How can I let go of my attachment to my family?

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This topic has 8 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 3 months ago by Mangesh Paradkar.

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August 7, 2016 at 2:31 am #111754

Leocube
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Hi, my name is Leo and I’m 22 years old. I have a problem that I need help with. How do I let go of the attachment that I have for my family?

By family, I mean my parents and my siblings. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t have a bad relationship, we get a long very well, but that’s what’s wrong with it. Because we get along well that I’ve built this attachment to them. I feel like they’re very special, but I know that they are not actually special. They treat me well just like any parents would treat their child. It’s not something “special”. I remember asking my mom when I was a really small kid that had I been born in a different family, would she still love me, and she said that of course she would still love me, but that was obviously a lie. If I was born in a different family, they wouldn’t even care about me because they wouldn’t know that I existed, and I wouldn’t have cared about them. Everything is just circumstantial.

I want to stop caring about them as if they are special to me. I don’t mean to just treat them like crap. I just want their importance to me to not be any more than the importance of a stranger. I grew up in Asia and I encountered monks on a daily basis. They are not attached to anything, not even their own family. I want to be like that, please give me some advice on what I can do to be like that. I understand their mindset, I just can’t seem to think in that way. Thank you

August 7, 2016 at 5:55 am #111755

Nina Sakura
Participant

Hey Leo,

I am from an Asian type background too in terms of family culture and ties. Here are my two cents:

Put yourself in your parents shoes. How would you feel if they really thought of you like this and treated you accordingly: “I just want their importance to me to not be any more than the importance of a stranger.” There is a huge difference in the importance we give to a stranger and to a loved one.

It seems very glamorous to think in these philosophical circles and think all this theory – but the reality is this – whatever the case, they loved you, looked after you and did their best. How would you feel if your sibling suddenly became distant like that and just left? And when you ask why they are behaving like that, they say this whole circumstantial logic, oh the monks dont care too…Can you imagine how much it would hurt you and your family? You say you dont want to treat them like crap but by treating them like they mean nothing is equivalent to that only.

And FYI, all monks aren’t like that – some in fact take up monk-hood to get financial support from their governments, for example in Bhutan. The very motive thus is to look after their family. Please look into why you really want to let go of this attachment – is something else bothering you? Are you disillusioned with the way you have been treated by someone?

August 7, 2016 at 8:37 am #111757

Anonymous
Guest

Dear Leo:

The answer for me is quite simple: you let go of your attachment to your family by not practicing certain behaviors that are motivated by such attachment. Trying to reject and expel your emotional attachment will not work. Choosing to not behave certain ways will work.

For example: you have a desirable job opportunity far away from your family: moving away from your family and taking the job is a non-attachment behavior on your part.

Another example: you are interested in a life partner that your parents dislike but you believe is good for you: having that person as your life partner anyway is non-attachment behavior.

Choosing your career, choosing your friends, choosing your life according to your values, needs, wants and not according to your family’s is how you let go of your attachment to your family.

Key point: examine your values and wants to see that indeed… they are yours!

anita

August 7, 2016 at 10:12 am #111765
Inky
Participant
Hi Leo,

Your family is special ~ they are modelling what a healthy family is supposed to be! So many people don’t have that. Even though it is somewhat ordinary, every year it is becoming more and more unusual.

How do you think adoptive parents know a particular stranger child is theirs? They “just know”. There IS a certain knowing when you meet your people, blood related or spiritually so.

The monks? I met a Hindu one. His parents gave him away as is the tradition in certain circles. He claimed not to have an attachment to his family, but I could see the “What if” pain/longing behind his eyes.

Other monks enter the priesthood because they don’t have what you have, or they don’t know what else to do. It’s sometimes not for noble reasons.

You are a young man and naturally want to venture out into the world unimpeded. As a mother, give us parents a call once in a while. And make an attempt to see us once a year or so at holidays. That, too, is what families are for! 🙂

Best,

Inky
- This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Inky.
August 7, 2016 at 1:48 pm #111789

Chris
Participant

Hi Leo,
I am 23, and detached from my family, or at least I have been practicing detachment. I haven’t held a conversation with my parents in 6 months, even though I have regular contact with my sister, and I plan on continuing that pattern. Hows that for them being strangers!? This isn’t at all by choice, but out of necessity. An unhealthy family system hijacks the lives of its individuals and entirely suppresses spirituality and love, I have found. I’ve been reading “Healing the Shame that Binds You” by John Bradshaw, which isn’t written in the Buddhist tradition, but it may as well be – given all of the parallels I can draw. A key theme of the book is the role that families CAN play in the denial of our basic goodness and perpetuation of Samsara.
All of that said about me and where I am coming from, I have two pieces of advice:
If I were you I would practice gratitude for your family. In that way, you will not take them for granted. Your family does not sound like the kind you need to run away from and turn into strangers. Where would we be if we rejected the love that flows freely to us? Does it make sense to dull our appreciation for life by “detachment”? We all suffer, but much of my path of suffering is built by my parents (and not maliciously, but mostly out of ignorance and the shame that their parents passed onto them). I treat my parents the way I do because I have learned that they have and will continue to sew wounds into me. They see me in the same dim light that they see themselves, and while I am busy relating with my own pain, they will generate more for those around them until they don’t (and hopefully they learn at some point in their lives).
My second piece of advice would be to be very skeptical of your desire to be like a monk. Why do you want to be like a monk? Will you escape pain that way? Why do monks want to be like monks? I have experienced firsthand the struggle for an ego enrichment that seems “correct” because it has a spiritual label. Wanting to be like a monk sounds very fishy to me.
ANYWAYS,
Good luck!

