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

by Sherrie Campbell

So what is their fuel? Tudor sums it up in two simple concepts: emotional reaction and attention.

How do our toxic family members secure our emotional reactions and consume our attention? Manipulation. 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, ...

When I was growing up, my mother made me feel emotions I can only describe as fury. The feeling I felt inside was beyond anger, frustration, or annoyance; it was pure, unadulterated fury. I felt like there was an emotional tsunami swirling inside of me, but I couldn’t pinpoint the exact reason why. What I didn’t know at that time were all the subtle ways in which she was passive-aggressively baiting me to rage. Once I would get to that point, she would t...

They will only focus on my reaction to their abuse and how my reaction made them feel.

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.

What they “love” is watching us lose ourselves. They “love” knowing they have that kind of control over us.

Power is a toxic person’s drug.

Revulsion is a powerful emotion that causes us to immediately want to avoid or escape being around this type of toxic individual.

When we grow up feeling of little value, that we are not worth caring for, we learn not to care for ourselves, and this is exactly what happened to me. Loving myself had to become my own mission.

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.

My parents thrived on the divide-and-conquer technique.

Why would any parent want to create separation and division among their family members, especially their children? They do this in order to maintain manipulative control over the relationship dynamics within the family. The effort is all about divide and conquer.

“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.”

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...

the clinician usually discovers that the source of the problem does not lie with the child but with the parents.

I was just a symptom of toxic parenting.

Dysfunctional families despise the truth-tellers and whistle-blowers. They are all about admiring the Emperor’s new clothes, and they turn on anyone who dares to mention the nakedness.9