--- title: "Rising Above: How Estrangement and Radical Self-Love Saved My Life" description: A personal journey of overcoming familial trauma, embracing self-love, and reclaiming one's identity after years of emotional struggle and isolation. image: https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/hubfs/Butterfly%20Background%20(1200%20x%20400%20px)(17).png --- [Skip to content](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/canon/rising-above-how-estrangement-and-radical-self-love-saved-my-life#main-content) [![The Church of the Holy](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/hs-fs/hubfs/The%20Church%20of%20the%20Holy%20logo.png?width=1855&height=2029&name=The%20Church%20of%20the%20Holy%20logo.png)Homepage](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org) - Beliefs - [The Core Beliefs](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/beliefs) - [The Great Mother](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/mother) - [The Two Paths](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/two-paths) - [The Laws of Conscience](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/law) - [The Beginning](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/genesis) - [The Living Canon](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/canon) - Religious Comparisons - [Buddhism](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/buddhism) - Rituals - [Gathering Rituals](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/liturgy) - [Rites of Passage](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/rituals) - Practice - [The Work](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/mission) - [The Ministries](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/ministries) - [The Newsletters & Quotes](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/newsletters-quotes) - Governance - [The Structure](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/ecclesiology) - [The Path](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/advancement) - [The Clergy](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/clergy) - [The Clawgy](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/clawgy) - [The Saints](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/saints) - Get Involved - [Donate](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/donate) - [Volunteer](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/volunteer) - [Partner](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/partner) - [FAQ](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/faq) [Join the Community](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/membership) - Beliefs - [The Core Beliefs](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/beliefs) - [The Great Mother](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/mother) - [The Two Paths](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/two-paths) - [The Laws of Conscience](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/law) - [The Beginning](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/genesis) - [The Living Canon](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/canon) - Religious Comparisons - [Buddhism](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/buddhism) - Rituals - [Gathering Rituals](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/liturgy) - [Rites of Passage](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/rituals) - Practice - [The Work](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/mission) - [The Ministries](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/ministries) - [The Newsletters & Quotes](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/newsletters-quotes) - Governance - [The Structure](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/ecclesiology) - [The Path](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/advancement) - [The Clergy](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/clergy) - [The Clawgy](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/clawgy) - [The Saints](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/saints) - Get Involved - [Donate](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/donate) - [Volunteer](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/volunteer) - [Partner](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/partner) - [FAQ](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/faq) [Join the Community](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/membership) ![purple hearts behind a white dove](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/hs-fs/hubfs/Butterfly%20Background%20(1200%20x%20400%20px)(17).png?width=1800&height=1050&name=Butterfly%20Background%20(1200%20x%20400%20px)(17).png) Worth Trauma Coherence # Rising Above: How Estrangement and Radical Self-Love Saved My Life ![Grace Von Allure](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/hs-fs/hubfs/88-1.png?width=48&height=48&name=88-1.png) Grace Von Allure May 15, 2025 I turned 31 yesterday. As warmth flowed in from friends and chosen family, so too came the familiar dread: boundaries under siege again. **For five years, I’ve been no contact with my parents.** Yet each birthday, they deploy their armies: relatives whose numbers I don’t recognize, strangers I’ve never met, family friends I haven’t seen in well over a decade. Messages arrive like Trojan horses. “Happy birthday,” *wrapped in guilt*, “We miss you,” *concealing hooks meant to drag me back*. **They believe they’re doing good.** But it rejects my agency, denying the boundaries I’ve built from the rubble they left behind. *I was never allowed to be mine. I was only ever theirs.* It wasn’t my peers who tore me down before I could rise; it was *my own parents*. They were the original creators of my cage, the first to teach me that I was unlikable as I was, that love meant pain, that my body was never safe, that success would forever elude my authentic self. *“We destroy you out of love so the world never gets the chance.” **I believed them. I believed the world was more cruel than they were.