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royalpains-roleplay · 4 years

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Original Characters - Female

» ; ♛ ❮ORIGINAL CHARACTER❯

Character quote: ❝ Something 'bout you makes me feel like a dangerous woman. ❞

✗ — Name: Elsa Grimaldi. ✗ — Age: 19. ✗ — Kingdom: France. ✗ — Sexuality: Heterosexual.

— Personality; Compared to what she once was, Elsa is a complete nightmare. There is not much left of the shy, sweet and innocent child that had once been Elsa Grimaldi. Whether it was shattered by her mother in early childhood, or by her weakness, Prince Ashton, Elsa has not much left of the kindness she once harbored for others. Elsa is a party girl, the liquor chugging, coke snorting princess that everyone loves to have a good time with. She likes the ability to lose herself in the buzz; it makes her feel better than getting in all of her deep emotions. She puts on a cold, bitchy demeanor, showing no sign of care or even awareness for other people, which is just another way to protect herself from being hurt. She used her abrasive personality to push people away, so they didn’t hurt her as her mother did. Deep down, the outwardly confident princess is really just broken on the inside, torn between the need to let someone in and to protect herself.

— Biography; Elsa grew up being the youngest child, yet still close in age to her brother, Luca. Despite being close in age the pair didn't have a close bond. As they grew, older Elsa became a quiet, shy girl. Her mother felt as if she wasn't fit to be a princess much less a queen because Elsa didn't possess the same manipulative qualities Mrs. Grimaldi had at that age, the qualities Mrs. Grimaldi seemed to deem important for a ruler. The queen began to treat her daughter terribly, acting as if the girl was an unwanted step child. Although the abuse wasn't physical, it took a toll on the girl. She developed an eating disorder, formed by her eagerness to please her mother. She strived to make her appearance perfect, and often worked for success in all other aspects of her life. She would go days without eating and it became effortless for her. She would often throw herself into the perfection of her own life. At the age of sixteen, she officially met Ashton Deutch, the Russian Prince at a party and they slept together. Elsa, still the shy girl from before panicked because of what she’d done and left before the boy could wake up. They had been in puppy love from years of glances from across rooms and brief encounters at balls so once Elsa left and refused to see the boy it crushed the both of them. She convinced her father to ban the boy from entering France. Elsa was taking all precautions she possibly could to prevent herself from letting Ashton in, which led to her ditching the shy sweetheart part of herself and becoming a liquor chugging princess with an attitude. Her cold-hearted demeanor was used to push people away from seeing the flaws her mother so eagerly pointed out. With her complete change in personality, her mother finally decided she was good enough and she was sent to Royal Pains Estate in order to develop the skills of a leader so she could maybe become the ruler of her country. A distraction became present when she discover Ashton was also at the Estate. It was at the Estate that she also met the old flame of her brother, Sophie and made the connection that her two year old child was her nephew.

✗ Secret; She suffers from anorexia and although it has drifted to a less severe problem it hasn't completely ceased. Its formation was heavily influenced by the treatment of her mother and although it has become less of the problem, her drinking often triggers it.

「 Faceclaim: Ariana Grande. 」

» ; ♛ ❮ORIGINAL CHARACTER❯

Character quote: ❝And the things bottled inside have finally begun to create so much pressure that I'll soon blow up.❞

✗ — Name: Arlo Dawson ✗ — Age: 18 ✗ — Kingdom: New Zealand ✗ — Sexuality: Pansexual

— Personality; Arlo is typically nice and sweet, but she’s very quiet, especially around her sister. She’s level-headed most of the time, though she can become dark and irrational and act out some times. She’s very intelligent. But living in her sister’s shadow, she’s learned to become a little insecure and strive for perfection from herself. She’s working on allowing herself to be an individual from her sister and be confident.

— Biography; Arlo’s parents were set up for an epic love. Her mother, Isabelle, was next in line for the throne when she met Elijah, Arlo’s father. Isabelle didn’t want the throne; she was going to step down and let her brother take it, so she could have a relatively normal life. She put herself through university with working off jobs, and she worked very hard to move all the way to medical school, to become a doctor. Elijah was a small town boy, who taught literature at a community college. When the two met at a party, it was instant attraction. The two started dating a few days later, much to her family’s dismay. They were only together four months where they decided to get engaged. Then a month later, Isabelle discovered she was pregnant. Is and Elijah decided to have a shotgun wedding the same day; they went to their local court house and got married. When Isabelle’s parents found out, they insisted on giving her a proper wedding, one that would take place after the babies’ birth.

The day of their wedding, everything was going to plan. They were ready to be each other’s forever...again. But as Isabelle was saying “I do,” her brother swooped in and stabbed her in the back. Elijah and the doctors did everything they could to save her, but she passed away later the same evening. The kingdom wasn’t the same again.

Shortly after Isabelle’s death, Elijah took the girls to the country side to raise. Being a widowed single dad was hard on him. He turned to alcohol to soothe the pain, and the girls’ godmother stepped in to help them. After getting him help in sobering up, Elijah went back to teaching, and the girls grew up rather normally. The girls were best friends as they, but it seemed Arlo was the more submissive twin. She did whatever her sister wanted just to keep her happy, never really voicing her opinion; and it only worsened when they discovered her sister was bi-polar. Arlo became a sort of anchor to her sister, calming her down and cleaning up her messes. When the girls turned sixteen, their grandparents wanted the girls to start their royal training. Arlo was content to just be a normal girl, but agreed to go to keep an eye on her sister. After several months of training, their grandmother threw them a “coming out” party. Arlo met Antonia and completely fell for her. But her sister didn’t approve. For weeks after the party, Arlo snuck behind her sister’s back to start a relationship with Toni. Arlo was caught in her secret as her sister walked in on them being intimate. The whole thing turned into a fight that almost ended their bond. Feeling overshadowed and alone, Arlo attempted to take her own life by swallowing pills and downing her dad’s whiskey. Elijah found her in the morning and rushed her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with depression. Once she was healed and seemed to be in better mental health, her father, with backing from her grandmother, sent her to the estate to get some distance while she finished her classes and training.

✗ Secret; Arlo was diagnosed with depression and codependency after her attempt. If she doesn’t take her medicine, she’ll soon be a grenade and the darkness inside her comes out.

「 Faceclaim: Kaylee Bryant」

» ; ♛ ❮ORIGINAL CHARACTER❯

Character quote: ❝ From porcelain to ivory to steel, I rise above. ❞

✗ — Name: Sloane Luxem. ✗ — Age: 22. ✗ — Kingdom: Germany. ✗ — Sexuality: Pansexual.

— Personality; coming off as antagonistic and cold, Sloane has built up walls around herself. She had been a happy child when she was younger, filled with curiosity and thirst for knowledge. After she was kidnapped she learned real quick to block out emotions and not let anything phase her. Otherwise she'd just get herself killed. She's sarcastic beneath her shield and loves to provoke people into fighting her. She's reckless to the point of self-destruction and thrives off danger. She holds no regard for her own life, but she does care about the lives of others. Sloane can hold a grudge unlike anything else, she's unforgiving and ruthless especially when she has been wronged. Beneath the surface, Sloane is playful and quick to tease those that she’s allowed in and through her shields and armor. Most of the time she doesn’t think before she acts and reacts based off of instinct. She’s a protector when it counts and will do whatever is absolutely necessary to protect the few she cares about, willing to make the hard decisions and bear the guilt of the consequences so others wouldn’t have too. Sloane is empathic and despite the fact that she rarely shows it, she empathizes fairly easy with people, she just buries the emotions down and pretends that they are not there.

— Biography; The Luxem Queen was as independently strong as they came. For her entire reign she has refused to marry and hand over control to her husband. A decision that has always made waves. Her two children were the product of test tubes and doctors, no men directly involved. Another wave, a major wave that decision had made, twice. Sloane had been protected as she grew up, always having guards present. Until one day their loyalty was bought. Sloane was twelve when she and her brother were kidnapped from their home and taken by men who wanted them gone. Initially meant to be trained as an assassin, Sloane spent four years being taught how to kill. Before she was sold to the highest bidder. At sixteen she was bought by a fighting ring that heard of her vicious nature. She never had the finesse for assassination work.

Two years with the ring, she fell in love despite the fact that she knew she shouldn’t. Love was a weakness in that dark world, it painted a target on your back like a neon arrow screaming that you had a weakness. She knew loving him would get them both killed, but she did it anyway. It had been a love as fierce as the way they fought and it wasn’t long until their owners found out. At first when they did nothing, Sloane naively thought they didn’t care. But they did, especially when the love of her life was plotting a rebellion behind her back. He was killed for it in front of her. Each man and woman involved were slaughtered and the only reason Sloane had been allowed to live was because they knew she had no knowledge of the deceit, and they knew she’d been broken beyond repair and would not foolishly rise against them.

For the next few years she completely froze out all emotions, vowing to never love again, to never let another soul behind her walls. She lived, breathed, and survived fighting every day. About a month ago the ring was taken down by law enforcement, the fighters were all taken to a hospital and asked for names or had DNA tests run. Sloane knew who she was and didn’t say, knowing no matter what a test would be run. But she didn’t want to return, she didn’t know who she was outside the fighter she had become. Seeing the damage done, and her vicious nature, Sloane’s mother had her sent to the Estate after she finished healing of whatever injuries she possessed.

✗ Secret; Sloane was kidnapped as a child and a few years later sold to a fighting ring by her kidnappers. She watched the man she loved get murdered in front of her while there.

「 Faceclaim: Marie Avgeropoulos 」

» ; ♛ ❮ORIGINAL CHARACTER❯

Character quote: ❝I am damaged at best, like you’ve already figured out.❞

✗ — Name: Hana Myung.

✗ — Age: 25.

✗ — Kingdom: South Korea.

✗ — Sexuality: Heterosexual.

— Personality; If you didn’t know her than you would be convinced that Hana truly is the embodiment of the stereotypical princess. From an outside perspective, she comes across as shallow and self-centred, only really caring about money and her looks. She knows that she can be a little conceded and often tunes out to the world around her. There is no doubt that Hana is spoilt, she’s used to getting what she wants and it shows. It’s a terrible habit really but she’s not ignorant to it. In fact, Hana is very self-aware with what she does and who she is. She chooses to embrace the negative sides of her personality as well as the good ones. No one’s perfect and that’s a statement that she lives by. Of course, Hana is no angel, she’s made plenty of mistakes in her lifetime but she’s always managed to learn from them. She’s no so ignorant where she would be stupid enough to make the same mistake twice and allow herself to be made a fool out of. You’d never guess it with the way she acts but Hana is a deeply sympathetic person, she doesn’t like to show her kindness in public settings but if she ever notices someone is having a particularly rough time, she’ll take time out of her day to talk to them. Not the kind to cause meaningless problems, Hana won’t purposely sub people unless she has a prior issue to them. She’s pretty open to talking with others and so she’s always been fairly popular with her peers. She may not look like much of a threat but Hana will do anything and everything to protect her friends and she’s not above playing dirty tactics in order to do that. Though she does sometimes come across as naive, she’s anything but. Hana doesn’t allow others to walk all over her. Even in a vulnerable state, she’s smart enough to realise when people are trying to dominate her or prove that they’re of more importance and she refuses to stand for it.

— Biography; Growing up in a big family was always going to be difficult. Hana wasn’t the oldest child and she wasn’t the youngest. With seven siblings in total, it was hard for her to ever really get any of the attention a normal child craved. Instead, her parents would usually just give her whatever she wanted in order to get her off their case so they could focus on more pressing issues. This often meant that Hana and her siblings were left alone with nannies to take care of them who only did it because of the money rather than the fact that they cared for the kids. There was absolutely no hiding that she came from a wealthy family, the Myung’s were a well respected royal family in South Korea, they had been ruling for hundreds of years until the last vote when the Myung family lost to the Kim family. It was the first time they’d lost in centuries which meant that Hana’s parents were set on doing everything they could to ensure the Myung’s would be back on top the next time a king or queen was needed, so of course a lot of pressure was placed on their kids to be perfect. Hana’s parents drilled into her head that it was up to her and her siblings that to make an impact in the world and that meant that they had big plans for their kids. Wanting to maintain their family status, the Myung siblings were forced to go to classes 14 hours a day with minimal breaks in between. They were a hard-working family, determined that they would be the future rulers of the country. The kids didn’t get a lot of time to just have fun and act like kids but they never complained, falling into line so that they would please their parents and their country. Hana was a middle child, the only two siblings younger than her was her sister Youra and her twin brother Arlo. Particularly close to her sister, Hana grew up with a protective instinct to take care of her. It was obvious fairly soon into her life that Hana was different from the rest of her family. While still entitled and arrogant, she longed for more than just the life of a royal. She didn’t want to have to fit into this perfect box her parents had created for her. While her siblings were more than thrilled with the way their lives were heading, Hana wanted more than that. She wanted freedom, adventure and all things in between and so she made the bold move to tell her parents about her dreams and ambitions. It was a sensitive topic, she was well aware of the risks she was taking telling her parents she didn’t want to follow in their footsteps. Her siblings never questioned their parent’s authority and with good reason to. While they weren’t physically abusive by any means, they definitely knew how to hurt their kids. For Hana, it was through their pets. Growing up, she’d grown attached to her dog, Bruno and when she was seven and refused to finish her classwork, her parents got rid of the dog and she never saw it again. She worried that perhaps something similar would happen to her pet cat but surprisingly they supported her. She has six other siblings so she didn’t really have to worry about the crown, it was unlikely that she would ever get to become queen so her parents said that as long as she kept up her good grades and reputation, they would allow her to travel on her own terms. Of course, Hana agreed to their terms and happily packed her bags to travel around the world. She loved it, the freedom of being who she wanted to be rather than the princess she had to be and the funds she had were endless, it was bliss. She’d always been exceptionally intelligent so it wasn’t hard for her to maintain her royal classes high grades. Hana moved around frequently, never staying in one place for long because she just wanted to see everything the world had to offer. She was happy and wanted to share that. Her younger sister, Youra often contacted Hana and told her how bored she was so after two years of travelling on her own and meeting a bunch a wonderful people, Hana asked her sister to come and visit her for a month.

For the first couple of weeks, everything was running smoothly, they decided to go to America and that’s where the real trouble began. Hana decided to go and have lunch with a friend and leave her little sister to her own devices for an afternoon. Youra agreed to pick her up with the car they rented later on and when that time came, disaster struck. Hana had only been in the car ten minutes at the most when the accident happened. Tires screeching and the sickening sound of metal crashing haunted Hana but before she could process what had happened, Youra sped off leaving the other car and the person inside it. It was revealed later that night on the news that the man had passed away and they were looking for the suspect that had committed the crime. Youra was hysterically crying at this point so Hana knew she had to remain calm and so she did. Without hesitation, she phoned her father and informed him about the hit and run that claimed a man’s life but she changed one major detail. Protecting her sister, Hana told her father she was the one that committed the crime and he immediately flew out to help his daughters. Like he always did when there was an issue, her father threw money at the problem and it disappeared. Hana and Youra were in the clear but their father was furious and insisted that they pack their things and go home. Though she loved travelling, Hana didn’t put up any protest, she was devastated by what had happened so she did what he asked. No one realise just how negative of an impact it made on Hana until she tried to jump out of her third-story bedroom window. When asked why she did it, Hana explained that she kept seeing the man from the crash wherever she went and he constantly told her to hurt herself. She had been harming herself for months and no one even noticed until she almost died. Hana’s parents insisted she see a specialist who decided to put Hana on a medication to help her out. Though she’s stopped seeing the man putting awful thoughts in her head, her guilt lingers and so her father insisted she be sent to royal pains estate so that she could recover properly there.

Secret: Hana and her sister were involved in a hit and run accident. Instead of letting her younger sister take blame accident for the accident she was responsible for, Hana said she did it. The crash claimed a mans life and instead of it being publicised, the girls father threw money at the problem and it disappeared. Although she wasn’t actually the one driving, she’s devastated about the situation and it caused her to start seeing the man that died who kept encouraging her to harm herself.

「 Faceclaim: Jennie Kim. 」

» ; ♛ ❮ORIGINAL CHARACTER❯

❝ I am here in my mold. But I’m a million different people from one day to the next, I can’t change my mold.❞

✗ — Name: Elise Dawson

✗ — Age: 18

✗ — Kingdom (do not place character in a Kingdom with three ruling families already): New Zealand

✗ — Sexuality: Heterosexual

— Personality; From her looks right down to her personality Elise can be considered a typical mean girl. Almost every word that comes out of her mouth is laced with venom. She’s fun, witty and brutally honest. She’s not afraid to tell it how it is, even if it hurts someone else in the process. That includes people that she cares about. She’s a narcissist with a fragile ego that hates it when she doesn’t have someone’s full attention. She might care about her father and sister more than anything and do anything for them, but she’s self-absorbed and finds it difficult to see things from others perspectives. A lot of that can be attributed to her bipolar disorder. The desperate search to have some form of control and stability in her life. That’s why she craved so much attention from her father and clung to her sister more than she probably should have.

— Biography (at least two hundred words); From a young age Elise was always a little more dominant of the Dawson twins. When it came to choosing what the girls were going to do it was always Elise’s idea and Arlo just went along with it. At first nobody questioned how she acted. That was how some children were. When she got older though the changes got worse. She started having manic episodes that didn’t go unnoticed to her father. She got sent to be seen by a psychologist who after a few sessions diagnosed Elise with bipolar disorder. While she spent a lot of time with her father doing things like meditation and calming exercises, her sister was just as much there for her as she had ever been. Whenever things were going seemingly well and Elise had an episode that she didn’t want anyone finding out about Arlo would be there and help do damage control. When the twins turned sixteen and their grandparents wanted them to do royal training Elise got excited. The idea of one day being able to take the throne and be queen of their homeland was something that she didn’t take lightly. She agreed to it before they could even finish their sentence.

After several months Elise felt like she was really getting into what the royal lifestyle had to offer. The royal outfits were similar to her everyday outfits so she fit right in. She was even working harder on her mental health to be the leader that she thought was needed. When her grandmother thought they were ready she threw the twins a “coming out” party to introduce them into the royal life and circles. While Elise was more focused on the attention she didn’t realise that her sister had found an interest in one of the royal girls that were there. She felt like she was losing her sister and that there wasn’t something right about the girl she fancied. Arlo gave in and agreed not to see Toni anymore. Everything was going smoothly after the party. Elise began going to royal parties and occasions to get an “in” with them. When sneaking back in from one of the parties Elise overheard her father and grandmother talking about how they were going to choose Arlo to be the one to take the throne. The girl began spiraling as she made her way up to her room that she shared with the slightly younger Dawson twin, only to find her sister in an intimate situation with Toni. Whatever anger she had was just intensified ten fold. The pair got into a fight, the worst one they had ever had. Because of the betrayal and thing that she had overheard Elise took it all out on Arlo. Blaming her for everything and being a lot harsher than she should have. When the fight finally ended Elise left to go and stay somewhere else. Not wanting to be under the same roof as her sister, who in that moment was the enemy. It wasn’t until the next morning when she got a call that Arlo had tried to take her own life and was in the hospital that Elise actually thought about the fight that they’d had again. She wanted to get better. Learn how to control daily challenges, her outbursts and regain control. With Arlo being sent to Royal Pains after her suicide attempt her father didn’t want Elise being far away. So instead she started going through the process of intense behavioral therapy at a local facility. Everyday was spent being bombarded with medical professionals and healers to try and help her with her bipolar. She was making great strides until her grandmother attempted to introduce training back into her routine. Making her first reappearance since her sister had been sent away all Elise could focus on was the chatter amongst everyone of what happened to Arlo. Everyone talking bad about her sister caused her to have a massive episode. Attacking people both verbally and physically. After the incident her father and grandmother decided to send her to Royal Pains after deciding that was the best place for her to make progress and have some stability amongst the royal life.

✗ Secret; She has bipolar disorder and can be a loose canon because of it.

「 Faceclaim: Jenny Boyd」

» ; ♛ ❮ORIGINAL CHARACTER❯

Character quote: ❝So much history in my head, the people I’ve left, the ones that I’ve kept.❞

✗ — Name: Mercury Zoegar.

