They say that you can’t choose your family, and that’s that.
And so, in the spirit of growth and personal development, if you are not being served and supported by your family, the advice often given is to cut them out.
Life hackers like to advocate leaving those people who don’t support you, don’t serve your growth.
When you are changing and others are just holding you back, you will have to ditch them. They can’t accept your change, your success, their need to change and get better, too, it’s their problem.
But is it?
There is some truth to that.
If you have an uncle who sexually abuses you, sure, cut him out. There are toxic situations.
We do tend to be held back by the circumstances, very much including the relationships, we have come to find ourselves in.
Making a clean break with everything can help feel, if not make, the change.
That’s why retreats and workshops somewhere else, breaking our usual patterns, feel like such great change.
Our own biographies, habits and beliefs, as well as circumstances, contexts and situations, tend to hold us back much more, though.
And making a break with all our stuff, our habits, and our contexts is ever-so-slightly hard; this is exactly why retreats and workshops somewhere else tend to have close to zero effect when we get back into our homes or our companies and the usual situations and patterns of how things are done.
From that view, choosing friends and especially choosing family the way lifehackers recommend, leaving them if they don’t support your growth, will probably do one thing only: Leave you without family.
And when it comes to family, what kind of a frigging immature attitude is that?
Leave them just because you think you’re growing so much and they can’t keep up, don’t support you enough?
Why do you even think they have to support you? How are you supporting them, their journey, their life?
If you want to be grown-up and unhacked, maybe you should know how to deal with various people.
If you want to grow and develop, such social skills are likely to be much greater assets than any foreign languages or coding skills you may acquire by focusing on your growth alone.
Family, especially, are predominantly people and relationships you’d better learn to choose, deal with, handle well.
You cannot choose what family you’re born into, sure.
But even less can you choose how long – or short – they will be in your life. And their lives will somehow, to some extent, be a part of yours.
Why not choose them and make the best of it, then? Didn’t you say you were growing?