You reparent yourself so you don’t carry it forward to the next generation. You love your daughter. You kind of mentally and emotionally revisit certain moments when they happen with your daughter the right way and that is incredibly healing.

Of course, your mother will then say something like, “I don’t know why she (your daughter) loves you as much as she does," and then shake her head like it’s the most bizarre thing she’s ever seen.

Alternately, you choose not to raise children. You fully embrace being an emotional orphan. You’ll realize your mother didn’t provide you with a safe harbor but shackled you to an anchor. You’re going to be in trouble during a storm surge if you don’t get free. So you get free and start swimming. You don’t have anywhere to go, but that means you can go anywhere and there are a lot of harbors. You build your own family with people of YOUR choosing rather than ones you got stuck with who don’t really love you. You get strong. You take care of each other. They help you reparent yourself. It gets better until one day, life is good because you’ve become one hell of a swimmer.

And sometimes, you do both. And begin a pagan, wicca, or spirituality path, which is especially helpful if your emotional abandonment was due to evangelicalism. There’s a reason why so many exvangelicals turn to animalism pagan practices and religions that strongly focus on spiritual healing.

Some point along either path you realize how common this is. Not feeling so alone is a big boost to healing.

I’m bending your ear preaching to the choir.