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Expat in Korea

(119 posts)
15. Make a nurturing environment for yourself.
Mon Oct 20, 2014, 05:13 AM
Oct 2014

Maraya, I don't know if this will be helpful to you or not. If not, maybe someone else will find something in it.

It took years for me to realize that my family was toxic. They bullied me, held me back, ridiculed me for expressing interest in anything outside the "norm" and I was under constant pressure to conform to their values and lifestyle.

When I tried to have a mature, mutually respectful discussion about my perspective on things, my brothers threatened me with violence up to the point of threatening (verbally) my life. After that, I realized that I had done everything in my power to find or make a nurturing situation out of family life. I didn't want to fight, and I didn't think I had any more right to try to force them to change than they had to force me to.

So I didn't engage much with them after that. I just kept my thoughts to myself until I was old enough to go to college in another city. I gradually visited less and less until I eventually stopped going back at all. During that time, they didn't change in any significant way. That was about 25 years ago. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that that was the necessary and correct thing for me to do.

Of course, I'm not encouraging you to leave your family. That should be a last resort. But emotionally disengaging from their negativity is a healthy choice, I think. They seem set in their ways and have as much right to be themselves as you do to be yourself. I found a mental way to experience my family's negativity while nevertheless keeping it at a distance. I gave myself the right and the power to disengage emotionally from them.

Most people in this world are bound up in thought habits that keep them mired in dukkha of their own making. The main message that the Buddha taught is that there is a way to train yourself to have better thought habits and more wholesome responses to stress. If I had one solid recommendation, I would suggest that you spend time thinking (not just in sitting meditation, but in studying books, quiet reflection, etc) on the Four Noble Truths. Life as given is not satisfactory. It's not satisfactory because we always want something to be different. There is a way to escape that trap. If you take the Noble Eightfold Path as a long-term project, you will start seeing results very soon.

My best to you.

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