August 7, 2016 at 10:20 pm #111818

Leocube
Participant

Thank you for all your advices
@Nina To be honest, I would be very happy if they too decided to stop seeing me as “family”. Relationship between people is very fragile in my opinion. Everything, like I said, is just circumstantial. If I care about them as if they’re special, which logically they’re not, my happiness would have to depend on them and I don’t want my happiness to be depended on another person, and I don’t want their happiness to depend on me. I guess you could say that because I care about them that I don’t want us to depend on each other.

I didn’t have a lot of friends as a kid and was bullied, but as I grew up, I also had a lot of friends and even a girlfriend. I know that people can make you happy or sad, and I don’t want other people to have that power over me. I know it sounds like I don’t want to be hurt, and that’s true, but I also don’t want to be happy. All those emotions are just so fragile.

@Anita I’m actually living in Canada while they’re in Asia. I don’t talk to them much because I don’t feel the need to, so I’ve got behavioral covered (haha). But it doesn’t matter how I treat them, in my brain, they are still significant, and I need them to not be significant. That’s what I’m trying to get at.

@Inky I don’t think people become monks because they don’t have what I have. I think a lot of people become monks for the very same reason that I have, they want to break free from worldly attachments. I mean a lot of human are blinded by emotions. Emotions (like love, anger, disappointment etc) keep us from seeing the world for what it really is (whether reality is bright or dark). It’s kind of like a drug, it makes us feel like something is real, but everything is just a product of chemicals in your brain.

I have a distant uncle that decided to become a monk when he was 3 or 4, and now he’s 67 and he’s the head monk (I don’t know the terminology). He had great parents, my mom told me that his parents cried a lot upon hearing that he wanted to leave them to become a monk. She said that when he began to walk as a kid, he would just sit in his room and meditate (our family joked that he was the reincarnation of buddha lol). I asked if he was sad when his parents died and he said that he wasn’t sad, because everybody dies. He also said that when you see the world with total objectivity, you will be at peace even if there’s a war going on outside.

@marglark My parents are great people and they make me happy more than sad. There is absolutely nothing wrong with my family. If I decided to just live my life being indulged in love, it would be fine, everything would work out. But I don’t want to. I do feel love for my family, but there’s a part of me that keeps growing day by day since I was a kid. A part of me that says I’m experiencing something that’s not “real”. I’m not questioning their love, I’m just saying that their love for me is only circumstantial, and there’s nothing wrong with it being circumstantial, but at the same time, it’s just that, circumstantial.

I don’t want to “escape” anything. I’ve experienced both sadness and happiness, I just feel like it’s time for me to get a different perspective on live. My motive is not emotional, it’s just logical.

August 8, 2016 at 9:22 am #111853
Chris
Participant
“I just
like it’s time for me to get a different perspective on live. My motive is
, it’s just logical.”
You contradict yourself here. If it is a feeling, where is the logic?
And I think it’s quite alright to contradict yourself, but better if you know you are doing it.
In my experience, logic itself is circumstantial. It is a tool of consistency that people use, but people can use it for different things. Something that I think about is that there is nothing that is not circumstantial (Non-independent origination, Heart Sutra).

Talking about your uncle:
“I asked if he was sad when his parents died and he said that he wasn’t sad, because everybody dies. He also said that when you see the world with total objectivity, you will be at peace even if there’s a war going on outside.”
It seems as though you are saying “I should be objective, so I can be at peace”. That itself is a desire. It’s one thing to tell the truth, that you are not sad, like your uncle did. It is another thing to want the truth, to want not to be sad. One is unmotivated. The other is motivated, moving in a direction; from here, towards there.
In my view, it is not a wrong thing: “to want”, to be motivated. But I think it is confusing to say that your motivator is logical, and without circumstance. Some psychologists say there is no such thing as motivation without affect (without emotion).
To finish: If circumstantial means “not real”, then nothing is real….Just like the Buddha always knew, that life is a dream.
August 8, 2016 at 9:48 am #111856

Anonymous
Guest

Dear Leo:

I reread your original post and I don’t know the answer to how you let go of an emotional attachment, how you can no longer feel emotionally attached. As hard as I tried to void my emotional attachment to my mother, I failed to do so for over fifty years.

And I just realized as I typed the last sentence that indeed most recently, and after a process of a bit over five years I myself did indeed successfully let go of my attachment to my mother.

How did I do it? I am trying to answer this in a short paragraph, thinking as I type:

The attachment to my mother was formed when I was a child, not by my choice, but by nature. As a child I did not have a separate identity from my mother. In my brain (as is in all children) my mother and I were one unit of identity. In the last few years, following my first psychotherapy with a competent therapist in 2011-2013, and successfully only recently, I extricated my mother from this Unit of Identity. So not I am Me and she is no longer me.

anita

August 16, 2016 at 11:17 am #112498

Mangesh Paradkar
Participant

A few observations

It seems the attachment to your family is troubling you. Else why would you want to letgo of your attachment. You say that you know that the love of your family is circumstantial. If you would have really known you would have long lost your attachment. But since you havent, this circumstantial love only seems to be your rationalisation. You also say that monks are not attached to anything. Take away their spiritual life and you will see how much they are attached to that way of life.

And why you have chosen only family for attachment. Why not give up attachment to everything. Why cant you give up your attachment to your thoughts, your feelings and your own self. Because that too may not be real.
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