✗ — Age: 25.

✗ — Kingdom: Iceland.

✗ — Sexuality: Heterosexual.

— Personality; On the surface, Mercury seems like the typical mean princess. She is beautiful and popular but can be a complete snob at times. Her strive for popularity stems from her parents need to make her into the perfect daughter with the perfect reputation while Mercury just wants to be herself. However she’s not a complete lost cause as some would think, at times, Mercury does display forms of kindness and support towards other, and often shows it to those that deserve it instead of doing it for everyone just for the sake of being nice. She is much smarter then she lets on and much more lost then she wants people to know. She used to be the kind of girl that thrives off living in the moment but certain recent events have caused her to live in the past and she’s afraid she’s never going to get past it. Mercury is excellent at hiding her own emotions though so she can easily prevent people from seeing how badly she’s coping. Sometimes she finds herself dewlling on the past and wishes she could go back to a year ago when she was truly carefree and happy as she worries she will never feel that way again. It’s hard for her to get out of that head space but she really is trying.

— Biography; Mercury lived in a household where being royalty came second to religion. From a young age, Christianity was forced up on the young princess and at first, she didn’t mind. After all, it was all she had known. She had always considered herself as a religious girl, but unlike her parents, she never mocked or discriminated against others with different religious beliefs as her and was open to the possibility of new things. As she grew into her teens this became more of a problem for Mercury, she never lost her faith but she had questioned it a few times. First when her mother fell pregnant and lost the baby four months into the pregnancy, again when she became scrutinised by the public on the internet for ‘growing up too quick’ because she was seen out wearing a bikini to the beach and the last time she questioned the religion was when she was sexually abused by one of the kingdom guards when she was only fourteen. Of course she told her parents and he lost his job and was sent to prison but that was when she decided that religion wasn’t everything and she also became cold and confrontational towards people because she didn’t trust them not to hurt her. For years she lived like this, keeping a comfortable distance from everyone. Of course she wasn’t a complete nun, Mercury had a few boyfriends here and there but nothing too serious and she never really had friends she completely trusted. She was labelled as the ‘bitch from Iceland’ in her country so it became rather shocking to her parents when they discovered that at the age of nineteen, Mercury was sleeping with her fathers best friend, Warren, and they had been in a secret relationship for months. Her father was furious, threatening to send the man to jail but Mercury managed to calm him down by telling him that she deeply cared for the man despite the big age gap. It was true, after the sexual assault she suffered, Warren was the first man that she ever really trusted. He didn’t treat her like a china doll, he knew she was tough and could handle herself so he acted normally around her. Sometimes they drove each other insane and they would be up all hours of the day arguing but at the end of the night, he would be back in her bed holding her close, they never went to bed on an argument. Mercury thought everything was great in her relationship especially after her father agreed to calm down and renationalised the situation. It was the first time Mercury ever truly felt what it was like to be loved but when she met and soon became best friends with a local girl called Bianca things soon took a turn between the couple.

Quickly the two became inseparable. Bianca encouraged Mercury’s careless behaviour and despite her parents and boyfriends disapproval of their friendship, Mercury enjoyed Bianca’s carefree nature and let that come between her and her relationships with other people. Bianca claimed that Mercury’s boyfriend had attempted to hit on her. It was the one thing Mercury ever really questioned when it came to Bianca because she knew Warren adored her but she was a fantastic manipulator and cried her heart out to Mercury and always acted scared when her boyfriend was around so Mercury believed her despite having no evidence and the relationship broke apart taking a bit of Mercury with it as it faded away. She was heart broken over the loss of her longest relationship that she fought so hard for her parents to except but Bianca wouldn’t let her mope about and always come up with new things for them to do together. Mercury fell hook, line and sinker for all the lies she was being told because she truly believed that they would be friends until the end of time but that didn’t happen. Mercury tried to block out the painful thoughts of losing her ex by replacing him with a less boy her own age, he was called Malcolm but despite her attempts at trying to act normal around him, he never compared to Warren. One day Bianca invited Mercury to a party and she agreed, insisting that she brought Malcolm along despite the fact they were just a casual fling. Things quickly took a nasty turn when the car Bianca was driving them in crashed into a truck, instantly killing both Bianca and Malcolm on impact. Mercury fell through the windshield and was in a coma for two weeks due to the incident. The doctors were unsure of her survival but she did pull through. When she woke up her parents explained to her what had happened and Mercury was devastated, completely broken by the loss of her best friend, and was flooded with guilt because she made her Malcolm join them in the car when all he wanted was to spend time with her alone at the movies. A month after the car accident, while Mercury was still recovering and wallowing in her own guilt, the truth was revealed. There was never a party going on. Bianca was part of a secret organisation set up by the rivalry royals to take down the Zoega family and had set the entire thing up. She had crashed the car on purpose. Mercury was the first cause of action, they wanted to take out the only heir of the Zoega family to devastate her parents hoping that they would become too depressed for to run the country and hand it down to someone else. Fortunately for Mercury, she survived but the mental scars lived on. Ever since the incident, the girl has been failing to sleep much and when she is able to, she always wakes up screaming because of the flash backs she has. She can’t wrap her mind around the idea of her best friend wanting to hurt her after she finally let someone close. The situation became so bad that Mercury began to pinch her arms and legs to keep herself awake to avoid the nightmares. Warren came to see her in the hospital because her parents hoped it would calm her down and though it did somewhat help and she was happy to see him again, Mercury’s mind was too messed up for anything to really sink in. Seeing what was happening to their daughter, her parents decided it was best for Mercury to be sent to Royal Pains Estate until she has fully healed from the trauma, but things have spiralled further then ever. Since arriving to the academy, Mercury hasn’t been able to forget that an organisation is set up and they are hell-bent in ending her life. It has all became too much and Mercury has began to self harm as a way to help her cope.

Secret; Since arriving at Royal Pains Mercury has began to self harm.

「 Faceclaim: Margot Robbie. 」

» ; ♛ ❮ORIGINAL CHARACTER❯

Character quote: ❝ A wolf is still a wolf, even in a cage, even dressed in silk. ❞

✗ — Name: Raven Avalanche ✗ — Age: 21 ✗ — Kingdom: Colombia ✗ — sexuality: Bisexual

— Personality: Raven has built a rather cold brick wall around her heart. She doesn’t let people get too close to her especially after her last failed relationship. She prefers it that people see her as someone that is coldhearted. Raven is sarcastic and has a rather big attitude. At first Raven can come off as a typical , bitchy Royal but she is so much more than that. Once you manage to get past the cold exterior Raven is actually caring and compassionate. She is the type of girl that would do everything for the people she loves.

— Biography; On the rare occasions two Royals fall in love without being forced into marriage beforehand. That was what happened to Raven’s parents. Raven’s mother was the Princess of Poland and her Father was the King of Colombia. The two fell in love , got married and decided to have a child. However, each story has an obstacle and in this case it was the fact that the King of Colombia couldn’t provide a heir. The Royal couple couldn’t allow that information to be leaked to the news so they started to search for a sperm donor and then the King came up with a wonderful idea about getting their trusted advisor Richard to do the honors of allowing them to have a child. Of course, they paid him well and he accepted the offer. Several months down the line a baby girl was born she had a head full of black hair and her parents decided on calling her Raven. the King loved his daughter more than anything in the world, he kept her out of the media in fear that his enemies would think of kidnapping or hurting his little princess. However, one day, when she turned 12 and was returning home with her father after spending the weekend away in a different city whilst her mother, was back in Poland dealing with some important stuff. For safety reasons, the king traveled in a different car and Raven traveled in a car with their parents trusted advisor. When her father’s car got attacked the driver of Raven’s car stopped in order to go and help the king. Richard the advisor couldn’t allow anything to happen to Raven the only Heiress to the throne. Quickly he found himself behind the wheel and drove in a completely different direction. The news of her father’s assassinations reached her mother faster than anything else. Magdalena rushed back home to her child, unfortunately, Raven couldn’t stay with her mother she got put into a witness protection program considering the fact she was one of the few people that survived the attack. She got sent away to Canada to make sure her daughter was well protected Magdalena sent Richard along with her.

Raven had to go through a whole makeover, she wore wigs and changed the color of her eyes using contact lenses. Raven and Richard also lived in one of the poorer houses and Raven attended a public school. Every now and then she would have to fly back to her home so she could attend all the important events and visit her mother. Whenever Raven would be back home she would have bodyguards surround her throughout every moment.

Back In Canada Raven was known as Mary Santiago, she got told not to stand out too much but her dominating nature took the best of her and eventually she became one of the popular girls that attended the school. She also had a best friend that was younger than her by two years called Nesryn Elliot to who she developed romantic feelings towards, however at the time Nesryn was dating a boy in Raven’s class so she never acted upon it. For her seventeenth birthday Raven’s mother decided to take her to Australia since it was a place the girl always wanted to go too. she decided to sneak out of the hotel they were staying at for the first time ever. She was tired of being followed by the bodyguards and wanted to live a little. Raven managed to get herself inside one of the clubs, enough flirting caused her to achieve that.

In the club she met Cayden Moore, the two clicked pretty instantly and Raven liked the fact he was older than her. They spent the rest of the night talking and then just as dawn was creeping up, within the space of a few hours she had formed an opinion on Cayden and it was a good one. She liked him a lot , she liked the fact he was older and she wanted to forget completely about Nessie at least for one night so Raven was drunk enough to spend the night with him and experience her first time. When she woke up in the morning and saw that he was nowhere to be found with not even a single note the girl felt rather hurt. She returned back to the hotel and headed straight to her Room to pack back for Canada being ready to leave earlier. When she returned back to Canada she decided to tell Nesryn about how she felt and the two of them dated. Until Nessie’s nudes from one time have been leaked, Raven in an instant assumed that Nesryn cheated on her so the two got into a heated argument and broke up before Nesryn left for France and Raven once again left for Colombia. Being back at home she found out that her mother was having an affair with Richard and that her fathers death was planned by the two of them, she found the documents and all that stuff. Raven couldn’t believe her own eyes, but her mother caught her the moment Raven found the documents and sent her away to royal pains before she could act on it.

✗ Secret; Raven found out that it was her mother and her father’s trusted advisor that have planned his death.

「 Faceclaim: Sofia Carson. 」

» ; ♛ ❮ORIGINAL CHARACTER❯

Character quote: ❝ We do what we have to so we can do what we want to. ❞

✗ — Name: Luna Evans

✗ — Age: 19

✗ — Kingdom (do not place character in a Kingdom that already has three ruling families): Monaco

✗ — Sexuality: Bisexual

— Personality; Growing up in the royal lifestyle isn’t for everyone. In this case, that involved Luna. She always dreamed and looked for more than just the royal life she grew up in. She’s very self-possessed, able to keep control of herself and her emotions no matter the situation. It’s the thing that helps her stay level-headed, even in the face of chaos. Luna has always been very smart and knowledgeable, that didn’t matter much to her parents, however. They preferred someone who was able to not get distracted by words and meaning, and just be able to rule their kingdom. And that wasn’t who Luna was. She couldn’t just ignore the meaning behind things. Although knowing just how cruel the world can be, Luna never liked to linger on the topic. Instead finding interest in ways that she was able to help better the world. Be it through psychology, literature or charitability. She never thought that she would find herself in a position where she would have to act for her life, finding sly and conniving solutions. But after the abduction and death there was a hint of darkness always lingering inside her, simply waiting for the next opportunity to jump out.

— Biography (at least two hundred words); Due to her mother having infertility issues after her birth, Luna was the only child to the Garcia family. There was worry from an early age that Luna wouldn’t be enough to take the throne. As she got older it was clear they had a right to be worry. Luna continuously strayed from her royal duties, instead finding comfort and interest in books and learning from the environment outside of the palace. It was important for a Queen to be well-educated before she took the throne, so her parents encouraged her at first. But when she turned 18 it became clear that she wanted more than the royal life had to offer her. She wanted to continue to study, earn a degree and make the most of her life. Taking control of the situation, her father organized a marriage to another Monaco royal. Tying two royal families together seemed like the perfect idea to strengthen their country. Luna hated the idea. She hated not having control of how her life was going to turn out and who she was going to marry. So, she concocted a plan with one of her best friends, Elijah to stage a kidnapping. The day before the wedding Elijah and Luna staged her room to make it look like there had been a struggle and Elijah drove Luna to a smaller town where she was able to change her last name to Evans and enroll in a local college where she could study. Or at least that was the plan. On the drive Luna filled out the papers, but they were never filed. Luna trusted Elijah, but it turned out that he was obsessed with her, even stalking her at her home and while she was out. Not wanting to risk losing Luna to someone else Elijah did the only thing he thought where he wouldn’t lose her. He drugged her coffee on the drive and chained her to a bed in a locked soundproof basement. It had been decorated to look like the bedroom she had as a child when she had first met Elijah. It creeped her out to say the least. Attempting to reason with Elijah didn’t work since he thought he was protecting the princess from a fake marriage and miserable lifestyle when he was able to provide for her and be the person she needed. One day while Elijah was out. Luna attempted to escape by using a key chain she found on the bedside table next to the bed. She succeeded in getting the lock unlocked, but she was quickly found out by Elijah. Something Luna hadn’t thought about was that he had cameras in the room, watching over her. She was drugged once more and chained back up. This time making sure that there was nothing around that Luna could possibly make-shift into a key. When Luna woke up, everything hurt physically and mentally. The drugging was taking a toll on her and she knew it. She became bitter. Bitter towards Elijah, towards the situation, that she didn’t have control over anything. She began snapping and swearing at Elijah whenever he tried to sit and have conversations with her. As a punishment Elijah would only come in to give her food and water once a day. Needing a more conniving solution to help her escape, Luna one night decided to position the chains around her neck making it look as though she had strangled herself. From the cameras watching the room, Elijah freaked out when he saw the seemingly lifeless Luna on the bed. When he came down to try help her, he unlocked the chains and unhooked them from around Luna. Acting on impulse, she grabbed the most solid thing closest to her and hit Elijah over the head with it. He fell to the ground, still alive but struggling to move and breathe properly. He grabbed his phone from his pocket with much effort saying that something didn’t feel right. Climbing off the bed, Luna grabbed the phone from his hand and took a step back before sitting on the ground and watching as Elijah died in front of her. Once she was sure he was dead, Luna escaped and ran outside learning they were in the middle of nowhere. It took what felt like forever to get to the next closest house where she announced to the person that she was the lost princess Garcia. Her parents didn’t know the full story of what happened. All they knew was that she was kidnapped and that was enough for them to send her to Royal Pains Estate to work through the trauma she went through and catch up on what she missed. Luna agreed to go if she could change her last name to Evans, not wanting to be known as the helpless princess that got kidnapped and not wanting to let others know the full story.

✗ Secret; Luna staged her own kidnapping and watched her kidnapper die after landing the crucial blow to his head.

「 Faceclaim: Danielle Campbell 」

» ; ♛ ❮ORIGINAL CHARACTER❯

Character quote: ❝Isn’t it lovely all alone?❞

✗ — Name: Asenka Alexandra Ivanovska (Nickname: Alex)

✗ — Age: 19.

✗ — Kingdom: Latvia.

✗ — Sexuality: Demisexual.

— Personality; Alex is nothing like a royal is supposed to be. She could be quite sarcastic and ungraceful with her words and demure. Insecurity is her best friend due to the fact she had never been comfortable or really liked herself. Alex never felt like she was allowed to express herself without reprimand which has led to her feeling like she isn’t much of a person. Alex often finds herself trying to live up to other’s ideas of what she should be and how she should act out of fear of people leaving her or disapproving. She is often very self-critical and when she fails at something she tends to be self-destructive. There are times she feels very anxious especially when it comes to dealing with her grandparents and trying to prove to them that she can be royal so that maybe they will care about her as a person.

— Biography; Asenka Ivanovska was pronounced dead on 03/30/2001. Along with her death, her mother, Dahlia, was pronounced dead the same day, having died during childbirth. Alex’s grandparents were never happy that their son, Mikelis, married the daughter of a slightly well off merchant, they had intended for him to go through with his arranged political marriage. Mikelis and Dahlia had been meeting up in secret behind his parent’s backs which had led to her getting pregnant and Mikelis couldn’t just leave her after that so he took her hand in marriage. To add salt to the wound Dahlia and Mikelis had learned they were expecting a daughter who they had intended to name Asenka. However, Dahlia had unexpectedly gone into labor while Mikelis was away and she had her twin sister Azalea visiting. Due to a complication during labor Dahlia hemorrhaged and the bleeding couldn’t be stopped in time. Azalea had heard Asenka cry once before she was taken out of the room, her grandparents following to check on Asenka. They walked back in a few minutes later to pronounce the death of the princess. Azalea couldn’t believe that bother her sister and niece had died but no one would listen to her. For months she tried to convince private investigators and nurses to try and find the girl or tell her what happened, but no one would question the king and queen. Eventually, the king and queen had Azalea institutionalized under the argument that she wasn’t in her right mind, that the death of her twin had been too much for her to comprehend just so she would stop asking questions.

In a way, Asenka had died that day or at least her ties to that name and her family had. Her grandparents had made a call and managed to get the girl put into the foster system under a different name. They had wanted to erase any trace of Asenka and her ties to royalty leaving room for their son to have a different heir. Asenka was promptly renamed Alexandra when her new birth certificate and information was forged.

Happy was never a word Alex would use to describe her childhood or honestly herself during any of that time. It seemed like Alex never quite fit in anywhere or even stayed somewhere long enough to fit in. She was constantly in and out of different foster homes. When she was younger it wasn’t so bad but it got worse when she was no longer an adorable baby and toddler. One thing she could always remember from being that young was feeling lonely, hungry and scared. She never quite got past feeling scared. When she was younger she found herself constantly getting attached to her foster parents just to be abandoned by them. As she got older despite knowing they would eventually get rid of her she still found herself trying to impress them and give them reasons to keep her even if it meant changing herself to make them happy. It never seemed to work no matter how hard she tried.

It wasn’t until she was fifteen that she was placed in a home for longer than two years. At first glance this would have been a good sign, however, it was a new form of hell. Alex never could seem to do anything they asked her to do right, and every time she got it wrong her foster father would find a way to punish her. At first, he just hit her where it wouldn’t be seen when she went to school until that wasn’t enough. He eventually escalated to using a belt or other objects to hit her with until she bled. Alex had multiple scars on her back from her many different screw-ups. She couldn’t help but think that maybe if she did something different or was better then maybe she wouldn’t beat. It led to her believing she deserved to be punished, that she really was just a waste of a life. Her foster mother offered her no comfort, nor did she try to stop her husband. Instead, she found comfort in ridiculing Alex and making sure that she knew exactly why she deserved everything that happened to her.

Alex’s only escape from home was school, it was the only place she was basically invisible. For the most part, no one noticed her or rather cared that she existed which she grew to enjoy. She wasn’t the new girl or the charity foster kid she was just that random girl you might have to partner with in science class. In all honesty, Alex wasn’t surprised when her foster father crept into her room for the first time at night a year after she moved in. But, that didn’t make it hurt any less when he got on top of her and forced himself inside of her. He hadn’t been the first person to use her. She had been eight her first time and hadn’t really known what her older foster brother was doing outside of the fact that it hurt. There were times after that she would tell a foster brother or father yes just because it made the beatings stop or for a moment they were nice to her. Sometimes it was just easier to comply and ignore that it was happening to her. That didn’t stop her from wearing baggy clothing that hid her figure or trying to avoid it when she could, but she knew that she wouldn’t fight it. She was too tired and hated herself to try and stop it, a part of her thought she deserved to be used that at least some part of her pleased others.

Alex was sixteen the first time she tried to end her life, or at least the first time she had planned to but her younger foster sister had walked in on her tying the rope. After that, she felt guilty to try again because the little girl had almost been the one to find her body and she wasn’t about to be responsible for inflicting the girl with that trauma. So instead Alex told herself that when she turned eighteen she would try again once she was no longer in this house and on her own at least that way there would be no children walking in.

