The people who raise us have a profound impact on shaping how we see and deal with the world around us.  Among other things, they teach us principles and techniques for forgiveness, self-respect, and setting boundaries.  When the people who raise you are the same ones who abuse you, that means they have the opportunity to teach you methods of forgiveness and boundaries which absolve them and enable the perpetuation of abuse.

For my parents, one of those key principles and techniques was the idea that virtuous and good people should always forgive and forget, but that entire concept is a lie.  If a grievance is more than an inconvenience, forgetting it is not going to happen.  You certainly cannot force yourself to forget something.  Trying to force it will only keep the thing on your mind.  What my parents actually meant was to forgive and ignore, to pretend that it had never happened.

When we experience trauma, most of the time we will seek ways to prevent it from happening again.  Trauma teaches us to create boundaries, and how to maintain them, even when those traumas are part of the normal background noise of our lives.  As we heal from trauma, we learn how to balance boundaries and other defenses with love and trust, so that we are neither fortified in a castle with machinegun turrets fueled by our pain, nor blindfolding ourselves and skipping towards a cliff.  Instead, through healing we can learn to balance boundaries and openness, so that we are able to live fulfilling, secure, and happy lives, even after experiencing overwhelming or protracted trauma.  I genuinely believe that anyone and everyone is capable of achieving this, but it can and often does take time and a lot of hard work.

Forgive and forget is a form of toxic forgiveness because it demands that you put down your boundaries, relinquish control, and let things happen as they will.  It demands that you put on that blindfold and not only pretend that you have never fallen off a cliff, but pretend that cliffs do not exist at all.  If you are going to pretend the original event never happened, you must also pretend that no harm was inflicted.  If the existing harm is denied validity, not only can the perpetrator never be held accountable, but you are not allowed to create any boundaries or defenses against future events.

I will never know if my parents were intentional when they continually emphasized the importance of both forgiving and forgetting, but the impact of that sentiment benefitted them greatly.  I wanted to be a good person, and they created a framework where in order to be a good person, I needed to ignore their bad deeds.  In order to be a good person, I needed to never hold them accountable for their words and actions.  It was one more thing that gave them a free pass to do as they wanted, regardless of the harm it caused.

I mention this here, in this epilogue, because I did not fully comprehend that aspect of my tolerance for their behavior until Toxic Blood was nearly complete.  I mention this here, because “forgive and forget”, oft repeated, is another wound to heal, in a seemingly endless quagmire of wounds to heal.

It is hard enough to heal from trauma that is caused by a singular impactful event.  When the trauma you want to heal spans months, or years, or decades, the layers upon layers of wounds can seem without end.  When pervasive trauma is inflicted by those who were supposed to love and care for you as a child, you end up living your life with open wounds from the very start.  Being wounded is your normal, and the idea of being healthy and happy and secure can seem like nothing more than a fantasy, unattainable and completely outside of personal experience.  You grow up having no personal frame of reference for what being healthy and happy even is, which makes figuring out how to be healthy and happy all the more daunting and confusing.

My trauma started with my birth, and although I had some respites, I did not cease receiving new wounds from my family until I was 38 years old, finally said enough is enough, and stopped interacting with my family in any capacity.  I started consciously working towards achieving healing when I was in my mid-teens, but I had no frame of reference for what that meant.  I had no personal experience with being healthy and happy to use as a guidepost for where I wanted to be.  I only knew that other people had that, but no one I knew well, and yet I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could have it too.

I was lucky I met Diana when I did, when I was only 19, because suddenly I had a guidepost for what it could mean to be healthy and happy.  That does not mean she was perfect, because no one is, but she was close enough to provide a shining beacon towards what was possible.  Had that not happened, there is no telling what my life would be like now.  I may have decided in my early teens that I wanted to be mentally healthy and happy, and that I was willing to genuinely do the work to achieve that, but I did not know what that meant, or what I needed to do to get there.  I did not know what mental health looked like.  The supposed mental health I had witnessed in my parents was all spiritual bypassing, providing the illusion of mental health as a means of avoidance while they continued indulging in all the toxic behaviors they wanted to.

