Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life QUOTES

1 " Children who are not encouraged to do, to try, to explore, to master, and to risk failure, often feel helpless and inadequate. Over-controlled by anxious, fearful parents, these children often become anxious and fearful themselves. This makes it difficult for them to mature. Many never outgrow the need for ongoing parental guidance and control. As a result, their parents continue to invade, manipulate, and frequently dominate their lives. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

2 " Just as verbally and physically abused children internalize blame, so do incest victims. However, in incest, the blame is compounded by the shame. The belief that ‘it’s all my fault’ is never more intense than with the incest victim. This belief fosters strong feelings of self-loathing and shame. In addition to having somehow to cope with the actual incest, the victim must now guard against being caught and exposed as a ‘dirty, disgusting’ person "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

3 " I also believe that forgiveness is appropriate only when parents do something to earn it. Toxic parents, especially the more abusive ones, need to acknowledge what happened, take responsibility, and show a willingness to make amends. If you unilaterally absolve parents who continue to treat you badly, who deny much of your reality and feelings, and who continue to project blame onto you, you may seriously impede the emotional work you need to do. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

4 " Unhealthy families discourage individual expression. Everyone must conform to the thoughts and actions of the toxic parents. They promote fusion, a blurring of personal boundaries, a welding together of family members. On an unconscious level, it is hard for family members to know where one ends and another begins. In their efforts to be close, they often suffocate one another’s individuality. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

5 " Denial is the lid on our emotional pressure cooker: the longer we leave it on, the more pressure we build up. Sooner or later, that pressure is bound to pop the lid, and we have an emotional crisis. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

6 " Perfectionist parents seem to operate under the illusion that if they can just get their children to be perfect, they will be a perfect family. They put the burden of stability on the child to avoid facing the fact that they, as parents, cannot provide it. The child fails and becomes the scapegoat for family problems. Once again, the child is saddled with the blame. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

7 " You have told the truth about your life to yourself and your parents, and the fear that kept you trapped in your old role with them can no longer control you. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

8 " Many toxic parents compare one sibling unfavorably with another to make the target child feel that he's not doing enough to gain parental affection. This motivates the child to do whatever the parents want in order to regain their favor. This divide-and-conquer technique is often unleashed against children who become a little too independent, threatening the balance of the family system. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

9 " Parents who feel good about themselves do not have to control their adult children. But [toxic parents] operate from a deep sense of dissatisfaction with their lives and a fear of abandonment. Their child's independence is like the loss of a limb to them. As the child grows older, it becomes ever more important for the parents to pull the strings that keep the child dependent. As long as toxic parents can make their son or daughter feel like a child, they can maintain control. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

10 " In his psychoanalytic practice, Freud was getting so many reports of incest from the daughters of respected, middle-class Viennese families that he groundlessly decided they couldn’t all be true. To explain their frequency, he concluded that the events occurred primarily in his patients’ imaginations. The legacy of Freud’s error is that thousands, perhaps millions, of incest victims have been, and in some cases continue to be, denied the validation and support they need, even when they are able to muster the courage to seek professional help. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

11 " Verbal abuse is as damaging as physical abuse, and in some cases, it does even more damage to a child. Insulting names, degrading comments and constant criticism all leave deep emotional scars that hinder feelings of self-worth and personal agency. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

12 " Instead, incest occurs in families where there is a great deal of emotional isolation, secrecy, neediness, stress, and lack of respect. In many ways incest can be viewed as part of a total family breakdown. But it is the aggressor and the aggressor alone who commits the sexual violence. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

13 " Enmeshment creates almost total dependence on approval and validation from outside yourself. Lovers, bosses, friends, even strangers become the stand-in for parents. Adults like Kim who were raised in families where there was no permission to be an individual frequently become approval junkies, constantly seeking their next fix. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

14 " In families like Fred's, much of a child's identity and his illusions of safety depend on feeling enmeshed. He develops a need to be a part of other people and to have them be a part of him. He can't stand the thought of being cast out. This need for enmeshment carries right into adult relationships. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

15 " For hundreds of years, parental rights were considered inviolate—in the name of discipline, parents could do just about anything to their children, short of killing them. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

16 " Children need to make mistakes and discover that it's not the end of the world. That's how they gain the confidence to try new things in life. Toxic parents impose unobtainable goals, impossible expectations, and ever-changing rules on their children. They expect their children to respond with a degree of maturity that can come only from life experiences that are inaccessible to a child. Children are not miniature adults, but toxic parents expect them to act as if they were. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

17 " Most adult children of toxic parents grow up feeling tremendous confusion about what love means and how it’s supposed to feel. Their parents did extremely unloving things to them in the name of love. They came to understand love as something chaotic, dramatic, confusing, and often painful—something they had to give up their own dreams and desires for. Obviously, that’s not what love is all about. Loving behaviour doesn’t grind you down, keep you off balance, or create feelings of self-hatred. Love doesn’t hurt, it feels good. Loving behaviour nourishes your emotional well-being. When someone is being loving to you, you feel accepted, cared for, valued, and respected. Genuine love creates feelings of warmth, pleasure, safety, stability, and inner peace. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

18 " It’s amazing how people can change behind closed doors. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

19 " Instead of promoting healthy development, they unconsciously undermine it, often with the belief that they are acting in their child’s best interest. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

20 " Successful adult relationships, whether between lovers or friends, require a significant degree of vulnerability, trust, and openness. "

― Susan Forward , Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life