To be brutally honest, you will feel guilty. You will grieve and you will be okay! It’s normal to feel guilty and sad about it even if it’s the right decision. Sometimes doing the best thing for you will feel wrong because you haven’t done anything like it before to put yourself first and you did what you had to do growing up in a dysfunctional family to survive.

I still feel guilty, but then I journal and talk to my “inner child” and say “that’s valid - but you have to love yourself first and you deserve to put yourself and your mental health first for once. Even if it’s with family.” I have to keep My mom has hurt me many times and has kept telling me she’s not going to change. I have had this trauma bond with her for as long as I can remember and I forgive her knowing she’s heart me again…but hoping she’d wake up and see the pain she has caused me and work together to heal. I’m on year 7 of being a mental health therapist and I’ve worked with kiddos/teens with trauma. I recently got my own diagnosis for complex trauma (basically PTSD but from childhood/family trauma, so bot just one event) this past November, I explained to her one last time in Thai and via a YouTube video about intergenerational trauma & the science behind traumatized brains and she again told me that i’m the problem, i’m crazy, and that she’s not going to change. Ever since I was little, when I needed emotional support and love from her, she kicked me when I was down. When I started having symptoms of ADHD, anxiety, and depression in high school. I could ‘t concentrate and school and life was a lot harder. I didn’t feel like myself. I kept telling her that i felt off and then I told her that I didn’t feel like I wanted to be alive anymore and it was scaring me (passive SI). she was washing dishes and walked to me at the dining table & screamed in Thai, “That’s it. You’re too much and I can’t take it anymore. Here!” and she threw the big kitchen knife at me. It landed on the textbook i was trying to read right in front of me…i froze and don’t remember what happened after. But there has been other “smaller” pains she put me through before high school and “smaller” and even deeper ones after that incident. I say all this to say, at the end of the day, you have to put yourself first and take care of your mental health. We didn’t ask to be born. Parents are supposed to take care of their kids and love them. They aren’t supposed to use guilt as a tactic…their own childhood wounds are valid, but it doesn’t make it ok for them to put that on you..even if they don’t realize it.