The Cost of Clarity: When Honesty Destabilizes the Family Blueprint
On breaking the ancestral loops of avoidance and reclaiming your own frequency.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being the one who sees what is happening while being surrounded by people who refuse to look— yet claim they “see.” Lately, I’ve been thinking deeply about family systems, roles, and how certain individuals become the emotional containers for everyone else’s avoidance. Once you see the pattern, you can never unsee it. I watch these dynamics with a sense of awe. It’s never from a place of judgment, but from a profound observation of the human condition. We all need that sense of awe to truly understand the world.
In my clinical work, I see it repeatedly: the one who notices, the one who names the tension, the one who feels everything first. Often, it is the eldest daughter carrying not only her own pain but the unprocessed grief, fear, and resentment of the generations before her. She becomes labeled as “too much” simply because she refuses to pretend things are fine when they aren’t. What we don’t discuss enough is how often awareness is punished. Naming the truth is frequently met with projection. When you name a pattern, it is interpreted as an attack, an act of harm, or a sign of moral superiority.
Kind of like growing up with our parents.
Let’s pause for a second…
You know I giggle every time I type “pause” in my writing because I imagine us on a trail walking and you hear the crunch sounds of our little feet exploring the terrain of human behavior together. I quickly pause, and the shuffling sounds of crunching trail dirt seize for a moment.
silence…
In nature… thats what presence feels like for me
Let’s sit in this presence for a moment and truly reflect…
What if naming the truth really meant: “I see you because I am you?”
The more I work in family systems the more I realize, many of us fall into the role of holding something for others. At least holding that narrative. When you grow up in a system where survival requires emotional suppression, awareness becomes a threat to the blueprint, It isn’t that your observations are inaccurate. You see, that’s the destructive mental trap designed to make you doubt yourself. It’s that your clarity disrupts the illusion of peace. Many families selectively bury their heads in the sand; they are oblivious to their own patterns, yet they are the first to look up and judge when YOU disrupt the status quo. When the child or adult kid breaks the status quo that draws attention to their parenting.
When you break that illusion, you instantly are seen as “difficult.” In my practice with high-conflict or avoidant families, I’ve watched this play out:
The moment you name a pattern, you are “intense.”
When you stop absorbing everyone else’s emotions, you are “cold” or “abrasive.”
When you stop performing happiness, you are “angry.”
The irony is that those criticizing you for being “too much” are often the ones who never learned how to sit with their own discomfort. It pisses me off to see people adopt the language of healing, using words like “boundaries,” “regulation,” or “perspective” without embodying any of it. It becomes a costume— a performance to appear “evolved” while avoiding real accountability internally, and the body knows. It’s like a Scooby-Doo mask; I find myself wanting to snatch it off to reveal the avoidance underneath. I find I need to remind myself at times that some people will convince themselves the mask is the only thing they can survive in.
There is no point in losing yourself trying to convince someone to live.
Real work means acknowledging your own baggage. It is easy to “explain” things using absolute, accusatory language, while positioning yourself as the mature one. Respectful dialogue is often a comedy when it comes from those who have mastered covert power plays. There are undercurrents of energy—invisible highways—that most people cannot see because they are “playing therapy” while living in a distorted reality. We see this when calmness is used as a shield while the language spoken suggests high nervous system activation. In these dynamics, withdrawal is mistaken for maturity, and anyone who questions it is labeled the problem.
This is a setup.
That is the ache.
Many of us were forced to grow up early. We learned to read rooms, manage tension, and keep the peace before we could learn what “peace” even meant. That hyper-awareness made us responsible for things that weren’t ours to carry. When someone tells me I “need to let things go” or that I “think too much,” what I really hear is: “I’m uncomfortable with your clarity.” Clarity asks for ownership, and not everyone wants to pay the cost of acknowledging what they’ve avoided. What hurts most is the expectation that people should shrink themselves to protect others from their own reflection. What does reflection actually mean? Why does the concept of seeing ourselves reflected back to us become so hard to not just accept, but at least hold.
Examine it.
Some refuse too, because to them the pain of discomfort is too much, or because the ego has swallowed them whole.
I am learning to stop trying to be understood by those who benefit from misunderstanding me. I am learning to slow down my “needy ADHD brain” that sees every pattern. But most importantly, I am recognizing that accountability is often treated as a one-way street. Some people will only walk down accountability lane if you hold their hand and walk it with them.
Many of us are out here fighting the world. Myself included. This last week, traveling back to Mexico during a crisis to get my dog emergency veterinarian care. Exploring a city I only ever heard stories about from locals of El Paso. Seeing how people live there. How you are treated because the car you drive and how that mentality spills into the States because— well— group think.
