The purpose of toxic families…

a·wak·en·ing

/əˈwākəniNG/

noun

noun: awakening; plural noun: awakenings

1. an act of waking from sleep.

"since my awakening I had realized it was a very special day"

2. an act or moment of becoming suddenly aware of something.

"the war came as a rude awakening to the hardships of life"

3. the beginning or rousing of something.

"the awakening of vigorous political debate"

adjective: awakening

1. coming into existence or awareness.

Why is it that so many people who are spiritually sensitive, who seem to have an inner knowing and a capacity for awareness, were born into families that were less than ideal—families that were dysfunctional, toxic, or painful?

You might wonder, if the universe is so wise, if there’s some kind of intelligence behind all of this, why would it place such sensitive souls into such difficult circumstances?

But what if that isn’t a mistake?

What if the very thing you’ve been cursing, the situation you’ve been trying to escape your entire life, is actually the most important part of your spiritual development—not because suffering is noble…..but because sometimes the hardest soil produces the strongest trees. 🌴

We often think that spiritual awakening should come through pleasant experiences: meditation retreats, wise books, quiet gardens. And yes, those things can help. But the real awakening—the kind that shakes you to your core—often comes through fire, through difficulty, through losing everything you thought you needed until all that remains is what you truly are.

If you were born into a perfectly harmonious family where everyone was kind and understanding, where love flowed freely and naturally, would you ever question anything? Would you ever look deeper or develop that inner strength and capacity to see through illusion? Probably not. You’d simply flow along, never realizing there was anything else.

A toxic or dysfunctional family gives you something else entirely: friction.

Problems that cannot be solved by ordinary means. Situations where you can’t simply go along with what everyone else is doing, because what everyone else is doing is clearly madness. And in that friction, that impossibility, something within you begins to wake up.

Think of a grain of sand inside an oyster.    🦪

It irritates and hurts, but the oyster cannot eject it. So it begins to coat it—slowly, patiently—until the very thing that caused pain becomes a pearl. The most beautiful thing the oyster creates comes from the thing that hurt it most.

Your toxic family was that grain of sand. (Oyster emoji)

Through all your struggles and pain, through years of trying to understand why they were the way they were, you’ve been developing something that people born into easy circumstances never have to—real wisdom. Not the kind you read in books, but the kind that comes from learning to survive and grow amid chaos.

But there’s something deeper still. A toxic family doesn’t just create problems—it creates confusion about love. And strangely enough, that confusion is the gateway to awakening. Most people never question what love is; they simply accept whatever their family taught them. If their family was loving, they assume that’s love. If it was distant, they assume love is supposed to be distant. They never have to think about it. But when you’re born into a toxic family, you can’t just repeat the pattern. It’s too broken. You might try at first, but eventually something in you rebels and says, “No, this isn’t what love is supposed to be.”

That rebellion is the first step toward awakening, because now you have to figure out for yourself what love actually is. You can’t rely on what you were taught or trust the old programming. You have to go deeper, to look within, to discover what love means when it’s not mixed with manipulation, control, or conditions—all the garbage your family attached to it. Not to glorify the suffering or excuse the damage, but to recognize that it forced you to wake up, to question, and to look more deeply than most people ever do.

This doesn’t mean the pain wasn’t real. It doesn’t mean what happened to you was okay. It doesn’t mean you should feel grateful for abuse or neglect. That would miss the point entirely.

The pain was real. The damage was real. What happened to you was not right.

But here’s the thing about reality—it doesn’t care about our ideas of right and wrong. A tree doesn’t grow straight by being kept in a greenhouse. It grows straight by being bent by the wind, by reaching for the light, by developing deep roots to keep from being blown over. The wind is not kind; the wind is simply wind. Yet without it, the tree would never gain strength.

Your family was the wind.

And you, whether you realize it or not, have been developing roots that reach deep—roots most people never have to grow. Those roots, that depth, are what make you capable of understanding things others cannot. Think about the people you know who had easy, comfortable childhoods, where everything was handed to them. They’re not bad people, but often there’s a certain shallowness to them—a lack of ability to grasp the darker, more complex aspects of life. They live on the surface because they’ve never had to go beneath it. They believe in fairy tales because their lives have been something like a fairy tale.

But you—you cannot believe in fairy tales.

You’ve seen behind the curtain. You know that families can be cruel, that parents can be selfish, that love can be twisted into something ugly. And while that knowledge was painful to acquire, it made you real in a way that protected people never become. You’ve been stripped of illusions. And while most people spend their entire lives clinging to them, you didn’t have that luxury. You had to see things as they truly are. And seeing things as they truly are—that’s the beginning of wisdom. That’s the beginning of spiritual awakening.

Now, let’s talk about something harder to accept. Your family wasn’t just toxic to you—they were toxic because they were wounded.

And they were wounded because their parents were wounded. And their parents before them. It stretches back generation after generation, each one passing on the pain they received because they didn’t know how to do anything else. You became the culmination of all that pain. All those generations of wounds flowed directly into you.

And you—you were the one who finally said, “This stops here.” You were the one who looked at the pattern and declared, “No more. I will not pass this on. I will not continue this cycle.” That is why you’re different. That is why you were chosen—not because you’re special in an egoic sense, but because your soul was strong enough to say, “I will carry this weight. I will be the one who breaks the chain.”

