Matt, I agree with what you mentioned about the puzzle piece, and you made an insightful analogy there. It is true that I have attracted men who have acted like my father, because that was my main example of what love looks like.

What would I like my life to look like? I really am resonating with your advice here! I want to move far, far away from my family, tell my story without shame, then move on from the past. I want to meet and interact with healthy minded people and live out my life free from the toxic thoughts that used to govern my subconscious, but no longer do. I can clearly see my future self doing this, and it’s as if it’s already done.

I have had various friends, churches and ministries advise me that I shouldn’t leave my family’s area until I can walk into my parents’ house and be OK with sitting in the same room as them without feeling the need to speak up. That would take a lifetime, and I’d never get there. They tell me that it is my fault I am having problems with my family, and that it is I who should change. That I’m being rebellious and unreasonable because I don’t put up with things silently like my mom and sisters do. That I’m not being the good, quiet, meek daughter and wife I should be.

But I really want to move away, and think it’s best. My brother in law is walking around saying that he prays that God will strike my one sister dead because she is living an immoral, unGodly life, according to him. My mother and other sisters have to be quiet when he says that because my brother in law is a patriarch, and above approach. He and my father also curses her and me, and tell us we will never recover our health, never get into good careers, and never make it in a relationship with a man because we “aren’t right with God.” Being right with God means submitting to their control, and their church’s control. We’re not allowed to talk back or we get bullied and hushed down. This same brother in law threatens to kill his wife (my other sister) and shoot his two kids, and no one is allowed to say anything to him.

So I really have to leave this family of mine. They’re nuts, but when I try to speak up, they tell me that the devil is in me talking through me.

I do agree that I attracted my husband because I was used to this kind of behavior since I was a kid. I know now that I unknowingly manifested this, and I know how to walk away and attract/manifest more healthy relationships.

However, I’d like to know how or why I was born into my family in the first place. I wonder why I chose to be born into this kind of life? I feel like I chose it for some reason before I was born, and I’m very curious why I would have done so.