Is it a personal crisis or a family one?

"Every year I understand people who leave their families more and more.

I love my family, but I'm on the verge of dropping everything and leaving. I don't want to do that to them, but I feel trapped."

A psychologist answers

What you're describing sounds like a crisis, a turning point. It comes when the old ways of living are no longer possible.

A crisis calls for new solutions. Often the first option that comes to mind is leaving the family. Sometimes that's the best choice, but it isn't always the only way out.

First of all, it's important to understand what is causing the crisis: a personal inner conflict, difficulties in the relationship, or both.

Family crises can be normative: for example, the birth of a child or their socialization (starting kindergarten or school), a child's teenage years, or adult children physically separating from their parents.

Non-normative crises are caused by the unexpected: a move, an illness, infidelity, losing a job, or a personal crisis in one of the partners.

All of this affects the emotional state of the family.

If the cause is your personal crisis, leaving the family won't solve the problem of self-determination or identity.

Yes, you'll most likely feel relief and start living differently, but the difficulties may come back.

A new life can become a catalyst for inner processes, but your family's support can also be something to lean on during a personal crisis. Which path to take is up to you.

These questions will help you find important answers and make a decision

• What is causing my emotional state?
• How does the relationship affect my emotional state?
• Does your partner know how you're feeling, and what do they think about it?
• Have we discussed the difficulties and tried to fix them?
• Is there anything else we haven't tried?
• What do I feel for my partner?
• Can I still see in them the person I once fell in love with?
• What will happen to me and my emotional state if I stay in the marriage?
• What's the point of keeping the relationship?
• What's the point of ending the relationship?

"Don't leave, for the kids' sake"

Keeping up a relationship in which the adults are unhappy can, on the contrary, have a negative effect on the child.

A child, even a very young one, "picks up on" tension, dissatisfaction and coldness between their parents, and this makes them anxious and guilty.

Positive images of the parents and their emotional stability are important for a child's psychological development and health, but — surprise — this isn't necessarily tied to keeping the marriage together.

What can hurt children is not the divorce itself, but the way it happened.

Sometimes people who went through their parents' divorce as children try to save their family at any cost so as "not to repeat" their parents' behavior.

But to "not be like them," it's enough to end the relationship differently.

The divorce will be easier for the child (and for you, too) if the child feels the love of both parents and sees that you have a good relationship and can resolve conflicts constructively.

"If my family fell apart, I'm a failure"

Simply having a family doesn't bring well-being, and it doesn't make a person successful or complete.

We create a family based on certain meanings. But those meanings can change over the course of a life.

Families can break up, and new ones can form.

If you've decided to leave

All couples and families face crises, and not all of them come out with their marriage intact. Our culture has a myth of romantic love, the kind that lasts until the end of your life. But it's just a myth. Feelings in a relationship change many times.

Not all relationships last a long time, but that doesn't make those relationships "bad" or us failures.

We change, our partner changes, and our values, priorities, aspirations and goals change. All of this may stop lining up with our partner's. Not every couple feels each other's value throughout the entire relationship.

Even long family relationships can come to an end. And that's okay.