no contact Archives - Wholesome Badass: A Work in Progress

A reflection on conditional belonging, self-worth, anxiety, and growing up with unmet emotional needs.

The Difference Between Lack of Care and Personal Failure

June 2, 2026

When I was young, I experienced needs, feelings, fears, and sensitivities that did not seem commonly shared, well supported, or even allowed. It seems as though that lack of care and support somehow was framed as reflective only of my unworthiness and unlovability. I am rejecting that. I seemed more affected by things than many of the people around me. My reactions, worries, questions, and needs did not appear to have a place within the common experience. I did not question the environment. I questioned myself. When Feelings Felt Dangerous What I recall vividly is not only the feelings themselves, but what followed. If I was hurt, afraid, overwhelmed, hungry, lonely, or needed something outside what was expected or understood, there seemed to be an unspoken cost. I wasn’t just sad. I was afraid and ashamed of my sadness. I wasn’t just hungry. I was fearful of being hungry. I wasn’t just anxious. I was anxious about being anxious. The feeling and the consequence fused together. The vulnerability and the diminishing or banishing response. What I Made It Mean For years, I thought my depression and anxiety were the problem. What I recognize now is that much of my anxiety and despair may have flowed from anticipating what would happen when I had a need, feeling, preference, limit, or reaction for which there seemed no allowance. What I learned to believe was that there was something wrong with me. That I was less deserving of care, understanding, protection, patience, or support. Not because anyone sat me down and said so. Because that seemed to be the conclusion supported by the evidence available to me. Care, belonging, protection, and support felt conditional. When those things remained absent, the most obvious explanation was that I had somehow failed to qualify for them. It still feels as though the only thing my family and I agreed on was my lack of value. Once I stopped agreeing to that, the system collapsed and I was said to have opted out. That experience shaped how I understood myself, relationships, and what I could expect from other people. Searching for an Exit The problem was that I could not stop being myself. I could not stop feeling what I felt or experiencing the world through the nervous system and sensitivities unique to me. I attempted every means of escape. Food. Sex. Alcohol. Drugs. They solved nothing. They offered interruption. A way to step away from the exhausting experience of being conscious inside a life organized around fear, pain, and loss. Being blacked out, distracted, consumed, or off the grid often felt preferable to being fully present. What If I Wasn’t the Problem? For most of my life, I assumed the missing piece was worthiness. I believed care, understanding, protection, and support existed, and that my task was to make myself deserving enough to receive them. What never occurred to me was that those things might not have been available in the ways I needed them. That their absence was not evidence of my lack of value. I don’t have conclusions. Only questions. What if I spent years trying to solve the wrong problem? What if I mistook the absence of something for evidence of my worth? What if the story was not that I was unworthy? What if the story was that I was unmet? And what if I had been baptized in the waters of being unmet by people who would not meet me, and came to understand that as truth, connection, love, and home? What if those are not the same thing at all?

Black-and-white illustration of a woman isolated behind a wall as family members reinforce the divide, symbolizing triangulation and parental alienation.

Your Enemy’s Enemy Is Your Friend

December 9, 2017

Being publicly told “you’re welcome to join” by people who openly disregard and disrespect me is hardly evidence of genuine inclusion. The invitation is presented as evidence of goodwill, while my condition of repair before returning is presented as proof that I’m choosing to separate myself from the family. No contact was a tragic last resort. There’s something particularly cruel about weaponizing my decision to protect myself from further harm. Years after a loveless, volatile marriage and unnecessarily contentious divorce, my estranged sister and ex-husband established an alliance of their own. I had married a man whose emotional patterns mirrored my sister’s, recreating the same relational dynamic. Given their shared, longstanding patterns of divisive behavior, their alliance was hardly surprising. They began gathering with my children while excluding me, despite my repeated requests that my sister stop. The resulting division extended beyond my relationships with either of them, affecting my children, our co-parenting relationship, and my already strained relationship with my mother. As my mother liked to say, “Your enemy’s enemy is your friend.” Whatever their intentions or explanations, their words and actions hurt our family. That harm was not mitigated by context or justification.

