65 Comforting Quotes for People With Unsupportive Families

In an ideal world, families would be perfect. They would be whole, warm, and each family member would always have your back. But life isn’t perfect, and neither are families. Sometimes, your lot is a family that doesn’t support your dreams, the path you want to take in life, or just anything about you.

In these cases where invisible bonds cause you too much heartache and an inability to move on, the best recourse is to cut ties and move forward using your own strength. There is much to draw strength on in this world and you can surely find it – either deep within you or in the generous hearts of your friends and colleagues.

As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time. – Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Rejection is an opportunity for your selection. – Bernard Branson

Cutting people off doesn’t have limits. Family can get cut off too if they are causing you stress. Eliminate any negativity in your circle.

Sometimes you have to move on without certain people. If they’re meant to be in your life, they’ll catch up. – Mandy Hale

Train yourself to be fueled by laughter and unsupportive people.

When you walk away from a toxic family, you begin the journey of finding your true people

Dysfunctional families despise the truth-tellers and whistle-blowers. They are all about admiring the Emperor’s new clothes, and they turn on anyone who dares to mention the nakedness. – Sherrie Campbell

In my family, strangers are relatives. – Kate Rockland

A family can be the bane of one’s existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one’s existence. I don’t know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a large hole in my heart. – Keri Hulme

This year was about removing chairs from the table.

You can love them, forgive them, want good things for them… but still move on without them. – Mandy Hale

Learn to use the criticism as fuel and you will never run out of energy. – Orrin Woodward

Our family was stuck in a cosmic hamster wheel of toxic love—making the same mistakes, saying the same words, being hurt in the same ways generation after generation. I didn’t want to keep playing a role in this tragedy of errors. – Yamile Saied Méndez

Never surrender your hopes and dreams to the fateful limitations others have placed on their own lives. The vision of your true destiny does not reside within the blinkered outlook of the naysayers and the doom prophets. Judge not by their words, but accept advice based on the evidence of actual results. Do not be surprised should you find a complete absence of anything mystical or miraculous in the manifested reality of those who are so eager to advise you. Friends and family who suffer the lack of abundance, joy, love, fulfillment and prosperity in their own lives really have no business imposing their self-limiting beliefs on your reality experience. – Anthon St. Maarten

In one family, all goes by two and two. If a member of it has any interest, he or she will confide it to some one other, but the rest know nothing. In another family, all feel what touches one, nothing is kept dark from the father and mother, brothers and sisters all share. This family habit is by far the better, it strengthens the tie between the members, and makes the home one home. – Charles Buxton

Shoutout to people who grew up with emotionally unsupportive parents and have to hear other people talk about how supportive their families are while you’re basically guiding yourself through life. You’re strong and brave.

The only thing we had in common was DNA, which gave us limited mileage conversationally. – Naoise Dolan

I was in denial of the glaring reality that my existence depended on my willingness to comply with the family policy of me earning the splinter of space they granted to me. – M. Wakefield

Children betrayed their parents by becoming their own people. – Leslye Walton

She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name. – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I forgive, but I also learn a lesson. I won’t hate you, but I’ll never get close enough for you to hurt me again. I can’t let my forgiveness become foolishness. – Tony Gaskins

A warm house does not always depend on its structures, but depends on the heat of relationship that all members have towards each other. – Ky Vanchhay

The harsh truth of every relationship—even between those who love each other, like fathers and sons and daughters, or husbands and wives—is that the love is always unequal. – Karl Taro Greenfeld

Surround yourself with people that reflect who you want to be and how you want to feel, energies are contagious. – Rachel Wolchin

Immediate, often unsolicited, sometimes undeserved forgiveness—that is what turns the wheel of family life. – Kelly Corrigan

Family is supposed to be our safe haven. Very often, it’s the place where we find the deepest heartache. – Iyanla Vanzant

I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people that make you feel all alone. – Robin William

