But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

by Sherrie Campbell

the one and only place authentic healing can take place is from the truth of our reality, no matter how ugly it may be.

Family is the place where “home” is. In this case, home is the originating place of unconditional love and support. If our family was healthy and we had a bad day, we couldn’t wait to get home to take respite in the love and comfort we received in our home and from what our family members had to offer us.

Healthy families offer its members unconditional and nonjudgmental love and support. Family members feel surrounded by people who care about who they are and how they feel, and they each take an invested interest in helping each other grow into human beings who feel hopeful and positive toward self, others, and life as a whole.

for those of us who were raised in toxic family systems, the concept of home is quite different. Home equates to the creation of fear, anxiety, a lack of acceptance, and a lack of unconditional love and support. Home was the place we least wanted to be. Growing up in a toxic family is a hollow, confusing, maddening, and lonely experience. When we are raised by toxic parents, we live in a unique kind of crazy where we feel more like things to manage and keep on a schedule rather than as human beings to love, nurture, and care for. We leave childhood feeling emotionally homeless.

Always told them "you're supposed to raise me not own me."

The most challenging aspect of psychological/emotional abuse is that is deniable by our family members and impossible to prove. Our family members don’t believe they are abusing us

We as their children don’t realize we’re being manipulated because we believe the lies our toxic family members tell us, convinced everything is our fault and that we are the ones who are broken and destroying our family members.

This was the last thing my biological father told me as he smashed a ceramic plate on the kitchen floor and my biological mother swept it up, cleaning up after him and as usual, not holding him accountable for any of his actions.

The sinister and obscure nature of their emotional abuse leaves us alone to pick up the crushed pieces of our self-worth and all aspects of how we function in life, love, and relationships. When we try and explain our fears of love, life, and people to others, we tend to come off sounding needy, desperate, and paranoid. This is because psychological abuse is not equipped with a clear set of descriptive indicators that our toxic family members find undeniably true. Consequently, to them at least, we can rarely if ever prove what has happened to us. All of the descriptors are subjective and therefore debatable, just as our toxic family members need for them to be.

Because emotional abuse is impossible to prove, we often have an incredibly difficult time describing or putting into words what exactly has happened to us that is so bad. We know things were not or are not normal, but we don’t know why. Emotional abuse moves quickly.

Our toxic family members are experts at concealing their abusive behaviors just slightly under public radar so that when we complain about the hurt they have made us feel, our complaints fall on deaf ears. This level of slyness allows our toxic family members to walk away looking innocent and unfairly accused while we appear emotionally unstable. This is the most infuriating part for us.

My biological father when 2 cops came after I called 911 after he chased me up the stairs. I ran to the bathroom which had a broken lock. I had to push the door closed with my elbows and hold my legs and feet stretched against the opposite side, using friction to keep the door closed as my biological father kept barging and banging while yelling "YOU BITCH!" to me. Luckily, I had my cellphone with me and I called 911 as soon as I coud. "My dad's chasing me! My dad is trying to get me!" My mom had made it in time for my call and she pleaded for my dad to stop because I'm already calling the police. I don't know how he talked his way out of it when they arrived, but I ended up packing my things and leaving. I heard him say to the two police officers "I just want her to be safe". He was the only one who ever put me in danger.

loving someone doesn’t always mean having a relationship with that person, just like forgiveness doesn’t always mean reconciliation. Reconciling, in many cases, only sets us up for more abuse. A significant part of our healing will come in accepting that not reconciling with certain people is a part of life.

There are some relationships that are so poisonous that they destroy our ability to be healthy and to function at our best. When we put closure to these relationships, we give ourselves the space to love our toxic family members from a distance as fellow human beings where we do not wish harm upon them; we simply ha...

When it comes to recovering from toxic family abuse, the first step that needs to happen is self-protection. Until that is in place, recovery or treatment cannot happen. Recovery and treatment center around the life-long journey of undoing the severe damage that destroyed our self-worth. Recovery entails learning to think, live, and love in healthy ways, with healthy boundaries, and with our own intuitive sense of what is right and what is wrong.