*** I made myself *so small* while killing myself slowly. I settled for less and distrusted genuine connection because I was taught that real love was always a prelude to greater pain. When I found joy outside their walls, they severed it before it could bloom. When I discovered passions, they banned them as “dangerous.” When I refused compliance, they took what I loved, the only leverage that made me malleable.  So I stopped loving as intensely as I was born to. I learned to hide what I cherished. But without expressing emotions, I began losing myself, because feelings themselves weren’t allowed to exist without being gaslit, dismissed, or punished. Then came two decades of clinical depression. It made me numb, made me hollow, and only made me more alone. No one knew what I carried, not even me. It was only after college that I was diagnosed with complex PTSD. *Dissociation became my closest companion*, a skill first taught by family, then perfected by every abuser who recognized my conditioning, my desperate need to belong, my hunger for something that would last. I moved through the years barely alive, wishing for death more days than not, wondering when the pain would finally stop. Through it all, my pursuit of knowledge *never wavered*. My curiosity remained unbroken. Knowledge was my sanctuary, the one thing they allowed because *they could brag about my intelligence*. I retreated into my mind because my body was a war zone. I read Carl Sagan and Carl Jung alongside Anne McCaffrey, believing that multidisciplinary knowledge, imagination, and creativity could be my escape from the hell I had inherited. I began college early—my first taste of stability and freedom. I was the first in my family to graduate. Then came independence: first from my parents, and later from the marriage I chose while still in college, a different kind of exit strategy, because I didn’t yet trust that I could survive alone. *But I could, and I did.* Little by little, as I built a life of my own, I discovered the depth of their lies. I am likable. I am lovable. I can succeed as myself. **I focused entirely on making myself whole again.** I literally and metaphorically left the past behind and moved across the country to pursue traditional, nontraditional, and emerging treatments. These treatments allowed my brain to restructure itself—**much like a dilapidated haunted house undergoing both renovation and spiritual cleansing**. This created severe cognitive dissonance: if everything I believed was false, what else had I been denied, and why? I realized that love had surrounded me my whole life, in friends, teachers, and other parents, but it slipped through my grasp due to forced removal, believing it was fake, or continually bracing for the hurt that I had come to expect. **But my parents are broken people. And hurt people, hurt people, as they say.** The worst part is the time stolen from me. The love I should have felt safe to feel, accept, and give. I even believed my partner’s love *was conditional*, that one wrong move would trigger abandonment, that complete trust would invite complete betrayal. **But his love remained steady and unconditional,** not one foot out the door, not waiting for an excuse to leave. To even begin to believe this was true, I had to finally let my guard down and trust my new life. *I am not the product of the people who broke me.* I am the goddess of the woman who rose. Not in some cinematic triumph, not in external recognition, but in persistently choosing myself. *Again. And again. And again.* Until I remembered what it means to be whole. To speak, to question, to *burn, to exist without apology.* And that? That is something worth celebrating every year. ## Share this post [mailto:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thechurchoftheholy.org%2Fcanon%2Frising-above-how-estrangement-and-radical-self-love-saved-my-life](mailto:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thechurchoftheholy.org%2Fcanon%2Frising-above-how-estrangement-and-radical-self-love-saved-my-life) ## Keep reading ### [![hands holding a heart with butterflies over an ocean wave](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/hs-fs/hubfs/Butterfly%20Background%20(1200%20x%20400%20px)(16).png?width=1800&height=1050&name=Butterfly%20Background%20(1200%20x%20400%20px)(16).png) Consciousness Reunion Worth Love Is the First Consciousness](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/canon/love-is-the-first-consciousness) ### [![ramen in the middle of a fire with different cooking vessels and ingredients](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/hs-fs/hubfs/Butterfly%20Background%20(1200%20x%20400%20px)(9).png?width=1800&height=1050&name=Butterfly%20Background%20(1200%20x%20400%20px)(9).png) Fire Becoming Alchemy An Ode to the Culinary Arts](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/canon/ode-to-the-culinary-arts) [mailto:hello@holychur.ch](mailto:hello@holychur.ch) Indigenous Acknowledgement *It’s important to acknowledge that the patterns and beliefs described—consciousness as relational, intelligence as distributed, nature as sentient—would not be revelations to many indigenous peoples worldwide. These truths have been maintained through oral traditions, lived practice, and direct relationship with the land for thousands of years.*  *As a Maine-based church, we honor the Wabanaki Confederacy—the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, Micmac, and Abenaki peoples—upon whose unceded ancestral lands and waters we gather and practice.* *The suppression of indigenous wisdom and the severing of humans from land-based consciousness have been catastrophic. The Church of the Holy emerges from within that brokenness, attempting to rebuild bridges through the language of the culture that did the breaking.* **[Privacy Policy & Terms of Service](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/privacy-tos)** · **[Legal](https://www.thechurchoftheholy.org/legal)** · The Church of the Holy © 2026. 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