now that you begin to fill your life with people who care about you, for you, and not for some religious badge you wear.
One of the things that has helped me most in letting go of my family, is by making the choice mine.
As far as I see it, real love supercedes religious love, I have seen other religious families learn to cope with the apostate within their midst, without disowning them, and that IS love, not what you are experiencing, nor what I did.
Therefore make this choice yours, you may love them but aren't you angry to be so devalued by them?
It's that anger at their stupidity that gets me through each day tbh. I'm still not at that "not feeling" stage.
A support group as someone else mentioned is also a must, there was nowhere online really that fit what I needed for suuport, so I started a forum up with 3 other like minded people, and now it's full of people in the same boat as me, and we help each other by forming our own type of family.
So keep busy, get mad, and believe me, one day this won't bother you as much.
I only feel sad a couple of times a month these days, there was a time where I went to sleep with a heavy heart each night.
+1
Honestly, I would consider why these people are worthy of your love AT ALL.
They may have been nice in the past and you may be longing back to the old times where you felt a true connection between you. But I can't see any deep, personally admirable qualities in their behaviour towards you that is worthy of anything but anger, contempt and - on good days - pity for having allowed an amputation of their basic humanity and replaced it with an unloving prothesis of religious faith.
It may be tough to hear, but I think the love you feel for them is not real love, since it's self-defeating and relies on a false image of what these people are really, actually like as individual persons. The 'love' you feel looks more like a wish for love to be possible. It is a wish that they were actual lovable and loving people. But they don't want to be, perhaps they don't even know how to be anymore.
I think you are very much entitled to be angry and hurt by the utter disrespect they show for you.
And without ever having been in a similar situation, I must say that my first thought was the same as BerberElla's: take your grief and fear and anger and loneliness serious and join a support group, preferably a real-life one (!), to work through this tough life change together with others who have also experienced conflicts and estrangements from their family due to apostacy.
You'll probably have to grieve a lot: About the loss of the people from your past. About the loss of your illusions about who they were. About how shallow their 'love' for you really was.
But maybe the hardest grief: about having to give up seeing the best in everybody, give up stretching yourself beyond measurement in order to 'be the one who's always hopeful, loving, accepting and open, no matter how people hurt you'. You will have to change a bit of your sense of self here and it's painful.
I personally HATE to give up my hope that something will bring out the good buried deep down in most people. I'm an ENFP, I can't help giving people second, third etc. chances. Caring for others is supposed to be a good thing, so it's immensely painful to give up doing it. But enough is enough and you'll kill yourself inside if you don't.
You have to be loving to yourself too, treat yourself with the respect and care you deserve, so you must be the first in line to protect yourself from loving people that are harmful to you.
I really wish you all the best and admire you for your strength and honesty.
But please, take good care of yourself, don't be a doormat, don't accept any blame or guilt, don't suppress your absolutely justified anger, don't demand of yourself to feel tender love for people who in the harsh light of reality don't want you any good unless you obey. Demanding you to give up your self in order to recieve affection has nothing to do with loving who you are. It's pure power, control and fear. Don't go there.
You will meet people who like and respect you and want to support your choice of travel for an authentic, happy and loving life. You will.
Take care!
A genius once said: "Without religion good people would do good things and bad people would do bad things. But it takes religion to make good people do bad things." It's sadly true.