Toxic, in fact, is an internal state—the condition of a person’s true character, mind-set, and will. And it can only be witnessed through the consistency and persistency of manipulative behavior.

People with pathological personalities, on the other hand, respond more like regressed, stubborn, vengeful bullies. They are never wrong. They are above apologies. They never question if they could have or should have done anything differently. And everything in their lives is an embellished drama of how they have been victimized by others.

My biological father

The very reason toxic people are so frustrating to deal with is because we’re looking at an adult but dealing with a toddler. The majority of us grew out of our two-year-old narcissism as a function of normal development. When an adult still responds from this regressed level of self-centeredness, it is very difficult for the visual and auditory parts of our brain to put a toddler’s emotional response system inside of what looks and sounds like an adult, let alone when this adult is our parent.

Toxic people cannot tolerate consideration of others. When trying to have a conversation with them, they are self-referential rather than self-reflective. When you share something about yourself with such people, they immediately turn the account into a story about them.

RJ

when healthy persons are in conflict with the world, they automatically assume that they are at fault, but when toxic people are in conflict with the world, they automatically assume the world to be at fault.

It can be 10 people disagreeing with just my biofather and he's still correct and they're all wrong in his head.

When we are with toxic family members, we will find that the entire trajectory of our life has to be, without choice or flexibility, all about their schedule, their needs, their feelings, their goals, their ideas, their illnesses … their everything.

Because we love our family members and want desperately for them to love us back, we choose to believe they don’t mean to treat us the way they do. When we rationalize and justify their mistreatment of us, it is called reverse projection.

My bio mom does this.

Toxic people do not think, operate, or play by the same rules we do, and our failing to recognize this sets us up by default for manipulation and unhappiness.

to the claim that our toxic family members don’t know what they’re doing or that they don’t know any better is completely false.

“anyone who has the intellectual capacity to blame-shift, gaslight, project and stage a smear campaign to escape accountability has the intellectual capacity to be aware of their own blame and to process it when the victim says ‘this hurts’.”

Our toxic family members know what they’re doing, but they don’t care about what they’re doing. The reason they don’t care is because what they do works for them so they see no reason to do things differently.

toxic people do not care about the results of their actions because they are driven by an all-consuming need for fuel. This need for them is so overwhelming that any consideration of the results of their actions falls a distant second to their need to secure their fuel. Our toxic family members leave behind a legacy of pain, chaos, and confusion. They want our focus to be on them at all times. They crave, need, and want this attention. Without our emotional reactions, our fears, or our tears, or without us pouring our love and neediness all over them, they cannot experience their own existence.

Our toxic family members may believe inside themselves that they love us, but ultimately, they live through us to use us. They feed off of having the power and authority to manipulate, degrade, and create insecurity, fear, sadness, neediness, guilt, feelings of obligation, hope, and rage in us. This is their fuel. This is what they live on. They use us to keep themselves going.

My bio mom

A toxic parent will provoke an independent child to anger in order to feel superior and to “prove” the child’s flaws.

My bio mom

my parents do feel, but they feel solely for themselves. They are egocentric, and they do not, cannot, and will not feel for me or for the things they have done to me. They will only focus on my reaction to their abuse and how my reaction made them feel. The only thing our toxic family members process is if they feel loved or hated, regardless of what they’ve done to cause and provoke our negative or positive reactions. Who we are and what we feel are not considerations for them. In some way it’s not always that our toxic family members are trying to hurt us; rather, they just aren’t thinking about us at all, which is almost worse.

Hoooooooly.

Our toxic members feed off watching us feel confused, angry, and frustrated as we try and reason with them. This is exactly the kind of attention and emotional reaction they seek. They enjoy watching us scramble to understand their abusive behavior and all the work and effort we put forth trying to get them to take responsibility for how they’ve treated us. It’s all of our scrambling that makes them feel. They don’t deeply consider loving us or hating us. They only think about manipulating us. They love pulling us in close and making us feel safe so they can enjoy the thrill of throwing us out, without warning, the minute they feel they have secured our love. What they “love” is watching us lose ourselves. They “love” knowing they have that kind of control over us.