Soon enough her eighteenth birthday came and took the bus away from the hell she had been living in for the past few years finally free of it. She got off in the next town over and locked herself in a diner bathroom where she downed a bottle of pills and slit her left wrist first and then as she went for the right one the knife slipped from her grasp when she heard the sound of someone pounding on the door. By the time they had made it into the bathroom, she was unconscious and she had been sent to the nearest hospital.

Instead of being dead, Alex was admitted to their psych ward. At first, they had to restrain her because she kept trying to finish what she started that night until finally the reality of the situation sunk in. At first, Alex refused to leave her room until they dragged her to the group therapy session they were having. She was angry at the whole situation that at first, she didn’t notice the woman across from her staring at her like she had seen a ghost. What was even stranger was that the woman had tried to get her attention and called her Asenka.

When one of the nurses noticed Azalea getting more and more insistent that Alex was Asenka they had her brought to a different room where they explained that Azalea’s twin sister had a child Asenka who had died and she had never got over it. At first, everyone had tried to ignore Azalea’s plea that Alex was Asenka but no one could deny just how similar the two of them looked. Finally, one of the nurses was tired of hearing about it that she ran Alex’s DNA with Azalea figuring it would come out as a nonmatch and it would get the woman to shut up. Azalea would be a perfect match to her twin sister due to being identical that it wasn’t a big deal to use her DNA in place of Dahlia’s. Everyone was surprised when the DNA results came back positive. Alex was the presumed dead princess Asenka. The news of it hit the media before the king and queen could get a hold of it to stop it. They were forced to agree to the release of both Alex and Azalea from the institution they were at. In the time that Alexa was in the foster care system, her father had never remarried or had another heir. Instead, he spent his time away from drinking and gambling. He hadn’t even come back when he heard about Alex and just sent word that he had no interest in the girl who was supposed to be dead, that it would hurt too much with how similar she looked to her mother.

Alex went from being no one to being royalty overnight and she couldn’t cope with it. Her grandparents were not happy that she was the heir they were stuck with and as a result, they held her to unrealistic expectations. The more Alex failed to meet them the more self-destructive she became. She couldn’t turn her anger outwards so instead, she internalized it and used it against herself. The one thing Alex couldn’t grow accustomed to was her grandparent’s insistence on her being called Asenka because unlike Alex it was fit for a royal, not a common street urchin. More often than not Alex felt like she was lost and defeated like the weight of the world was resting on her chest. Eventually, her grandparents sent her to royal pains informing her that she needed to come out acting like the perfect royal or they were going to arrange a marriage for her with one of the royal families so she would become their problem.

✗ Secret; Alex struggles with self destructive behavior and self-worth issues, she was also sexually abused throughout her childhood which she hasn’t told anyone about.

「 Faceclaim: Liana Liberato」

» ; ♛ ❮ORIGINAL CHARACTER❯

Character quote: ❝I didn't have it in myself to go with grace, and you're the hero flying around, saving face.❞

✗ — Name: Cassandra Kallas.

✗ — Age: 22.

✗ — Kingdom: Estonia.

✗ — Sexuality: Pansexual.

— Personality; Cassie’s a sweet and generally optimistic girl. She likes to look on the bright side of things and tries to be as positive as possible regarding situations. Compassion and empathy are two of her main traits. When someone is suffering in any way, she needs to be there to try and help them. Whether it’s bandaging a wound or giving comfort to help a broken heart, Cassie is the first one to be there for a person, even if they’re a perfect strangers to her. She is probably one of the more relentless people in helping others, and it is one of the few times she doesn’t find herself being more sensitive or reactive to rudeness. If she sees someone in danger, she disregards her own safety and wellness to ensure they’re okay. Cassie is generally a more sensitive person. While name calling doesn’t affect her a lot, sometimes if they strike a chord in particular she’ll be affected. Though Cassie is brutal for hiding her pain and often just bottles away her feelings. She’s quick to respond with a sassy remark and go on. She’s a very playful person and doesn’t consider herself held back by her royal status as without a great deal of seeing her dad involved she wasn’t always raised in the royal way. In Croatia it was obvious she wouldn’t get the throne so she didn’t bother being prim, proper and snobby. She’s got no problem letting her hair down and having fun. Though a part of her always has to be controlled. She often doesn’t drink until blackout or do drugs of any kind. She doesn’t ever dress too provocatively or she refuses to spend too much money even though she has plenty. Along with this, Cassie often experiences moments of dissociation. This is heavily due to the fact that despite the fact she bottles things up as to not remember them, or her amnesia now, she still is suffering from PTSD from what has been done in the past. Sometimes it’ll be as little as not responding a lot in conversation. Other times it can be a full on, staring off into space check out. Cassie also has a habit of being slightly paranoid and does things she doesn’t have a reason for. Such as locking the door for most rooms she is allowed to. Or sitting in the back corners of rooms. All things related to her PTSD that she isn’t aware she has.

— Biography; Cassandra’s parents were one of the few couples who actually fell in love and got married. They had both been engaged at the time. With Cassandra’s mother being a wealthy lady whose father was a lord, and her father being the crowned prince of Estonia, champion of all of his siblings. After meeting, they broke off their engagements and talked their parents into agreeing to allow them to be engaged. Cassandra’s paternal grandfather’s were reluctant to accept, but allowed it nonetheless. The first years were happy, after being married for two they had their first child, Cassandra. She was the light of her parent’s lives, even her grandparents were happy to meet her. They loved her dearly. She was given just about everything she wanted, though her mother was determined to teach her about work ethic so she encouraged her to do things for herself, bonding with her by teaching her life skills like baking and cooking, all supervised of course. At four years old, Cassie’s father inherited the title of king, and she became the princess and one of the next potentials to be a ruler of Estonia. At six years old, Cassie’s mother and father told her she was going to have a new baby brother or sister. She was over the moon with excitement, overjoyed to be a big sister. To her it was an honor, and she couldn’t wait to meet the new baby. Tragedy struck, and her mother suffered a late term miscarriage, one that resulted in the loss of fertility. After that, things began to grow strange. Cassandra’s father, once enamored by Cassie and her mother seemed to want nothing to do with either of them. He was always away on business, or meeting with other royals. She barely saw her father, though part of her thought it might have been worth it. He always seemed angry, or he was yelling at her mother. It wasn’t something she felt entirely comfortable with. Cassie’s mother seemed sad, but she didn’t stop trying to be a mother to her child. One night, her father was out and Cassie was given the go ahead to stay with her mother that night. It hadn’t happened since her mother had lost the baby, because her dad said dependent children didn’t make good rulers. That night, her father showed up drunk. His walking through the bedroom door woke her up. She stayed quiet as she watched him try to talk her mother into going to the other room. When her mother said she wanted to stay with the kids and repeatedly turned him down, he punched her. Cassie screamed, and while the fight was quickly broken up by a few house servants, Cassie was changed. Three months later, Cassie’s parents announced to her they’d be getting a divorce. Cassie’s mother would be leaving to stay in her estate house, and Cassie would go with her for now. For about a year, Cassie lived like this. She only saw her father occasionally, and it was always awkward. About a year and half later, her mother announced that she was to be arranged in another marriage, to the fiance she had rejected years ago to be with Cassie’s father. He was recently widowed, with a young child of his own and he understood Cassie’s mother hadn’t wanted to marry him for love. He was also a King, in Croatia. Cassie’s mother accepted, and they were soon headed off for Croatia. At first, her father put up a fight but it was quickly dropped when Cassie’s mother threatened to tell everyone what he did. Cassie liked Croatia. She even liked her new step father. Cassie watched her mother start to fall in love with the man she’d married, and she knew they were happy like Cassie had never seen her mother before. Soon, Cassie’s step brother came home from boarding school in England. He was strange, there was no doubting that, but she didn’t mind him. Slowly but surely, they adapted to each other. Most tabloids painted it as a story for the ages, love in unexpected places, and a family found from nothing. Before her stepbrother left again at the end of the summer for boarding school, he told her he liked her a lot. And he kissed her. She didn’t exactly return the feelings, and she was deeply confused by what had happened. This was not the end of the strangeness. Whenever her stepbrother would come home, things like this would happen. He’d taunt her, pull on her clothes. He did a lot of things that made her uncomfortable, like walking in while she showered. Cassie felt more estranged from her father than ever, but her paternal grandparents were desperate to try and keep her around him. So she’d go visit them, and often see her father. These visits were awkward, uncomfortable and sometimes he was downright cruel to her. But she was always happy to go home. She could even ignore her stepbrother. Even if he made her uncomfortable, kissing her and touching her when she didn’t want him to. It was only when he was home. And he wasn’t home a lot. So she justified it, considering this normal. When she was fifteen, her stepbrother was kicked out of boarding school. He came home for good to attend a private school in Croatia. Things got ugly. The small things that she had brushed off were harder to brush off. He was always there, all the time, doing things and growing more bold each time. One night, they were attending a gala and after having a glass of champagne she felt dizzy and woozy. Her stepbrother took her to her room, and finally all the weirdness came to a climax after he forced himself on her. She woke up in the morning, confused and uncertain of what had happened when he asked her if she enjoyed herself. It happened three more times. The drinking and feeling woozy, him carrying her away. She could never stop it. She just constantly told herself that it was normal, and that she wanted to do this with him. Yet, despite the lies she told herself, she convinced her mother, who was too busy with her relationship to notice what her daughter had been going through to send her to boarding school. Sure enough, she agreed and Cassie went away. Slowly but surely, Cassie suppressed all the horrible memories of her stepbrother. She forgot them, whether through willful ignorance or the trauma hurting her so badly that she’d break from the memories, so her mind was protecting her. She went on and got through school, eventually graduating and going on to start some general studies programs her mother wanted her to complete. She might not have needed it, but her mother wanted her to have a degree of some sort. On her twenty second birthday, she was home from the university she’d been attending. After a night of having fun with her friends back home, she returned home and went to bed. Later that night, a hangover driving her, she was woken and went to sip from a water glass on her nightstand table. A familiar feeling washed over her. That dizziness. The room was spinning than her step brother walked in. This time, she was lucid enough to fight him off, realizing all those memories she denied herself for years. She finally remembered all that he had done to her, and now after getting out of the world, she knew that what he had done was not right or normal. She confronted him rather violently about everything he’d done, and decided she was too much of a liability now he started to beat her. He staged it so it looked like a ‘rogue’ guard had done it. When she woke up from the coma three months later, she couldn’t consciously remember nearly the last year of her life, or what her step brother had done for her. After two weeks in the hospital, her grandparents came to her and told her that her father was sick, and soon she may be considered for a royal position. They wanted her to be their choice to endorse as their heir. Her mother didn’t agree to the idea of having her daughter who just woke up hauled away. But something told Cassie to do what her grandparents wanted. She agreed to study to become Queen. They started the ball rolling by sending her to The Estate, where they assumed she would end up receiving an education while also recovering her health.

✗ Secret; Cassie has been pretending as if she still remembers the last year of her life, but has secretly been trying to fill in the blanks the entire time and figure out what had happened to her.

» ; ♛ ❮ORIGINAL CHARACTER❯

Character quote: ❝Sometimes quiet is violent.❞

✗ — Name: Violet Ahlström

✗ — Age: 21

✗ — Kingdom Sweden.

✗ — Sexuality: Bisexual

— Personality; Violet can be fairly shy and quiet especially when it comes to meeting new people or any form of public speaking. Socializing had always made her feel anxious and self-conscious to the point where at times it made her sick to her stomach. She tends to avoid large crowds of people due to her fear of not being able to keep up with the conversation. Violet has difficulty letting people in and actually letting down her walls so they can get to know her. Instead, she tends to show people a more happy cheerful side of her. She uses humor and optimism to avoid people getting too close to her and having to say anything personal. She was raised to keep her emotions bottled up inside to avoid showing any weakness which has led her to have emotional outbursts that she usually directs at herself. There is a darker side of her that is more prone to anger and depression that she internalizes instead of expressing. Violet believes if anyone were to actually see her insecurities or outbursts of emotion they would grow to hate her or be disappointed in her. She constantly feels like she is never good enough and strives for perfection to the point where if she doesn’t achieve she feels worthless and angry with herself.

— Biography; From a young age Violet had experienced problems with her hearing. At first, it was little things where she couldn’t quite hear someone talking from the next room over but every time it got worse. Eventually, it became difficult for her to keep up with conversations especially when more than one person was talking at once or there was too much background noise in the room. At first, her parents had decided that Violet just hadn’t been trying enough, that she had just refused to pay attention. So they would give her extra lessons outside of the tutoring she received or quiz her on certain social events she was expected to attend. Violet tried to be perfect. She found herself studying in her free time trying to make up for the fact that she often would only hear or comprehend half of what her tutors were saying. Even then she could still feel her parent’s disappointment with her progress in her lessons especially when it came to learning other languages or public speeches. Violet began to dread having to attend parties that her parents arranged and even just social engagements. The prospect of having to speak in front of people and engage with them turned her stomach to the point where it often made her sick and anxious. This only fueled her parent’s disappointment in their daughter and their view of her being socially inept. It wasn’t until she was thirteen that she ended up seeing a doctor for her anxiety and they also diagnosed her hearing loss. Her parents were unhappy with the fact that their daughter had the disease and viewed it as a stain on their bloodline. They allowed her to get hearing aids but they still expected her to keep up at social functions and they pushed her harder to keep up. Anytime she couldn’t keep up with a conversation and her parents noticed they would take her aside and have her hold out her hand palms up and then hit her hands or wrists. They figured that if she associated it with pain then she would learn to be better. Her parents wanted to be sure she understood to never show weakness and to them her hearing loss and the issues it caused her were a weakness. At one point they told her that if a suitor found out about it before she was married it could ruin any alliance they would make and that she would be responsible for the destruction of their family name.

For years Violet tried to live up to her parent’s expectations and every time she failed to meet them it made her hate herself for being unable to garner her parent’s approval. Eventually, her self hatred and the weight of the expectations she put on herself got to be too much for her to handle. She started to act out and sneak out in the middle of the night. She started to go to clubs and soon she came across a place where she met other people who were deaf and hard of hearing and she felt less alone. Violet had even started to get a few of them to teach her sign language so she didn’t always have to communicate with words which helped with her anxiety. She found she could express herself better with it and keep up with the conversations she had with her friends easier. It was a feeling she had never felt before, a sense of belonging and the ability to express a part of herself she always kept hidden.

When she was seventeen her parents found out about her sneaking out and after that, she was basically on lockdown. They yelled at her for hours on end about how stupid it had been to go out in public and flaunt the fact she had difficulty hearing by using sign language. After that Violet was back to being alone with only her anxiety and her own expectations for a companion. The weight of everything crashing down on her and the emotions she kept bottled in the hopes her parents would finally not be disappointed in her had started to trigger episodes of rage. She kept those episodes hidden from her parents and instead internalized it and inflicted that anger on herself. At first, she only hurt herself when it got to be overwhelming or her anxiety got bad but eventually she was doing to cope with socializing and appearing normal. She found it easier to pretend she was fine and less like she wanted to just disappear and stop being a problem for everyone. She finally took it too far and her parents found her in the bathroom surrounded by her own blood. Violet hadn’t been trying to kill herself; she just wanted to stop feeling everything at once and be able to breathe. Her parents sent for a physician to come to the house so no one else had to know about Violet’s problem because if she was hospitalized for it then everyone would know that their daughter was weak. So they sent her to royal pains hoping that would fix her and that maybe they could mold her into the perfect royal.

✗ Secret; Violet was born with type 3 usher’s syndrome, over time she has begun to lose her hearing which her family has kept hidden. She also struggles with her emotions and self-harm issues.

「 Faceclaim: Vanessa Marano」

» ; ♛ ❮ORIGINAL CHARACTER❯

Character quote: ❝They told me all my cages were mental, so I got wasted like all my potential.❞

✗ — Name: Kalina Marek.

✗ — Age: 21.

✗ — Kingdom: Poland.

✗ — Sexuality: Pansexual.

— Personality; Kalina isn’t rough and tough, but she’s not the heart on her sleeve type either. She likes to keep it someone reserved, but is generally a rather friendly person. She holds a lot back, many of her secrets, true emotions and feelings, but often puts on a face of outwards being rather laidback. She’s rather charming and gets along well with most. Holding back most of who she is often grants her the ability to also morph into the more subtle factors of what others decide that they want with her. It’s all part in portion with the fact she doesn’t truly believe that she can be loved as she is. The rejection from her parents have led her from hiding most true parts of personality, scared people will turn her away for them. Because of her fear of rejection, she often ends up being something of her people pleaser and will often put up with a lot in order to keep people happy. Kalina missed out on a great deal of familial affection, and because of this, she seeks for love through other mediums. Often through meaningless one night stands with strangers who she doesn’t really know. It’s a bad habit of hers. Kalina is a compassionate soul, and does like to take care of people. She’s very sensitive to the feelings of others and can often pick up on small things some people can’t.

