Making a Chosen Family (Part One)
Living without family of origin and why sharing identities isn't enough
We often talk about chosen family in the LGBTQ+ community and I wanted to share my experience of this as someone that has lived much of my life without family of origin. A family I gave up to marry a woman. Who I then divorced after 13 years of civil partnership without my family of origin to return to. And as someone that then spent years seeking connection with people that share my identities. Here are some learnings from my journey to making a healthy, loving chosen family.
I was disowned by my family of origin when I came out as a lesbian and I then spent sixteen years with no contact with my dad. I eventually gained some contact with my mum, albeit in secret. I had thought my younger siblings would stand by me but they distanced themselves and came in and out of my life at times through the years. There was an overall absence of my family, including my extended family in the UK and India. I was devastated by the loss and spent much of my late 20s and 30s in a state of depression.
I reconnected with them in 2022 and spent a year making trips to see my parents and attend family occasions. But after a year I made the decision to walk away, this time for myself. I felt myself moving backwards, becoming drained and undoing the work I had done to centre myself in my own life. I had been putting them first and falling into a pattern of having to choose between tolerating abusive language and behaviour or remaining silent just to be in their exhausting company.
It was clear that my parents had simply wanted me to support my brother, their only son, because they were worried about his mental health. Imagine surviving after being discarded by your family and eventually healing the horrific traumas they caused and then being used again because they are worried about their son and not you. I decided after a conversation with my mum where she denied the decade of violence I received from my dad as a child, that I was better off without them. It was a relief to walk away and I find myself at last no longer grieving them.
I finally feel free.
There is a tendency in society for people to feel they are being well-meaning by saying things they are not qualified to say. Because of these things that people would say, such as “oh they’ll come around” or in the case of my ex-wife’s family, being asked at least once a month (for 13 years) if I’d heard from my dad and when I said I hadn’t being met with a sort of disappointment which I would then internalise. Because of this sort of thing, where people think it is a fault in you that means you don’t have your family of origin in your life, I found myself yearning to have them back, even though I knew they were abusive and I was probably better off without them.
It has taken me almost 20 years to stop grieving and accept that my life is infinitely better without these people in my life. People who have abused me, violently, verbally and sexually and then disowned me, just because I fell in love. People who used me as a servant, scapegoat and betrayed me for as long as I can remember and set the precedent for countless other people to abuse me since, because that’s what I thought love was.
When I was asked to visit them in 2022, I’d spent three years deeply healing the wounds they had caused, which had required me to revisit childhood trauma. I’d learned to show up for myself in new ways, healthier ways. This made me unwilling to make excuses for abusive behaviour from people in the way I had done before, when I would show greater compassion to my abusers than to myself. Now, I refuse to lower the bar for people simply because we share blood. I didn’t always have this stance, there were years and years when I yearned to have them back in my life, but this was my mistake. For believing in the desires of others who wished this for me, but didn’t know who my family actually are.
Making a chosen family when you have only known love to be accompanied with trauma is something that takes time. It is normal to re-enact trauma and to choose people that subconsciously represent your abusers. Making chosen family requires patience, with yourself and the other and it also requires you to be able to root and ground into yourself. Chosen family can help you feel safe enough to make space for your own healing and in turn this enables you to have even healthier relationships with them. It can be a beautiful, safe and nurturing process.
Crucially it is a shared experience. You have to both/all be in it, with the same dedication and willingness to listen and reflect upon yourself. I say both here because often the chosen family is comprised of many one to one relationships that in time become connected with each other. Being dedicated to developing self-awareness may sound really obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people I’ve met who have called me ‘fam’, ‘sis’, ‘ride or die’ or indeed ‘chosen family’ without any real desire to reflect upon themselves and do the work of creating loving, safe space together. Choose people that are willing to heal and grow with you. I have had to let go of people that I thought were chosen family, and they were for a period, but were not able to share my values of kindness and self-reflection in the end.
As well as this, while you work on this chosen-family-making, a good therapist can provide an outside ear and support to anchor you while you build your relationship with yourself and others. A good therapist can provide a voice of reason that is both supportive and independent and somewhat unbiased. For me, the consistent showing up by my therapist each week has also been something of great value to me having not had this in other relationships. For seven years, my therapist has been a bridge from the time I got divorced until now when everything in my life has changed. Especially as I learned to consistently show up for myself.
It is normal to re-enact trauma and to choose people that subconsciously represent your abusers.
