by Rachel Rabbit White

I don’t have a relationship with my parents. While that may actually be pretty common, I don’t go with them on depressing holidays or carry on with angering phone calls pretending there is a real, true relationship there. I have severed from my family of origin. Breaking from the family is an option and it’s okay.

I don’t know for certain what will happen in the future with my parents, but I’m at a point now where I am okay with the prospect of never having a relationship with them. I am living my values and leading a virtuous and blissful life, I don’t see my family fitting into what I’ve had to create and work hard for.

I am enjoying true freedom in my life for the first time, I am allowed to celebrate being me, to live, learn, grow and know true happiness. I’ve kissed the eyelids of personal freedom, I live on the other side of the barricade, able to dig my feet in the warm soft grass and feel the sunlight on my neck…and it is so good.

Whether or not you choose to have a relationship with your family is a personal choice, but I think it’s time we broke down the propaganda and started being honest about our experiences with the institution of the family.

From the time we enter this world we are inundated with propaganda about the institution of the family, with statements like “Family is all that matters in life” or “Your family is really all you have in this world.” I could go on with knick-knack axioms, but you know them all already. I believe in free will and the fact that you had no control over the random clan you were born into. The wooden bric-a-brac of my philosophy would read: “Family is not a virtue, Family is earned.” I think that we as humans do function best with close loving relationships in our lives. The mistake people make is thinking that these relationships must be with the default, your family of origin. Sharing history and genes with someone does not make them (or you) a good person.

Voluntaryism is a philosophy based on principles: relations between humans should be of mutual consent and voluntary cooperation. Self ownership is an innate right of a human being: to be the exclusive controller over your own life. The shocking thing that I am doing here is actually living my values, living my philosophy.

Last Summer I began immersing myself in these ideas. Ned and I built our relationship on personal freedom, virtue and philosophy. Ours is a relationship in which we don’t yell or call one and other names. We talk openly and honestly about what we feel in the moment. Sadness, anger and hurt are met with curiosity, empathy and vulnerability by the opposite partner. As you can imagine, this is not easy and it is something we are always working on, but anyone can do it. As we began to mold our relationship around philosophy and I learned what real love looked like, it became clear what type of relationship I had with my parents; needless to say it was not — nor had it ever been — a healthy one.

I think that part of living a healthy, self-aware life means to cleanse yourself of all the destructive, negative and abusive relationships that you may have accumulated. If your relationship with your parents is negative or destructive it is highly likely that you will have other negative and destructive relationships in your life as well — and vice versa. Why do you keep getting fucked over in relationships? It sounds cliche but a good place to look is your early childhood experiences.

My decision also came through delving into my past, into my psychology with the guidance of a therapist. I think it is so important in life to truly know yourself, to dig into your unconscious. I have said so many times before that what we do not process we will repeat, and this is especially true when it comes to parenting. If you are among the brave souls who choose to access their unconscious, you might find some dark stuff there, some questions about how you were raised. With this knowledge comes the fact that you’ve got to make a decision about your parents in the lives of your possible future-children.

Do you know many really good parents? We always seem to focus on how things are better than they used to be. It was undoubtedly worse for kids 25 years ago, even more 50 years ago and scarily more 100 years ago. Things are getting better, but these ancient notions of how we should treat children continues to drip down through our culture. Unless we take a stand and acknowledge the whole of super-prevalent child abuse (emotional, psychological, physical), process our pasts and work hard to not pass a drop of that on, it will continue seeping through our white picket fences, poisoning the generations we create .

This whole family-is-unquestionably-virtuous propaganda is so entirely outdated and medieval. I do think more and more young people are now realizing this, which means even more people will know this in the future. Can you even begin to imagine a world where we all drop abusive people and work on having real honest relationships, where parents treat their children like human beings with respect because they recognize the relationship is voluntary? A world where everyone processes their unconscious and their abuse, refusing to pass a bit of it on to the next generation? That is freedom, that is true happiness and that is something to actually work on achieving in your lifetime.

Rachel Rabbit White is a writer and blogger living in Chicago, Illinois. Visit her blog, Rabbit Write.