— Biography; The Marek’s were always a family of self-importance. They held themselves to a high standard and prided themselves on being the possessors of the throne for so many years. They were the rulers, and they would remain that way for the rest of their lives. They were perfectionists about it really. It didn’t just cause discourse with the rest of the world. With other rulers, potential suitors and allies. But it caused issues with the Marek family itself. Siblings would compete and throw themselves at each other’s throats to gain the throne. Their parents would only choose to endorse the one who was most qualified, who’d put in the most efforts. Unlike most royals, they did not choose their eldest son and their eldest daughter, but the one who showed most promise. It wasn’t uncommon for Marek siblings to argue. It was more rare than anything for them to actually be getting along. Jakob and Antoni were poisoned by this just as much as any Marek sibling. They duked it out for several years for their parents endorsement as the male heir to be put up for election. It was extremely promising, given that the Slyvinksy’s male heir wasn’t anything to scoff at. Tooth and nail, with snipes and jabs and sometimes physical blows, Jakob and Antoni would fight. Unlike their sister who never actually had to, given she was the only female. It was shortly before the election when their sister committed suicide. It was then Antoni decided that he was going to do better, to try and do better. He vowed to stop fighting Jakob and cherish his brother. He would end their feud. This is what made their parents choose him to endorse. And sure enough, with his promising resume and tact for politics, he got elected as their King. He got married. Little did he know that in Jakob’s heart, the feud was still ongoing and he was determined to win. Right under Antoni’s nose, despite having his own wife, Jakob slept with Antoni’s wife and got her pregnant. The woman was suddenly far more scared so she covered the affair quickly by saying her child was Antoni’s. His experience with his sister caving to the pressure of royal life meant he didn’t let any of those royal curses near his daughter. Instead he kept the paparazzi from her as much as possible, limited staff in contact with her. Kalina, born Isobela, was kept away from most people but her parents, uncle and aunt. Things were good for her. Her parents doted on her, her father completely unknowing of the truth of her lineage, and her mother just happy to have a child. She was spoiled, but most importantly loved. She was one of the lucky royals who knew the love of her parents. However, when she was four tragedy struck. Most would say it was up there with the suicide of Antoni’s and Jakob’s sister’s suicide. The palace was invaded by assassins in the night. They were bloodthirsty, killing most maids and guards in their wake. But their main targets were the royal family. The King, his wife. Though they’d been given special orders by those who’d sent them not to hurt Isobela. Because, while the feud burned in Jakob’s heart, with his power hungry wife cooing in his ear they plotted to have his brother killed so the family power would default to him. But there was one line he couldn’t cross. Jakob knew that Isobela was his, and he couldn’t bring himself to kill her. So he devised another plan. He had her injured enough so that the blood patterns would make it appear as if she had in fact died. And then he brought her quietly to his home. Most of those who were around her were killed in the attack, others were bribed. A month later, Isobela was living with Jakob - who had been crowned King -, now named Kalina. She was confused a lot, and often shouted for her mother and father. And soon the press statement was released. Jakob guiltily admitted to having an affair on the camera with a common woman. He begged for the forgiveness of his Kingdom and wife. But was now faced with the fact that his former lover had died and had left him behind a child he hadn’t known he had. He convinced them all that Kalina was his daughter and that he was going to do the noble thing and raise her while paying penance for his unfaithfulness. Kalina slowly forgot the memories of those who had raised her. And life with this man became the new normal. She came to know Jakob and his wife as her father and mother. To her, her father was the best to her. He was harsh with Alexa and Lena, their newer addition, but he would always take time to quietly dote on her. He would bring her gifts from his trips, get her new dresses. His wife however didn’t show any love towards the daughter she had adopted. Kalina was ignored by her mother for the most part. The woman was cold most of the time, without emotion. Sure, she was still bossy, still enforced that she couldn’t let down the Marek name, but she refused to even let her husband acknowledge her as a true potential heir to the throne. Old time royal views haunted her and spite that Kalina was alive at all. Kalina craved love from her mother, or even love from her father that could be more than a secret from his wife. She felt as if she was just a shame. She may have had bloodright to the throne, but she was treated as awfully as if she was a bastard in the older days. Kalina tried to keep her head down and stay rather lowkey. At the end of the day, she just needed to get away from her family, so when her mother suggested she attend a boarding school in Switzerland she jumped on the opportunity. She gradually distanced herself from the royal world. While it was still upper class members of society, at least she wasn’t judged so harshly there. Eventually, she graduated and moved onto a college campus. It was in her second year attending college that she stopped getting invited to galas and events. It was like not only had her mother given up on her, which she knew had happened a long time ago, but her father too. She felt like she was being left out on purpose, abandoned. So she started to act out, seeking love in others. Often this led to one night stands with no real love or romance involved at all. Sometimes, the men and women she found herself with were find with it. Others were looking for more. Most overall took her rejection pretty easily. But there was one man who swore up and down he was in love with her and tried to be with her. He was bullied on campus often, and she was the first one to really show any interest. Of course it was all superficial, she was just looking for someone to fill the emptiness inside of herself. Almost a few months later, after dodging all of his text messages, it was announced on the PA system that there was a shooter in the building. Lockdown procedures were fallen into, but it didn’t stop the shooter from ripping through the school. Many students were injured and killed that day. And finally, he came to Kalina’s classroom. He took off his mask and revealed himself to be the man she’d slept with who’d become obsessed with her. She was forced to watch him kill almost four members of her class when he finally started addressing her. He told her that he didn’t know why she couldn’t love him back. She tried to convince him that it wasn’t anything to do with him. And finally she tried to convince him she did love him, if only it meant the stop of the carnage. She managed to almost nearly talk him down, but at the last moment he told her that he knew she was lying and shot her before ending his own life. As she bled on the floor, she remembered her arm being cut as a little girl, and a man taking her away. Kalina was surprised when she woke up in the hospital if she was honest. She hadn’t expected to survive. She believed she had endured her last moments of life. But, sure enough she awoke. Only to find an onslaught of memories coming to her the more days she spent in the hospital. Finally, the dam broke and she realized what had happened. She confronted her mother and father, telling her she remembered everything. Her father surprisingly seemed happy to unload his guilty conscience, but her mother was furious. She said it was too dangerous. They had to end her. Her father refused, and finally they institutionalized her instead. She spent most of her time out of it, filled with things that were so strong she could barely open her eyes. It lasted for a few months, this new hell. Honestly, she was barely conscious. She lost almost twenty pounds, slowly starting to fade away as she could barely function. Finally, her father decided enough was enough. He wanted to rescue her, get her out of there. So he bribed the doctors to say she was still there. And for a long time she was put up in a hotel room, forced to undergo withdrawals from the drugs she’d been given, but finally he brought her to the Royal Pains Estate on the condition she wouldn’t say anything. She agreed to avoid returning to the drugged state. Anything to keep from going back there. And so she went. She just relied on the fact her father had somehow taken care of Lena and Alexa.

✗ Secret; Kalina was originally born Isobela, the legal daughter of King Antoni and his wife. She was kidnapped by her biological father after he had her legal father killed.

「 Faceclaim: Sabrina Carpenter.」

#ocs #females

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mountphoenixrp · 7 years

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We have a new citizen in Mount Phoenix:

Kang Daniel, who is also known as Geon; a 20 year old son of Tohil. He is a student and a chef at Honeypot Brewery & Tapas.

FC NAME/GROUP: Kang Daniel / Wanna One CHARACTER NAME: Kang “Euigeon” Daniel; Nickname: Geon AGE/DATE OF BIRTH: December 9, 1996 (20) PLACE OF BIRTH: Busan, South Korea OCCUPATION: Student at Mount Phoenix University (majoring in dance), cook at Honeypot Brewery & Tapas HEIGHT: 5’11” (~180cm) WEIGHT: N/A DEFINING FEATURES: Daniel looks like he stepped out of a manga panel, sporting wide shoulders, long legs, and a v-shaped jaw. He also has a mole under the corner of his right eye. His style can be described as trendy and casual. He’s fashionable and certainly not afraid to express himself. He likes wearing earrings on both ears. His hair is sometimes dyed in unusual colors such as pink, but he has currently settled for light brown. He wears eye make-up and is often groomed to perfection. Some may say he’s the definition of a pretty boy. He can usually be seen with a kind and bright smile on his face. When he speaks, he tends to have a Busan accent on some words.

PERSONALITY: Daniel oozes charisma. He’s charming and confident. However, he’s not confident to the point that he’s arrogant or cocky. Despite his fiery nature, he is rather warm and sympathetic. He’s on the wilder side, having inherited some of his father’s vibrant personality. He’s playful, not hesitating to crack a joke or smile wherever he goes. He finds comfort in lighthearted humor, hoping that others around him will feel the same way.

HISTORY: Born in Busan, Daniel is the son of the Mayan god, Tohil. His mother was a single mother who raised him all by herself. His father was never in his life. He has always had an unusually high body temperature for a human being, even though he was perfectly healthy. He was a bubbly and bright child, always giggling and smiling. His powers started to show when he was around three years-old. After seeing a picture of fire, he was able to create tiny amount of it in his hands which certainly freaked out of his mother. He later moved to Seoul with his mother to live with relatives.

Even though they didn’t have much, Daniel was perfectly content. His mother was too busy raising Daniel to find a stable job. Her parents would scold her for carelessly having a baby. Daniel and his mother were often ridiculed by their relatives. His mother assumed that Daniel was too young to know what was going on, but he was perfectly aware that his grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were never too fond of him. When money was running low, his mother would occasionally try to contact his father. However, that proved to be pointless. Daniel couldn’t help but feel like a burden to his mother. For years, he blamed himself for preventing his mother from living her life. Despite all of his hardships, Daniel was able to find one thing that he loved to do. He loved to dance. It was one of the only things that managed to help him feel better and to give him hope.

Around the age of sixteen, Daniel decided to move out and live on his own. He felt like he was suffocating living with his relatives. He rented a room in a rundown apartment and started working several part-time jobs. He basically took care of himself, which included cooking and cleaning. He also debated quitting school in order to work full-time. Since he was receiving mediocre grades, college was definitely not in the cards for him. His mother was worried sick about him. No matter how hard she tried to give her son independence, a sixteen year-old boy living by himself wasn’t the most ideal situation. His teacher, who was like a mentor to him, encouraged him to finish school. In the end, he managed to graduate with a high school diploma.

Seeing how Daniel was living certainly broke his mother’s heart. Through teary eyes, she decided to send him to his father since there isn’t anything for him in Seoul. At the age of eighteen, Daniel set out for the island of mount phoenix. He really didn’t know what to expect, but the living conditions were certainly better on the island.

PANTHEON: Mayan CHILD OF: Tohil POWERS:

Fire manipulation: He can control and shape fire as well as creating small amounts with his hands

Fire immunity: He’s completely unharmed by fire or heat.

Limited body temperature manipulation: He has the ability to heat up his own body and already has an unnaturally high body temperature. Thus, he’s never cold.

STRENGTHS:

In addition to his powers, he’s brave and grounded

He knows how to play to his strengths. He’s certainly not dumb.

somewhat sociable and relatable

WEAKNESSES:

He is unable to create large amounts of fire out of nothing, needing a source in order to manipulate it.

Strong emotions make it difficult for him to control his powers. Like a wild forest fire, he sometimes can’t be tamed.

He’s weak against water

#kpop rp #krp #wanna one #kang daniel #wanna one daniel #mp; welcome

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kurtbuensuceso · 5 years

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My Family Love Story

The story of my family began around February of 1996. My father, Brix, and my mother, Florence, first met on the second semester of their freshmen year. Apparently, they studied at the same university in College. They had different degree programs, though, as my mom took up BS Hotel and Restaurant Management while my dad took up BSBA major in marketing. Their paths first crossed when they became classmates in a minor subject, specifically English. My dad made the first move when he tried to borrow a ballpen from my mom. At first, she was not interested. She thought he was just one of those playful guys. But he felt something different. He knew she was not some ordinary girl. So as the days passed, he tried pursuing her.

Some couples would start their courtship stage by going on a first date. But that was not the case for my parents. My dad immediately gave my mom a bracelet on the Valentine’s Day of 1996. She was surprised at first but she gave him a chance. Hence, they started going out together. According to them, their first date was at McDonald’s near their school. She ordered Spaghetti while he got a rice meal. They proceeded to small talks, and shared some laugh since he is a humorous guy.

After seven months of courtship, my mom finally gave my dad her sweet ‘yes’. Their official boyfriend-girlfriend relationship started at their freshmen year until only the junior year. You would wonder, “why did it last for such a short time?” The answer is my older brother. It was during the summer of 1998 when a not so pleasant surprise arrived. My mom already got pregnant as she was about to enter her last year in college. It came as a shock for both of them as well as their families. So, the initiative was to hide it from their parents until they were ready to face the music. Obviously, the news could not be kept for so long. On the third month of my mom’s pregnancy, they both told each other’s parents. The initial reaction for the both sides were the same. My grandparents were hesitant but eventually came to terms with it.

Upon receiving the news, my grandmother from my father side insisted that they should be married. My parents did not have much say on their marriage. They just succumbed to the decision of their elderly. The wedding pushed through with a simple ceremony in Manila City Hall. On the 18th of August, 1998, they ended their boyfriend-girlfriend relationship and officially became partners for life.

The first house of my parents is inherited to them by my grandparents. As a matter of fact, it is still our home several years after they first moved in together. In the beginning, it was only the three of them― my father, my mother, and my older brother. But it was just for a short span of time because a year and four months later, I was already born.

We were a family of four for pretty much a long time. My brother and I were both baptized at the United Church of Manila. My family is born-again Christian so we grew up in a household that is bound by the religion’s teachings. Because of this, we both did not have our first communions or anything that the Catholics practice.

The age gap of me and my brother is not that far so when we were kids, it was easy for us to get along. I remember back then that we would always wear the same clothing, we had similar hairstyle, and basically had the same set of friends in our neighborhood. My mom had a hobby of matching everything that we have from shoes, to toys, even up to the little accessories. We also went to the same preschool through high school, where we were separated only by a year. Hence, whenever he graduates, I immediately graduate a year after. Our parents never missed important activities in our academic journey. They attended our graduation, boy scout investiture when we were in 4th grade, recognition, competition and a lot more.

A new blessing came in our way when we welcomed another addition to our family. On the 9th of July, 2009, my little sister named Trixia Martina was born. She is indeed a blessing from God because my mom was not expecting to bear a child anymore. With the prayers of our family and relatives, my mom successfully delivered a baby girl. It was a breath of fresh air since she is the only girl in the family aside from my mom. Martina, as we fondly call her, brought a lot of joy in our home.

She is a ray of sunshine that makes everyone in the room happy. I am thankful that God gave me another sibling that I can play and have fun with. Notwithstanding, a child I can impart my love and wisdom to.

Every family has been through ups and downs and mine is no exception. Although we shared plenty of happy memories together, we also had a fair share of struggles. I remember that our family almost got separated when I was in 3rd grade. My parents got into a deep fight that we thought we may not be able to resolve anymore. My brother and I momentarily parted as I live with my mother in Makati and my brother with my father in Manila. At that point, it was really difficult for us but I did not lose hope. When Martina was conceived, only then my parents got back together. They did not want her to have a broken family when she grows up. Hence, they patched things up for family’s sake. Safe to say, my little sister was the glue that made the family stick together.

Currently, my family is in a good state. My older brother recently finished his studies earlier this month. It was a proud moment for my parents as the success of my brother is as much as theirs. They have two children that they still have to think of though since I am still in my freshman year in College and Martina is just on her 5th grade. Nevertheless, I am happy because the fact that my family is still intact after all the road bumps we encountered along the way. It is still a long journey for us but I know that as long as we stand on each other’s side, we will make it through.

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roslinadama-sinequanon · 7 years

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Major Crimes Re-Watch- Out of Bounds

“Uh, what, no. Glasses go---” “On the top. Sorry. I remember.” I love this scene with Rusty clearing the table and Sharon teaching him how to use the dishwasher. Since the scene where Rusty’s mother didn’t show up on the bus, we have seen a real change in him. He has accepted that not only is his mother not coming back for him, she is staying away of her own free will. Even when she was given help and money to return to him, she chose to steal the money and not come back . I think that really made him face some facts and instead of trying to push Sharon away, he knows that she is now all he has and he is making an effort to make a new life with her, for however it lasts. Now with this new threat brought on by the discovery of his biological father it seems even more imperative that he prove to Sharon that he can do the things that she asks and fit into her life without being the trouble that he was before.

“My biological father.” “Who comes with biological grandparents, aunts, uncles…” In this scene, I think it becomes very apparent that Sharon and Rusty have completely different views of family. Sharon is trying to make Rusty open to the possibility that meeting his father may also bring other family members into his life, grandparents, aunts, uncles etc. For Sharon O’Dwyer Raydor that is a GOOD thing. While we don’t know a lot about Sharon’s family we do know that she is close to her parents and her kids, that they do things like go away for ski vacations together at Christmas. For Sharon family is comfort and warmth, love and connection…happiness. That has simply not been Rusty’s experience. The only family he has ever known is his abusive, neglectful, drug addicted mother. For Rusty family is chaos, pain, fear and hurt. So, for him the idea that he may have more relatives out there bringing that dysfunction and stress back into his life is hardly a good thing. The fact that Dunn’s brother is a coke addict hardly alleviates Rusty’s fear and wariness about the whole situation.

“Now that you know you have family, you may enjoy meeting them.” “And living with them?” And here is the crux of it all. Yes, Rusty has negative feelings about his father and is not interested in meeting other family members but most of all he is afraid that in meeting Dunn, he will be forced to leave Sharon---and that Sharon wants that to happen. You can hear the hurt in his voice when he says this. He’s already been dumped by one mother and now it seems like his surrogate mother might be looking to do the same. Also, by now, Rusty has found a stable home with a caring woman and is settling down into his new life at school and at home and he doesn’t want to lose that.

The little sort of gasp Sharon makes when he says this to her seems like she hadn’t realized that by trying to do the right thing and keep an open mind about his biological father that he might misconstrue this as her trying to get rid of him--because that is not how she feels at all.

“Rusty, I’m not trying to get rid of you. In fact if you weren’t here I’d miss you.” It is important that Rusty hear that from her. Sharon doesn’t lie--and he is coming to know that about her. By letting him know that she’d miss him she is telling that she truly cares about him.

I think Sharon really would miss Rusty. Sharon is a nurturer. I feel like she probably really struggled with the empty nest when both Emily and Ricky left for college, especially having been a single mom, but had built a comfortable life for herself with work and friends (I‘m sure she has them though we‘ve never met one). Then Rusty came along and while he was a pain in the ass and exhausted her in the beginning, I think she actually thrives and gains emotional fulfillment with helping him and nurturing him along. Though Sharon comes off as emotionally reserved, she actually has a very big and open heart--probably why she has to kind of keep a shield around it.

“Is that it? Now that I’m out of emergency care you’re going out every night? Is that it?” “To a murder.” LOL---as if Sharon is going out clubbing every night with different guy. In some ways, Rusty is a typical teenager. He doesn’t really want her to go out but there is no way he is going to say THAT to her, thus the sarcastic comment. And I love Sharon’s “Do your homework before you watch TV” and the little smirk. She knows exactly what he is saying and is happy Rusty wants her around.

“Madison High is not going to become a shooting gallery on my watch.” Taylor isn’t completely wrong here but I can’t help but wonder how interested Taylor would be about this school if his son didn’t go to school there. Taylor only seems to get involved in cases when they are personal to him or have the chance to reflect poorly on him. It is always about him.

“Say what you will about her, the woman knows the rules.” Love the way Sharon struts out of the room after the Taylor confrontation and Provenza makes this comment. Sharon is always smarter than Taylor is; he is always several steps behind her. It makes me wonder if Sharon plays chess with Rusty and if she’s good at it or not. And now that I say that, Rusty plays chess with Andy--the board was set up in hospital room--I wonder if Andy is any good. My speculation is that if she plays, Sharon is a good player; she is patient and able to think several steps ahead. I don’t think Andy would be very good, he is too impatient to play a game like chess--and is usually in the here and now. Okay, so I went off on a tangent there.

“I can make breakfast for you every morning.” Sharon comes home exhausted after a night at work and Rusty has an omelet ready for her. This is actually sweet but kind of sad at the same time. He really is scared that she is going to hand him off to Dunn. He knows he has treated her like crap and has made her life really difficult and that she has no real reason to want to keep him around so he is trying now to ingratiate himself with her--to show her that if she keeps him around he can make life easier for her--he can do better. It’s kind of sad that he feels he has to earn his place in Sharon’s life and home in ways a biological child who would be used to a parent’s unconditional love would never feel.

“I can’t deal with anymore adults and drugs and if he were into that sort of thing you guys could find out, right?” “Well, technically it’s against the law for me to run a background check on someone who’s not under criminal investigation.” “Well, then how am I supposed to decide if I want to meet him?” “I’ll have to think about how we might proceed.” This is Sharon in a nutshell. She knows the law but in knowing the law she also knows there has to be a legal way around it. She doesn’t jump into anything, does not make promises she cannot keep, she just tells him she is going to mull it over and see what she can do to help. Of course, this leads to her consulting Flynn and Provenza for their advice--I love how she now turns to them as allies rather than as adversaries.

“Thank you for the find job you do, you’re an American hero and I don’t tell that to you nearly enough.” Of course, it is Andy the rule bender that immediately comes up with this idea of the phone call--and I do love me some smartass Andy Flynn. I liked this part of the phone conversation because it seemed very real. I am sure that all the members of the team feel unappreciated for the work they do, putting their lives on the line to keep the public safe and not always getting the credit they deserve for that. I read once that the friction between police officers and firefighters often stems from the fact that the police are disgruntled that firefighters are always seen as heroes without any negativity, while police officers are sometimes viewed negatively because they have to use force and at times their guns. Police sometimes have to kill, firefighters don’t. Wow. I’m really going off on tangents today.

Ultimately, it is also Andy who comes up with the idea of calling DCYS to have them run a check on Dunn. He mentions there is a woman there he has been meaning to call anyway. Andy was quite the player on the Closer but if memory serves me correctly this is the last time we have Andy talk about dating or trying to date another woman.

“Holding Lamar Lewis any longer could leave us vulnerable to a lawsuit and since I need to let him go I’m making the best of a situation and if you are taking over this investigation please let me know.” “If this blows up it is not Sanchez’s job on the line, it’s yours.” I love that Sharon is not taking any of Taylor’s crap. Rather than supporting her and trying to help with the investigation he is behaving like a jerk, throwing his weight around, not trusting Sharon and threatening her job--in front of the squad. I love Buzz’s little smirk when Sharon asks if Taylor is taking over the investigation. Sharon may be new to the job but she is NO pushover.

“We have overwhelming presence at the school.” It is a pretty ballsy move for Sharon to allow Lamar to go to that school. It shows she is not afraid to make those kinds of tough controversial decisions--and to stick to it even when Taylor has a hissy.

“Officer down!” Amy gets the pulp beat out of her; her face is a bloody mess. Okay. Sharon gets one punch in the face and the fandom erupts for days LOL. We do love our Sharon. I like how we got the reaction of the team while she was being beaten--especially Sharon because you know she was beating herself up over this.

Interesting that Provenza ,who had the hardest time accepting Amy onto the squad, is the first to hop in the car to get to the hospital. While Amy might irritate him, she has guts, and Provenza admires guts. Also, Provenza is the grumpy grandpa of the group, he is going to give you loads of crap, he is going gripe and pick on you, but when push comes to shove, he will be the first one at your side to help you.