After 13 years of marriage, I got divorced and I had no family of origin. This is when I spent time seeking out people that shared my identities. I thought that sharing identity would mean shared experiences and shared empathy, compassion even. I thought that meeting other LGBTQ+ South Asians would give me the chosen family I was desperately longing for. This isn’t quite what I found. Because I was still showing up in the same way I had in my family of origin and in my married family, which was to over-give and allow myself to be mistreated, because that’s what I thought I had to do to be loved. So when I went looking for people that shared my identities, I simply carried on being treated appallingly and then reacting from that place in unhealthy ways, harming myself and others in the process. This highlighted to me that the healing I needed had to be done in solitude. I was fortunate to be able to take time to do this work and to find the courage required to do it.
Like many people, I have been letting go of people in my life after deeply healing. When we confront ourselves and our past traumas, when we hold ourselves and heal, re-emerging and connecting with people we once felt close to can feel disappointing because we no longer feel we fit. Perhaps we realise, as I did, that being in relationship with many of the people in my life had meant tolerating abuse that I had mistaken for love or had simply accepted as part of being in relationships. As a gender-fluid, Indian lesbian, this can look like misogyny, lesbophobia, transphobia, racism, casteism and any number of harm that occurs because of the ignorance and blind-spots of dominant culture people and also the very people that share your identities.
We don’t tend to talk about the abuse that happens within our own communities by other marginalised and abused people. But this is what I was confronted with as I sought out people that shared my identities. I found people who were traumatised and unhealed and projected their internalised [insert ism/phobia here] onto each other. As someone a little older than most of the people I was meeting and with my own practices and a good therapist to help me figure out how I was feeling, I stepped back from this community in order to go inward. Thankfully I had a few friends that I considered my chosen family by this point who offered enough support for me to get through the challenging pandemic while I healed. But it was a very isolating time and I have since been working on building strong support systems for myself.
As someone embracing sobriety whilst recovering from severe childhood abuse, it has felt dangerous to be around people that are drinking alcohol as they can become insensitive and offensive. At times they can remind me of my drunken, violent father. If they haven’t put in the work around respecting boundaries or what it means to love someone like me, then when I express my boundaries, which has been a lifetime of work to be able to do, that request is sometimes ignored. I have tried with people that were friends from the times I betrayed myself for company, but last year I had to let many people go. What was left felt scary, as it is when you don’t have the support you should from family. But stepping into this unknown place at a time when I was also struggling with my health and resulting financial challenges, made me stronger. I had my small chosen family that held me through it. Eventually I was also able to lean into support systems like my Buddhist community and LGBTQ+ community again.
There are some learnings from this experience and from losing a friend to overdose many years ago that I’d like to share.
Firstly, to go visit your friends in their home. We can become really good at making it seem like things are fine when they aren’t. I got good at this by growing up in an abusive home and having to make my teachers think everything was fine and that my siblings and I should not be put into care as this would mean we would be separated. As a result, there have been tough periods in my life when most people in my life have had no idea. I haven’t been great at asking for help. My friend that overdosed had been using heroin and nobody knew that he’d sold all his belongings. He would put on a suit and tie and pretend he had a job when he met friends ‘after work’ and even his family had no idea of the depth that he was suffering. Something I really value about my Buddhist community, is that we meet in each other’s homes and chant together, which helps to keep us safe.
Another learning that helps when building a healthy chosen family is what I think of as a triangle. A lot of my relationships are quite one to one. I’ve never been much of a group person. The danger in this is that there is no third person to validate how you are doing. I always make sure that I connect with a friend, partner or family member of my friends, even if just over social media, but ideally I’ll get their phone number. This means if I’m ever worried about my friend or they go silent, I can check if they’re ok with someone else.
These two things of home visits and the triangle can be life-saving.
At this stage in my life I am more grounded and calm and I choose peace as an act of self-love. I am creating a chosen family that I can rely on for the rest of my life. One that is full of other growth-centred and grounded people who are kind and nourish me as much I do them. While I am having to be patient in this endeavour, meeting people that do not fit my value system is also a reassuring part of the experience, because this is when I get to see how far I’ve come, and how much I now refuse to abandon myself for company.
This is also a really exciting time. I’m meeting really wonderful people and watching my inner child soar, sharing laughter and ideas with precious souls that value me. It feels like I have a whole new lease of life, a life I treasure more than ever.