> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.inthegraywithkirsten.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# What Does It Actually Mean to Be a Cycle Breaker?
- URL: https://www.inthegraywithkirsten.com/what-does-it-actually-mean-to-be-a-cycle-breaker/
- Published: 2026-08-26T15:47:06.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-26T15:47:06.000Z
- Author: Kirsten Soldridge
- Tags: Life in the Gray

I was having a conversation with a friend recently about generational trauma and cycle breaking when she said something that stayed with me.

She talked about how many people are trying to break generational patterns without having the support they need to actually do it.

And I immediately understood what she meant.

Because breaking cycles sounds empowering when we talk about it from the other side.

*Set boundaries.*

*Heal your wounds.*

*Choose differently.*

*Break the cycle.*

They're powerful words.

But actually living them can be incredibly lonely.

Because the moment you begin questioning things that have been considered normal within your family for generations, you change the dynamic.

And change makes people uncomfortable.

When you start saying, *Actually, that doesn't feel okay to me anymore,* there may be people who don't understand.

When you establish boundaries where none existed before, there may be people who interpret those boundaries as rejection.

When you begin talking about things everyone else has agreed not to talk about, you may become the problem simply because you are willing to acknowledge that a problem exists.

And when you don't have a strong support system around you, continuing to choose differently can feel almost impossible.

I know because I've lived it.

And it's one of the reasons I feel so deeply called to talk about these things.

I want people who are doing this work to know that somebody sees them.

Because cycle breaking is so much more complicated than I once understood it to be.

For a long time, I thought breaking generational cycles simply meant recognizing what hurt me and deciding not to do the same thing to my own children.

If something happened to me growing up and I knew how badly it affected me, I would simply choose not to repeat it.

Problem solved.

Except it doesn't really work that way.

Because we don't only inherit behaviors.

We inherit beliefs.

We inherit coping mechanisms.

We inherit communication styles.

We inherit ideas about love, parenting, conflict, respect, success, money, emotions and family.

Sometimes we even inherit rules nobody has ever actually spoken out loud.

*We don't talk about that.*

*That's just how he is.*

*She's your mother.*

*Keep the peace.*

*Respect means obedience.*

*Family comes first, no matter what.*

And because those things are learned so early, many of them don't even feel like patterns.

They just feel normal.

That's what makes breaking them so difficult.

You can't change something you don't yet recognize.

And even after you recognize it, you still have to unlearn it.

Trust me when I say:

**Sometimes it is much harder to unlearn something than it ever was to learn it.**

Because cycle breaking isn't usually one giant decision.

It's hundreds of tiny ones.

It's being triggered and feeling the familiar response rise inside of you, and learning to pause long enough to ask yourself whether that's actually how you want to respond.

It's wanting to yell and choosing to communicate instead.

It's wanting to shut down and choosing to stay in the conversation.

It's realizing you hurt someone and apologizing instead of defending yourself.

It's allowing your children to tell you that something you did hurt them without immediately explaining why you did it.

It's realizing that being the parent doesn't automatically make you right.

It's learning that respect can move in both directions.

It's catching yourself repeating something you swore you would never repeat and having enough compassion for yourself to correct it instead of deciding you've failed.

And then doing it all over again tomorrow.

That's cycle breaking.

I see this work differently now that my children are getting older.

When they're little, the relationship between parent and child is naturally very different. We make most of the decisions because we're responsible for keeping them safe and guiding them through a world they don't yet understand.

But then they grow.

They develop opinions we didn't give them.

Beliefs we didn't choose for them.

Preferences we don't always understand.

They start making decisions we might not make ourselves.

And eventually, if we're lucky enough to watch them grow up, our children become adults.

My oldest daughter is eighteen now.

Legally, she is an adult.

Of course I am still her mother. She will always be my daughter.

But something about our relationship is changing.

I am no longer simply parenting a child.

I am learning how to have a relationship with the adult my child is becoming.

And that requires me to evolve, too.

It requires me to recognize that she is allowed to make choices I wouldn't make.

She's allowed to disagree with me.

She's allowed to have boundaries with me.

She's allowed to tell me when I've hurt her feelings.

And my role isn't to control the woman she becomes.

My hope is to create a relationship in which she continues *choosing* to have me in her life.

That distinction means a lot to me.

Because when I look back at my own relationship with my mother, I don't know that we ever completely made that transition.

There were times when I felt that becoming my own person created tension between us.

