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

by Sherrie Campbell

I am a believer that life’s greatest teacher is always experience.

The mission I have is to help educate,

identify, and bring clarity, closure, and healing to those of us who need this particular kind of information in order to move on and establish personal peace and happiness.

As a clinical psychologist, I am convinced that the one and only place authentic healing can take place is from the truth of our r...

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 wh...

dream common to all children is to have two parents who love them, who will be there to witness their most amazing accomplishments, to celebrate with them, and support them when they are down or when they have failed in one...

Home was the place we least wanted to be.

Growing up in a toxic family is a hollow, confusing, maddening, and lonely experience.

We leave childhood feeling emotionally homeless.

Our family members don’t believe they are abusing us because, by definition, they view themselves

as perfect, and perfect people don’t do imperfect things, such as emotionally manipulate their children. 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.

Toxic family abuse is always two-fold. The first layer of abuse is the original poor treatment by our toxic family members, namely our parents. The second layer is their denial of the ways in which they treat and harm us, irrespective of the evidence as it mani...

worth. 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 ...

To add to our challenge of validating our experience, the average person isn’t typically well educated or aware of emotional

abuse, even when it is happening directly to him or her.

Unless we have done the work to educate ourselves on emotional abuse, we cannot and will not be able to explain our situation. This allows the abusive treatment of our toxic ...

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 mad...

This level of slyness allows our toxic family members to walk away looking innocent and unfairly accused while we appear emotionally unstable. T...

is important to understand that loving someone doesn’t always mean having a relationship with that person, just like forgiveness...

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...

and experience to know it is unwise to remain con...

the first step that needs to happen is self-protection.

Recovery and treatment center around the life-long journey of undoing the severe damage

that destroyed our se...

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.

With healthy persons, we are dealing with individuals who operate with a sense of balance and composure. They are self-reflective, logical, collected, and able to listen to others with an openness to learn.

But with a pathological person, we are dealing with the emotional immaturity of a two-to five-year...

The very reason toxic people are so frustrating to deal with is because we’re looking at an adult...

When you share something about yourself with such people, they immediately turn the account into a story about them. The self-referential side of toxicity turns toxic people into the greatest one-uppers, name-droppers, and liars you’ll ever come across.

You cannot have a mutually beneficial conversation, where there is a natural back-and-forth flow. Sharing does not exist when communicating with toxic people.

Covert psychological abuse is sly, conniving, and confusing, making it extremely hard to spot and to know for sure if we are causing the problem or if it is truly the toxic person who is.

“Oh, I’m just teasing. Stop taking everything so seriously.”

Shannon Thomas, author of Healing from Hidden Abuse, teaches that covert psychological abuse is similar to putting clear toxins in a glass of water. Once we drink the water, we cannot see the injury wreaking havoc inside of our body until our body starts reacting to the continued exposure to the poison.

If we are their children, their abuse started on our first day of life and will only deepen as we age or for as long as we remain connected to them.

They simply do not see themselves as the source of their problems. They see the world or us as the source of their troubles. So they fail to recognize their

Healthy people value consistency, predictability, connection, and communication when it comes to loving self and others.

If you are living in constant confusion and feel as if your relationship with someone boils down to a delicate egg-shell walk, you are not in a relationship with a healthy person. You need to make some serious changes.

Toxic people cannot fathom that other people have needs of their own.

Being around my mother for five minutes is enough to wear me out.

The more we give, the more we try, the more the toxic person in our life discredits our efforts and demands more.

We must examine how our toxic family members make us feel and begin to consider the idea of when enough is enough.

If we feel consistent anxiety, a lack of trust, paranoia, like we’re walking on eggshells, that we can’t be ourselves, and feeling as if we would rather avoid talking so as to avoid arguing, we are not in a healthy love dynamic.

Moreover, the reality is that we cannot change anyone but ourselves. Once I came to this realization in my own therapy, I felt a deep sense of sadness before I felt any relief. It felt hopeless to me when the problem

wasn’t in my hands or my responsibility to fix.

I had to start the process of grieving the loss of my hope—the hope that kept me going back again and...

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.

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.