Good Grief

March 24, 2017

I cannot help but feel charmed when I hear people in utter exasperation calmly say “Good Grief”. It is so completely wholesome(benevolent) and old school. While grief, may not be good, it is essential, and a natural part of life. We all deserve to grieve and heal from heartbreak. My sons’ deserve a healed and whole mother. As an adult with choices, recovery of my spirit takes priority over my seat at “the family table”. My first choice is to recover with my family of origin. The alternative is to recover on my own. It has been collectively declared that “There is nothing to heal from, just move on, Already, goddammit”. My sister’s locking onto my ex-husband(any excuse at all to fawn and connect(gag)) has troubled us as co-parents, as well as divided me from our confused and aging mother. I have nearly quit judging that behavior, but still, I REFUSE to dine with abusers of my sons’ parents. The idea of sharing a meal is sickening. Our next genetic gathering will be for a death. While the passing of any family member will be unfortunate, the death itself, will not erase or stop the damage. I will pray for the grace to show up only as a mourner for the passing of whomever it is. The service will not pose as a union or a re-union. Just a memorial for the deceased; a ceremony dedicated to those who need to grieve the passing of a loved one. I respect and honor the need to grieve. For me, it will be a day of exercising courage, humility, and compassion–100% wholesome and badass.

You Spot It–You Got It

March 23, 2017

You spot it, you got it…. I was thinking of how I am most irritated by subtle little behaviors in which I assume to know the motivation…so arrogant. And the flip side of that coin is that I am deeply touched by small gestures and behaviors that I assume to know the motivation. The truth of this is, if I recognize a behavior as having meaning, it is because it is familiar and I relate, whether it is good or bad. When I see the good in people, that is the good in me that I am connecting with. When I judge people, that is my judgment for my own attitudes and behaviors that need work. My sister, who is desperate to be in charge of my destiny, is always pointing out whom she believes to be gay, needing a man, angry, needy, or overly sensitive. She illuminates these things as if she is a brilliant soothsayer and well above being possessing any of those dreadful things. I wonder if wearing all white every day and cringing at the idea of sex with your husband makes you feel as if you are a lady, full of grace. I love wearing black and having sex with my boyfriend!! what does that make me? Self-actualization is my only real goal and so far, my greatest achievement. I notice with her, that anytime she is preparing for a night out or an event, she sends me pics asking if she looks like a weird desperate dyke….no joke. I finally just reduced it to WDD. Now I suspect her greatest need is to appear normal, not needing, and straight. I love rolling up to dinners in a cammo jacket with greasy pixie and no make up to announce I am rockin’ the WDD. Though I am straight, I would, just to be subversive, be thrilled to announce that I was an unashamed lesbian. Anyway, You spot it, you got it—

Golden Memories

November 27, 2016

I’ve been thinking about the difference between making memories and making things look nice for photographs. Shared experiences and connections…rather than required and posed photos with others in close proximity. I have too many photos suggestive of good times and connection and have been often saddened that the lack of posed photos in recent years is proof of the opposite. Truth, I hide from the camera because pictures can lie…or worse, they can tell the truth! For OUR 2016 Thanksgiving, however, it would have been nice to have someone snapping pictures on the down-low, of us just doing our thing, laughing, playing, being who we are. Journalistic photos are my fave. Posing genuinely 100% pains me. I wouldn’t mind some photos of us, in action, enjoying each other. In addition to OUR sweet Thanksgiving Day, today, the Sunday after Thanksgiving (maybe the start of a ritual—memory making), we decorated both Christmas trees while listening to COUNTRY holiday music—taking breaks to throw football, walk dogs, and eat pizza. I experience the joy in simple moments when I am present enough to just show up. I don’t recall too many good moments in my life. I recall pretending but not feeling truly good, present, visible, and welcome. For special occasions, I must ride only with those who will help me push! It is said that I recall only bad things or that the bad things are figments of my imagination. A historical revisionist is what I am called…by those who, when I report being cold, offer me a thermostat reading rather than a blanket OR meet my expression of hunger with a report of the approximate time of my last feeding, rather than a sandwich. My more complex feelings, like fear and anxiety, are addressed with equal interest and compassion. Having my physical and emotional reality judged or disputed kinda messes me up. I cannot choose my feelings, only how I respond to them and with whom I share them. I don’t know how to not feel what I feel or to feel what I do not. I have sure tried, with food, a loveless marriage, sex, shopping, alcohol, drugs, geography… None brought relief, only distraction. When I am working on numbing or denying my pain, I am blocking myself also from joy and connection. We have made two precious memory days, nearly back to back. With a unity of purpose, none of us felt herded. We were fluid and non-confused. Just for today, I am practicing being present for those who WANT to connect and make memories. Together, to me, is much, much more than being in the same place or at the same table. Proximity is no proxy for connection. Wholesome connection is breath-taking and badass! Anything less for the special days is just bad.