The minute the therapy starts to turn on them and their character flaws, toxic people almost always quit therapy. They leave feeling victimized because therapy was “too hard,” or they leave threatening to take “legal action” with no legal or ethical reasons to do so.

RJ

the more toxic individuals are, the more dishonest they are in their behavior and the more distorted they are in their thinking. This doesn’t allow us, as clinicians, to help them because they do not have any insight. A vampire is a fictional character who cannot see their reflection in a mirror. Toxic people are like this in that they cannot see within themselves. They lack insight. The psychological definition of insight is: •The capacity to show understanding for one’s own or another’s mental processes; •The immediate understanding of the significance of an event or action; •The ability to understand one’s own problems.

“Evil is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings that seeks to kill life and liveliness. … Evil has nothing to do with natural death; it is concerned only with unnatural death, with the murder of the body or the spirit.”

Toxic people spread destruction and death to those who come in contact with them. The closer we get to them, the more we will experience their deadly poison. We have no cure for them that they will accept. The best we can do is find a remedy for the damage they have done to us.

For our toxic family members, the image they present of our family is of the utmost importance to them, which is why deception dominates the system; the image presented is false.

My biological mother and sibling.

Enmeshed Parents, on the other hand, view themselves as symbiotic with their children. They see their children as extensions of who they are, and therefore try to dictate their children’s lives—their choices—providing them no freedom to separate and individuate into healthy, unique, self-sufficient, confident people. Enmeshed Parents have clear expectations for their child’s success, popularity, and image, and they give their children an opinion about everything, from what they wear, who they date, and what they eat to the college they should attend, the career path they should take, and even their marital and family-planning decisions.

My biological mother except with the college.

it is much harder to remove ourselves from an enmeshed parent than it is to remove ourselves from an ignoring parent because when we’re enmeshed—when what’s happening to us is just always the way things have been—we don’t realize how deeply trapped we are.

Psychologically immature parents are too self-consumed to suffer with their children. They prefer to cause suffering to their children as a way to feel powerful, important, needed, in control, and not the problem.

My biological mother!!!!!

Toxic parents create deep and justifiable resentments within us as children and then act clueless as to why they have no authentic relationship with us as adults.

Selfishness and parenting cannot coexist.

When parents sacrifice love for their need for control and domination over their children, their reward is children who are excessively fearful for the future and doubt themselves.

Toxic parents make their children deeply doubtful of their own lovability, significance, importance, and personal value in this world as a way to maintain manipulative control and to keep them from telling the family secrets.

What has become clear to me over time is that genuine and loving connections are not the sought after or desired goal in toxic family systems. My parents thrived on the divide-and-conquer technique. My dad consistently and persistently spoke poorly about my mother, my brother, my brother’s wife—in fact, whoever he saw as getting in the way of him being the center of attention. My mother made my dad the “bad guy,” and whenever I stood up for myself or against her in any way, she would cryptically say, “You’re just like your father.” My mother talked poorly to me about everyone in my family behind their backs, and I’ve been in earshot when she’s done the same to me.

Holy SHIT relatable

In toxic families, siblings are often pitted against each other, which was also done in my case and continues to this day. This is how the scapegoat and golden child roles between siblings are created. The triangulation may be subtle or overt, but the damage to the relationships between siblings is fully accomplished. In my case, my brother and I were close as children because we had to survive together. At times he was the parent I never had, and at other times I filled that empathic parental role for him, especially when we were young adults. No matter the closeness we shared as children, he was still the worshiped golden child and I the scapegoat.