As I was growing up, no one in my family got their needs met through respectful negotiation and compromise. – Olga Trujillo

If you think you need to earn enough points on someone’s rubric for them to accept you, then either you’re wrong to assume they won’t love you for who you are, or they never loved you in the first place. – Zack Smedley

Unfortunately, some family members are so psychotic that no matter how hard you try to forge a healthy relationship, nothing will help. Now that you’re an adult, take refuge in the fact that some things are beyond your control. You owe it to yourself to steer clear of people who are harmful to your health. – Andrea Lavinthal, Your So-Called Life: A Guide to Boys, Body Issues, and Other Big-Girl Drama You Thought You Would Have Figured Out by Now

See, I think there are roads that lead us to each other. But in my family, there were no roads, just underground tunnels. I think we all got lost in those underground tunnels. No, not lost. We just lived there. – Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Dear family, please continue to include me in your activities when it’s convenient for you, and then act confused and upset when I ignore you. – The Black Sheep

Some of the most poisonous people come disguised as friends and family.

Letting go of toxic people in your life is a big step in loving yourself. – Hussein Nishah

Sometimes you just need to distance yourself from certain family members. It’s the only way to keep your sanity and your marriage intact.

My sisters. My blood. My skin. What a gruesome bond we shared. – Krystal Sutherland, House of Hollow

Our family became a place where you screamed for help but no one heard, not ever. – Marceline Loridan-Ivens

Families are forever, and I wondered if the slogan was meant as a promise or a threat. – Brady Udall

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama. – Dorothy Allison

Just because someone is your family doesn’t mean you have to keep them around if they are toxic or abusive. Don’t let people guilt you. – Winnie Nantongo

I love this quote, ‘Never argue with an idiot. People watching won’t be able to tell the difference.’ When we are attacked and defending ourselves, we end up looking just as bad as our attacker, and our attacker will make sure to focus on only our reaction rather than what they did to cause our reaction. – Sherrie Campbell

Being brushed aside is the easiest way to discard a child. – Sherrie Campbell

It’s normal to miss your family,’ he said. I said that was why I didn’t. – Naoise Dolan

Just because your father’s present, doesn’t mean he isn’t absent. – Elizabeth Acevedo

I explain to my patients that abused children often find it hard to disentangle themselves from their dysfunctional families, whereas children grow away from good, loving parents with far less conflict. After all, isn’t that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home? – Irvin Yalom

When we are raised in toxic families, we often go through a time period, and for some of us, a lifetime, of repeating the toxic patterns we were raised in with other people in our lives. We do this until we decide we’ve had enough pain and choose to genuinely examine our patterns and stop the craziness for good. – Sherrie Campbell

I’ve learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you’ll miss them when they’re gone from your life. – Maya Angelou

Everyone needs a house to live in, but a supportive family is what builds a home. – Anthony Liccione

If you pretend to be close, you’ll only find how far apart you really are. – Ryan P. Cole

Unhealthy families discourage individual expression. – Susan Forward

The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. – Margaret Sanger

It’s sad how I can trust teachers more than my parents. – Dawn Andrews

Bond is stronger than blood. The family grows stronger by bond. – Itohan Eghide

One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives. – Euripedes

Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof. – Richard Bac

Let unsupportive family members fuel your journey to success.

I knew, deep down, that I was different from my family. I knew just by looking in the mirror. – Alex Dalton

I’d rather be happy being myself, than sad trying to please my family.

You are not part of a toxic family if you walk away.

Toxic mothers are image-oriented rather than love-oriented. – Sherrie Campbell

If a man’s character is to be abused, say what you will, there’s nobody like a relative to do the business. – William Makepeace Thackeray

If you’re going home to an unsupportive family this holiday season, remember that your worth is not defined by what they say or how they treat you.

Don’t let lack of support from family make you think that you don’t deserve your dreams.

There’s nobody that can hurt you as bad as family.

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
– Robert Hayden, Collected Poems