When You Stop Knocking

My relationship is with the abyss.

I don’t mean that dramatically. I mean it the way you’d say “I live in North Carolina.” It’s just where I am. Space. Rest. The entirety of wisdom and learning and exploration. Truth. No pretending. No layer on top. Just being.

I figured this out after I told my mother goodbye. I didn’t figure it out through meditation or journaling or therapy. I figured it out in the place between.

I’ll explain. But first I have to tell you about the knocking.

The knocking

For most of my life I have been knocking on a door that doesn’t open.

My mother wouldn’t hug me as a child. She could perform warmth for friends and acquaintances — people she barely knew got the full display. But for me, she held it back.

I didn’t have language for this as a kid. I didn’t even realize there was another way. That was just the way love worked in our house.

The thing about knocking is you forget. Every time. You forget how bad it felt last time, and you come back bright-eyed and hopeful, and you get destroyed, and then you forget again. The cycle can run for decades.

After years of this I wrote my goodbye. I forgave her. I wished her well. I meant it.

What the destruction feels like

People ask “what happened” and I can tell them what happened. The facts. The timeline. But the facts aren’t the wound. The wound is what it makes you believe about yourself.

After every interaction with my mother, the same thing happens. I start doubting myself. Was it my fault? Is there something I could do differently? Some key I haven’t found that would finally open the door? Could I make her happy? Make her different? Get back the good times?

I feel worthless. And I feel like I’ll always be alone.

That’s the real damage. Not the cruelty. The self-doubt. The way it makes you scan yourself for the flaw that explains everything.

I’ve studied this mechanism across the major traditions and they all describe it. I want to share what I found, because understanding helped me break the cycle. Maybe it can help you too.

The mechanics of a severed connection

There’s an old model that describes connection as a triangle with three sides: how much you like someone, what you agree on about reality, and whether real communication is happening between you. All three have to be present. When one drops, the others follow.

With my mother the liking was conditional from the start. Warm for display, cold in private. The shared reality broke when I started making my own choices about my life. And the communication was really just her broadcasting and me receiving. The cycle never completed. I’d send and she’d refuse to receive. Or she’d send hostility and I’d receive it as love because I was desperate.

When all three sides of the triangle are gone, there’s nothing left to repair. You can’t rebuild a connection where there’s no liking to build on, no agreement about what’s real, and no communication that completes. You’re just sending messages into a wall and calling it a relationship.

Some people don’t just fail to support you. They work against you. Especially when you start doing well.

It’s not always obvious. It doesn’t always look hostile. Sometimes it comes with a smile. Sometimes it comes disguised as concern or silence.

When you begin advancing — getting healthier, more independent, building your own life — the influence works to undermine your confidence, make nothing of your efforts, invalidate your choices, and keep you dependent.

Some parents do this when their children seem to be growing up too fast.

The wisdom traditions offer three options when someone is actively working against your progress. First, try honest communication. If you can’t do that, hold your ground and build your capacity to deal with them. And if you can’t do that either, retreat. Get out from under the influence so you can breathe.

Retreat is not failure. Sometimes it’s the only sane move.

But if you retreat, do not blame the other person for the condition of your life. Even when the blame is deserved. Because as long as you’re pointing at someone else as the reason for who you are, you’ve handed them control over you. You’ve put your power in their hands and called it their fault.

My mother really was harmful. The harm really happened. And I still can’t afford to make her the explanation for my life. Because that keeps her at the center of my story.

It is pure masochism to accept someone else’s control in a relationship that’s hurting you. It seems obvious, and I’d been doing it anyway.

Every tradition teaches some version of this: the thing that destroys relationships isn’t fighting. It isn’t cruelty. It isn’t even betrayal. It’s the things underneath.

When you withhold something from someone, you pull back. The pulling back creates distance. The distance creates friction. The friction creates new things you withhold. And then you start criticizing them. Pretending they did something wrong, but really because making them smaller reduces their credibility. If they’re terrible, then you are justified.

I can see this running in my mother like a program. The affection withheld in childhood. The refusal to say why she was angry. The warmth held back as punishment. And then the criticism of my parenting, my choices, my character — not because those things were wrong, but because if I’m an ungrateful narcissist, then her abandonment makes sense.

My terrible realization is I can see it running in me too. The things I didn’t say to her for years. The truth about how her drinking affected our family. The real feelings I swallowed to keep the peace. Every hidden thing sat between us like a wall.

The process to move through this is simple and brutal: write it all down. Everything you’ve been holding back. The things too ugly to say out loud. The things you’re ashamed of. What they did, what you did, what you wish you’d said. Write it to the person.

Then burn it.