Think about what that really means. Your family, as toxic as they were, were not your enemies. They were your teachers—terrible teachers, yes, who taught through pain instead of love—but teachers nonetheless. They showed you exactly what not to do. They showed you what happens when people refuse to wake up, when they don’t question, when they simply repeat the patterns they inherited.

And by showing you what not to do, they forced you to discover what to do. They forced you to become conscious. They forced you to choose.

Because that’s the real gift—choice. Most people never have to choose how to be; they simply become what their family made them. They live like automatons, repeating programs they never question. But you—you had to choose. You had to consciously decide what kind of person you wanted to be, what you believed love really was, what values you would hold, what kind of relationships you would allow, and what kind of life you would build. Nothing was automatic. Nothing was given. Everything had to be chosen. And in that choosing—in that constant, difficult work of choosing—you became awake.

You became conscious.

You became, in the truest sense, yourself. Not what your family wanted you to be, not what society expected you to be, but what your deepest knowing guided you to become.

Now, here’s where many people get confused. They think awakening means being happy all the time, peaceful all the time, detached from everything. But that isn’t awakening—that’s just another form of sleep, another escape.

Real awakening means seeing clearly. It means understanding the patterns. It means realizing that your family’s behavior was never about you—it was about them: their wounds, their pain, their inability to love because they themselves had never been properly loved.

And when you see this—truly see it—something extraordinary happens.

The anger begins to dissolve. Not because you force it to, not because you think you should forgive, but because you finally understand. You understand that they were not villains; they were wounded people acting out their wounds, unable to do anything else because no one ever showed them another way.

Does this mean you have to maintain a relationship with them? No. Does this mean you have to trust them again? Absolutely not. Does this mean you must subject yourself to their toxicity? Not at all. Understanding is not the same as allowing abuse. Compassion is not the same as being a doormat. You can understand someone completely and still choose to stay away from them. You can have compassion for their wounds and still protect yourself from their behavior. These are not contradictions—they are signs of wisdom.

The truly awakened person knows this. They know that protecting yourself is not the same as hating. They know that setting boundaries is not cruelty. They know that you can wish someone well while also wishing them well from a distance. And this—this is the freedom that comes from being born into a toxic family. You learn to love without attachment. You learn to care without being consumed. You learn to see people clearly without judgment, because you’ve had to do all those things with your own family.

People from healthy families often struggle with this. They feel guilty for setting boundaries. They feel selfish for prioritizing their own needs. They confuse love with sacrifice, with enduring pain, with tolerating behavior that harms them—because that’s what they were taught.

But you learned a different lesson. You learned that real love includes boundaries.

Real love sometimes means saying no.

Real love sometimes means walking away—not with anger or hatred, but with the clear understanding that a situation is not good for you. And you have every right to choose situations that are. This is spiritual maturity. It’s what most people spend lifetimes trying to learn, and you learned it early because you had no choice. Your family gave you an advanced course in what love is not, and in learning that, you also discovered what love truly is.

The most spiritually awake people I’ve ever known all had difficult childhoods. Every single one of them.

For years, I wondered why suffering seemed to be the common thread in awakening. Then I realized—it’s not about the suffering itself, but the questioning that suffering produces.

When life is easy, you don’t question anything; you don’t have to. But when life is hard, when nothing makes sense, when the people who were supposed to love you hurt you instead, that’s when you start asking the big questions. Why am I here? What is this all about? What is real, and what is illusion?

Those questions are the seeds of awakening.

Your toxic family pushed you to ask them early. They pushed you to search for meaning in what seemed meaningless. They pushed you to find love within yourself when you couldn’t find it in them. They pushed you to develop an inner life because your outer life was too painful. And in turning inward, you discovered something most people never find—you found your true self. Not the self your family wanted you to be, not the self that society expected you to be, but the self that existed beneath all the conditioning, beneath all the wounds, beneath all the stories.

That self was always there. But most people never discover it because they never have to look for it. They live on the surface, being who everyone expects them to be. You, however, had to dig deep because the surface was unbearable—and in digging deep, you struck gold.

Here’s the final truth: your awakening isn’t just for you. It’s for everyone. It’s for your family, even if they never acknowledge it. It’s for the generations that came before you, because in healing yourself, you’ve healed the ancestral line. And it’s for the generations that will come after you, because you’ve broken the pattern. You’ve stopped the cycle. You’ve said, “This madness ends with me.”

This is what it means to be spiritually awake. It isn’t about being better than others or being special. It’s about being awake enough to see the patterns, strong enough to break them, and brave enough to choose differently—even when it’s difficult. Your toxic family was the darkness that forced you to find your own light. They were the problem that forced you to become the solution.

They were the question that forced you to find the answer. And the answer you found—the light you discovered—is not just for you.

So yes, being born into a toxic family can, in a strange and sacred way, be seen as a gift. Not because the toxicity itself was good, but because it forced you to become who you truly are. It forced you to wake up when you might have otherwise slept through your entire life. It forced you to question when you might have simply accepted. It forced you to choose when you might have merely followed.

And now, having done all that work—having climbed that mountain and discovered that light within yourself—you stand as living proof that transformation is possible, that breaking cycles is possible, that awakening is possible. Not despite your difficulties, but because of them.

This is the great gift. This is why you were placed exactly where you were placed. Not to suffer, but to awaken. Not to be broken, but to become whole. Not to repeat the pattern, but to transform it. And in transforming it, you transform everything and everyone connected to you.

(from the great Alan Watts) ❤️