Choosing Reality

Dr. John Deloney talked at a conference I attended this week about how if you want to overcome anxiety you need to start with the hard, non-negotiable work of choosing reality. Not the version we wish were true. Not the story that lets us keep hoping without evidence. The actual one. The one that sits in the room whether we acknowledge it or not. He says we cannot heal, connect, or move forward while we keep insisting the map matches a territory that no longer exists. Reality is not optional. It is the only ground solid enough to stand on. We have to choose to accept and name it before we can heal, change it, or embrace it.

I have been forced to choose that ground with two sisters.

One sister had cut off communication and told me, in clear terms, to leave her alone. That was the stated reality for a long season. At the same time, I knew in my bones she could not truly be comfortable with the permanent rupture she had chosen because in the three years of rejection she had at least not been hostile except for the ‘leave me alone’ statement. The human heart is not built for that kind of clean severing of history, especially not when the reasons remain tangled and unresolved and as well as others telling me she’s starting making more mature and faith filled decisions. That tension was the first paradox: the decision from her to not include me in her life was real for those years, the discomfort she was experiencing from having made that decision was also real, and both could coexist.

This week she has chosen to begin reconnecting. That, too, is now part of the reality I must face honestly. A door that was closed is cracking open. The reality I have to name is that I receive it with caution and gratitude, not with the fantasy that everything is suddenly restored. New reality does not erase the old one; it simply adds another layer that must be lived truthfully.

The second sister that cut me out with and alongside the first together has made a similar decision of distance, but hers is different in character. Her current life choices and posture toward me are not merely withdrawn; they are, at the core, hostile towards me. She has arranged her life in ways that treat me as an obstacle or an enemy rather than a sibling. That remains unchanged.

Here is the deeper conundrum that still stands. Even as the first sister begins to reconnect with me, she continues to keep the second sister close to her, as she has this whole time. She buys her things that enable patterns that are immoral. She encourages lifestyle decisions that pull further from truth and from family. She seeks her feedback and validation and advice. She maintains intimacy and loyalty with the sister who treats me—and by extension the bonds we once shared—so blatantly and clearly awfully. But also more than hostility with me - she does not live out or agree with Church teaching. And the first sister knows this about her. She has seen the treatment. She has heard the hostility. Yet she elevates that relationship in her life and defaults to it.

This is not neutral. Choosing to elevate someone who treats with contempt a sibling who has continuously sought relationship and reconciliation, while the relationship with me remains fragile and newly tentative, is itself a decision. It reveals priorities. It forms character. And it places a real stumbling block in the path of any full connection and reconciliation between us. As long as she continues to support and elevate the sister who has made hostility her posture, she is not merely staying out of it. She is participating in a hierarchy of loyalty that tells me, without words, where deeper allegiance still lies, even detrimentally. Worse, it actively communicates that this sister is okay in what she is doing—behavior that is also directly harming that sister herself. Full restoration between us becomes nearly impossible while that hierarchy remains intact and the other sister continues in her ways. The relationship cannot be whole when one party is actively propping up the very dynamic that wounds the other.

It’s a bit like walking into the Orca arena, sitting in the back row, yet instead of joining the show, still choosing to FaceTime the person who has stayed at the open bar, outside the stadium on her own path, who is bashing and bad-mouthing the orcas and the trainer. Long-term, the two postures contradict each other. They are incompatible. The hostility of the one who refuses to come in creates the conflict. Eventually the first sister will have to decide what she values. She can keep the FaceTime call open with the one who remains hostile, or she can tell that sister the truth—that the hostility is misplaced, that the orcas are fine, and that she’s welcome to change her attitude and decisions to remain outside on her own path and instead come join us and get wet too. But to get into the water with me, even to enter the splash zone before that, she will have to hang up the phone. That connection can’t remain in the splash zone as the electronics of the phone will be destroyed. Staying on the call with someone refusing to come join in and be present will continue to keep a distance by default as entering the splash zone is a threat to the call. She does not have to abandon her sister; that sister can still choose to come get wet with us too. Yet if her sister keeps choosing hostility and making choices that prevents her from coming into the show and she keeps clinging to that call, it remains an inherent block to entering the splash zone, a hindrance to enjoying the show from even up top, and certainly a hindrance to swimming side by side again. There won’t be reconciliation as long as she clings to a sister that has chosen hostility and absolutely nothing besides distance, blocking, and cold calloused responses for years to reject and remain entirely separated.

The truth hurts, but it is real. This is the difficulty before my sister if she wants to share life with me again. She won't be able to have both as long as the other sister keeps choosing to be who she is right now and she is choosing to hold that sister in esteem while knowing the choices she is making, especially in relation to family and what is good. This reality needs to be named because it's a real difficulty. It is reality. And until it is chosen to be acknowledged for what it is, anxiety will remain.

