Is family important?

[redvelvet]

Re: Is family important?

@Sentry

There probably are things which one should be grateful to their parents for but that’s another topic. This thread is about if family is important to you, not if you should be grateful to them for wiping your backside when you couldn’t thus the question relies on forgiveness and not gratefulness unless you’re talking about them being grateful that even after all their mistakes, you still have their back. But you’re saying that one should be grateful, not them being grateful. There’s a difference, your using gratefulness the other way around and I don’t believe it to have any bearing to the question.

Actually my initial and subsequent responses are connected to your question; they are very relevant and I will try to explain:

@Sentry

Do you consider family important even if they were never there for you? Would you still be there for them? Or is there a line and once that’s been crossed there’s no going back?

Look at the first sentence of your post. You have based importance on the condition that the other person should “be there” for you. This means that if one has been there for you, you will therefore consider them to be important. If one has not been there for you, you will not think they’re important.

Now when you say “were never there for you,” my response challenged this claim of yours. Generally when we are resentful toward a person, we see nothing good in them at all. So, in my post, I was trying to encourage you to scour your memory for even the most basic support your parents had shown you…even if it was support for your survival.

Putting parents aside, I think that when we are deciding whether or not a person (a friend, etc) is important to us…and whether or not we should still maintain ties with them…we asses the relationship. In doing so, we think about all the negative things and the positive things about the person. The former may outweigh the latter. But you have to decide if the few good things are enough for you to maintain even a thread of a connection with them. And it’s these few good things that bring about a feeling of gratitude (if not love) that can be the reason to not totally sever ties. It’s all connected and therefore I find my response to be relevant to your question even if you disagree.