Why it can pay to cut some family ties
Eamon Dolan tried to set boundaries with his abusive mother for years. He says severing all connections was one of the best things he's ever done.
Twelve years ago, US publishing executive Eamon Dolan severed all ties with his mother.
She had regularly beaten him and his siblings and subjected them to emotional abuse. Dolan tried to maintain ties with her as an adult, but she remained a destructive presence.
He writes about the process that led to the parting in his new book, The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement.
It was a gradual process, he told RNZ’s Afternoons. He had been setting boundaries for his relationship with his mother for years. Boundaries she always breeched.
Twelve years’ ago, Eamon Dolan severed all ties with his mother
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“She had consistently been unable to abide by those rules. One of them was no cruelty to me or to anybody else in my presence, and that was the rule that she broke on this day,” Dolan says.
His mother retorted: “I suppose I have to watch every word I say to you?”
“I said, ‘Actually, you have to watch every word you say to everyone. That's what good people do, and you are not a good person. We're done goodbye’.”
It took him decades, he says, to “figure out that how I was treated, and how my siblings were treated, in our childhood was not normal.”
Breaking with his mother was one of his best decisions, he says.
“I found it, in short, to be one of the three best decisions I ever made. Having my son and marrying my wife were the other two.
“But it was on par with those, I really felt that I started becoming myself after I broke ties with her.”
Dolan is vice president and executive editor at Simon & Schuster publishing. When he realised there was a potentially a book in his experiences, he cast around for a writer.
“Then one agent said to me over drinks one evening, 'you should write this yourself'. We had worked together, he knew my backstory, he knew my skill set. And I scoffed at the idea. I think that was a Tuesday night, but on Saturday, I started writing the book.”
There many forces telling us we have an obligation to family that supersedes other obligations in our lives, he says.
“Everything from religion, the law and popular culture and psychology and psychiatry and related professions and the self-help industry, all of these forces, even our well-meaning friends, sort of gasp at the notion that we might not be going to see our family for Christmas, say.
“So that is embedded so deeply in all of us, myself included.”
Family members are under the same obligations to us that we would expect from any other relationship, he says.
“The familial relationship, which is put on a pedestal in our society on this planet, deserves no more prominence in our psyches than does any other relationship.”
Although 30 percent of people who are abused go on to abuse their own children, the majority do not, Dolan says.
“We have power, power to step away from our relatives, and we have power to make sure that we never pass this stuff along.”
