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None of us is perfect, that’s for sure. We all have our flaws, but having flaws and being pathological or toxic are vastly different. Toxic people are hard to differentiate from other people because their toxicity isn’t easy to discern to the ordinary observer, and this includes us as their family members.
When we start life without knowing healthy love—including what it is, what it looks like, and what it feels like—we find it incredibly challenging to find healthy love later in life.
Healthy love happens when two givers come together. When this happens, it’s like magic. It becomes a connection of you nurture me and I will nurture you and together we will grow. Healthy love is fun and lighthearted. Can you imagine it? This is what we all deserve: to have our hearts held as something deeply precious in the hands of those who raised us.
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.
Medication doesn’t work because being toxic is not a brain chemistry issue but a character defect.
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.
Here is what I have learned and what I teach daily in my office. Being genetically related to our toxic family members doesn’t make us family. The real definition of family refers to constructs much deeper than bloodline or DNA. Family is about love, sacrifice, honesty, protection, support, unconditional love, reciprocity, acceptance, security, respect, protection, loyalty, and safety.
There is a large misperception that females cannot be abusers. The fact is, many women, especially many mothers, are the source of intense relationship harm. Nevertheless, mothers manipulate a bit differently than fathers.
Like all toxic people, a toxic mother’s greatest flaw lies in her belief that everything revolves around her.
A toxic mother talks but never listens, and she gives advice but never takes any. And we have to deal with all of this because she’s our mother.
Toxic mothers want us to think our normal reactions to their abuse are the problem, not the abuse itself.
No matter what she’s done, a toxic mother won’t ever genuinely apologize for anything. Instead, when she feels pushed to apologize, she will sulk, issue an insulting apology, or negate the apology she has just made with justifications, qualifications, or self-pity:
Overindulging parents forgot to remind their children that they stand among the billions of other ordinary people in the world. They have taught their children to view themselves as more special and unique than others, and because of this, these toxic children feel permitted to have whatever they want when they want it regardless of how other people may feel about it.
Healthy parents do not view their children as things, slaves, or psychological mirrors. Healthy parents view their children as growing and developing precious human beings. Children are loved with empathy and seen as sensitive, innocent, scared, elated, and curious about life.
We must be parents who are willing, open, and confident enough to admit to our children when we are wrong. When we do this, we show them we are human, that we are not perfect.
Personal accountability is an important part of growing up. When our children make a decision—whether it is wise or not—dealing with the fallout of their decision goes along with training them. When parents make their children accountable, the result is effective lesson-learning. Our children will quickly learn which actions are positive and which produce negative results through having to take accountability.
if our toxic parents were enmeshed, they will not just want to babysit our children; they will take over the parenting of them, creating in us the feeling that we are second to our parents in the eyes of our children.
When our parents are toxic, we can bet they will bring their toxicity into every area of our lives, and that includes our marriage. Because they thrive on the divide-and-conquer technique, they can easily turn our spouse into the scapegoat or targeted family member.
Toxic parents, depending on their unique agenda, either view our spouse as the enemy they need to get rid of to get back into their desired position of power, or they see our spouse as the person to triangulate against us. Their goal is to overcome and even decimate the boundaries we have placed on them.
I have come to believe that toxic parents never wanted adult children. Instead they wanted dependent infants. The most effective way they could keep us in an infantile and non-functioning space was to make us feel too broken to ever leave them. If we are broken, we will need them always, and they will use their counterfeit kindness to keep us coming back after we think we’ve finally decided that we’ve tolerated enough of their abuse.
Psychiatrist Scott Peck teaches that the only thing our toxic family members hold concern for is their outward image. Although they seem to lack the desire to be good, they are intensely driven to appear good. Our toxic family members are committed to being viewed as altruistic and innocent.
No, we are not crazy. Our toxic family members genuinely are as displeasing, horrible, exhausting, and painful to be around as we experience them to be. Period.
Keep in mind, our toxic family members feel no guilt and have never been sorry for harming us. We have every right to protect ourselves from those who manipulate and emotionally abuse us.
At one point we loved our toxic family members and wanted them in our lives more than anything else. Yet at too many points in time, we sacrificed our happiness to serve theirs, shut our mouth when we desperately wanted to speak up, and did what they wanted because doing that was easier than dealing with their drama.
What is the difference between the silent treatment” abusers use and going no contact, which we can use to set protective boundaries for ourselves? We may wonder, How am I any different from my toxic family members if I cut ties and go silent? The difference comes down to intent.
It is not hard to determine if someone is toxic. It is hard to accept that someone is toxic.
emphasis on forgiveness, I think a better way toward healing involves acceptance—acceptance of our abusers’ identity, what they have done to us, and their hardened hearts toward us. Whether or not we forgive them, we can accept them.
In place of forgiveness, what we can do to heal is accept our toxic family members for exactly who they are without expecting, wishing, or hoping for them to be different.
Loving yourself means getting to know who you are and never accepting treatment that is less than respectful toward you.
