Sometimes like attracts like

...And this is actually one of the occasions when the Hound will admit that the energies you put out there attract similar ones.

When you say to people 'my family's fallen apart' you get several different responses.

The first is that it is obviously your fault - I get this one because people don't see what I see in my family. Of course there are people whose view of 'my family right or wrong' means anyone who breaks contact with their family is wrong.

The next is something along the lines of 'that's a pity', usually followed by attempts to help & helpful suggestions. This is actually the most useful of the reactions.

The only other things that happens is that you suddenly discover how f*cked other people's relationships with family members are. Sometimes it feels like people are desperate to talk to someone who won't judge them on their inability to mend their family or on their breaking off contact with a family member.

I spoke with a very long-standing friend, whom I speak to rarely (largely because I don't want to be just friends with him, why are all the best men straight?). It turned out his big brother had got fed up with their dad & gone off the Scotland. He wasn't talking to his little brother - this was for having sex with his wife. All this in the six months since their mother died. Wooooooh!

In another family who are family friends - the youngest daughter of whom I was most friendly with & who was very keen to tell me how close her family was when I bemoaned my family - the mother never told her daughters that she had had breast cancer. Now this is the reason doctors ask you what diseases you've had in the family, because you're more likely to get them. Their mother only told the other daughters after their eldest sister died of breast cancer.

I'm being as judgemental here as anyone who judges me for not being able to have a relationship with my mother, but this frankly astounds me.

In fact so many people, on asking me how my mother is, & being told we've been estranged for two years, have come up with real divisions in their family.

Once again I'm banging my head against this shibboleth of how we are supposed to think, feel, & behave. We *should* love our family - in some families there is actual hate. Fortunately this is not the case for me & my mother.

We should also be able to behave like a family. Like all human relationships we make up ways of surviving: my personal opinion is that the most functional families are those where they come up with ways of living with or without each other.

We *should* get together at Christmas - surely one of the most stressful times of the year.

I suppose it's somewhat 'left hand path' consciously to act against these societal norms. I think it may be, to be proud of it. But if you choose the way that best safeguards your own sanity over how you should behave, that is left hand path in my opinion. What then happens is you receive the opprobrium of the 'you can't not see your mum' crowd, but you attract other things, including people who share your experience. You also find out who your real friends are. That's the crux: you come out of it resolutely you, & that is precisely what some people fear the most. Must be terrible, that, to go through life frightened of yourself.

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