MY LIFE

The family scapegoat becomes what therapists call the “identified patient,” or IP. According to Virgina Satir, renowned family therapist and author, “Identified Patient is a term used in a clinical setting to describe the person in a dysfunctional family who has been subconsciously selected to act out the family’s inner conflicts as a diversion; who is the split-off carrier of the family disturbance.”8 In other words, the scapegoat is the bad kid, the one who often suffers from eating disorders, poor grades, rebellion, poor attendance, illness, depression, and anger. Scapegoats are blamed for all the troubles in the family because their bad behavior is putting everyone else under so much stress. Ultimately, as the scapegoat, we are the symptom bearers of the family, acting out all the family’s dysfunction, and then our family members scapegoat us for it. Scott Peck shows that toxic parents have to have a scapegoat because, in their own hearts, they consider themselves above reproach, which causes them to lash out at anyone who criticizes them. More often than not, once the identified patient starts treatment, the clinician usually discovers that the source of the problem does not lie with the child but with the parents. The child is not found to be as sick as his or her parents. Although the parents have identified the child as the one in need of improvement, it is usually they, the identifiers, who need the treatment. The parents are the ones who should be the patients. P...

ME. ME. ME!!!!!!!!!!!!

being the scapegoat can actually be a sort of gift. The role actually helps the child much more in the long term than does the role of the golden child. The scapegoat is far more likely to question the family dynamics, to see how poisonous they are, to seek answers and help, and to eventually escape from the toxic family web. The golden child, however, hardly ever escapes. The golden child lives life completely enmeshed with his toxic parents doing all he can to secure their attention and keeping his role in making the family look good.

Some parents require that the family silence one person as a way to show disapproval for who “we” are or how “we” are behaving. When one person is shunned, it is clear to that person that she is being disparaged and rejected. She receives the message that she doesn’t belong and isn’t good enough to be a part of the core group. The core group’s purposeful cruelty creates deep shame in the outed person. Is there any greater pain than to feel like you don’t belong to the group of people who are supposed to love you the most?

My bio sibling: "what you're saying is irrelevant"

Some parents require that the family silence one person as a way to show disapproval for who “we” are or how “we” are behaving. When one person is shunned, it is clear to that person that she is being disparaged and rejected. She receives the message that she doesn’t belong and isn’t good enough to be a part of the core group. The core group’s purposeful cruelty creates deep shame in the outed person. Is there any greater pain than to feel like you don’t belong to the group of people who are supposed to love you the most?

No

The overall aim of gossip used by our toxic parents is to break us, their children, down little by little over time. They strategically manipulate in this. It’s the best way for them to keep us from questioning them and their actions while keeping us so deeply confused about what is going on that the only one we question is ourselves. They get us to question our own reasoning, our sanity, and our perceptions of reality. The more slowly and deeply they can keep us confused about who they are and questioning who we are, the more we gradually lose touch with our own sense of right and wrong. Problems are relentlessly blamed on whoever the identified patient is at the time. The more our toxic parents break us down, the less confidence we have to activate for ourselves because we’ve lost touch with the reality of who our toxic parent are—cruel and manipulative people.

When our toxic family members see the confusion on our faces, they trick us by claiming they were just joking. But make no mistake. That joking is a cut down. And in our gut, we know they are revealing what they really think of us. We begin to feel insecure and afraid and often start trying to please our toxic family members in an effort to maintain feeling the security of their love and acceptance.

The more we please our toxic family members in this stage, the more annoyed they get and start accusing us of being too sensitive, insecure, or needy. They insinuate that nothing has changed and that we’re reading too deeply into every little thing they say or do. The confusion we feel inside intensifies because their actions tell us an entirely different story, leaving us with no clarity and at war within ourselves. The more insecure we feel, the more desire we show to feel safe, the more ostracizing and rejecting our toxic family members become. They use our needy behavior as justification to completely discard us.

We usually experience being emotionally discarded by our toxic family members as an intense feeling of not fitting in with them, that we are not important, that we offer no value to their lives, and that whatever is so bad about us must be bad enough that our toxic family members don’t even show a desire or interest to fix anything with us.

bio mom: "I give up on you"