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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My family is very messed up and not a source of love, support, or belonging for me. I'm not estranged, but they are not a source of support or community and never will be.

Sadly my spouse's family is similar. His extended family is better, and we tend to spend holidays with his family because when his cousins and aunts are around, it can feel like proper family. But his parents and siblings are, like mine, very dysfunctional and not loving or emotionally supportive.

What do other people who are in this situation do for community and support system? We have friends but it's not the same. I know church is the answer for many. We are not religious but I've looked hard into this anyway because I so need some kind of support system. But the only church that made sense given our lack of religion was UU, and the UU church where we live was not a good fit.

What else can we do? Hitting middle age and have a child. The loneliness and isolation is crushing. I think it's started to seriously impact my physical health.[/quote]

I could have written this. Hugs to you, OP. I was thinking about this on my run this morning because now that Halloween is over the holidays are upon us and they are very triggering for me. My mom was always depressed on holidays and would lock herself in her room unshowered and with sweat pants on and cry all day emerging for dinner to sniffle and thank my father for cooking before going back to bed. Some years if I tried to get her up she would yell at me that she was depressed because I hated her (I was in elementary school during this time - I stopped asking her to come out as I got older). Other years she would rally and say we were going to visit her family two hours away. She would usually request my father stay at home, demand we clean the house before we left (she would give us a list of chores to complete the morning of the holiday) and then when it took us longer than expected she would get angry and blame us for making her late, and then the entire ride to her family’s house (and also on the way back) she would cry, pick fights and yell at us for things like chewing or making any type of noise, drive like a psycho, and try to hit us from the front seat. Now she wants to spend every holiday with my family and gets mad when I say we are spending time with my husband’s family. It’s like she has amnesia about how she acted for the first 22 years of my life. My husband’s family is also dysfunctional but at least his siblings and divorced parents can all be in the same place for a few hours. When we got married I fantasized about how I would finally have a nice family and normal holidays but they all have their own issues so it hasn’t quite turned out that way. My I’m so scarred by the dysfunction and abuse from growing up in my family as an adult a therapist diagnosed me with complex PTSD. I have a hard time with intimacy and boundaries (not great with intimacy because I didn’t experience healthy relationships and grew up in a family without healthy boundaries) but have some really close friends who I love dearly and who are very accepting. I wish I had more time for those friendships. I am religious but we haven’t really connected with a religious community yet, so I feel you on that. I’m thinking about going back to therapy and trying to get back into my yoga practice because as my kids get older I feel like I’m reflecting more on my experiences as a child and I don’t want that to influence how I parent. [/quote]

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