I think about how a woman in the line crossing the bridge entering back into El Paso literally called the Mexican police on us because we merged into the line like other people did— MANY other people. She almost crashed her car trying to prevent us from merging. Now, were we in the wrong? Probably, we are driving in another country and didn’t know what we are doing. Thats not the issue. The issue was the level of hatred in this women. The anger and rage— for what? Enough rage to call the police all of that just so she could feel like she had some control over something. There are women and men alike that have similar frequencies of this nature. Bitter, angry, no control in their own life. These people are working at schools with your kids, working as therapists, they are the lawyer, the judge granting your custody case.
We sit on our high horses from our special kid club groups of marginalization. Screaming about injustice and systemic oppression. Yet, don’t zoom into the narcissism within us all. We don’t bother to examine how we treat each other. We cuss people out on the highway. We take over the highway. We use our cars as weapons for control, and treat people a certain way beucase the way they dress, the car they drive, the side of town they live in. We judge people for being poor or for being rich. If they made a life for themselves we judge them while claiming they aren’t humble people. We make meaning out of anything that reveals whatever we feel we lack in ourselves. We disassociate into activism because it distracts us from the emptiness inside ourselves and the narcissism we use to mask that emptiness. We search for people who validate us because algorithms have conditioned that as baseline. So when we are in reality and the therapist doesn’t take our side or validate us, our kids don’t do what we say, live how we want them to live, we can’t stand our neighbor for getting a new car or remodeling their house—again. “Why does so and so always travel.” This is our life.
All we do is complain.
Why do you think that is?
We don’t ever complain about what we are doing we just complain about what others are doing.
I was once sitting outside having lunch with my brother years ago. A guy in a car pulled up to traffic that was stopped honking and yelling at people to move. He was in his egocentric loop not realizing traffic was stopped so someone in a wheel chair could cross. Did I holler at the guy and say “Hey! it’s sunny outside while gesturing for him to relax!!!” — yeah.. I did🤭 It worked though. He apologized, he got snapped out of his ego loop and back into the present reality where he could visually see the person crossing the road. Now, for me I understand ego-centric loops and how we all— myself included— get stuck in them. But, it’s the grief of how many perform altruism, perform kindness, but day to day behave hateful to people for whatever reason they created in their mind while stuck in the upside down of their ego-centric loop.
This performance is the ultimate systemic bypass. We track the patterns of the world so we don’t have to track the patterns of our own hearts. We want the world to change its “Family System” while we refuse to regulate our own internal system. What we are seeing in these moments—the rage in the car line, the weaponizing of a police call, the judgment of a neighbor’s success—is displacement. When we lack internal agency, we seek external dominance by doing things such as calling the police on others for literally mundane reasons, screaming racist and abuse at people who held a boundary up to you. Americans think we are losing our rights.
What this is Psychoeducationally, this is a failure of Self-Led Regulation. Many can choose to lead themselves to stagnation while blaming systemic forces for their lack of discipline. While simultaneously bypassing harm to people simply because “they were rich” “ they were white” or “they were racist.”
That worries me.
Scares me even.
We have replaced actual human connection with ‘validation loops’ provided by algorithms, which leaves us starving for real intimacy. So when we go looking for real intimacy, many of us don’t know what that is or even looks like— so, we turn to Ai and social media to have someone else tell us if this person is a red flag or not. We go to therapy hoping they will side or validate us against our family or partner. When that hunger isn’t met, it turns into communal narcissism where ‘the other’ becomes a canvas for our own unexamined shadows. We aren’t fighting for justice in those moments; we are discharging the discomfort of our own emptiness, just look online.
A lot of us are angry because the messaging and modeling that we received growing up was just anger. It wasn’t just anger, it was a lot of emotions that just make you feel “not enough,” and then we end up transmuting that and inheriting it, and then polluting the world. Being on Easter holiday weekend, seeing that level of hatred in a person purely for just what we did... it triggered me to want to be ugly back to her, like, “Oh hell no.” My husband was able to kind of let it go, but for me, it wasn’t about the woman in the line. It was a metaphor for what that woman represents as a collective, and it was creating this level of grief in me that really— hurt.
How are we sitting out here still pointing the finger at the right versus the left, versus the blue versus the red, versus the “you’re an idiot,” “you’re a racist,” “phobic” as we defend ‘our side’ and we’re having tantrums and we’re out here protesting, but look at how you treat each other on a day-to-day basis. Where do we think all of this built-up energy is coming from? Something is stirring it up in us and we’re not reflective at all. It’s the incongruence of the fakeness of it all. It’s Easter weekend and you’re out here hella hatred—she hissed with her teeth, almost about to wreck her own car so she could have control. This woman could be in your family, she could be an in-law, she could be a co-worker.
