If You Grow Up in a Dysfunctional Family

If you grow up in a dysfunctional family, you will learn silence. Anything less exposes you to attack. Vulnerability is not a path towards intimacy, but an opportunity for abuse. And so you will spend your life hiding in corners digging through shadows in search of all the nameless things you lost years ago. You will learn that you are unlovable. This is how isolation begets isolation.

If you grow up in a dysfunctional family, you will learn that mistakes are punishable by cruelty. This is how you will find shame; an emotion you will carry with you every time you forget to buy milk or oversleep on a weekday. You will never get this living thing right, so for godsakes, stop thinking of yourself as good enough. You will never be good enough. You are imperfect, and that makes you depraved.

If you grow up in a dysfunctional family, you will learn that your role in this world is to please. You will give of your hours, your care, your very cells, even when you have none to spare. You will be who they say you should be, or you will be despised. Those are the rules.

If you grow up in a dysfunctional family, you will learn that exposing need exposes you to attack, and so you will hide the smallest dependencies. Hell, you'll obfuscate the fact that you even *have* dependencies because you never know where the next judgement will come from.

If you grow up in a dysfunctional family, the dead will be used as weapons. She always said you were worthless, you know, and he never trusted you, and she never liked it when you did that. He always told me that when he was alive. The deceased do not have voices. You cannot repair relationships with ghosts. This makes them perfect oppressors.

If you grow up in a family like that, you will to become a ghost: unseen, unheard, and utterly quiet. You will learn to tread lightly or else.