Cure anxiety by cutting of abusive parents..?

Picture of my situation with parents, and then solution, I am very curious if anyone tried and whether it helped them.

My father is mentally ill, abused me until I left when I was 18, physically and mentally. He has himself mental issues but was trying to persuade me it is me who need help. During 28 years of marriage, he had a part time job for 4 years, living from the social support and my mother´s money.

My mother was neglecting me, later she told me it was because of my father´s breakdown and the fact that my brother was born ill (he is OK now).

My brother is 5 years younger, 4 years after school living at my parent´s house, earns 250 dollars per month that he spends on expensive clothing and mobile phones. So all 3 of them are living mostly from my mother´s money.

I do not live at home for 10 years now. I used to go home once in 6 weeks for a weekend, my mother pays for the ticket - like 50 dollars or so. They never forget to mention how much money it is and how much money do they have to spend on me during those 2 days at home.

I feel my parents do not take me as their chid. Everytime I have a little argue with a family member (casual, nothing extreme), my father run towards me, calling me names, kicking me out of the house - without knowing what we are arguing about (like I needed computer for 30 minutes to write an e-mail but my brother wanted to watch a movie on it despite the fact he has a TV and another computer in his room...). My father calls me a bitch, @@@@@@@, frigid slut - that only declares that he very easily loses his nerves. After that incident, I decided to leave right away and do not contact them.

My father told my mother not to talk to me, so it was my birthday and she only sended me a message on the phone. When I asked her why she did not respond, she replied she had healthy issues.

I have finished one university and now I am attending another, thanks to my husband who is very supportive. I have traveled a lot, without help of my parents, without their money (no regular money from them since I was 19). But they still prefere my brother who was for 4 years lying in the bed in our parent´s house. They treat him like a god, giving him money and me like a stupid naive girl, like I am not able to take care of myself.

I have anxiety because of that because I believe I am a stupid cow, I do not believe myself, I am trembling everytime I have a task in the school even I am doing very well and was never kicked out of any exam. I always expect failure in my life. No matter how many times I have won.

I love my parents so much, I love them with all my heart and I am desperate I have no contact with them. I need their support so much but they are just not willing/capable to give it to me....

Maybe it will be better not to contact them for a period of time, not to be treated like a dumb person, make me feel guilty they do not have money because of me despite the fact I am not living with them for 10 years.... This is pushing me down, because I believe them, I believe every word they say about how incompetent I am.

Is it OK to cut them off for some period of time? I am trying and feel HORRIBLE about it like I cannot stand this situation.

Is there anyone else who tried to cope with it the same way? I am asking because I do not want to cause myself depression or worsen my anxiety.

Choosing no contact with family isn't as simple as it sounds.

Ultimately, if your parents have the ability to make you feel incompetent or guilty or stupid, they can do this partly because you believe them. If you cut them out of your life, that might make it so that you don't have them saying those things to you all the time, but if you believe those things in the first place, not having them there to tell you those things won't take away your belief in what they said about you. You would still have the problems with feeling those things while you have cut them off but you will also likely feel guilty for cutting them off and alone from them, like you have lost the potential to ever have a truly loving and supportive relationship with your family because you are not in contact with them. Perhaps their behaviour indicates that you will never have a truly loving and supportive relationship with them but you don't sound convinced of this because you do say you love your parents so much. But this love might also be because their treatment of you is what you are used to and we tend to cling to what is familiar because we needed them when we were growing up (for food and shelter and stuff), even if they were abusive.

An alternative to going no contact all together is to have a trial period of no contact. Pick a time frame during which you would normally see them and tell them in advance that you don't plan on seeing them during that time. See how it goes, see how it feels to you. Try to think through how you will feel in the distant future, whether you will be more or less happy with the results of cutting off contact (say for example if one day you were to have found out they were really sick or had died, are you happy or unhappy with the decision you made and why). Getting a professional to help you work through the impact of the abuse you experienced can also be helpful to you and make it easier to decide what to do.

Ultimately you should do whatever it is that you think is right for you. Remaining in contact or cutting contact are both extremely hard decisions. I hope you can work out what will be right for you. Try not to think of cutting off contact with them as a magic cure for your anxieties about your abilities, those anxieties will still be there. Cutting off contact would, however, lessen the amount of emotional abuse you are experiencing (except unless they start trying to harass you to get in contact with them).

I went no contact with my family a while ago.

At first, it didn't help, because I kept running in the same type of persons as the ones who raised me.

But then I started very slowly rebuilding myself outside of their sphere of influence.

At the time I lived around them, they were all I knew. But since then I've built deeper relationships with people in general and one person in particular. Now that I experienced feelings of closeness, I have something to compare my relationship with them against.

We feel at our happiest when we are able to express the full range of our self, I feel at my happiest when I am loved by people able to take in the full range of my personality and I theirs. It's not something that my family was able to provide.

I will meet with some of them occasionally, the ones that aren't too hardcore. It doesn't make me feel exactly miserable, but we're not close. I've been struggling to take this realization in since it inspired me tremendous guilt: I am not at fault, there is nothing I could have done to make things different (except kept lying to myself which only would have made it appear otherwise...)