“Any word on Amy?” Sharon completely ignores Taylor when he interrupts Provenza’s answer to her question by going on about a press conference. Instead of responded to Taylor she simply asks Provenza again “How is detective Sykes?” She wants her answer and also shames Taylor because he was not interested in the answer.

“Concussion, cuts and bruises, dislocated jaw.” “Good God.” “This is one of the big differences from running internal affairs and working in homicide.” Provenza the veteran is trying to comfort Sharon whom he can see is riddled with guilt. She feels responsible for Amy getting hurt. It’s the first time someone she has sent into harms way has been hurt and he uses this as a way to mentor his superior, who in this case has less experience.

“But what did I miss?” I LOVE THIS. I love that Sharon is smart, confident, and decisive. But I also love that she is always looking at ways she could improve. That she is willing to take advice and possibly criticism if it means she can learn from it and can do her job better. I think the team really respects this about her. Sharon did not walk into that position thinking she knew everything and that it was going to be her way or the highway, which is what I think they probably expected.

“Sharon there is no defense against bad luck.” Provenza uses her name for the first time to purposely personalize this--letting her know that she didn’t do anything wrong and that no matter how prepared you are sometimes people get hurt.

“We can’t even take the time right now to properly consider Amy’s misfortune because we have a murder to solve which is what I’m sure Chief Taylor has come to remind us of.” Everyone forgot Taylor was there and this is Provenza’s way of digging at Taylor for not being interested in Amy’s well being. Taylor never once asks how she is. Again, poor quality of leadership. Are you going to walk through fire for a leader who cares about you as person or one who does not really give a rat’s ass about you?

“Maybe I should have kicked the bastard harder.” God love Julio--and Andy’s smirk of agreement. Andy and Julio really share that same sense of outrage over people who harm others--and they both have hotheaded tempers.

“Do you know how important being a quarterback is to someone from that neighborhood?” We learn something new about Sharon. This is the first time we get a slight inkling into Sharon’s knowledge of football--a passion she shares with Mary and that will later lead her to turning down her dream job as head of security for the NFL because as much as she‘d love it, she loves Andy and Rusty more.

“I can turn this into a win.” “Chief, may I say how touched we all are at the concern you’ve demonstrated for Amy Sykes.” Provenza calls Taylor out again. Taylor had nothing to do with getting a “win”. Amy was beaten up for it, but Taylor is sure willing to take the credit for it.

“Here’s a receipt with a time stamp.” Not too bright buddy, you were too eager with that receipt. If he’d had to fumble around to find it and not known if the time was on it, he might not have raised Sharon’s suspicion. But he did…and he paid the price.

“Good work today Captain.” Sharon nearly spits her coffee out at the unexpected compliment from Taylor. About time! Love the shared look between Julio and Sharon.

“You don’t get to pick your parents.” “No, you don’t.” Except in the end, Rusty does. He chooses Sharon to be his parent.

“Um, I just wanted to say that was really good work with the receipt.” Julio is now expressing his admiration for his new Captain. The whole team is coming around.

“Is Detective Sykes okay?” Even self-involved Rusty thinks to ask, where Taylor did not. Rusty even asks to go see Amy when Sharon says she is on her way to the hospital.

“What’s in the file that Lt.Flynn put together about your father?” Again, it is Andy doing all the legwork on Rusty’s family. First his mom and then his dad. Andy has been so involved with Rusty right from the beginning--he’s going to be a great step-dad.

“Do you want me to meet him so I can leave here and live with him?” “Of course not, unless that’s what you wanted to do.” There is such vulnerability in the way Rusty asks that question and Sharon is trying so hard to do the right thing and let it be his decision completely. Rusty then opens up to her about how he made a friend, wants to join the chess club, likes his history teacher…and then the little boy in him comes out with “I thought we were getting along, aren‘t we?” There is such hurt and vulnerability in that statement. He is so afraid that she doesn’t want him anymore. And Sharon’s “Yes we are, really well,” is said so eagerly. She doesn’t want to lose him anymore than he wants to lose her.

“I think I’m happy where I am.” Sharon has presented him with all the facts and has allowed him to use her as a sounding board for all his fears then let him make the decision over whether to meet Dunn or not without any judgment. This is an important trust builder in their relationship.

Overall, I liked this episode a lot. Great personal interaction between the characters, great mother ship moments and an interesting case that ended with some excitement.

#sharon raydor #andy flynn #Major Crimes #shandy #major crimes re-watch out of bounds

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purplesurveys · 5 years

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629

What color is your bedspread? Blue and yellow. Pick up the nearest book to you, turn to page 25 and read the first sentence. I’m on the rooftop and there isn’t a book anywhere near me at the moment. How many candles are in the room you are in? No candles, just two faint beams coming from our rooftop lights. What was your first word when you were a baby? My parents didn’t give much thought to stuff like that so they didn’t keep track of my first word, whatever it was. It was most likely either mommy or daddy though. How old were you in 1996? I was...somewhere in the universe, floating around lmao.

How old will you be in 2016? I turned 18 in 2016. How long until your birthday? A little less than three months before I turn 22. How many siblings do you have? Two. Are they older or younger than you? My sister is two years younger, my brother is five years younger. Are your grandparents still alive? I have three out of four. I lost my maternal grandfather in 2015. How many orange objects are there in the room you are in? The lights we have on our rooftop emit a yellow-orange hue. Have you ever run a stoplight? Never. I’ve seen enough car crash videos to know what could possibly happen if I was that impatient/if I drove too fast to brake. Do you have any children? Nope. Maybe by the end of the decade. Saying that and knowing that it isn’t 100% bullshit feels WILD. How was your first kiss? It was mostly her. I was too overwhelmed and shaking too much to remember. That whole time I was just in disbelief that I was already having my first kiss lol. Have you completed high school yet? Yeah, almost four years ago. I’m about to complete university/college this year. Do you have any relatives in the military currently? As far as I know, no. The only person I know who’s in the military is Angela’s uncle, who she’s told me about but we’ve never met each other. I also know Kate’s brother is attending military school instead of attending a ~traditional academic university, so to speak. Who got married at the last wedding you went to? Oh my, the last wedding I was in was in 2007, and it was between my uncle (my mom’s youngest brother) and my now-aunt. The new batch of weddings I’m going to be invited to now is definitely gonna be my friends’ and I’m STOKED. What time did you get up today? I first woke up at 6 AM, but I wanted to sleep in so I officially got up at around 9. When was the last time you stayed up all night? I haven’t had an all-nighter in around three years, but I did stay up until 4 AM partying with my friends a couple of months ago. We got back to Rita’s place by 5 AM, but I guess this still kinda counts as staying up all night. How long have you had a myspace, facebook, or whatever you use? I’ve had a Facebook since 2013 (I only made one since my English teacher in freshman year required us to make an account, but I technically wasn’t allowed by my parents so I had to sign up in secret). I made a Twitter three years before that, because it was a website that my parents didn’t know about yet so it was easier to sneak in and make an account for it. Who was the last person of the opposite sex you hung out with? My cousin, Jereth. We exchanged stories and played the Switch while waiting for 2020 to hit. Person of the same sex? Gabie. She came over last Friday. What color are your eyes? They are dark brown but appear to be black most days. Do you like them? Sure, it’s not like Filipinos have a choice lolol. Have you ever had braces? Yes, I had them for a year and a half in high school. I eventually lost my retainers and never got to buy another set, so everything that the braces did was to no avail since my teeth just went back to how they looked like pre-braces. :( Turn on your mp3, cd player, radio, etc. What song is playing? Khalid’s Talk just started playing on my Spotify. What was the last thing you drank? My second cup of barako coffee is keeping me company up on the rooftop right now.

Are you better at math or art? Math. I never accomplished anything presentable in art classes. Science or History? Oooooh, ya got me. I love both, but nothing replaces my love for history. Who was your 4th grade teacher? Ms. Belen, who is actually Satan in a middle-aged woman’s body. I won’t deny that I’ve wished for her death several times; she had her favorites and made her non-favorites know that she hated them. She was just that awful. Who was your best friend in 7th grade? Gabie! We actually met in the seventh grade and she’s been my best friend ever since then. Where did you go to pre-school, if you went at all? I went to the same school from preschool to high school, which we’ll hide under the name AA. We don’t have schools divided into primary, secondary, high school and whatever else y’all have in America. Who was the last person to call you? It was my mom. We went to the mall so I can spend time in Starbucks while she was looking for fancy china (we were going to have guests the next day), and she called to tell me she was gonna drive to another mall cos she couldn’t find any good plates in the mall we were currently in.

Did you smile in your driver's license picture? Yes. They told me I was allowed to smile, so I gave a hearty grin. Apparently that’s an unusual thing to do cos most people just give a closed-mouth smile or don’t smile at all, and the people at the LTO were very amused when my license was finally printed out hahaha. Do you have a job? Not yet, but that’s my goal by the end of the year. AHHHHHHHH WILD What is your favorite smell? Curry being cooked or cookies being baked. What's your favorite brand of gum? Bazooka is classic bubblegum flavor, so I’ll go with that. Have you ever dated someone & then dated their sibling? Nope. I think I’d find that super awkward, especially in my case because I see Gab’s sisters as my little sisters too lol. Who was your crush in 5th grade? My science teacher lmaoooo. We don’t talk about that era. Who was your first bf/gf? Gab. What color is the shirt you are wearing? Brown and black. What do you think of the 1980's? Pop music, big hair, Madonna, Michael Jackson. Have you ever dated someone more than 2 years older than you? I haven’t. How about 2 years younger? Nope. I’ve only dated one person and they’re the same age as me, so I don’t really know how I feel about age gaps in relationships. What brand of shampoo do you use? Dove. How long is your hair? It’s super long now that I hadn’t had it cut AT ALL in 2019. I want to have it long for my grad pic shoot so I’m probably not having it trimmed until February. If I lean my head a bit back, it already reaches my hips. If you could change one thing about yourself physically, what would it be? I’d have my teeth fixed. Is there a box of tissues in the room you are in right now? Nope, I’m out in the rooftop and there’s no reason to keep tissue in here lol. What time is it? 10:27 PM. Is their anything living (plant, animal, etc) in your room right now? We have plants on each corner of the rooftop. What color are the walls in your kitchen? White. All our walls are white, except for my brother’s bedroom which used to be the balcony until we had it renovated. His walls are creamish. Have you ever had a car accident? Mild ones. I’ve never been in a major crash where a car was totally destroyed or where someone was hurt. Do you have any major plans for today? There’s like half an hour left before the day officially ends, so I think I’m good. What kind of deoderant do you use? A...normal one? If you mean brands, I have a Dove one. What color is your toothbrush? Maroon and white. Do you own a digital camera? Nope. I stopped using those around seven or eight years ago. How old is the cellphone you have right now? It’s almost two years old. What are your initials, using the last letter of each of your names? NELZ. Do you know anyone named Tyler? I know a high school classmate’s stepbrother is named Tyler, but I don’t know anyone personally with that name. How about Reese? Katreen’s younger sister is named Reese. Diana? No. I know several Diannes, though. Shelby? That’s a no for me. Have you ever kissed someone who's name started with "C"? Negative. How about "L"? Also no. "E"? I haven’t. "B"? Andddddd nope. Are both your parents still living? Yep. What was the last thing you cooked? Nothing. How many times have you moved in your life? That I remember? Two. Do you live within 20 miles of your birthplace? Yeah, I think Manila counts as being pretty close to where I am now. Can you do a handstand? I can’t. I tried many times as a kid though (and hurt myself several times in the process). Is it after 11am? Well after, in fact. What day is it? Thursday, but it’s soon going to turn to Friday. What's the longest time you've ever spent on the phone? I was once on a Viber call for around eight hours straight with Gab back in like the early months of our relationship. That was insane. We never did it again after that lolol. How many pairs of brown shoes do you own? Just the one pair of brown heels. Are you on any prescribed medications? Nopes. What was the date 2 weeks ago from today? December 19th. If you aren't already married, do you expect to be married within 5 years? No. I’m giving myself between 7-10 years. How about 2 years? That’s an even bigger no. How many funerals have you been to in your lifetime? I’ve never been to a funeral, just wakes. I don’t think I’d like funerals, so I want to stay as unaware as I am now. Have you ever been far away from home on your birthday? Yeah. I was in Batangas for my 20th. I also went on a cruise around East Asia for my 18th birthday, but I was back in the Philippines by the day of my actual birthday. The cruise took place in the days leading up to it. Have you ever had a pet fish? Yes. My first pets were goldfish. Do you have any tattoos? Nope. Would you ever or do you have a nose piercing? Probably not. I wanted one as a teenager though. If you only had 30 days to live, what would you do? That’s pretty dark, but uhhhhhhhh I guess I’d spend all my money, party as much as I want, drink as much as I want, look for new owner/s for my dog, drive as far as I can, spend most of the time with my girlfriend.

#survey #surveys

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gordonwilliamsweb · 4 years

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Feeling Anxious and Depressed? You’re Right at Home in California.

It’s official, California: COVID-19 has left us sick with worry and increasingly despondent. And our youngest adults — ages 18 to 29 — are feeling it worst.

Weekly surveys conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau from late April through late July offer a grim view of the toll the pandemic has taken on the nation’s mental health. By late July, more than 44% of California adult respondents reported levels of anxiety and gloom typically associated with diagnoses of generalized anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder, a stunning figure that rose through the summer months alongside the menacing spread of the coronavirus.

America at large has followed a similar pattern, with about 41% of adult respondents nationwide reporting symptoms of clinical anxiety or depression during the third week of July. By comparison, just 11% of American adults reported those symptoms in a similar survey conducted in early 2019.

The July responses showed a marked geographic variance, with residents of Western and Southern states, where the virus remains most virulent, registering greater mental distress, on average.

The findings reflect a generalized sense of hopelessness as the severity of the global crisis set in. Most adults have been moored at home in a forced stasis, many in relative isolation. The unemployment rate hit its highest rate since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Thousands of families across California and tens of thousands across the U.S. have lost people to the virus. There is no clear indication when — or even if — life will return to normal.

“The pandemic is the first wave of this tsunami, and the second and third waves are really going to be this behavioral health piece,” said Jessica Cruz, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) California.

The surveys were part of a novel partnership between the National Center for Health Statistics and the Census Bureau to provide relevant statistics on the coronavirus’s impact. In weekly online surveys over three months, the Census Bureau asked about 900,000 Americans questions to quantify their levels of anxiety or depression. The four survey questions are a modified version of a common screening tool physicians use to diagnose mental illness.

Respondents were asked how often during the previous seven days they had been bothered by feeling hopeless or depressed; had felt little interest or pleasure in doing things; had felt nervous or anxious; or had experienced uncontrolled worry. They were scored based on how often they had experienced those symptoms in the previous week, ranging from never to nearly every day. High scores on the anxiety questions indicated symptoms associated with generalized anxiety disorder. High scores on the depression questions indicated symptoms of major depressive disorder.

In both California and the nation, symptoms of depression and anxiety were more pronounced among young adults, and generally decreased with age. For example, nearly 3 in 4 California respondents between ages 18 and 29 reported “not being able to stop or control worrying” for at least several of the previous seven days. And 71% reported feeling “down, depressed or hopeless” during that time.

Interestingly, respondents 80 and older — an age group far more likely to suffer and die from COVID-19 — reported nowhere near the same levels of distress. Just 40% reported feeling down or hopeless for at least several days in the previous week, and 42% reported uncontrollable worry.

Cruz said that may be because young adults are more comfortable expressing worry and sadness than their parents and grandparents, adding that such openness is a good thing. However, even before the pandemic, suicide rates among teens and young adults had been on a yearslong climb nationwide, and California emergency rooms had registered a sharp rise in the number of young adults seeking care for mental health crises.

Some researchers have cited the ubiquitous reach of social media — and with it an increased sense of inferiority and alienation — as factors in the rise in mental health struggles among younger generations. COVID-19 could be exacerbating those feelings of isolation, Cruz said.

The Census surveys also found higher rates of depression and anxiety among those who have lost jobs during the pandemic. Young adults in the service sector have been hit particularly hard by the wide-scale economic shutdowns. In July, the unemployment rate among U.S. workers ages 20 to 24 was 18%, compared with 9% among workers 25-54, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Others noted that many other young adults who would normally be immersed in college life are stuck on the couch in their parents’ home, staring at a professor on Zoom, with little social life and no paid work after class.

“Some of the things that generally help improve mood have been more difficult and more challenging now,” said Paul Kim, director of counseling services at the University of California-Davis. “So I think some of our counselors’ work is to help them think through, ‘How is it, for example, you stay socially connected while socially distant?’”

Californians with lower incomes also reported higher levels of anxiety or depression. About 72% of California respondents with household incomes below $35,000 reported “little interest or pleasure in doing things” for at least several of the previous seven days, according to an average of survey results from July 2 through July 21.

“People have had a lot of trouble accessing unemployment benefits — that has not been an easy path,” said Jo Campbell, a therapist and integrated operations director at Hill Country Community Clinic, which provides services to clients, many of them economically disadvantaged, in Shasta County.

Some experts said they worry that the tumble toward depression and anxiety could outlast the pandemic itself, particularly if the economy lapses into a prolonged recession.

“The pandemic will likely have short- and long-term implications on mental health and substance use,” said Laura Pancake, a vice president at Pacific Clinics, one of the largest mental health service providers in Southern California. The pandemic, she added, “has only exacerbated existing challenges that many face, including unemployment, poor health and other barriers.”

Phillip Reese is a data reporting specialist and an assistant professor of journalism at California State University-Sacramento.

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Feeling Anxious and Depressed? You’re Right at Home in California. published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

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dinafbrownil · 4 years

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Feeling Anxious and Depressed? You’re Right at Home in California.

It’s official, California: COVID-19 has left us sick with worry and increasingly despondent. And our youngest adults — ages 18 to 29 — are feeling it worst.

The July responses showed a marked geographic variance, with residents of Western and Southern states, where the virus remains most virulent, registering greater mental distress, on average.

Some experts said they worry that the tumble toward depression and anxiety could outlast the pandemic itself, particularly if the economy lapses into a prolonged recession.

Phillip Reese is a data reporting specialist and an assistant professor of journalism at California State University-Sacramento.

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/feeling-anxious-and-depressed-youre-right-at-home-in-california/

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stephenmccull · 4 years

Text

Feeling Anxious and Depressed? You’re Right at Home in California.

It’s official, California: COVID-19 has left us sick with worry and increasingly despondent. And our youngest adults — ages 18 to 29 — are feeling it worst.

The July responses showed a marked geographic variance, with residents of Western and Southern states, where the virus remains most virulent, registering greater mental distress, on average.

Some experts said they worry that the tumble toward depression and anxiety could outlast the pandemic itself, particularly if the economy lapses into a prolonged recession.

Phillip Reese is a data reporting specialist and an assistant professor of journalism at California State University-Sacramento.

