Why Didn't You Just Leave?

“Mom, why didn’t you just leave or speak up when they tried to marry you off?”

She wasn’t being cruel. She was genuinely asking, and she was right to ask — from where she stands, leaving should have been possible. I had no answer. Not because I didn’t want one, but because I’d never once, in all my years of trying to get free, been given the space to even imagine another option. If you’ve ever been asked some version of that question — by someone else, or by yourself — this post is for you.

I was raised in Toronto, not in India, in a Western country — and my wings were still clipped young. School dances, dating, friends of the opposite sex weren’t even conversations we could have. When my parents tried to marry me off, leaving felt like a concept from another galaxy. The thought did cross my mind once, in my twenties, but the fear of being disowned, of not surviving what came after, threatened my very existence. I didn’t have the wherewithal to face that alone.

Looking back now, I can see that my inability to leave wasn’t really about one decision in my twenties. It was the culmination of a family system I’d been adapting to since childhood.

In our home, obedience wasn’t simply about following rules. It was tied to belonging, approval, duty, and what it meant to be a “good” daughter. Questioning my parents didn’t feel like disagreeing with them. It felt like threatening the very relationships I depended on.

And those beliefs didn’t begin with my parents.

As I explored last week, they inherited their own ideas about family, duty, survival, and obedience from the generations and cultural systems that came before them. Their experiences help me understand some of what shaped our family — but context isn’t absolution.

What matters here is what that system taught me.

I learned to accommodate before I learned to challenge. To seek approval before trusting myself. To imagine the consequences of disappointing my family long before I could imagine the possibilities of choosing differently.

So when my daughter asked, “Why didn’t you just leave?” I finally understood why I couldn’t answer her.

You can’t choose a road you’ve never been shown exists.

My daughter’s question assumes agency — that I could picture an alternative and simply chose not to take it. But agency has to be built, usually by watching someone model it or by being given enough safety to practice it in small ways first. I had neither. I wasn’t raised in a system that forbade leaving — I was raised in one that never let me conceive of leaving as a real category of thing a person like me could do. That’s harder than “I was scared.” Fear implies a choice you’re too afraid to take. What I had was the absence of the alternative altogether.

Before we get into what actually helps, ask where your own map was missing options. Maybe it was a strict curfew that had nothing to do with safety and everything to do with control. Maybe it was an old patriarchal belief that positioned women as subservient — quieter, smaller, always deferring. Maybe it was a value system that never said “obey” out loud, but made obedience the price of staying loved. Naming your own version isn’t a detour — it’s the doorway into the practices below actually working for you.

Naming where this came from is necessary, but it isn’t the whole job. Here’s what research and clinical practice point to, if you’re ready to move from naming into repair:

• Post-traumatic growth. People develop genuine strength and renewed meaning because of surviving hardship, not despite it — notice what surviving this built in you.

• Narrative therapy. Separate yourself from the story you were handed: “I am the chaos” becomes “I survived chaos I didn’t create.”

• Family systems theory. See your family as an interconnected, enmeshed system, not individual failures — it explains harm without excusing it.

• Mindfulness and emotional regulation. Breathwork, grounding, and body scans give a hypervigilant nervous system its first real practice at finding still.

• Somatic healing and yoga therapy. Body-based practices reach what talk therapy alone often can’t.

• Strengths-based approaches. Name what surviving this gave you — resourcefulness, resilience, empathy, perceptiveness — alongside what it cost you.

None of these practices erase what happened. They’re not a bypass for inherited dysfunction or trauma— they’re real, evidence-informed starting points for building a different nervous system than the one you inherited.

Pick one practice from this list and try it once this week. Not to fix everything, but to prove to your nervous system that something other than vigilance is possible. Healing happens in the accumulation of small proofs that a different way is available to you. If you’re not sure where to start, or how to explore some of these practices, that’s exactly what I’m here for. Message me – let’s talk :)

This month, we’ve named what it costs to survive a family that treated you as property instead of a person, traced that cost into your biology, and traced it back further still into the ruptures your parents carried before you were born. This week, we’ve sat with the hardest part: healing doesn’t require resolving every unanswered question about who your parents were, or why. It just requires you to start.

That’s exactly what The Truth About Grief Circle is for this month.

Paid annual subscribers are invited to:

• A monthly support group. We’re meeting again on Tuesday, September 15, 7:00 PM EDT — where we’ll talk openly about the grief of surviving generational and cultural narcissism

• A private 1:1 mini-session with me

• Both of my e-books on complicated grief, betrayal, and family estrangement

If you’re ready to stop carrying this alone, this circle is where you get to put some of it down.

Become a paid annual subscriber → click here.

Sending peace and love,

Karen xo 💜

P.S. If this post spoke to you, or you know someone who needs to read it today, please share it with them. It’s free to read and it could be the one thing that helps them make sense of the heavy trauma they’ve been carrying for a long time.

Before you go, can you take a moment to help me out with this week’s poll:

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