Since I was poor and had no support from my parents as soon as I was out of their house, I did not have access to mental health professionals who could have helped me.  That meant I was lost and had no idea which way to go in order to achieve mental health.  In all likelihood, I would have either stayed in the abusive relationship with Boyfriend #2 or married someone else who was also abusive.  I certainly would not have stayed single, because I was desperately lonely, and my trauma, coping mechanisms and unacknowledged asexuality meant I was profoundly unlikely to find a healthy romantic relationship.  Beyond that, there is no telling where my life would have gone, but it definitely would not have resembled the life I have lived, and I doubt very greatly that I would recognize that person as anything other than a damaged shadow of who I am.

There have been many, many times over the years when I thought I had fully healed from what my family did, how they behaved, and who they were.  Each time I later realized I was very wrong, because I would uncover another wound and achieve fresh understanding of another aspect of myself, my upbringing, and my family.  As I worked on this book, I realized even more wounds, and with each of them a much more profound understanding.  Each time I thought I had uncovered the last of it, I found something else underneath of it.

The hardest parts of Toxic Blood to write were the ones that still needed the most healing.  In order to clearly describe the events of my life and my thoughts and observations, I needed to have a crystal-clear grasp of those things in my own mind.  If I still had a lot of internal work to do, I either had trouble writing clearly, or I unintentionally left out a lot of important details.  As I worked my way through successive drafts, the original last chapter turned into five chapters.  Then the new last chapter turned into three more as I uncovered new realizations and worked to describe details in a way that would hopefully be clear even to people who had never experienced similar traumas.  I was so relieved that I would no longer be receiving fresh wounds that until I started writing this book, I avoided looking deeper into the events that prompted my escape and how they played into other wounds that were still affecting me throughout my life.

The process of writing helped me profoundly in processing my traumas and healing from them, because it required me to look at and reexamine things that I mistakenly believed I was done with.  It uncovered layer after layer after layer, with each revision and each batch of feedback from friends who were kind enough to read over my manuscript.  It also gave me a much clearer understanding of the entire process of internal healing.  It allowed me to make peace with that process and the fact that it will never end.

At this point, I am confident that years from now I will still be finding new wounds and healing new depths of myself.  I would love to think that I might someday achieve complete healing in regard to my family, but for me that is not realistic.  There is simply too much, and it is too wound up in everything that made me who I am.  My trauma started too young, and was too pervasive, to be something I can ever truly separate myself from.  Even the healed parts are layers of scars upon scars upon scars, and at unexpected times or when the pressure is too great, they tear open at the edges and the intersections.  I will be healing myself and tending my scars until the day I die.

And I am sad and glad and grateful for that, all at the same time.

I am sad because I would love to be done with it.  Each newly uncovered wound carries with it its own grieving process, with the anger and shame and sorrow and pain and so much resentment.  I have been doing this a very long time, so sometimes it only takes me a few minutes to process the grief, but for the big, festering wounds it can still take weeks or months or years to fully process and heal.

I am glad for the process because each newly uncovered wound gives me an opportunity to consciously understand something else about myself and why I believe or do the things I do.  It gives me the opportunity to resolve the mechanisms behind the wound, so they no longer cause problems in other areas of my life.  It gives me the opportunity to either consciously accept, or to change my behaviors, attitudes, coping mechanisms, or impulsive reactions that stemmed from that wound.

I am grateful for the process because in resolving each newly uncovered wound, I can find peace of mind and closure with my past.  I can achieve what mental health professionals mean when they say forgiveness is essential to healing, which is a release of the guilt and pain and anger and sorrow and disappointment which lives in those festering wounds.  However, for me that forgiveness is never the first step.  Instead it is a natural conclusion to the healing process, a gentle melancholy compassion I feel as I let go of the last of my pain around the wound.

Addressing each of those festering wounds in turn gives me the ability to make peace with my life.  I cannot change the fact that any of it happened, but through the healing process I can be more whole, more happy, more secure, and more myself, freed from the constraints and damaging influences of those wounds and traumas on every aspect of my life.  Each step is profoundly worthwhile for what it brings to my mental and emotional wellbeing, even though I will never fully complete the process.

But I will never forget what my family did.  I cannot forget what they did.  To even attempt to forget it would be to deny years of my life, and countless events that in large part shaped who I am today.