After the burning, look at the situation fresh. Is there something that still needs to be said? Or can you let it go?

I wrote my last email to my mother from that place. Said everything. All of it. And let it go.

What wisdom traditions say

When I sat with this (not just cried about it), I found that every wisdom tradition I’ve studied addresses this exact thing. Specifically. And they agree more than you’d expect.

The yoga tradition identifies five root causes of human suffering. Ignorance of how things work. The ego’s insistence on being the center. Attachment to what feels good. Aversion to what feels bad. And the deep fear of loss.

Attachment — raga — is the one that kept me knocking. I wasn’t attached to my mother. I was attached to the idea of a mother. The gap between the mother I wanted and the mother I had was the source of most of my suffering.

Non-attachment doesn’t mean you stop caring. It means you stop clinging. You see the situation as it is, not as you wish it were.

My mother is who she is. She was like this before me. She’ll be like this after me. The pattern is the pattern. Accepting that was finally the end to the one sided war.

There’s a scene in the Bhagavad Gita where the warrior Arjuna stands on a battlefield and sees his own family on the other side. His teachers. His uncles. His cousins. He’s supposed to fight them and he drops his weapons. He tells Krishna he’d rather die than raise his hand against his own blood.

Krishna’s answer is not what you’d expect from a spiritual text. He doesn’t say forgive them. He doesn’t say find another way. He says: your dharma comes first. Your sacred purpose. If it requires you to stand against your own family, you stand. Not from hatred. Not from revenge. From alignment with what’s true, regardless of who opposes it.

Better your own dharma performed imperfectly than someone else’s dharma performed well. I spent years performing the dharma of the dutiful daughter. That was never mine.

Epictetus was born into slavery. His master once twisted his leg until it broke. From literal powerlessness came his foundational teaching: some things are up to you and some things aren’t. Your judgments, your responses, your choices — those are yours. Other people’s behavior, opinions, and capacity for love — not yours.

For years I judged my mother’s behavior as something I could change. If I tried harder. If I was more patient. If I made one more offer. That judgment that I had control over something that was never mine to control caused more pain than her behavior itself.

In the Sufi tradition, the first station on the spiritual path is called tawba. Turning. Not guilt. Not repentance. Just the moment you stop walking in one direction and deliberately face another.

I turned.

There’s another Sufi concept called tawakkul. Trust. You do everything in your power and then you release your grip on the outcome. I did everything I could. Offered everything I had. Sent the most vulnerable email I’ve ever written. And the outcome was: no.

Rabia, one of the earliest Sufi saints, was asked if she hated Satan. She said: “My love for God leaves no room for hating Satan.”

I don’t want to hate my mother. I don’t think I do. But I also don’t have room for her anymore. My love for my daughter Gracie, for my work, for the space I’ve found — it fills me. Not because I’ve exiled my mother from my heart. Because my heart is already full with what’s real.

In Kabbalah, two forces must balance for anything to work. Chesed — mercy, openness, unconditional love. And Gevurah — strength, discernment, boundaries.

Most spiritual teaching leans hard toward mercy. Forgive. Be compassionate. Open your heart. And that’s real — chesed matters. But without gevurah, mercy becomes self-destruction. Boundless love without discernment is how you end up pouring yourself into someone who will never receive it.

There’s a Kabbalistic idea called tzimtzum. Before creation, God was everywhere. To make space for the world to exist, God had to contract. To withdraw. Not out of rejection. Out of love. The world required absence to exist.

Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is withdraw. Not in punishment. Not in anger. In love. To make space for something new to exist.

Jewish law is more nuanced on family obligation than most people realize. The fifth commandment says honor your father and mother. But most post-Talmudic authorities hold that you are not obligated to honor a parent who is wicked, unless they’ve done the work of repentance. And the Torah commands: “You shall be very watchful of yourselves.” Self-preservation is not selfishness. It’s a commandment.

The founding act of Buddhism — the event that started one of the world’s great wisdom traditions — was a man leaving his family. Siddhartha had a wife, a newborn son, and a father who begged him to stay. He left in the middle of the night. Not because he didn’t love them. Because his dharma required it.

He named his son Rahula. It means “fetter.”

Years later, after his enlightenment, the Buddha returned and taught his son directly. Rahula became one of his greatest students. The relationship wasn’t destroyed by leaving. It was transformed into something real. Something that couldn’t have existed inside the old structure.

Chogyam Trungpa coined a term: idiot compassion. Being nice in a way that enables harm. Staying gentle when the situation requires fierceness. Keeping the peace at the cost of truth.

I practiced idiot compassion with my mother for years. Kept reaching out. Kept being the bigger person. Kept pretending the weekly calls were connection when they were just me absorbing hostility and calling it love.