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Feeling Anxious and Depressed? You’re Right at Home in California. published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

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lalka-laski · 4 years

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Do you and your parents like any of the same bands/singers? Absolutely. They’re responsible for majority of my music taste. And I love when the roles reverse and THEY latch onto a band/artist that I introduced to them. Is there any food in your bedroom? Nope. I rarely eat in there anymore. Do you know anyone who has road rage? My boyfriend. Driving with him gives me headaches for that reason! Too often I have to ask him to calm down and stop cursing. How expensive is too expensive for a pair of shoes? I’m not a shoes person at all, so any amount of money is more than I care to spend How far away do your grandparents live from you? Their assisted living facility is just about 10-15 minutes from my apartment

What kinds of cereal are in the cupboard? Cinnamon Toast Crunch for my 5 year old self, and some kind of Great Grains for Glenn’s 85 year old self. Is there anything related to cats in your bedroom? Uhhh nope Whats the last thing you spent over 10$ on? I spent over $100 yesterday at Bath & Body Works. But in my defense, $55 worth of it was for my sister & she’s paying me back! Over 30$? See above^. I can’t help a candle sale!! Do you know who lives three houses down from you? I live in an apartment complex Do you think Canadians all really love maple syrup? It seeps out their pores instead of sweat. Everyone knows this. Is there a bulletin board in your room? Negative Is your mom a big health freak or your dad? Or neither? My mom is a conscientious eater (although she’s very balanced and regularly indulges in her favorite “treats” and wine). My dad, on the other hand, eats and drinks whatever he pleases with no regard for his own health. It worries me sometimes. Easter or Halloween? Those are actually two of my favorites! Do you know anyone who wants to be the president one day? No way What kinds of chips are in the cupboards? Two kinds of Doritos, two kinds of tortilla chips, and some Great Value Cheddar & Sour Cream. Do you have your moms or dads hair? I’m the only blonde in the family so.... neither? Whats the first thing you see when you walk into your bedroom? The bed, most likely Have you ever skipped history class? In college, I’m sure. Do you own any yellow clothes? Very little, if any. I’m too pale to pull of yellow. Do you have any friends who have naturally red hair? Strawberry blonde or auburn, but no full-on redheads. Have you ever cried when a teacher retired? I can’t say I have Does your kitchen looks like it was designed in a completely different decade? Eh, kinda. My guess would be late 90′s? Whens the last time you wore heels? Years & years ago Do you have your moms or dads eyes? My dad’s Is there anything shiny in the room youre in? Not really Whats the best date movie? I’m not big on movies, much less on a date. It’s too impersonal. How long has your current best friend been your best friend? My longest best friend & I have known each other for 28 years strong! Have your parents ever been out of the country? My mom was born “out of the country” and my dad was military, so he’s traveled across the globe. Are you older then the last person you laughed with? Nope How many pairs of jeans, all together, are in your house? Uh, I don’t know or care enough to count Do you swear and yell while playing video games? I don’t play them to begin with. But Glenn does & he does occasionally swear but only under his breath. He doesn’t go Kyle mode. Would you rather name your daughter Andrea or Eva? They’re both quite pretty. Is there any alcohol in the fridge? Do you know me? If you had to get up at 6am tomorrow morning, would it be painful? I’m up by 5:30 most days and yes, it is painful. Tomorrow would be especially so because it’s supposed to be my sleep-in day! Have you ever seen the last person you watched TV with drunk? Ha, sure have. Has a best friend ever ditched you for a girlfriend/boyfriend? Not altogether but for certain occasions. Would you rather get a new brother or sister? My parents are WAY too old for this to even be a consideration.

Do you have anything in your room youve had for ten years or more? Plenty of things. I’m very sentimental and I like holding on to stuff for years and years. Would you ever kiss the last person who messaged you on facebook/MSN/etc? I’m Fb Messaging with Glenn right now and I plan to kiss him as soon as I get home. Do eat at home or in restaurants more? Well thanks to Covid, eating out in restaurants was impossible for several months. I’m slowly making my way out into the public again but I certainly eat at home more. Who has the money to dine out every night?? Whens the last time you were so excited you couldnt sleep? Why? It’s been awhile. These days, it’s more that I’m too anxious to sleep. Audrey Hepburn or Audrey Kicthing? I have no clue who the latter is but I’d choose Audrey Hepburn over anyone, regardless.

If your best friends birthday was next week, what would you get them? It depends which best friend we’re talking about What is your moms favorite movie? Love Actually How much older is your dad then you? Oh boy, gonna make me do some math here?? Pass. What TV family reminds you of your own family? We are the family from Last Man Standing to a T! Do you own any flip-flops? They’re my preferred footwear. I’m wearing a pair right now! Did you ever really believe that the stork brought babies? My parents never told me that, I don’t think. Do you have any relatives who really spoil you? Sure Are there any drawers in your house that are just filled with junk? The drawers of my art desk are a hodge podge Is the last person you spoke to in love? Yeah! How far away is Chicago from where you live? I don’t feel like looking it up Do you know anyone who always looks perfect? Who? A few people, yes. Do you know anyone who has security cameras in their house? Yep Do you think Zac Efron is really that good looking? I honestly never did. Pretty boys aren’t my type. What was the last movie to make you cry? I won’t lie, I teared up a little at Lilo & Stitch the other night Has anyone you know ever pulled the fire alarm in school, joking around? There was somebody in my residence hall Freshman year who did that often. How mature, right? Who was the main character in the last book you read? Her name was Margaret Is the last person you said goodbye to single? Nope, she’s married Who are the last people you saw kiss? Honestly I’m not sure. I haven’t kissed Glenn in public in awhile because we have to be masked up wherever we go Have you ever posted a fan fiction on a website? Nope Do you ever fantasize about your future wedding? Whos the bride/groom? I honestly never did until I met the love of my life. Now I daydream about it often :) Chapstick or lipgloss? Chapstick. I haven’t worn lipgloss since probably middle school. What was the last unplesant thing to wake you up? Oh my God. I had intense night terrors last night that I can hardly bring myself to talk about now. They were so bad I was shaking. Do you have any friends who are ALWAYS kissing their bf/gf? I might be that friend LOL Does that get annoying? I’m sure people probably think we’re annoying or at least *ahem* excessive. Would you rather look at clouds or stars? Why not both? If you could trade appearances with the last person you hugged, would you? This is is an uncomfortable question! Do you have any relatives who are expecting a baby really soon? Actually no. Not that I know of, at least.... Do you ever wonder what the opposite sex do at sleepovers? I’m assuming video games & berating women? When you get married, who will be the maid of honor/best man? I have two sisters so they will share the title Does your best friend get along with their parents? I have multiple best friends & the answer to this varies If you were to walk to Florida from where you live, would it take long? It would take YEARS Do you understand why ‘To kill a mockingbird’ is called what it is? Yep When’s the last time you broke plans? Why? I do it semi frequently. I’m always gung-ho about plans when I make them, but get struck by laziness and anxiety when the time rolls around. Have you ever been in a wedding? What were you? I was the flower girl for my aunt’s wedding when I was 4. I got halfway down the aisle, noticed everyone staring at me and burst into tears. Classic! Would you feel safer with an alarm systen or security camera? Both, although I guess a security camera is no good if you only use it in retrospect, huh? Does the last person you touched smoke? I don’t think she does Do you know someone who is CONSTANTLY texting? Does that annoy you? IT’S ME I’M BITCHES Does it matter to you what kind of shampoo you use? Definitely. Especially because my hair’s color treated. I need to use regular shampoo to keep it clean and then purple shampoo to keep the yellow tones at bay. Rate this survey from 1 to 5 (1 worst, 5 best): Honestly this was a solid 5!

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fresnocarealestate · 6 years

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Is Multi Generational Living for You?

There is an increasing demand for multi generation homes in Fresno CA. As more people in their early 20’s opt to stay at home with their moms and dads, and more baby boomers are retiring, the real estate business has seen a greater need for homes that can accommodate several households under one roof.

Don’t be surprised! Multi generational living is a rising housing trend in the U.S. these days, and almost one out of five Americans have been living in a multigenerational household since 2014.

Records show that 64 million Americans have adopted the multi generational lifestyle. Will you also consider embracing this housing trend?

What is multi generational living?

Why live in a multi generational home?

Pros and Cons

What to know before buying a multi generational home?

How to finance a multi generational home?

Kinds of homes best suited for multi generational living

Property features to make multi generational living easy

How to make multi generational living work

What is multi generational living?

If you're asked to picture multi generational household, you'll probably imagine a set of parents with children and an older couple who are most likely the grandparents. If this is how you imagine multi-generational living is, you're right.

“Multi generational living is when two or three generations come together and live under the same or in the same property.”

There are many reasons why this happens and why many people choose this type of living situation.

There are different kinds of multigenerational household. There's two generations, three generations, and more than three generations.

The two generation household is something you’re familiar with. It happens when people from two generations live under one roof. This is a scenario you know about. For example, a couple from one generation living with children from another generation.

Typically, when you grow up, you move out and get your own place. Right? Well, in this kind of household, the child (who is now an adult) does not move out of the house but opted to stay and live with the parents. Or he or she could have moved out of the house, but came back and started sharing one roof with the parents.

The three-generation household is the one you've imagined. It consists of grandparents, parents, and children living under one (or one property but under different roofs in some cases).

More than three generations refer to a family unit that has different generations living together. This could mean having children, the parents, the grandparents, and some other relatives that’s not of the same generation as the children and the parents.

Whatever the reasons are, the fact remains that multi generational living is increasingly becoming popular.

It's like the 1940's again where three generations living was the norm for many families. In this period, about 25% of U.S. population lived with three or more generations in one home. The American household started moving towards the two generation style after the war ended.

Why live in a multi generational home?

You're probably wondering why any adult would want to live with their parents. Or why would someone want to live with a relative?

There are some reasons why some people choose multi generational or next generation homes. Let us explore the reasons below:

Financial benefits. This is primarily the reason why many people are starting to prefer living in multi gen homes.

Living is costly these days! Buying or renting a home can cause a serious dent in someone's pocket. Some college and fresh college graduates who have student loans and car loans opt to stay in their parents home to be able to pay off their loans, or save money when the time comes they have to move out.

Different family structures also make owning a multigenerational home practical. If you are a single parent supporting two or three children, moving back to the family home or buying a multi generational home for sale in Fresno CA with your parents is a significant advantage.

Not to mention the savings on childcare because now that there are grandparents who can look after the children when the parent is away.

There are also families who opted to live with the grandparents because one or both the grandparents need financial help.

Relationship benefits

Another good reason why many people love living with their extended family is because of relationship benefits. The assurance that someone will be there to look after the children when the parents are away is a great benefit.

The opportunity for grandparents and grandchildren to interact and develop a closer bond is another reason why some people opt to build an in-law wing. Aside from the close bond and relationship, there's also the care-giving and household management factors.

Pros and Cons of multi generational living

There are always two sides to a coin. Different family structures have different pros and cons. In this section, we will learn the advantages and disadvantages of living in a next generation home.

The Pros

Saving money. Living in a multi gen home with extended members of the family can actually save you money because you share living expenses.

If your previous monthly rent was $1000, when you rent or buy a home with your extended family members, you cut down your expenses because you are sharing the rent with someone. The same is true with utility bills. This can help you save more.

If you decide to live with your parents and they are still paying the mortgage of the house, you can pay a rental fee at an amount that is convenient to your budget.

Shared responsibilities. Leaps and bounds in medical technology enhanced lifespan. Now that people are living longer, the challenge becomes "how do we take care of the home?" The answer is in next generation homes.

When different-age people live together, distributing age-appropriate responsibilities is the way to go. Younger people in the household can take care of more challenging physical work like mowing the lawn, cleaning, repairs jobs, paint jobs, lifting boxes, etc. Older generation can then take the less physically demanding tasks like cooking, washing the dishes, looking after the children, and other less strenuous tasks.

Improved family relationship. When a household includes small kids, parents, and grandparents, you can just imagine how many different generations there are in that house.

Living under one roof gives family members, especially grandparents, more time to interact with their grandchildren, giving them plenty of time for emotional bonding and in the process developing more closeness among themselves.

With a multi generational household, there's no need for a special occasion to gather and have fun. It can be done weekly.

Improved security. Grandparents benefit from the social relationship with their grandchildren. They feel more secure. This social interaction also limits the depression and loneliness frequently observed among the older generation.

A multi generational household offers significant advantages to children whose parents are absentee or suffering from divorce. Grandparents are an instant source of love, support, attention, and affection. Whether that's providing assistance in doing homework or just being there to listen or help when the children need someone to talk with is already a big help.

The constant attention of a loved one when one or both parents are busy or away at work can be a source of assurance for the children.

Take a look at this video from FastNews365.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdyRj5wb73o&t=31s

The cons

While there are many advantages to living in a next gen Fresno CA home with your extended family, there are also disadvantages. Check out the following cons:

Personality conflicts. One of the major disadvantages of living with other people are conflicts in habits and behavior. If you're a parent, you may not be used to being given unsolicited advice on how to raise your kids.

If you're a grandparent, you may have conflict with your children regarding parenting style or financial matters. If you live with your in-laws, you may not agree with some of their ideas, which causes friction in the relationship and affect the family dynamic.

Limited space and privacy. Another disadvantage of multi generational living is the limited space and privacy. Traditional homes are designed and built for only a few people. Squeezing in more family members can limit the space for everyone and cause discomfort unless you get a home designed to accommodate everyone's needs.

What to know before buying a Fresno CA multi generational home?

Living in the same house with your parents, in-laws, or grandparents can be great for everyone, but it also has its own challenges. Before you agree to creating a multi generational household, here are some considerations you need to make.

1. Space and privacy for everyone. The most important factors when considering a multi-gen home are privacy and space. Each member of the family should have a space to call his or her own.

This could mean installing new walls to divide rooms, or modifying your home structure to ensure that other family members feel they have their own place.

For many people of the older generation, it means having their own front door and their own den and mini-kitchen where they can enjoy their privacy.

In Fresno CA, builders like Lennar are already constructing homes that cater to this trend. In fact, they have already introduced next gen homes at the Ellingsworth New Home Community.

2. The financing. This is a very important topic you need to have a conversation with your family members. Talking about financial matters may be awkward, but it must be done.

Some issues you need to discuss include:

Who will buy the property?

How will the mortgage be paid?

How much will the monthly contribution be?

Some families who have tried to the multi gen household setup recommend having a "house" prenup. This is a document that clearly states how the family would pay for the home, how long they would do, how much each person's contribution would be, etc. The house prenup basically covers the expenses for the home.

It also includes an "exit strategy" in case someone wants to move out.

The house prenup is signed by all adult members of the family, signifying their agreement to the plan.

3. The right buyer’s agent. Not all agents know how to sell the right multi generational home. You need the help of the right buyer’s agent to ensure that you’ll have a smooth and stress-free home buying journey.

Having a buyer’s agent is one of the best things you can do when you buy a Fresco CA next gen home.

Check out some of the benefits of using a buyer’s agent.

Better representation. Listing agents have the interests of the sellers in mind. A buyer’s agent has your needs in mind. When you have a buyer’s agent, you can be sure your needs are met and prioritized.

More opportunities. Having a buyer’s agent means you have a professional dedicating time and effort to find a place according to your parameters. This way, you don’t waste time looking at houses that don’t fit you. Having a buyer’s agent also means you have a wider network and more homes to look at.

Professional recommendations. If this is your first time to get a home mortgage, you’ll need professional assistance to make sure you are getting a good deal and how to work the number of people you’ll be meeting, from loan officers to appraisers.

Discover how I can help you here: http://equityassetsrealestate.com/about-jason-nenadov/

4. Location. When it comes to purchasing a home, location is very important. You need to consider the needs of each family member.

If you have elderly family members with health conditions, your home should be close to the hospital. If you have school-age children, you should be within proximity to good school districts. Of course, you also have to find a home that's within a short driving distance of family members who work.

Being near shopping and dining options should also be part of the consideration.

5. Resale value. Whenever you buy a property, you have to keep the resale value in mind. Fortunately, there is an increasing need for multi gen homes so the demand is likely to remain consistent.

6. Get everyone involved in the discussion. Buying a multi generational home is quite a challenge because not only do you have to consider the needs of every family member who’ll live in the house, even those who won’t live in the house should also get their two cents in because the property becomes a potential inheritance.

How to finance a multi generational home

Buying a home can be a challenging and tedious process. Buying a multi generation home makes it even more challenging. Not only do you have to consider more people’s needs and must-haves, you also have to deal with more employment issues, credit scores, financial stability, and more.

Before buying a multi generational home, you need to have a clear discussion with everyone involved. You need to get things in writing, with everyone’s signature. This is a precautionary measure for those times when some people have forgotten what they’ve agreed to and start making things difficult.

Individual mortgage or joint loan?

A custom-built multi generation home, or even one that is big enough for you and has an attached suite for your in-laws, can be expensive. Fortunately for you, you have the option of getting an individual loan, or if the house is too expensive, a joint mortgage.

An individual loan is when you get a mortgage and you pay for it by yourself. A joint mortgage is when you and your parents or your grandparents apply for a mortgage together.

“In a joint mortgage, the lender will evaluate all the applicants’ incomes and assets and consider it as a cumulative number. There are pros and cons to getting a joint loan.”

There are pros and cons to getting a joint loan.

For one, if your income is not high enough and your parents or extended family members have better-paying jobs, the salary amount on your application paper will look good. If your credit history is a little rocky, partnering with someone who has excellent credit history can really help.

A joint loan also allows you to save some money on the property tax, and you and your parents will also get an income tax rebate.

However, while it may look great because you can qualify for a larger loan, there are also several downsides.

One downside is if you have a good credit history and your parents have a bad credit history, it will harm the chance of getting a mortgage. In this case, you are better off getting an individual mortgage.

Another disadvantage is everyone who took a mortgage is responsible for paying it on time or risk getting penalized. This can be difficult especially in situations where one might have lost his or her job, so others have to carry an additional burden.

Check out how this family resolve their family’s multi generational home mortgage concerns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfXxa2H9ZhM

Kinds of homes best suited to multi generational household

The typical American home structure would find a multi gen household a tight fit primarily because it was not designed to cater to such a family structure. With grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and other relatives coming to live in the house, you need a special kind of home to accommodate everyone comfortably.

Here are some kinds of next gen homes in Fresno CA.

Homes with in-law suites or guest house. In-law suites or apartment are living spaces built over a garage or like a basement. It can also be an attached living quarter, or it can be completely detached from the home.

A guest house can be an attached or detached living space that comes with its own kitchen, bathroom, and sometimes a den, or small living room.

Both in-law suites and guest houses have their separate entrances.

Two homes on one lot. Another ideal home style for a multi-gen is a property with two homes. It could be two single family homes on one lot.

Duplex. Two duplex standing side by side is another good option if you have to live with your extended family. You have your own duplex and they have theirs.

Custom-built homes. A customized home built with everyone in your family’s needs in mind is the best home suited for multi generational living. Another builder of next gen homes in Fresno is De Young Properties. Property features to make multi generational living easy

Property features to make multi generational living easy

If you've decided to give multi gen a go, knowing the right property features can make it easier to live with parents or other family members.

Here are home features you MUST include in your multi-gen home.

1. Easy access. Whether you are in the process of building a home or buying a home, one of the most important features you need to have is easy access for all, particularly for family members who might have a walking aid or in a wheelchair. You want a home where everyone, from the youngest to the oldest family members, can freely come in and feel comfortable.

2. Flexible living spaces. Homes with flexible living spaces are the ideal ones for multi generational families. Keep the living spaces (ex. bedrooms) as simple as possible so when a family member leaves (ex. a child goes to college), his or her bedroom can be easily be converted into a guest room or an alternative sitting room.

3. Ensure privacy. Although a next gen home promotes shared living spaces, it does not mean you don't get privacy. Having your private space can be achieved by using various architectural features like movable wall dividers and cabinets. Adding a second entrance also gives the feeling of privacy because they get to have their own door.

4. Add suites. If you have a large house and would like to customize it for a multi gen household, adding a suite is the best way to do it. Creating an "in-law suite" that functions as a mini-apartment will make the user feel more comfortable.

5. Soundproofing. If you can find a house that already has a built-in in-law wing that's also soundproofed, that's great. If not, be prepared to invest in soundproofing.

Why should you even bother with the sounds? Because if you have small children, they will likely be running around and causing too much noise, which can be disturbing for the elderly grandparents. On the other hand, it could be that the elderly grandparents like to watch TV a little too loud and the noise carries over to your living room, or study room, or kitchen.

How to know if multi generational living is right for you

Multi generational living can be fun and exciting. It can also be challenging and stressful. Expect plenty of adjustments, bickering, and challenges. But also expect cooperation, understanding, and empathy.

Before your family dives deep into this lifestyle, here are some things you need to talk about.

Will this be for short-term or long-term? Cohabiting with extended family members presents its own challenges, so you need to know how long everyone wants to do it, and what are some exit strategies.

How do you split the bills? Mortgage payments aside, you also have to consider utility and living expenses.

What’s the best way to ensure privacy? Living together under one roof does not mean seeing each other all the time. You have to make sure that everyone has their own private space they can escape too when the demands and challenges of being around the family become too much.