I will also never reconcile with them, and I will never absolve them of their guilt, because they proved they were too invested in denial and continuing their bad behavior to ever admit to how toxic they were, let alone make recompense for it.  The only way I can have peace in my life is for them to not be in it.

I am grateful for how I have handled my wounds, but I am not grateful to my family for inflicting those wounds.  I am grateful for who I am today, but I am who I am despite my family.  They deserve no credit for who I am because what they did and how they shaped our relationship is inexcusable, and they did everything in their power to prevent me from finding myself and tending the wounds they inflicted.  They did everything they could to prevent me from becoming the person I am.

Despite that, I do mostly forgive them, in that I release the resentment I have around things they have done.  I try to understand their motivations, and to be compassionate about the fact that they are so deeply damaged that they acted out of misery, a profound refusal to address their own deep-seated flaws and wounds, and pathetic attempts to satisfy hollow desires they will never be capable of truly satisfying.  Of course, each time I uncover a wound it brings up a new round of resentment and anger and heartbreak that I must work through before forgiving them again, but with each round, that internal forgiveness becomes deeper, calmer, and more resolute.

But, that is not how it works for everyone. Not everyone wants to, needs to, or ever does forgive their abusers, and they can still achieve personal healing. I never sought to forgive my parents. It simply happened as my personal healing process progressed. If it had not happened, I would still be doing the work and healing.

The only person that you must forgive in order to heal is yourself! We must each find honesty and compassion for our coping mechanisms, past actions, our own toxic behaviors, and especially our inability to fix the things that were wrong with our parents and our relationships with our parents. Then we must take that compassion, be accountable, work to change the things we can, and forgive ourselves. If you never forgive yourself, you will continue to inflict guilt, anger, and resentment upon yourself, keeping the wounds fresh and preventing the healing you seek.

It has been literal decades of work that I have spent on healing myself to get to this point, but it was worth every moment.  I had to work through the anger, the resentment, the disappointment, the heartbreak, the betrayal, the confusion, the sorrow, and the frustration to get here.  There are no shortcuts, but you do not need shortcuts for a journey to be worth taking.  The stumbles and the missteps and the setbacks and the tumbles are all worthwhile, for without them you can never make it to the vistas and the meadows and the beautiful calm lakes, especially if your life starts in a poisoned quagmire.  If you have wounds like mine, refusing to do the work to heal means you stay in the brambles and thorns and jagged rocks and fallen trees, half-buried and bleeding, while telling yourself, “I’m OK.  This is all OK,” when in truth you are anything but OK.

It does not matter if you start doing the work to heal when you are twelve, or when you are one hundred.  Starting yesterday is ideal, but the next best time to start is right now.  The third best time is tomorrow.  That is because when you do the work, you can find the profound beauty in the world, and you can find and recognize the soulfully beautiful people in your life.  If seeing that beauty means letting go of my anger and resentment, and instead feeling compassionate sorrow for my family, I am absolutely fine with that.

If you take only one thing away from reading my story, let it be this: Never tolerate abusive, manipulative, selfish, dishonest, toxic people in your life, even if you are related by blood or marriage, even if they never have violent outbursts, even if they never yell at you.  There are a lot of amazing and wonderful people in this world, and life is both too short and too long to waste it on the people that are horrible for you, no matter their justifications.  If what they bring into your life is misery, send them packing.

If you take only two things away from reading my story, let the second be this: No matter how bleak or lost you feel, no matter what happened to you or who hurt you or in what ways, you can take control of your life and heal yourself.  It is often a very long and winding road which at times can seem fruitless or even feel like you’re going backwards, but with perseverance, you can overcome your trauma and become whole and happy in your truest self.  You will still carry the scars, but scars prove you were stronger than that which tried to break you.

It is never too late to set boundaries, to heal, and to respect yourself.  That road tends to be long, winding, and full of setbacks, but that is a painfully natural and necessary part of the process.  Those setbacks, no matter how many times they happen, and no matter how severe they are, do not define the outcome.  You do.  So, when you get knocked down, take a rest if you need to, do what you must to take care of yourself, get back up, and keep fighting.  You, your happiness, and your wellbeing are worth it.