When You Can't Just 'Cut Out' Emotionally Abusive Parents From Your Life

For me, cutting out the toxic people in my life isn’t as easy as it sounds. They’re my mom and my stepdad. I was emotionally manipulated for so long. I was kicked out so many times, and even though they didn’t tell me straight up, it was obvious they never wanted me. They made that clear.

So, just cut them out, right? They don’t want you, you don’t need them.

It’s not that easy though.

One, I’m only 16, and with my mom still technically being my legal guardian, I do still have to have some sort of minimal contact with her. Not to mention, her job gets me the only form of health insurance I can get at this point and she works at my doctor’s office.

That’s not so bad. I only see her during checkups and doctors appointments or the few times she stops by my grandmother’s house where I live for whatever she’s stopping by for.

However, as an older sister, the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do is protect and love my younger brother and sister. They don’t need protection from the same people I do. My mom and stepdad have always been great to them. They’re the ones who are wanted.

That should make me a bit resentful and angry, and I’ll admit, there are times when I want to hate my younger siblings for being the ones that everyone seems to want, but that’s not their fault. They don’t deserve for me to be angry at them for what my parents did to me.

I just want to protect them from getting hurt. I want to love them the way an older sister should. It’s a bit easier with my sister. She’s 13, she has Facebook and a phone. I can text her whenever and vice-versa. Actually seeing her is a little bit harder, though. My younger brother is 9 years old. He doesn’t have a phone so I can’t just text him. Outside of going through my mom, I have no way to see or contact him at all.

Cutting out the toxic people in my life means cutting out a few of the only people I love with everything in me.

So what’s a girl to do here?

Sometimes it feels like my brother and sister forget about me because I’m not there. It feels like they don’t care about me or love me as much as I care about and love them. They’re too young to understand the people who are so great to them can be the reason their older sister doesn’t want to be alive sometimes.

I know they don’t get why I’m gone. They don’t understand why my older brother and I don’t live there like normal siblings would. They just know I was there one minute and gone the next. The only thing they see is me leaving. Everything else was hidden from them.

Seeing my mom gets really hard. If it wasn’t for me being so young, and for my younger siblings, I don’t really know if my mom and I would still talk at all, even though we talk very little now.

Most stories you see about parental emotional abuse say to just cut them out. You can live without them.

It’s so hard to believe I can live without them when I know I can’t leave my brother and sister hanging like that.

As they get older, maybe that won’t be so hard. Maybe I can see them without going through my parents. Maybe. But for now, my love and care for my siblings is stronger than the hurt from what has happened to me.