Multi generational living has its own perks and challenges. If you love the idea of living with your parents, parents-in-law, or grandparents, then this trend may be for you.

Discover multi generational homes in Fresno CA!

When you want the best real estate experience, call me, Jason Nenadov, at 559-246-8991. At Equity Assets Real Estate, you and your needs are our top priority.

#FrescoCANextGenHomesForSale #MultiGenerationHomesFresnoCA #JasonNenadov

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vyldan · 6 years

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Culturebox

Where I’m From

How a trip to Kenya changed the way I think about the terms African-American and black American.

By Aisha Harris

July 29, 20145:12 PM

One of the first times I recall being asked the question “Where are you from?” was also one of the first times I realized that being black wasn’t a sufficient answer. For a sixth-grade project, I had to create my own version of a family crest to be presented to the class. The idea was for each student to celebrate her ethnic heritage. I knew my ethnicity, but where were my ancestors from? While almost all of my classmates in my predominantly white Connecticut elementary school could proudly claim that their grandparents—or great-grandparents—had come to America at some point from Ireland, or Italy, or Greece, I was forced to acknowledge that I had no idea where my forebears had lived, as they were brought here against their will and any records of their origins had long since been lost. My grandparents and great-grandparents on both sides of my family were born in the South and the mid-Atlantic—hardly an interesting story, or so I thought at the time.

I was recently asked where I’m from again—multiple times—in an entirely different context: while in Kenya for a wedding. On one occasion, I struck up a friendly conversation with a young armed guard (and aspiring engineer) who stood watch within the gate of the compound where my boyfriend and I, along with several of the other foreign wedding guests, were staying.

“Where are your parents from?” he clarified, after I told him I was a visiting American. “They’re also from America,” I explained, slightly confused about what he was getting at.

Eventually, it dawned on me: He was asking the same question my school project had asked: He was curious what non-American country my family was from. Kenya, Nigeria, both? I tried to explain that as far as I know, I have no immediate or extended relatives outside of the States, but he didn’t seem to fully grasp what I meant.

Later, another Kenyan I met—the cousin of the bride—posed the same question to me during the wedding afterparty. His complimentary response: “Ah, you look like you could be African!”

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I am at least partially African, genetically speaking. A few years ago, my father took an ancestry DNA test, which revealed that some of his roots can be traced to Nigeria. But I don’t consider myself Nigerian-American, or even African-American. Where I’m from is America—who I am is a black American.

I was about 7 or 8 when my dad sat me down to watch Roots—all 500 hours of it—recorded on VHS tapes from an ’80s cable rebroadcast. Alex Haley’s tale of genealogical discovery resonated with my father as a powerful attempt to re-establish the lineal connection between Africans and African-Americans that had been erased by slavery. Roots was just one of the African-themed cultural artifacts that my father introduced to my sister and me: There was also the gorgeous soundtrack to Sarafina!, a Broadway musical about the Soweto Uprising in South Africa; the African-themed art in our home; Anansi tales; Kwanzaa celebrations. He attempted to instill in us not just a sense of pride as black Americans, but as Americans of African descent, and throughout my adolescence, I identified as black and African-American interchangeably. All of this without knowing, at the time, from what country our ancestors had come, due to the loss and erasure of their birth records prior to the turn of the 20th century.

Despite my father’s efforts, however, my first in-depth encounters with first- and second-generation Americans who had immediate family from African countries made me question my adherence to the label of African-American. To me, people with such explicit connections to their relatives’ home countries accurately embody the term; they truly have access to both cultures. As someone who grew up with a much stronger sense of my black American roots, and an understanding of African culture distilled primarily through an American sensibility, I feel as though the term African-American doesn’t quite suit my identity.

That didn’t stop my father from (sort of) jokingly asking, upon my return from Kenya last month, “Did you feel different when you landed in the motherland?” What he meant, of course, was whether I felt as if I’d returned “home” to a place I’d never before been. People have spent their whole lives hoping to find the equivalent of their own personal Zion. Had I?

My answer to him, without hesitation, was no—at least not in the way he meant it. I definitely felt different in Kenya, but it was the kind of difference I imagine everyone experiences when exploring an entirely new place for the first time—that of a tourist. (I suspect that visiting my supposed ancestral homeland of Nigeria would produce the same effect.) In addition to the obvious differences in transportation and living conditions (livestock roam the streets even in urban areas of Kenya), there were smaller but significant cultural gaps. While the wedding featured familiar traditions like the tossing of the bouquet (accompanied, naturally, by a sound bite from that universal anthem “Single Ladies”), many parts of the ceremony were in Swahili, the country’s official working language alongside English. Even some of the jokes the emcee made in English delighted the Kenyan guests but flew over my head—I later had one of the guests, a cousin of the bride who also lives in the U.S., explain the playful digs to me.

But it’s not just the lost-in-translation humor that made me frequently aware of my outsider status. Having to explain what I am—an American with American parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents—emphasized the gulf between the Kenyan understanding of race and my own. For the Kenyans I interacted with, having black skin also means being African. For me, being black means, well, being black.

During that sixth-grade project, I envied my classmates’ apparent abilities to trace their lineages as far back as the turn of the 20th century. My teacher surely intended to instill pride in family heritage, and to celebrate the varied paths each student’s family had taken to this country. The assignment, made in the mid-’90s, was likely a product of America’s obsession with hyphenated identities (“Kiss Me—I’m Irish!”), formed in the decades following the civil rights movement. As Matthew Frye Jacobson notes in his book Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America, the rise of black nationalism in the ’60s and ‘70s coincided with a growing emphasis, among white Americans, on the idea of America as a “nation of immigrants.” He argues the two phenomena are not unrelated:

This blunted the charges of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and eased the conscience of a nation that had just barely begun to reckon with the harshest contours of its history forged in white supremacism.

Americans who traced their ancestries to the Great Wave of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century couldn’t be blamed for the horrors of slavery or Reconstruction, or so the thinking went.

In hindsight, I had nothing to be ashamed about; the family crest I created was just as valid as any of the other kids’, even if I couldn’t claim to know for certain the foreign lands in my family history. But it wasn’t the last time I felt a tinge of inferiority. Later, when I was in college and met African immigrants or first-generation African-Americans, I felt it again.

I’ve since changed my point of view on that as well, however, and am comfortable now with defining myself by my upbringing rather than by where my ancestors may have come from. The distinction between black and African-American has been expounded upon in recent years, on both a semantic level (Slate just this year changed its standard from African-American to black American) and, by extension, a cultural one. I know I’m not alone in wishing to identify as a black American. And I believe that every individual, and especially people of color, who so often have their existences defined by the standards of a white majority (recall, for example, the one-drop rule), should be able to identify as they see fit.

I don’t see my preference for being called a black American as a way of denying or distancing myself from my genetic African heritage. Rather, I believe it acknowledges the similarities that do extend to all black people—in spite of our differences—as black people: the prejudices we can face from nonblacks (from police brutality to skewed standards of beauty) to the cultural influences we share with one another, like the aesthetic notion of “black cool,” traced to West Africa and translated more recently into black American art.

Having never lived in the land of my ancestors, I will never truly understand what it means to be Kenyan, Nigerian, or, more generally, African. But my recent travels, which included a cross-country road trip from Nairobi to Diani Beach and Mombasa on the coast, gave me my first immersive understanding of an African country, and I did feel a kinship with the people I met: It was fascinating to spend time in a country where the majority of the population was not white, and to interact with such a wide range of social classes and cultures, from the traditional Maasai tribes to the rural farmers and city dwellers. Finally, after years of learning from afar, I got to understand a small slice of African culture for myself. I’m eager to experience even more in the future, even if it’s only as a tourist and not as a long-lost family member returning “home.”

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bandbacktogether · 6 years

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Estrangement Resources

New Post has been published on https://www.bandbacktogether.com/master-resource-links-2/family-resources/estrangement-resources/

Estrangement Resources

What Is Estrangement?

Broadly speaking, estrangement is defined as one or more relatives (or loved ones) intentionally choosing to end contact because of an ongoing negative relationship. (Relatives who go long stretches without a phone call because of external circumstances like a military deployment or incarceration don’t fit the bill.)

In the past five years, a clearer picture of estrangement has been emerging as more researchers have turned their attention to this kind of family rupture. Their findings challenge the deeply held notion that family relationships can’t be dissolved and suggest that estrangement is not all that uncommon.

Relationships are the dynamic between two people. Relationships take care, upkeep, and resources. However, they are not always easy, and rifts may develop between two or more people. When this rift grows, and two people grow apart, the relationship becomes estranged.

Estrangement can lead to many relationship consequences, such as separation, divorce, and alienation. Estrangement is a rift or division that is the result of unmet expectations or other disruptions in a relationship. Estrangements come in all forms, particularly in families: partner from partner, parent from child, sibling from sibling, grandparent from child, aunt/uncle from niece/nephew, and so forth. Even the best of friends can become estranged from one another because of unmet expectations or other disruptions in the friendship.

When families have endured disruption related to abuse, addiction, or other trauma, adult children may sometimes step back from their parents as they sort through their childhood experience. However, estrangement can also occur when adult children experience their parent as failing to honor established boundaries, when there is a conflict over money or when there are long-standing resentments. Parental divorce and remarriage are frequent sources of distress. The disconnection that occurs when an adult child alerts a parent of the need to take a break from the relationship differs from the type that results from an angry, unexpected cut off.

Estrangement is widely misunderstood, but as more and more people share their experiences, some misconceptions are being overturned. Assuming that every relationship between a parent and child will last a lifetime is as simplistic as assuming every couple will never split up.

How Does Family Estrangement Occur?

The Psychology of Splitting From Your Family of Origin

Estrangements from family are one of the most psychologically painful experiences to experience. Estranging yourself from family is absolutely counterintuitive: Who, after all, would think to terminate a relationship with someone who raised you? Sadly, the answer is that it’s typically only people who have been neglected, abused, or exploited in some way who would pursue such a tumultuous split within the family dynamic.

Adding more stress to the already-stressful mix, society tends to give harsh judgment on people who reject their family – even as disturbed as some families can be. We must work to find the empathy for anyone who shares his or her story, it’s hard to understand that some people can be so judgmental about others’ experience – especially when they have no real idea about how bad things may have been in the estranger’s family.

After years of discontent, some adults choose to stop talking to their parents or returning home for family gatherings, and parents may disapprove of a child so intensely that he or she is no longer welcome home.

Sometimes families become so dysfunctional that a family member decides that he can’t stay connected any longer to a specific person in the family or, in some cases, the entire family. Typically people who estrange themselves from family tend to be over the age of 18, because that is the point when they begin to reach adulthood and increased independence.

In a study published in June 2017, Dr. Scharp spoke to 52 adult children and found they distanced themselves from their parents in various ways over time.

Some adult children moved away. Others no longer made an effort to fulfill expectations of their roles, such as a 48-year-old woman who, after 33 years with no contact with her father, declined to visit him in the hospital or to attend his funeral.

Still others chose to limit conversations with a family member to superficial small talk or reduce the amount of contact. One 21-year-old man described how he called and texted his mother, but not his father, after leaving for college.

Estrangement is a “continual process,” Dr. Scharp said. “In our culture, there’s a ton of guilt around not forgiving your family,” she explained. So “achieving distance is hard, but maintaining distance is harder.”

Family estrangement is often experienced as a considerable loss; its ambiguous nature and social disenfranchisement can contribute to significant grief responses, perceived stigma, and social isolation. It’s amazing how little research actually exists on this topic, that lack is due largely to the stigma associated with estrangement:

Most people don’t want to talk openly about why they estranged themselves from family for fear of judgment.

A Few Statistics

On the website Estranged Stories, both parents and their adult children can fill out surveys about their estrangement. The results are surprising. For one thing, the parents who are estranged are older than one might expect, with over one-third falling into the 70-80 age group. When asked to describe the parent-child relationship before the rift, the most popular answer given by the adult children was “moral obligation.” The second most popular answer was “volatile and/or not close.” When asked whether they bear some responsibility for the estrangement, slightly more than half said yes. In 2014, 8 percent of roughly 2,000 British adults said that they had cut off a family member, which translates to more than five million people, according to a nationally representative survey commissioned by Stand Alone, a charity that supports estranged people.

Kylie Agllias, a social worker in Australia who wrote a 2016 book called “Family Estrangement,” has found that estrangement “occurs across years and decades. All the hurt and betrayals, all the things that accumulate, undermine a person’s sense of trust.”

Another interesting area concerns whether the children ever “concretely” told the cut-off parent the reasons for the estrangement. Over 67% said they had. This is a reverse mirror image of the parents’ response in a similar survey when over 60% said that they had never been told the reasons for the estrangement. This disparity reflects difficulties that parents sometimes have in communicating with adult children.

A British survey found that children are usually the ones who cut off contact. In fact, researchers found that members of the younger generation initiated the break about ten times more often than did members of the older generation.

Some Repeated Themes

Reasons for conflicts with adult children vary. Some adult children have severed relationships with parents due to traumatic childhoods: They were abused or grew up with parents who were alcoholics or drug users. Occasionally, family disputes have erupted over money. In the majority of cases, however, the reasons for estrangement are not so clear-cut. Still, certain themes occur over and over in commentary from adult children who have divorced their parents.

“You Weren’t a Good Parent.”

Some children feel that they weren’t loved or nurtured sufficiently. Sometimes, that’s because they were reared in a time or a culture that didn’t value open expressions of love. Sometimes it is because their parents truly had a hard time expressing their feelings. Occasionally adult children still feel hurt from episodes that occurred years ago, things that the parents may not even be aware of.

Therapists working with parents who are estranged from their adult children note powerful consequences from the cutoff. Depression related to loss and shame along with a strong sense of failure are commonly reported. Some have pursued grief counseling to deal with the overwhelming feelings of loss, while others have sought assistance to mend the relationship. There are others who suffer silently because they feel ashamed of their perceived failure.

Indeed, horrific parental behavior is sometimes assumed to be the cause of parent-child disconnection, an assumption that can heighten discomfort and despair.

“You Broke Up Our Family.”

The children of divorce often blame one party or another for the divorce. Sometimes that is due to what they have been told by one or another of their parents. Even when the divorcing parties remain civil, children often place the blame on one partner or another. After adult children marry themselves, they don’t always gain sympathy for their parents’ marital troubles. While they acknowledge that marriage is tough, they tend to feel that if their parents had persevered, they could have made it work.

“You Still See Me As A Child.”

Parents and children live for many years in a specific relationship, with parents in charge. Parents sometimes have difficulty giving up that construct. Children, on the other hand, are usually ready and willing to make their own decisions. When adult children say that their parents don’t see them as adults, they are sometimes correct. Many times parents persist in giving unwanted advice. Voicing disapproval of a child’s spouse or partner can definitely cause conflict. Finances, jobs, and lifestyle are other frustrations for conflict.

“We Don’t Have the Same Values.”

When children make choices that aren’t consistent with their parents’ values, the parents sometimes say, “We didn’t raise you that way.” They have trouble acknowledging that grown children are responsible for developing their own moral compasses. Also, trouble can arise when an adult child marries someone who differs in important ways from his or her family of birth. Sometimes the difficulty springs from differences in political leanings or religious beliefs. These issues present especially difficult challenges because political and religious beliefs tend to be closely held. Some families learn to live with such differences. Others never do.

Exactly what is meant by a “toxic person” depends upon the speaker. It’s not included in standard handbooks of psychological disorders, but generally, it’s understood to mean a person who is harmful to another’s emotional equilibrium. Those who are overwhelmingly negative, who blame others, who are excessively needy or who are casually cruel sometimes are called toxic.

Other labels that are often used to justify ending a relationship are narcissistic and bipolar. Both of these are genuine psychological disorders, but the labels are often casually applied, without any professional diagnosis.

What Are Some Of The Contributing Factors To Estrangement?

There are a number of contributors that may act as a catalyst for an estranged relationship. Unresolved issues such as trust, money, safety, emotional abuse, neglect, domestic abuse, anger, child abuse, sexual abuse or incest – all can contribute to two or more people becoming estranged.

In a study published in the journal Australian Social Work in 2015, 26 adults reported being estranged from parents for three main reasons: abuse (everything from belittling to physical or sexual abuse), betrayal (keeping secrets or sabotaging them) and poor parenting (being overly critical, shaming children or making them scapegoats). The three were not mutually exclusive, and often overlapped. Most of the participants said that their estrangements followed childhoods in which they had already had poor connections with parents who were physically or emotionally unavailable.

Along with individual characteristics, environment can play a factor. Extreme social isolation can lead to estrangement. In particular, social isolation is often key to the control exerted by strict religious sects and cults over their members.

In addition, if one or both of the individuals involved have any of the following personality disorders, there is a greater risk of estrangement occurring:

Asperger’s Syndrome/Autism Those who struggle with Asperger’s may have more difficulty with social skills and interpersonal relationships.

Bipolar Disorder: Impulsive behaviors and decisions may lead to troubled relationships. Further, irritability and paranoia may strain relationships.

Depression: Depression may cause social isolation, irritability, sadness, and other symptoms that may lead to an estranged relationship.

Borderline Personality Disorder: Extreme difficulty with interpersonal relationships can lead to estrangement in both home and work relationships

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Self-centered approaches to relationships can lead to confused or one-sided relationships. There is also a tendency to project insecurities or attribute characteristics upon others.

Deciding Upon Estrangement:

Family estrangement or disownment is a complicated process. Each person has their own unique set of reasons for cutting contact or experiencing rejection from a family unit. Some of our community members have been distanced because of a lifestyle choice, their sexuality, a gender choice, disagreements over money, religious differences, marrying someone from a different background, or not behaving to the satisfaction of their core family members.

Family estrangement can be common for families with strong and rigid religious beliefs, where younger generations often feel conflicted about their cultural heritage and make decisions that are not seen favorably or are accepted by their extended family.

People say that they chose to become estranged after occasions such as a wedding, a death in the family or a bad Christmas. These people often felt their family could not work through the intense feelings of hurt and painful memories associated with something that happened on these occasions.

Some people become estranged from their family because their family has been emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive during childhood or beyond.

It’s immensely difficult to keep a relationship together if a member of your family has been abusive towards you, and it can be extremely risky to continue a genuine relationship with this family member without the right professional intervention and support. This can unfortunately also apply to other family members who may not have believed you, or were aware of the abuse but did not have the capacity to help you with the problem. For many, estrangement may begin when someone speaks about the abuse or tries to heal the hurt caused.

Family members who are experiencing the symptoms of mental health difficulties, which are often not acknowledged or treated, may also cause distance. It can be difficult to deal with inconsistency from a close family member, particularly if that family member can’t understand and acknowledge the impact of their behavior on your own wellbeing.

Marriage and/or divorce are common features in estrangements, and often when your parents get divorced it can significantly alter your motivation to stay in touch with one or both of your parents. If your parents become re- married, this could again alter how you feel towards your family of origin. There are, of course, many other reasons why you may feel a relationship is untenable. And the points above are in no way exhaustive.

But whatever your circumstances, people often speak of the sadness of not being able to take part in the concept of family togetherness that is seen to be at the heart of society.

People may feel vilified, even after making the ‘best’ choice out of a set of hugely difficult life choices, or after being denied a voice in the process of expelling them from a family unit. There is simply no easy answer here.

Many people report that the moment in which they became estranged with family members or loved one, was a particularly insignificant thing. The trigger for estrangement could be as easy as a disagreement over the shirt you’re wearing. See, over time, it’s incredibly easy to let the issues you have with another person be pushed away, in order to keep a positive relationship with a loved one. Unfortunately, much like a balloon popping, the years of anger, hurt, and sadness can build up until they boil over, at which time, you or your loved one simply explode over something previously innocuous. In this case, the grief and sadness and anger will be felt right up front, and dealt with as additional time passes – in a perfect world, that is. Many people feel extreme emotions and emotional triggers throughout their life on significant days and often use talk therapy to cope with their feelings.

If you are in a position to make a more level-headed decision to estrange yourself, do not simply drop the issue of estrangement on your family member if at all possible.

