I want to start by telling you what a cycle breaker is not.
It's not a redemption arc. It's not a clean, triumphant moment where you look back at everything that happened to you and feel grateful for the growth. It's not a chapter that ends neatly.
A cycle breaker is usually the scapegoat of the family. The black sheep. The one who sees the pattern clearly — who names it, refuses to continue it, and gets punished for both.
It is some of the hardest, loneliest, most necessary work a person can do. And almost nobody talks about what it actually costs.
I'm going to.
How Cycles Start
To understand what a cycle breaker is, you have to understand how cycles work.
My great-grandmother had six children. She kept two and put four into foster care — including my grandmother, who was about three years old at the time. Too proud to ask for help from family, she chose to separate her children rather than reach out. My grandmother grew up in the foster care system, split from her siblings, never taught how to process emotion or communicate or heal. She aged out at eighteen having never had a parent who put her first.
She married the first person who would have her. His name was Murray — Zayde Mickey, I called him (Zayde is Yiddish for Grandpa). He was abusive. She was emotionally stunted and desperately alone, and she clung to whatever felt like love because she had never been shown what love actually looked like.
Together they had children — including my mother. My grandfather physically and verbally abused my mother and her brother. My grandmother emotionally neglected them, parentified my mother from a young age, put men before her children, and locked herself in her room while her kids figured out life on their own. My mother grew up without a single model of what healthy love, healthy communication, or healthy family looked like.
My grandfather — Zayde Mickey — died in prison, serving multiple life sentences for the sexual abuse of children. I was one of them. My mother knows this. She chose not to believe it. I understand, in the way that only someone who grew up in that house can understand, why that was easier for her than the alternative. It doesn't make it okay. But I understand it.
My mother then met my father. She was unhealed. He had his own wounds — parentified by his mother, emotionally shut down, with what I can only describe as significant narcissistic tendencies. They fell in love the way broken people sometimes do — finding in each other a familiar kind of pain — and they had four children.
Us.
What Growing Up Looked Like
My father was physically, verbally, emotionally, and medically abusive. He told me I was the cause of my own Tourette syndrome. He refused to take me to doctors. He said things to me that I will not repeat here because some things don't need to live on the internet, but I will tell you that I once told him I had never felt loved by him, and he said: "You could tell I was just going through the motions." He said it like a confession. Like it was nothing.
He didn't love us. He said so. And somehow hearing that out loud was one of the most healing things that ever happened to me — because I had spent my entire childhood wondering if I was the problem.
I wasn't. I never was.
My mother was different — sometimes warm, sometimes funny, sometimes the person I wanted her to be. But she was also emotionally reactive and unpredictable in ways that kept us all walking on eggshells. When she was overwhelmed she would lock herself in her room for hours, and we would hear things through the door that no child should ever hear. She endangered us in ways I won't detail here. She couldn't see the parallels with her own mother — the neglect, the unavailability, the children left to fend for themselves — because seeing it would have required her to reckon with something she wasn't willing to face.
When I finally told her, as an adult, that growing up had been really hard — she laughed. She said: "I wish I had your childhood. You're lucky. People would kill for your childhood."
She believed it. That's the thing about cycles. The people inside them often can't see them at all.
When I Started to See It
I spent years in therapy before I understood the word "cycle" in the way I understand it now. I could see my pain. I could feel it. But I couldn't yet trace it back through the generations — couldn't see my mother in her mother, couldn't see the pattern repeating itself the way a song does, the same notes, the same damage, passed down like an inheritance nobody asked for.
EMDR therapy helped me more than I can say. Processing the things that happened to me — really processing them, not just talking about them — changed something fundamental. I started to see myself more clearly. I started to see my parents more clearly too. Not to excuse what they did. But to understand where it came from.
A therapist once asked me: who taught your mother how to love? And I sat with that question for a long time.
Nobody did. Nobody ever showed her. She was doing the only thing she knew how to do.
That doesn't make it okay. But it made it make sense. And making sense of it was what allowed me to stop carrying it as my fault.
What Going No Contact Actually Looks Like
In the fall of 2023, I formally reached out to both of my parents. I told them I needed space to heal. I asked them to honor my boundary. I told them that if anything changed, I would be the one to reach out.
They both read it. I blocked them. And then I sat on my bed and sobbed.
No child chooses this. I want to be clear about that. No one wakes up and decides they'd like to grieve their parents while they're still alive. It goes against every instinct you have — the same instincts that were wired into you as an infant, before you had words for any of it.
But I had already tried everything else. I had forgiven things that most people would not have forgiven. I had extended grace I didn't owe. I had stayed in contact long after it was good for me because I kept hoping that this time would be different — that they would finally see me, finally show up, finally be the parents I needed them to be.
The last thing my mother communicated to me — through my sister — was that if I didn't want a relationship with my father, she didn't want one with me.
She made the choice first. I just made it official.
What It Gave Me
In the months after going no contact, I started to heal in ways I hadn't been able to before. Because I wasn't being triggered every week. Because I wasn't spending therapy sessions cleaning up the damage from the last family interaction. Because I had space — real space — to figure out who I was when I wasn't in survival mode.
I read a book called Divorcing a Parent by Beverly Engel. I recommend it to anyone who is in that season or considering it.
I learned what it felt like to say no without guilt. To set a boundary and hold it. To trust my own perception of events. To stop shrinking. To stop apologizing for existing.
To take up space.
What a Cycle Breaker Is
A cycle breaker is someone who sees the pattern and refuses to pass it on.
It costs you the family narrative. You become the problem, the one who makes waves, the one who can't just let things go. You become the black sheep, the difficult one, the ungrateful one — because you asked for accountability in a family that runs on denial.
It costs you the fantasy. The hope that they'll change. The relationship you deserved and never got. The parents you needed and they couldn't be.
But it gives you something too.
It gives you the chance to be the person for your future children — or for yourself, or for the people you love — that nobody was for you. It gives you the ability to feel your feelings without shame, to communicate without fear, to love people without weaponizing what they've shared with you.
It gives you the chance to build something clean.
I choose to be a cycle breaker. Not because it's easy or noble or because I wanted to lose my family. But because I looked at the pattern — from my great-grandmother to my grandmother to my mother to me — and I said: this ends here.
No child I love will ever have to feel the way I felt.
That's what a cycle breaker is.
And if you're one — if you're in the middle of the grief and the space and the strange quiet of a life without the family you wished you had — I see you. What you're doing is one of the hardest and most loving things a person can do.
You are not the problem. You never were.
If you're a cycle breaker — or you love one — our Gifts for Someone in Recovery collection has designs that see that work clearly. The Not Broken Shirt is one of the most resonant pieces for people doing this specific kind of healing. And the You Are Enough Hoodie is something soft to wrap around all of it.
Designs like Take Up Space, You Are Not a Burden, Be Who You Needed When You Were Younger, and Plot Twist in My Family's Generational Trauma exist because these words needed to exist.
10% of proceeds donated to 988 and The Trevor Project. 🖤
If you're struggling, call or text 988. Anytime.
