Toxic Parents Quotes

“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

“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

“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 Ph.D, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“It’s amazing how people can change behind closed doors.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“As long as you continue to react so strongly to them, you give them the power to upset you, which allows them to control you.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“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

“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

“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

“Once you understand what love is, you may come to the realization that your parents couldn’t or didn’t know how to be loving. This is one of the saddest truths you will ever have to accept. But when you clearly define and acknowledge your parents’ limitations, and the losses you suffered because of them, you open a door in your life for people who will love you the way you deserve to be loved—the real way.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“People can forgive toxic parents, but they should do it at the conclusion—not at the beginning—of their emotional housecleaning. People need to get angry about what happened to them. They need to grieve over the fact that they never had the parental love they yearned for. They need to stop diminishing or discounting the damage that was done to them.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“An unpredictable parent is a fearsome god in the eyes of a child.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“The family drama may look and sound different from generation to generation, but all toxic patterns are remarkably similar in their outcome: pain and suffering.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“You can learn, but you’ve got to give yourself time to pick up the basics, to practice, and maybe even to fail once or twice.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“Abused children have a caldron of rage bubbling inside them. You can’t be battered, humiliated, terrified, denigrated, and blamed for your own pain without getting angry. But a battered child has no way to release this anger. In adulthood, that anger has to find an outlet.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“Children soak up both verbal and nonverbal messages like sponges—indiscriminately. They listen to their parents, they watch their parents, and they imitate their parents’ behavior. Because they have little frame of reference outside the family, the things they learn at home about themselves and others become universal truths engraved deeply in their minds.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“What makes a controlling parent so insidious is that the domination usually comes in the guise of concern. Phrases such as, “this is for your own good,” “I’m only doing this for you,” and, “only because I love you so much,” all mean the same thing: “I’m doing this because I’m so afraid of losing you that I’m willing to make you miserable.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“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

“In this way she perpetuated the pain she had experienced as a child. Not unexpectedly, her enormous accumulated rage had to find a way out, but since she was afraid to express it directly, her body and her moods expressed it for her: in the form of headaches, a knotted-up stomach, and depression.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“Phil talked openly about his current life, but he closed up when I asked him about his early years. With some gentle probing, he told me that what he remembered most vividly about his childhood was his father’s constant teasing. The jokes were always at Phil’s expense and he often felt humiliated. When the rest of the family laughed, he felt all the more isolated. It was bad enough being teased, but sometimes he really scared me when he’d say things like: “This boy can’t be a son of ours, look at that face. I’ll bet they switched babies on us in the hospital. Why don’t we take him back and swap him for the right one.” I was only six, and I really thought I was going to get dropped off at the hospital. One day, I finally said to him, “Dad, why are you always picking on me?” He said, “I’m not picking on you. I’m just joking around. Can’t you see that?” Phil, like any young child, couldn’t distinguish the truth from a joke, a threat from a tease. Positive humor is one of our most valuable tools for strengthening family bonds. But humor that belittles can be extremely damaging within the family. Children take sarcasm and humorous exaggeration at face value. They are not worldly enough to understand that a parent is joking when he says something like, “We’re going to have to send you to preschool in China.” Instead, the child may have nightmares about being abandoned in some frightening, distant land. We have all been guilty of making jokes at someone else’s expense. Most of the time, such jokes can be relatively harmless. But, as in other forms of toxic parenting, it is the frequency, the cruelty, and the source of these jokes that make them abusive. Children believe and internalize what their parents say about them. It is sadistic and destructive for a parent to make repetitive jokes at the expense of a vulnerable child. Phil was constantly being humiliated and picked on. When he made an attempt to confront his father’s behavior, he was accused of being inadequate because he “couldn’t take a joke.” Phil had nowhere to go with all these feelings. As Phil described his feelings, I could see that he was still embarrassed—as if he believed that his complaints were silly.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“Co-dependent was used interchangeably with the term enabler—someone whose life was out of control because he or she was taking responsibility for “saving” a chemically dependent person. But in the past few years the definition of co-dependency has expanded to include all people who victimize themselves in the process of rescuing and being responsible for any compulsive, addicted, abusive, or excessively dependent person.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“All of us develop our expectations about how people will treat us based on our relationships with our parents”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“You are learning to trust your own perception of reality. You will discover that even when your parents don’t agree with you or don’t approve of what you’re doing, you will be able to tolerate the anxiety because you don’t need their validation anymore. You are becoming self-defined.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“As you gain more control over your past and present relationship with your parents, you will discover that your other relationships, especially your relationship with yourself, will improve dramatically. You will have the freedom, perhaps for the first time, to enjoy your own life.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“We can only speculate why, but physically abusive parents seem to share certain characteristics. First, they have an appalling lack of impulse control.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“Whether adult children of toxic parents were beaten when little or left alone too much, sexually abused or treated like fools, overprotected or overburdened by guilt, they almost all suffer surprisingly similar symptoms: damaged self-esteem, leading to self-destructive behavior. In one way or another, they almost all feel worthless, unlovable, and inadequate.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life