‘I’m gonna hit you with an electric flyswatter’:  Woman outlines convincing argument why you shouldn’t visit your family this holiday season

Everyone knows that you can’t choose the family where you come from, but the silver lining is that, in case of a dysfunctional dynamic among kin, you may create a new family in the people you meet and the friends you make.

If you were born into such a family, the holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, are not something you look forward to. Unless, much like this TikToker, you have made the decision not to subject yourself to any more toxic family gatherings.

There is no objective, hard-and-fast law dictating that you have an obligation to talk to or even love your family, or that you must endure whatever treatment they may put you through regardless of how much it afflicts your mental health. Kat, whose TikTok username is jellyroots, did not give up on her family members without first making an effort to understand where their less savory attitudes come from. In her words: “I used to spend so much time trying to understand why narcissists act the way they do. I have read a shelf full of books on psychology trying to understand the reasoning.”

But there came a point where, in what is ultimately an act of self-care, Kat decided she had had enough of sitting through another painful Thanksgiving dinner.

Making peace with cutting unhealthy ties

Finding the willpower and determination to sever ties with blood relatives is not an easy feat, especially if you’ve become used to being gaslit into thinking you’re always in the wrong, not them. In Sources of Suffering: Fear, Greed, Guilt, Deception, Betrayal, and Revenge, author and Professor of Psychiatry Salman Akhtar outlines how being raised by “narcissistic and needy parents” can instill in the child a feeling of “wrongdoing” and “separation guilt” when they begin “to take steps towards psychic autonomy and independence.”

It may take years to get past the guilt and come to terms with this drastic but needed measure of self-protection. We can tell that it took Kat a while to accept that she needn’t force herself to be in contact with these people. But now that she has emotionally moved on, the TikToker has adopted a fresh and self-assured point of view that comes across throughout the short video.

As we grow older, we tend to become more selective with the people we want to be around and keep in our lives. Now that it’s been years since she made the decision not to go home during the holidays, Kat has found the peace she would have been unable to cultivate if she had kept trying to put her empathy and people-pleasing before her own well-being. Her words and tone are that of someone who has since matured in how she handles her relationships, even if those are blood-related.

Responding to a commenter, the TikTok creator wrote: “I thought people were lying about how much no contact changes everything but the second I went nc I could feel the weight lifted from my shoulders.” Hopefully, Kat’s 1-minute clip may inspire others who are still caught in the vicious, venomous cycle to place themselves first and escape the domineering claws of perniciously narcissistic relatives.