Make yourself an itemized list of the reasons you feel you need to estrange yourself

Try instead to do it by measure, slowly reducing contact with your family member

Decide what the best method of doing this may be for you – phone calls, emails, visits, texts. This is important especially if you know you won’t be able to get “out of their grasp” in certain situations.

Decide how long you want to use this pre-estrangement – do you think six months is enough time? A year? A week? Your answer is as unique as you and shouldn’t be given as a standard amount of time. Just do it as comfortably for yourself as possible.

Some may find it easier to put the dates on the calendar – as a reminder to reach out to your loved one and to fix a time in which you’re going to make your devision.

This action plan may cause you some anxiety or guilt or other unpleasant feelings. If/when this happens take out your list of reasons why, in order to stay true to your course. You don’t need the extra stress of this situation becoming heated enough that it drives you back to your dysfunctional family.

After your estrangement date, this may help, if you’ve not yet decided one way or another, and you’re still calm and level-headed, you can try these steps:

If you’re feeling as though you’re ready to stop talking to them, write a letter, call, text, email, whatever method works for you, let them know that you need a break from them. Explain that you feel that taking some time apart could be helpful for you and them to take some time to figure out how to navigate the relationship better, and state, “Because I do want to get along with you and I do hope we can have a better relationship in the future.” (If you feel this way)

Estrangements are messy and emotional for all parties involved. If you can avoid an estrangement and find a way to improve the relationship dynamics, that may cause you less stress in the long run – because the stress of maintaining your estrangement can be overwhelming.

A big part of an estrangement – whether or not you decide to stick with it is learning to create healthy emotional boundaries. If you’re estranged from your family, you probably didn’t have a healthy relationship with them. THIS IS OKAY. It’s NOT all your fault.

Emotional boundaries are put into place and can either affect the relationship as a positive or a negative, and you’re the one who gets to decide which way the boundaries go.

What Are Emotional Boundaries?

Emotional boundaries distinguish separating your emotions and responsibility for them from someone else’s. It’s like an imaginary line or force field that separates you and others. Healthy boundaries prevent you from giving advice, blaming or accepting blame. They protect you from feeling guilty for someone else’s negative feelings or problems and taking others’ comments personally. High reactivity suggests weak emotional boundaries. Healthy emotional boundaries require clear internal boundaries – knowing your feelings and your responsibilities to yourself and others..

It’s hard for people who grow up in dysfunctional families to set boundaries because:

They put others’ needs and feelings first

They don’t know themselves

They don’t feel they have rights

They believe setting boundaries jeopardizes the relationship

They never learned to have healthy boundaries

Boundaries are learned. If yours weren’t valued as a child, you didn’t learn you had them.

Any kind of abuse violates personal boundaries, including teasing. For example, my brother ignored my pleas for him to stop tickling me until I could barely breathe. This made me feel powerless and that I didn’t have a right to say “stop” when I was uncomfortable. In some cases, boundary violations affect a child’s ability to mature into an independent, responsible adult.

You Have Rights

You may not believe you have any rights if yours weren’t respected growing up. For example, you have a right to privacy, to say “no,” to be addressed with courtesy and respect, to change your mind or cancel commitments, to ask people you hire to work the way you want, to ask for help, to be left alone, to conserve your energy, and not to answer a question, the phone, or an email.

Make a list your personal bill of rights.

Examples include: What prevents you from asserting them? Write statements expressing your bottom line. Be kind. For example, “Please don’t criticize (or call) me (or borrow my . . .),” and “Thank you for thinking of me, but I regret I won’t be joining (or able to help) you . . .”

Internal Boundaries

Internal boundaries involve regulating your relationship with yourself. Think of them as self-discipline and healthy management of time, thoughts, emotions, behavior, and impulses. If you’re procrastinating, doing things you neither have to nor want to do, or overdoing and not getting enough rest, recreation, or balanced meals, you may be neglecting internal physical boundaries. Learning to manage negative thoughts and feelings empowers you, as does the ability to follow through on goals and commitments to yourself.

Healthy emotional and mental internal boundaries help you not to assume responsibility for, or obsess about, other people’s feelings and problems – something codependents commonly do. Strong internal boundaries curb suggestibility. You think about yourself, rather than automatically agreeing with others’ criticism or advice. You’re then empowered to set external emotional boundaries if you choose.

Similarly, since you’re accountable for your feelings and actions, you don’t blame others.

When you’re blamed, if you don’t feel responsible, instead of defending yourself or apologizing, you can say, “I don’t take responsibility for that.”

Guilt and Resentment

Anger often is a signal that action is required.

If you feel resentful or victimized and are blaming someone or something, it might mean that you haven’t been setting boundaries. If you feel anxious or guilty about setting boundaries, remember, your relationship suffers when you’re unhappy.

Once you get practice setting boundaries, you feel empowered and suffer less anxiety, resentment, and guilt. Generally, you receive more respect from others and your relationships improve.

Setting Effective Boundaries

People often say they set a boundary, but it didn’t help. There’s an art to setting boundaries; if it’s done in anger or by nagging, you won’t be heard. Boundaries are not meant to punish, but are for your well-being and protection. They’re more effective when you’re assertive, calm, firm, and courteous. If that doesn’t work, you may need to communicate consequences to encourage compliance. It’s essential, however, that you never threaten a consequence you’re not fully prepared to carry out.

It takes time, support, and relearning to be able to set effective boundaries.

Self-awareness and learning to be assertive are the first steps. Setting boundaries isn’t selfish. It’s self-love – you say “yes” to yourself each time you say “no.” It builds self-esteem.

Coping With The Guilt of Estrangement:

Do you have family members you choose not to see or speak with? If so, you probably feel very sad about that, especially at a time of year when most families gather together. But if you’re also feeling guilty over it, it’s time to stop. Recent research has shed new light on the phenomenon of family estrangement. Here are some of the most surprising findings:

You Are Not Alone

In a British survey from 2014, 19 percent of respondents reported that either they themselves or one of their relatives had no contact with the family. That fits with my own experience. I have several friends who either don’t talk to at least one of their family members or didn’t for many years. And I myself have gone through lengthy periods when I was not on speaking terms with one relation or another. I’d bet you also know several people who are or have been estranged from their families. It’s not fun, but it happens a lot.

There’s A Reason You Decided To Stay Estranged

Most estranged people who stay away from their families or individual family members to save themselves from dysfunctional situations or behavior. In one study, adults who reported being estranged from their parents usually cited (physical or emotional) abuse, being betrayed or sabotaged by a parent, or very poor parenting in which they were endlessly criticized or shamed by their parents. If you’re estranged from your family, it probably isn’t something you did lightly.

It May Seem Stupid But It’s Valid

We’ve all heard about family members who stop speaking to each other over strikingly minor matters. And in a 2015 study, a woman told researchers she hadn’t spoken to her son or daughter-in-law for seven years because of a dessert they brought to a family gathering.

But these things are never as simple as they appear. In some cases, there were resentments and disagreements going back to childhood, and the fact that as adults, the two joined opposing political camps didn’t help.

The case of the wrong dessert was similar. That woman said her daughter-in-law regularly disrespected her and also prevented her from seeing her grandchildren. She’d been asked to bring a specific dessert but instead made something else–something she knew her mother-in-law was also making. That final bit of rudeness was too much to bear.

You Gave Them Chances

Estrangement doesn’t usually happen as a result of one big argument. It takes years for someone to break contact with a family member or family members. It happens gradually, with the family member reducing contact over time before cutting it off altogether.

During that lengthy process, you likely gave your relations lots of opportunities to start a dialogue. You might even have talked to them about the behavior that was driving you away and asked them to change it.

If you didn’t do that, and you think there’s a chance that things could change, it might be worth reaching out one time and making a final attempt to fix your relationship. Or maybe not–only you can know for sure. Either way, if you’re estranged from some or all of your family, there’s one thing to remember: You’re not alone.

Divorce and Estrangement:

Similarly, divorce is another area where estrangement occurs. During a bitter divorce that is full of contention and fighting, it is not uncommon for one parent to become estranged from the children involved. This is known as Parental Alienation Syndrome, and occurs often after a divorce, although it can also be caused by any of the other factors outlined above.

Divorce greatly increases the risk of estrangement. It often creates a fundamental reshaping of alliances and can place parents at risk for greater distance from their children. Whether it’s a grey divorce or a breakup when the child is young, it often causes a child to see parents as winners and losers. Second, it can create the opportunity for parental alienation where one parent consciously or unconsciously (covertly or overtly) poisons the child against the other parent. Children, especially when they are young, are very vulnerable after divorce. Divorce can also bring new people into a child’s life (new sibling, half sibling, step-parent) and they may feel they have to compete for love, attention, or resources

Finally, in our culture, divorce can cause a child to see their parent as an individual with their own attributes and liabilities—and less of a family unit that they’re part of.he concept of one parent attempting to separate their child from the other parent as punishment or part of a divorce have been described since at least the 1940s, Gardner was the first to define a specific syndrome. In his 1985 paper, he defined PAS as “…a disorder that arises primarily in the context of child-custody disputes. Its primary manifestation is the child’s campaign of denigration against the parent, a campaign that has no justification. The disorder results from the combination of indoctrinations by the alienating parent and the child’s own contributions to the vilification of the alienated parent,”

>He also stated that the indoctrination may be deliberate or unconscious on the part of the alienating parent.

Gardner initially believed that parents (usually mothers) made false accusations of child abuse and sexual abuse against the other parent (usually fathers) in order to prevent further contact between them While Gardner initially described the mother as the alienator in 90% of PAS cases, he later stated both parents were equally likely to alienate.

The Grief Of Estrangement:

You may be estranged from your loved ones because of a fight or disagreement you’ve had. Attachment is often a part of estrangement. Issues with attachment can be expressed in many ways, which may result in an individual feeling the need or desire to fix or resolve conflicts or in individuals feeling that they are misunderstood or looked upon with disapproval.

You may also be grieving what you never got from the relationship—love, approval, attention.

Often those who have been cut off by a loved one react with anger, telling themselves, “I’m better off without her!” But, “underneath the anger, there’s usually sadness. You need to acknowledge, ‘I’m sad because this is a genuine loss.’ Otherwise your feelings will remain stuck.” Permanent estrangements can be cloaked in shame and stigma.

Estrangement causes a unique form of grief, in that hope is often held out for a reparation in the relationship, keeping the pain and grief current and raw. Further, repeated interactions that follow the same pattern of expectations and ultimate disappointment when those expectations are unmet, keep the grief close at hand.

When a person is estranged by a family member, they generally experience a range of immediate grief, loss, and trauma responses. Bodily responses such as shaking, crying and feeling faint are common, alongside emotional responses such as disbelief, denial and anger. People often ruminate over the estrangement event or the events that led up to the estrangement. Over time, most acute emotions and bodily responses seem to decrease in intensity, and generalized feelings of hurt, betrayal and disappointment might emerge.

Even when the estrangement has continued for years or decades, many people suggest the pain persists or re-occurs at particular times. Triggers such as birthdays, Christmas, Mother’s Day and funerals are difficult. So are sightings of the estranged person, or hearing about them from others. Triggers can sometimes cause a person to re-live and re-experience the initial grief, loss and trauma responses, while other times they can be managed.

Most of the people I have spoken to suggest that being estranged by a family member is one of the most painful events across the lifespan. It is intensified by:

It’s unexpectedness,

its ambiguous nature,

The powerlessness it creates

Social disapproval.

First, when a person is estranged by another, they generally do not expect it to happen. Studies suggest that trauma is increased when it is enacted by humans rather than an act of nature, and this is even more so when that human is a family member.

We are biologically attached to family and socially acculturated into idea of family togetherness. We do not expect an estrangement.

Second, estrangement is ambiguous. It has lacks transparency, and it cannot be readily understood. The loss is ambiguous because the estranged person is physically absent, but psychologically present (in the memories of the estranged person, and the triggers). It is not certain if the family member will ever return, so there is no finality or closure to the event.

Third, people who have been estranged by a loved one often describe feelings of incredible powerlessness. When someone has been cut off, they cannot tell their side of the story, ask questions or apologize. Without interaction the estranged person is often left wondering and ruminating about the truth, with no means of discovering it.

Estrangement of Mothers And Daughters:

The decision to go no-contact with a family member is a deeply personal one. For some of us, it’s impossible to heal ourselves and remain in connection with our mothers.

It’s still considered taboo to be estranged from one’s family; especially to be estranged from one’s mother. Sometimes the distance can be brief and short-term while for others, the estrangement can be permanent. It takes enormous strength and fortitude to follow through with this.

What can lead to estrangement?

There are so many reasons why people make this choice. But a core theme leading to estrangement is realizing that your mother’s dysfunctional behavior has demanded an enormous cost to your mental/emotional well-being and you’re simply no longer willing to pay that cost.

Estrangement isn’t something chosen in a flippant, cavalier way, but rather it is often a choice made after years of trying every other possible avenue to preserve the connection and see it evolve.

At a certain point, you may reach a crossroads where the cost is too much, and you have to make a choice. It may be the hardest thing you ever do in your entire life. And it may be the single most empowering thing as well.

Families are complicated systems. When one person stops playing their usual role in the family, this family will often experience some degree of disequilibrium or chaos. Conflict can serve to transform the system to a higher level, if the family members are willing and open to grow and learn. Unfortunately, sometimes, in an attempt to resist change, the family attacks the person trying to grow. That person has the choice to stay and suffer the toxicity or to heal and leave the unhealthy system.

The choice to terminate contact is often made when it’s clear that it’s impossible to heal while still involved in that family.

Daughters often play the roles of family mediator, scapegoat, keeper of secrets, or emotional caretaker. If a daughter on a path of growth and wishes to evolve beyond her typical role in the family, (perhaps by being more empowered, having firmer boundaries, being less tolerant of poor treatment) the degree of chaos that ensues is indicative of how dysfunctional the family is as a whole.

If the family members are each relatively healthy, stable, and open, the family may be able to find a new equilibrium without much chaos. However, if the family members are deeply wounded or traumatized themselves, a daughter’s evolution can be perceived as deeply threatening. This chaos can be deeply unsettling and extremely hard to navigate. Support is essential.

In an unconscious attempt to maintain equilibrium and resist change, family members may launch attacks against the daughter.

A common and virulent form of backlash is “Pathologizing” the daughter: Seeing the conflict as a result of some form of pathology in the daughter.

The message is “Your unwillingness to continue in the family system in your established role shows us that there is something deeply wrong with you.”

This shame-based narrative abdicates the mother and other family members from honestly examining their own behavior and taking responsibility. The daughter’s level of mental stability, her past mistakes, everything about her may be openly questioned, that is, except the role of her mother in the conflict.

It’s amazing how vehemently people resist looking at their stuff and the lengths they will go to remain in denial of it, including ostracizing their own child. This is actually an unconscious attempt to resist change by projecting all the conflict or “badness” onto the person initiating transformation of the family system.

Ultimately, this is not personal, it’s simply what happens when people who haven’t been dealing with their inner selves are confronted with their disowned pain through a catalyzing event, like a woman in the family growing beyond the predominant dynamics that have kept the family in a stable state for generations.

We can’t save our mothers. We can’t save our families. We can only save ourselves.

You don’t need your mother (or other family members) to understand you in order to fully heal.

It’s heartbreaking to realize that your mother/family are simply unable or unwilling to understand you. No matter how much you explain or how many attempts to convince them of where you’re coming from, it goes nowhere; like you’re speaking two different languages. Learning to understand you may cause a major shift in the very foundation upon which they’ve built their identities and worldview.

It’s painful to realize and still it helps to create a singularity of spirit within you. It becomes clear that your own understanding of yourself must be enough. Your validation of yourself becomes primary. You realize you can be okay even if others do not understand you.

After you go no contact, your life may begin to improve in many area; chronic illnesses clear up, neurotic fears vanish and life-long patterns dissolve. It’s worth noting that sometimes the challenge for you becomes enduring the pleasure of your own life.

See, with each new level of increased prosperity, increased intimacy, joy, freedom, you are reminded that your family is not there to share it with you. It’s particularly at these horizons where we may experience the turbulence of grief. There’s nothing to do but feel the grief that comes with that and allow yourself to move forward.

The grief doesn’t mean you’ve made the wrong choice. It’s actually a sign of health and healing.

Keep yourself grounded in your new life, the one that gave you the strength to leave the toxic connection. If you don’t, you could get pulled back through guilt or shame. It’s so important to get lots of support and give yourself time and space to process all the emotions that come with this choice. Ground yourself in exactly why you’re doing this and use it as an opportunity to birth you into a new paradigm in your life.

Estrangement Leads To Empowerment

You may discover something deeply profound: you realize that you can survive your family’s rejection of you. This can birth a level of freedom and determination within you that may initiate quantum leaps in your life. It can spur a fierce commitment to truth and carve out a radical integrity that extends to other areas of your life. It stokes a fire of truth within you that now can blaze fully.

You feel your own source within.

Grief, grief, and more grief gives way to… FREEDOM

Grief may arise every time you go to a new, higher level that your family have never been. It may feel like a bone-deep grief, almost tribal or ancestral, a grief of having to go forward without them. And it gets easier and easier with time; the more we lovingly allow ourselves to grieve, the more space is created for magic, beauty and joy in our lives. There is something deeply sacred about the grief that comes from making this choice. It can serve as an opportunity to deeply connect to your truth and to embodying it at the deepest level.

We must make meaning from this loss and use it to enhance our lives in new ways. That’s the key to long-term healing.

Your integrity becomes the solid foundation for the rest of your life.

It’s okay to walk away from toxic people in your life, including toxic people in your family.

Healing inter-generational wounds can be a lonely path. But within the space you created, soulful connections will come into your life. Our attachment needs are the most powerful need we have as humans.

To face this level of estrangement is to confront the depth of your pain, of your humanity, and to claim the full the value of your own life. Our greatest fear is that we will be alone. But the aloneness that we fear has already happened in the trauma of our families. You’re not alone and you will find your soul family in time, people who are capable of seeing and valuing you for who you are.

In a world where women are predominantly expected to stay silent, to cater to the needs of others and where the darker side of mothers is not acknowledged, the experience of estrangement can be an initiation into a new level of awareness that many people never experience. A space is cleared to allow your light to shine at full radiance.

What will you do with this light blazing within you?

Estranged daughters are finding each other, creating a new mother line; a connection of authenticity, realness and truth in each other that supports the arising consciousness in all. There is often instant camaraderie between women who have walked this path. There’s more of us out there than many people realize. You’re not alone!

You have to do what is right for you. Trust yourself.

Estrangement doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t love your family.

It doesn’t mean you’re not grateful for the good things they gave you. It just means you need space to live your own life the way you want to live it.

Women who feel no choice but to go no-contact with their dysfunctional mothers create the break because it’s the only way to send the powerful message that:

“Mother, your life is your own responsibility as my life is mine. I refuse to be sacrificed on the altar of your pain. I refuse to be a casualty of your war. Even if you are incapable of understanding me, I must go my own way. I must choose to truly live.”

Reconciling Estrangement:

The first step to healing an estranged relationship is forgiveness. This is a very difficult first step, but holding on to resentment, anger, and hatred does not foster healthy and positive relationships.

After deciding that a relationship is beyond repair, it can be overwhelming and scary to consider reconciling an estranged relationship. The following tips are important when beginning the reconciliation process:

Has emotional growth occurred since the last contact?

Can I set and maintain appropriate boundaries?

Do I need to “change” the other person or his or her beliefs about a situation?

Do I have my own identity, or am I overwhelmed by another’s opinion?

Am I still angry?

Validating your feelings about the situation is important during the reconciliation process, as a lot of feelings are likely to occur. Recognize that is may be a slow process of building trust and re-learning the other person, and establishing a new relationship.

Focus on the positive and find new ways to establish common ground. Meet in a neutral location, and do not discuss difficult issues.

Repairing an estranged relationship is often very similar to building a new relationship. Do not expect that everything will be perfect right away. There are often setbacks, hiccups, and issues that may need to be navigated throughout the process.

And finally, keep in mind that you are not responsible for the entire relationship, nor can you control the entire relationship.

If you never, ever feel like reconciliation, that too, is okay.

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