Now, I want us to really zoom out.
This is how I bring this back to families, because a lot of us are being raised by women who are burnt out, drained, and exhausted. They’re surviving. They’re in marriages they are not happy in (their choice, yes villains exist but it’s still a choice that was made and we all must accept that fact.) Instead of metabolizing that and processing it, it gets displaced on their partners, kids and some of these kids are adult-adults. Some of these adult-adults don’t even want to deal with the parent anymore because all they do is discharge their energy because they don’t know how to metabolize it themselves with healthy habits, healthy skills, healthy diet, healthy sleeping patterns, or healthy mental and spiritual health. Essentially learning to be an individual outside of being a role. Many don’t want to do that. You don’t want to have the discipline; you just want to go to work. You want to come home, you want to b*tch and complain, and then you want to complain about how your kids aren’t treating the world how you raised them—which was basically to circle you and validate everything you think and feel because you didn’t know how to learn how to do it for yourself. This is what so many are going through right now. whether you are the mother in the story or the adult kids in the story.
The transitions in life are what we humans are struggling with adapting to. So we drift.
When there’s somebody in the family who is the scapegoat, who pulls out, who emotionally cuts off, who is tired and isn’t going to deal with it anymore—that’s where narcissistic injuries start showing up. This isn’t about blaming women—that’s your victim schema. It’s easy to say out loud that all I do is side with men rather than actually sit with the message thats being said. I get annoyed because I have to walk this path too. The woman in the crossing line is a metaphor for what we deal with in our mothers-in-law, and our fathers-in-law, and our partners, and our family systems or even at work. It's the shadow aspect of us, the rugrat aspect of us, the child. Everybody talks about communication, and then when you actually do try to communicate:
“Hey, what’s been going on? I noticed that you’ve shifted, did I do something?”
What do you get in response?
…“Oh, everything’s fine,” and then they run to chismé brunch where they gossip and generate more meaning making stories to blind loyalty friends. It’s a pattern I see in my office, in my own life, with peers. So often.
We want communication but are not honest when faced with it.
This is the world that we live in. This is why I always say we cannot care what people are going to say or even think about us. Let them talk. Let them... because if somebody is going to believe information like that from a secondary person... I learned that real quick how fast people gossip, because gossip is the best way to avoid the chaos in your own life.
It is.
It truly is.
The perfect distraction from our own shadows.
The more we gossip, judge, and condemn people for their shadow. We drift further and further away from reaching and facing our own.
The Cost of Clarity
This is the Cost of Clarity.
When you decide to stop being the ‘stabilizer’ for a dysfunctional family blueprint, you become the villain in their narrative. The woman in the line at the border wasn’t fighting a Tesla; she was discharging a lifetime of unmanaged powerlessness onto a stranger because it’s easier than looking at the burnout in her own kitchen. Psychoeducationally, we are looking at Intergenerational Displacement. Working in El Paso, this experiences has granted me the opportunity to see this play out live in so many capacities. When a system—whether it’s a family or a community—refuses to metabolize its own grief and anger, it requires a target. If you aren’t willing to be that target anymore, if you refuse to ‘hold their hand’ down accountability lane, the system will experience a narcissistic injury. They will use gossip, and labels or even guilt and manipulation to regain the control they lack internally.
This displacement doesn't stay behind closed doors; it migrates. When we haven't reconciled the powerlessness in our own living rooms, we take it to the streets, often under the banner of a 'cause.' Activism, in its unexamined state, becomes the ultimate dissociative shield. This is why activist movements frustrate me. As much as I understand the heart behind them. They are riddled with people infected by egoic constructs and noise using that movement specifically as a shield to disguise narcissistic traits, entitlement, and unfazed unhealed wounds. I find them to be psychologically dangerous while in a society being conditioned to process data into polarity. What I mean by this is many of these groups members—trauma bond together due to having the same ache. Yet no skills are being used, many struggle with mental illness, mood or personality disorders, and are walking on eggshells among their own group members. Reenacting the very blueprints they fled creating these small groups that are systems too. We just recreate what we know in new decorative ways. Think about it, we go into relationships as an escape from the childhood wounds, only to find they show up in the relationship. It’s the same concept with friendships, and these activist spaces.
Until we stop using activism and roles as a dissociative shield and start looking at how we hold the ‘hand’ of our own accountability, the system doesn’t change. It just shifts characters. The goal isn’t to be ‘right’ in the line back to El Paso; the goal is to realize that the person you are screaming at is the mirror you are most afraid to look into. Clarity costs you the comfort of the groupthink, but it buys you your soul back.
Sitting across from difference is my life version of exposure therapy, because difference gets me closer to my own truth.
So…
Let them talk.
You have work to do.
I see you because I am you!!