In a sick way I find it really funny how toxic estranged parents say "in the old days, people had to stick around and work their issues out!"
Things People Did Back in the Old Days to Escape "Working Things Out" with Their Parents, A Short List:
- Murder them!
- Marry literally anyone who'd get you away
- Fisticuffs
- Change your name and pretend to be an orphan
- Move out and feud with them for several generations
- Join a monastery
- Move to the city and get a job in a factory
- Buy passage on a boat to some other continent
- Convert to a different religion
- Join the Navy
- ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING
It's incredible, the number of things people would do to get away from shitty parents. Then and now.
add the various (often deadly) ways people got out of no-divorce marriages, and you should start to realize that going no-contact and getting divorces is usually the safest route in dealing with unsolveably toxic relationships
One of the troubles I find with people in toxic relationships is that they sometimes want to "win" the argument over who's the worst. What they did to me was worse than what I did to them! That proves I win!
And the thing is... in the West today, we benefit from centuries of legal change that have mostly decided that those arguments are stupid.
Like, in England in the first chunk of the 20th century, divorce needed a "guilty" party and "innocent" party. If one person committed adultery, they were "guilty" and the "innocent" party got to petition for divorce.
If both people in a marriage committed adultery, the law did not say, "Whoa, I guess this marriage is just not working out" and divorce them. It decided that if there was no innocent party, nobody got out of the marriage. They were indissolubly stuck with each other, quite explicitly as a punishment.
After centuries, really, of activism and change (England has had no-fault divorce for two whole years now!), we have won ourselves the most tremendous prize our ancestors could imagine, when they were trapped in inhospitable homes.
You get to leave.
That's it. That's your prize. That's the pearl of great price. You get to say, "Fuck this shit, I'm out," and nobody gets to stop you.
It's absolutely unsatisfying and is not in the least a cure for your broken heart. It's one of those rights, like quitting your job or opening a bank account, that feels like more of a burden than a privilege.
It's just also the only prize worth having sometimes. It's freedom.