Catholic teaching does not soft-pedal this kind of truth. The Church insists that charity and truth are not opposites; they are inseparable. We are commanded to love, but love that refuses to name reality is not love—it is sentimentality. “By their fruits you will know them” is not a suggestion; it is a diagnostic. Our associations, our encouragements, and the people we elevate reveal the shape of our hearts. Enabling patterns of sin or cruelty, even under the banner of family loyalty, is a form of cooperation that damages both the enabler and the one being enabled. The Catechism is clear that scandal and the failure to correct (when correction is possible and prudent) wound the Body of Christ. Family does not get a free pass from moral accountability. Blood does not override the demand to choose the good. That relationship is causing my sister real wounds, wounds she will have to face in reality if she wants to alleviate anxiety as Dr. John Deloney addresses.

There is also the hard teaching on detachment and the ordering of loves. Christ Himself said that following Him can set family members against one another—not because we seek division, but because truth sometimes forces a choice. When a relative’s ongoing decisions require us to participate in or silently endorse what is harmful, the faithful response is not endless accommodation. It is clarity, boundaries, and the willingness to let the other person live with the consequences of their own choices. Forgiveness remains obligatory. Reconciliation, however, requires more than one-sided desire. It requires a shared commitment to truth.

So I choose the paradoxical reality as it stands this week. My first sister has begun to reconnect. That movement is real and I will meet it with measured openness and gratitude to God for the gift that is. My other sister’s hostility is still real. And the first sister’s ongoing choice to keep the second close, to affirm her while our own reconnection remains fragile, is also real. That choice continues to reflect on her character and places a barrier between us that I did not build and cannot remove alone. If reconnection is going to deepen, it cannot fully happen while it remains intertwined with the sister who is actively hostile toward me. My sister is here, she has shown up this week at the top of the stadium in the back row, still busy on a FaceTime call with another who refuses to come. Where she goes from that back row and what she chooses to do will be up to her. She may one day swim with me again. She may walk back out and down to the path away again. Whether she decides to choose reality or not will determine what presence will remain. It will come down to if she actually wants freedom from anxiety through truth and choosing what is real, or not.

I don’t yet have a clear way to share this reality with her. How do you gently explain this difficult reality and the requirement to choose it if she wants to be free of anxiety with someone? I’m still learning. I’m trying. But, she doesn’t like being painted in a poor light. What she doesn’t maybe see, is this isn’t a poor light. It is simply the light right now. The current reality. Not what has to be true later today, tomorrow, next week, next year etc. It is the reality now that by choosing to acknowledge it, healing and growth can become possible - for everyone involved that wants it. I tried to use the image of intertwined rosaries in a previous discussion with her: both she and her sister are good in how they are made—very good, beautiful, remarkable, inspiring, truly good. But rosaries can also have their purpose distorted and twisted. As long as one is tightly intertwined with the other who is actively choosing rejection, we cannot fully share life. There is an inherent block. She knows her sister has been nothing but crummy to me for years. When she is honest, she knows I did nothing truly to deserve that treatment. If they had extended grace to me at even a fraction they extend to each other, nothing could have gone amiss. She knows the mess. Being intertwined with someone still choosing that mess each day is where that problem continues and she gets held back. The question is whether she will choose that reality.

Choosing this reality is still painful. It means surrendering the fantasy that a few tentative steps of reconnection will magically erase the deeper loyalties that created the fracture. It means accepting that some relationships remain limited, not because I lack love, but because the other party has made different priorities visible. Yet there is a strange mercy in the acceptance. Once the map matches the territory, I can stop exhausting myself trying to redraw the borders. I can receive the small openings without demanding they become full restoration overnight. I can pray for both sisters without pretending the situation is other than it is. I can keep my own conscience clean by refusing to enable what I know is wrong. And I can leave the door of my heart open without standing in the doorway indefinitely, waiting for people who have not yet fully turned toward truth.

Choosing to acknowledge that the other sister is a stumbling block is not choosing that she is bad. It is simply naming that she is choosing wrongly right now. Which is simply objectively true by any metric in her treatment towards me. We can still hope and pray she will look at her life and choose reality someday too—acknowledging where she is and what it will take to move toward the life she was made for. The truth can cause division. But we are never going to be free of anxiety without choosing it. If my sister really wants to be free of anxiety, it starts with acknowledging this hard reality and choosing it: that right now, her sister is creating this problem, even still creating a problem for her in this ongoing reconnection with still being intertwined knowing what she is doing and what she is choosing to be.

Reality, chosen, is the only place where genuine peace and genuine hope can grow. Anything less is just a longer version of the same wound.