I made my own choices, of course, but when those choices weren't the ones she would have made for me, I sometimes felt the weight of her disapproval.

Looking back now, I wonder if some of what existed beneath the surface between us was something neither one of us completely understood at the time.

I was beginning to challenge patterns before I even had language for what I was doing.

I was beginning to become a cycle breaker before I knew I was one.

And one of the biggest cycles I eventually recognized was the way we communicated.

Growing up, difficult things weren't really talked through.

Problems could be yelled about, but they weren't necessarily resolved.

Feelings weren't always given a safe place to exist.

Things were swept under the rug with the hope that eventually everyone would move on.

Except unresolved things don't always disappear.

Sometimes they become resentment.

Sometimes they become tension.

Sometimes they become wounds people carry for decades without understanding where they came from.

So in the family Mike and I have created, we try to do something different.

We talk.

Not perfectly.

Not always immediately.

And certainly not without emotion.

But we talk.

We have uncomfortable conversations.

Our children are allowed to have feelings that differ from ours.

We try to listen to understand instead of listening only long enough to defend ourselves.

We apologize.

We revisit things.

We repair.

And sometimes one of my children points something out and I have to sit with the uncomfortable realization that I got something wrong.

Being a cycle breaker doesn't mean my children will have nothing to heal from.

I don't think any parent can promise that.

It means I'm willing to listen when they tell me where I got it wrong.

It means I don't expect perfection from myself simply because I'm trying to do better than what I knew.

It means creating enough safety that hopefully my children don't have to wait until adulthood to understand that something hurt them.

And sometimes cycle breaking reaches beyond the family we create and changes our relationship with the family we came from.

This is the part I think deserves more compassion and nuance.

I don't believe healing automatically requires estrangement.

I don't believe everyone who breaks generational cycles has to walk away from their family.

There are families capable of growing together.

There are parents who listen.

There are siblings who listen.

There are people who are willing to say, *I didn't understand before, but I want to understand now.*

I think that's beautiful.

But that isn't everyone's story.

It wasn't mine.

I tried for a long time to change patterns while remaining within my family.

I tried to establish boundaries.

I tried to communicate.

I tried to create something healthier without completely losing the people I loved.

But eventually, I reached a point where continuing my own growth required me to step away.

That was never the outcome I wanted.

It was the choice I ultimately believed I needed to make.

And I think that's another misconception about cycle breakers.

People sometimes see the boundary.

They don't see everything that happened before it.

They see the person who finally said *enough.*

They don't see how many times that person tried to make it work.

They see the distance.

They don't see the grief.

They see someone choosing themselves and assume it must have been easy.

Sometimes choosing yourself is one of the most painful things you'll ever do.

Being a cycle breaker has required a level of strength I didn't know I possessed.

But strength isn't the absence of grief or pain.

Sometimes strength is grieving and hurting deeply and choosing differently anyway.

And if you're reading this while trying to break patterns within your own family, I want you to know that I see you.

If you're learning how to communicate after growing up in a home where nobody communicated, I see you.

If you're learning boundaries after being taught that boundaries were selfish, I see you.

If you're raising children while simultaneously realizing how much of your own childhood you're still healing from, I see you.

If you're trying to have a relationship with your family while becoming a healthier version of yourself, I see you.

And if becoming healthier has changed some of your relationships in ways you never wanted, I see you too.

There isn't one way to be a cycle breaker.

There isn't one boundary everyone needs to set.

There isn't one relationship everyone needs to leave.

There isn't one perfect version of healing waiting for us on the other side.

This work is deeply individual.

It is messy.

It is uncomfortable.

It is painful and beautiful and freeing and heartbreaking.

It exists in the gray.

But perhaps what I've come to understand most is this:

**Cycle breaking isn't only about what we refuse to carry forward.**

It's about what we intentionally choose to put in its place.

Where there was silence, we can create communication.

Where there was fear, we can create safety.

Where there was control, we can create trust.

Where there was conditional acceptance, we can create room for individuality.

Where there was avoidance, we can create repair.

Where there was pain, we can create something gentler.

And then maybe our children will take what we gave them and make it even better.

Maybe they'll catch patterns we couldn't see.

Maybe they'll heal things we weren't able to reach.

Maybe they'll raise their children with even more awareness than we had.

And their children will do the same.

Because maybe being a cycle breaker was never about becoming the person who finally gets everything right.

Maybe it's simply about becoming the person brave enough to say:

**It can be different from here.**