I disowned my mother at 34 years old.

It has been 4 1/2 years since we’ve spoken. She doesn’t have a relationship with 4 of my 5 children. She uses my oldest son when she needs to move something. He is hopeful she leaves him something when she passes. My other children will never know her.

It took a long time. It was a long process of emotional and mental break downs, broken trust, heartache, hopes to become a family and to create a bond that ultimately became dashed, and listening to stories of my mother’s vicious backbiting against me, her constant gaslighting and scapegoating of me and my siblings, and years of therapy to decide that my mother wasn’t a good person to keep in my life.

It didn’t happen overnight.

It required multiple attempts to trust and share love and to help her to try to get to know me as an adult, an individual, a human being, to realize that it was best not to continue a relationship with her.

As a child, my six younger siblings and I were severely neglected, starved and isolated from the world under the guise of being home schooled. Home schooling is amazing if you teach your children and use a curriculum to guide instruction. I’ve seen it do amazing things for people. In our home, however, it was just a label that gave our mother an excuse not to enroll us in school. There could be no truancy officer if she never enrolled us. No one would see how dirty, how thin, how sad or lonely we were. She kept having children long beyond her realization that she didn’t want any, and I was given small teething babies who were still in diapers and needed to be potty trained and needed to learn how to walk. I was only 13, my younger sister 11, my brother 9, caring for each other and sisters ages 7, 5 and 2. We learned how to cook by trial and error. Several of my siblings grew up illiterate into adulthood and faced many educational, psychological and emotional challenges that either completely broke them, like my younger brother who became an alcoholic, and several of my sisters who were unable to care for themselves in adulthood because they lacked basic skills and tools to survive on their own. My youngest two sisters had a 2nd and 3rd grade education at 17 and 19. I found out that at a certain point, she kept enrolling them in school from time to time to keep child protective services from taking them away but not long enough to learn anything. My second youngest sister called me to tell me she was being molested by her step father. I took her and my youngest sister out of my mother’s home and got full custody and guardianship of my sister who was 17. My mother didn’t show up to court because she didn’t care. Then, their survivor benefits started coming to them instead of her; our father had passed in 2004, and she suddenly took me to court. The judge humiliated her.

As my siblings and I got older and had children of our own, she would continuously create drama between her own children that would make us fight or become angry at each other. Every time there was a problem, something she said or did was at the root of the issue and as adults today many of us have very few genuine interactions with each other. Most of us see therapists to seek help for depression, anxiety and even dissociative identity disorders today.

I took care of my siblings in a house alone, our parents living next door to us at first but moving across the street from us so that they couldn’t hear their children calling their names from the windows. Child Protective Services was called on our mother, and to this day she blames me for calling them although I didn’t. She doesn’t see her behaviors, only what was done as a result and blames and slanders her own children for the aftermath.

If your daughter disowned you, it is time for you to look at your own behaviors that have contributed to her inability to keep you in her life. It is time for you to seek therapy and consider the idea that you may have personality disorders that prevent you, for now, from coping with how you’ve been treating other people in a negative and destructive way.

Disowning someone takes years of thinking, years of conflict resolutions that fail, years of tears and disillusionment about wanting someone to be close to you who just is not able to.

Talk to a therapist and find out what you need to do to heal yourself. Make it about discovering what you’ve been through in your own life that causes you to push the people you love away from you, so that you can acknowledge what you’ve been doing to yourself and others and apologize genuinely.