On Fissures, Family and the Limits of Forgiveness
Fissures do not form all at once.
They begin as hairline cracks—often long before we are born. They deepen slowly under pressure, widened by silence, stress, and the unspoken demand to keep going.
Family fissures are rarely caused by a single act of harm. More often, they are carried forward when pain goes unexamined and healing is postponed—passed quietly from one nervous system to the next.
We are taught to think of harm as something that happens to us. But much of what shapes us happens through us: the tension a body learns to hold, the vigilance it never quite releases, the sensitivity that forms in response to environments that were unstable, frightening, or overwhelming.
This is not about blame.
Most parents do the best they can with what they were given. But “the best they could” and “what was needed” are not always the same.
I think of my own parents. A mother who grew up in post–World War II Austria—old enough to sense danger as the war was ending, not old enough to understand it. A father who served in Vietnam and returned changed, carrying experiences that had no easy place to land. Both trying to build a family while tending wounds that had never fully healed.
I do not believe anger itself is transferred from parent to child. But chronic stress, fear, and unresolved trauma shape the developing nervous system. Sensitivity forms where vigilance was required. The body adapts.
Over time, those adaptations can be labeled as illness—bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression—without ever fully asking what the nervous system learned in order to survive.
What we call fissures may, in fact, be the places where armor had to bend.
Forgiveness can heal fissures but is often misused when it comes with conditions.
In families, institutions, and political systems alike, forgiveness is sometimes offered only if compliance is guaranteed—I’ll restore the relationship if you do exactly what I tell you to do. This is not forgiveness. It is control framed as grace.
True forgiveness releases the hold of resentment and the demand for retribution. It does not require submission. It does not erase truth. And it does not obligate continued exposure to harm.
I learned this distinction in the workplace. I was wronged by a colleague who later became my manager—first through misattribution of blame, then through a breach of trust that escalated concerns about my mental health to her superior without my knowledge. What followed was framed as concern, but functioned as coercion: take time off, question yourself, be smaller.
I knew my mind was not the issue. My nervous system was responding to an environment that overwhelmed it—something many systems are unequipped to recognize or tolerate. The system did not want repair; it wanted silence. I chose to resign.
That decision was not an act of bitterness. It was an act of self-preservation. Forgiveness did not require me to stay. Release did not require reconciliation. Distance became the boundary that made healing possible.
This is where forgiveness reaches its limit—not because it fails, but because it has done its work. What remains is responsibility: to oneself, to one’s health, and to the refusal to carry what does not belong to you.
Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation.
And it is not the same as access.
Reconciliation is a relational act. It requires accountability, truth, and a genuine change in conditions. Where those are absent, forgiveness may still be possible—but reconciliation is not.
This is where the limits matter.
Limits are not punishments. They are not acts of revenge or moral superiority. They are acknowledgments of reality: of nervous systems that cannot continue to bear what they were never meant to hold, of fissures that will widen if the pressure does not change.
Generational healing in families and systems does not mean rewriting the past or indicting those who came before us. It means telling the truth about what was carried forward—and choosing, consciously, not to pass it on.
Sometimes that choice looks like repair.
Sometimes it looks like distance.
Sometimes it looks like releasing the role of mediator, fixer, or container for everyone else’s pain.
None of those are failures.
They are acts of responsibility.
We do not honor our families by ignoring what harmed us. We honor them by doing the work they could not—or were never supported to do—so that what fractured quietly across generations does not continue unchecked.
Fissures do not remain small forever. Left unaddressed, they widen. What was once contained eventually breaks through. Breaches are not acts of rebellion; they are the consequence of pressure without relief—and the beginning of truth.
Forgiveness does not require us to stay in places that make us smaller.
It requires us to stop carrying what is not ours.
That, too, is love.
— From the Breach
The Middle Way
The Middle Way is not neutrality or indifference.
It is clarity without extremism.
It is a way of seeing that refuses false binaries and asks instead what leads to wisdom, balance, and shared human flourishing. Rooted in ancient wisdom traditions, including the Noble Eightfold Path, the Middle Way recognizes that power without restraint corrodes, and compassion without discernment collapses.
It insists on both.
The Middle Way calls for:
leadership grounded in emotional intelligence and humility
moral authority rooted in accountability rather than certainty
action guided by discernment, not fear or domination
cooperation over conquest in an interdependent world
This is not an ideology or a political program.
It is a call to maturity.
In a world pulled apart by extremes, the Middle Way stands in the breach—not to shout, but to steady; not to conquer, but to restore; not to replace one form of power with another, but to re-center power around wisdom.
There is another way.