Real compassion sometimes looks like walking away.

Jung wrote: “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on children than the unlived life of the parent.”

Not the parent’s actions. Not their words. Their unlived life. The things they didn’t face, didn’t dare, didn’t live. Children pick that up and carry it without knowing it’s not theirs.

My mother’s unlived life — the intimacy she couldn’t give, the honesty she couldn’t tolerate, the warmth she performed but never felt — all of that was running in me. Loading like an old operating system every time I talked to her. I’d shrink. My voice would change. I’d become whatever version of myself might finally earn what she gave to strangers.

Jung would call this the mother complex. The daughter “leads a shadow-existence, often visibly sucked dry by her mother.” You prolong your mother’s life by a sort of continuous blood transfusion.

Individuation — becoming who you are — requires separating from the family’s psychological field. Not in anger. Not in revenge. In clarity. Becoming yourself, not as a reaction against them, but as an expression of your own nature.

What you don’t heal, you pass down. Shamanic traditions across cultures talk about the lineage healer. The one who says: this pattern stops with me. The trauma, the withholding, the conditional love — it goes no further. When you heal it in yourself, you heal it backward toward your ancestors and forward toward your children.

I have a three-year-old. Whatever I don’t face becomes her inheritance.

“I came not to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother. A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”

That’s Matthew 10. Most people skip past it because it’s uncomfortable. But it’s the clearest statement in any tradition: your allegiance to truth supersedes your allegiance to blood. When family aligns with truth, honor it. When family stands against truth, truth wins.

The desert fathers built entire movements on this. Anthony the Great was orphaned at twenty with a dependent sister. He heard the Gospel say give everything away. He arranged care for his sister and walked into the Egyptian desert. Radical. Permanent. Done.

Meister Eckhart, the 14th-century mystic, placed detachment above love as the highest virtue. The will that neither grasps nor resists but stays open. “To be empty of all created things is to be full of God.”

What I know now

There’s no right answer to whether you should heal a relationship or let it go. Anyone who tells you there’s a formula is selling something.

But there is a right question. And the question is: What does the survival of your purpose require?

Not what’s comfortable or makes you look good. Not what your mother or your culture or your guilt says you should do. What does your dharma — that one thing that matters more than anything else — actually need from you right now?

For me, it’s Gracie. She’s my purpose on this physical plane. This life. This hundred-year span. And every hour I spent managing my mother’s dysfunction was an hour stolen from her.

You don’t owe anybody anything. Not for what they did for you in the past. Not for the blood you share. Not for the roof they put over your head or the food they put on your plate. If those things came with conditions that require you to shrink, to perform, to abandon your purpose — the debt is cancelled. It was a leash.

Get clear on your one purpose. Give that everything. The relationships that can’t survive your purpose were never real.

The door

Rumi wrote: “I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside.”

I thought I was trying to open my mother’s door. I thought if I knocked long enough, hard enough, with enough love, she’d open it.

But the door was mine. I was locked inside a story about what a daughter owes. Inside a belief that if I tried one more time, something would change. Inside a house she built for me in my own head, and I’d been furnishing it with my own suffering.

I stopped knocking.

The door opened from the inside. It was never locked from the outside.

The abyss

After the emails. After the flying monkeys. After the word “narcissist” landed and I scanned myself against it and found it didn’t stick. After all of that settled something else was there.

Space.

Not emptiness. Space. The kind that has no pretending in it. No performance. No layer on top of what’s real. Just being. Rest, sitting there like it had been waiting for me to stop making so much noise.

I don’t think I’m meant to be in relationships. Not the way most people mean it. My relationship is with the abyss. With the space where learning lives and truth doesn’t require a translator.

That probably sounds like damage talking. Like something a woman says after her mother calls her a narcissist.

But it doesn’t feel like damage. It feels like home.

Gracie reaches me there. She climbs into my lap and puts her face against mine and says “I love you mama” and there’s no withholding in it. No conditions. No performance. No punishment waiting behind it. That’s what love is when there’s no broken mechanism running it.

My mother can’t reach me there. She couldn’t when I was a child and she can’t now. That’s her pattern and it was running before I was born and it’ll keep running.

But Gracie can. And the abyss can. And God can.

Me, Gracie, and God. That’s enough. That’s everything.

And if you’re still knocking. Still bright-eyed, still hopeful, still getting destroyed and forgetting the destruction long enough to try one more time, here’s what I’d say:

Get clear on your one purpose. The thing that matters more than anything else. The thing that you’d protect with your life.

Give that everything.

Stop knocking on doors that were never going to open. The door that matters is yours and it opens from the inside.