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Ostracizing and cutting off your family is a traumatic experience. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-04-18

Its a gut wrenching awful pain that no one can fully understand until they’ve done it themselves. Its not happy. Its not something that should be celebrated in the slightest. Its a rough decision — one that will have a lasting impact on not only your own life, but the lives of your family members and friends. Believe me I have done it numerous times before. My mother, my brother, two sisters and my step mom all gone, not because of politics, nothing that petty, but over a long term refusal of my family to care for my mother ailing with schizotypal disorder. It was the most gut wrenching thing I have ever had to do. It was not a decision I made lightly, nor in the heat of the moment, nor on the advice of a blog post.

Its very dismaying to me having ostracizing and cutting off family members be a position that is advocated by any dailykos regular. I am not saying that cutting off family members should never be done, there are extremely toxic dynamics out there. What I am saying, however, is the decision is intensely personal, intertwined with history some stranger on the internet wont nor ever could understand. Its not a decision you should make based on someone approximation of that family members political leanings. We should not, just as a community of compassionate people, be encouraging people to willingly go through honestly one of the roughest emotional experiences out there just because user somedudeontheinternet says its time to fight that way. You have to make the decision and live with the consequences, good or bad. Somedude isn’t gonna take your place when you’ve alienated your love ones because of politics. Somedude isn’t going to take your family members place when you miss their presence. Its all you.

Flippantly discussing cutting off family members for years because they are Republican or happened to have voted for Trump on that basis alone is not something we should be doing. It looks creepy, from the outside looking in. It looks like Q-Anon or something and that is not the movement I signed up for.

Please think before acting, from a guy who knows all too well what family, specifically missing it, means.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/18/2317291/-Ostracizing-and-cutting-off-your-family-is-a-traumatic-experience?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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