But It’s Your Family… Quotes

“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. Just as we’re about to put our finger on it, it seems to slip away. Without a clear set of concrete, provable terms, many of us question if our abuse or neglect was real. Did it really happen? Or are we just making it up? We reason that if we were truly abused, our abuse should be easy to explain.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“We unconsciously gravitate toward relationships and situations that are familiar to us because we know how to deal with them. As children, we don’t recognize, or at least we don’t want to acknowledge, the flaws in our parents, because seeing them as flawed or substandard is scary. But by denying the painful truth about our parents, we aren’t able to recognize similarly hurtful people in our future relationships. This form of denial or lack of the ability to recognize the pattern causes us to experience the same painful heartbreak over and over. We just don’t see it coming, even when all the signs are right before us. Instead, we keep believing that things will be different each next time, but the different doesn’t come.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“Experience tells us that certain people are not ever going to change. This is a reality, and this is the reality we need to deal with when it comes to our toxic family members. The Bible clearly tells us that evil people—those who have hardened themselves to that which is good—do not change, not because they can’t but because they won’t.32”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“The longer we ignore red flags, pretend they don’t exist, the more we disconnect from ourselves.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“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.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“A child should never feel as if they need to earn a mother’s love. This will leave a void in their heart all of their life. A mother’s love needs to be given unconditionally to establish trust and a firm foundation of emotional intimacy in a child’s life. If love is withheld, a child will look for it in a million other ways, sometimes throughout their lifetime unless they come to some sort of peace with their past. The emotional foundation we give our children at home is foundational to their life. We cannot underestimate the value of home and the power of a mother’s love.12”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“Bree Bonchay, author of I Am Free, explains that we relate to our toxic family members as if they are normal healthy people who possess a conscience, self-awareness, and a sense of integrity. Because of this inherent trust in them, we believe their words. We know that we don’t lie or manipulate so we believe our toxic family members would never lie to or manipulate us. We give them the benefit of the doubt because we believe they genuinely love us. Because we believe they truly love us, we cannot believe they could ever or would ever do anything to intentionally hurt us. When we believe in this way, we are essentially projecting our own good qualities or character traits onto the toxic family members we love. So when they don’t respond in the ways that a loving, kind, healthy person would, we are left feeling hurt and confused and questioning ourselves, believing we must somehow be to blame for their lack of love and understanding.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“Like toddlers, toxic people base all their decisions on what they feel rather than on what is right. The thought of any consequences of their actions pale in comparison to getting what they want in the moment. Contrast this with healthy people: they think before they act and are mindful of how what they do may negatively impact themselves or others. 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. 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. Of course, healthy flawed people sometimes do some of the same things that toxic people do. The difference, however, between ordinary and toxic lies is in the subtleness, persistence, and consistency of a toxic person’s behaviors.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“We enter the world of love and relationships with such little confidence that we have a hard time believing that others could be genuinely interested in us. Because of this, we are too afraid to ask for what we need from others. We fear rejection. To us, rejection from others only proves our toxic family members must have been right about us. We have been programmed to believe that having needs of our own bothers other people, so we don’t ask for what we need and end up stifling ourselves by constantly acquiescing to others to stay in relationships we don’t even want to be in. In this way we end up perpetuating the emotional loneliness we were raised in.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“Being enabled to tell my story and through it help others, I feel that all the pain I have endured and continue to handle has and is coming full circle. Every evil done to me is being made up to me tenfold.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“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.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“It is important to understand that 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 have the knowledge and experience to know it is unwise to remain connected with them.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“Toxic family members will see expressions of forgiveness as weaknesses to exploit. Don’t give in to their tactics this way. If you need to forgive them for your own healing, then do it, but keep it to yourself.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“Complete separation and time away allow us to recover and to remember—perhaps even finally establish—how to express who we really are. We are people who are deserving of love, good fortune, and acceptance. We cannot get to this point in our recovery if we don’t let our toxic family members go and focus on healing ourselves.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“I have come to realize since breaking free of my toxic family members that I was justifying insanity to stay connected with them. The longer I am free of their manipulations, I notice that more memories surface of instances of manipulation I didn’t even have the time to focus on at the time they were happening because the next manipulation was already in play. Now I can see that even the smallest things that were going on or that were said to me all served to push me down.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“As we recover, we start to remember and connect with who we really are. We start connecting with the image of that amazing person we always thought or hoped we had the potential to be.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“As I have matured, I have become more of a runner. If I start sensing things aren’t right in a relationship and I feel I’ve done my best to express myself and there is still no understanding with my partner, I start to run. I start to feel that if I can’t be understood on something not all that deep, then my partner will have a really hard time understanding me when things become more significant and intense. I falsely interpret this to mean that I am a burden, so I unconsciously start preparing for plan B.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“Prone to Cling or Run Because we had no balance in our emotional worlds growing up, when we start developing other relationships in life, our insecurities create us into runners or clingers. I have actually been both in my life.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“Fear People When we grow up under volatile, immature, chaotic, and selfish family members, we are nurtured to believe that people are scary and cruel. And when we are raised to question our lovability and worth, how can we trust that others will see us as worthy? Because conflict was so high growing up in our toxic family, many of us learned to agree with the poisonous dynamics as a way to find or keep the peace. We may have also lived our lives trying to please and prove our value to our parents.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“Low Self-Worth Danu Morrigan teaches that the reason our toxic family members impact us throughout our lives is because they are responsible for programming our beliefs. We respond automatically based on the core beliefs we were raised on. It makes logical sense then that, when we are loved well as children, we gather that evidence and conclude that we are valuable, lovable, and worthwhile. If, however, we were not loved enough and we were consistently neglected and shamed, we draw conclusions from that evidence too: We were not loved by our toxic family members because we were not lovable; we were neglected because we weren’t worth taking care of; and we were humiliated because we are shameful. Healing”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“Out of our insecurities, we strive to be needless in relationships. We take on the belief that we are the person who has to do all the work because who could possibly love us if we’re not the person doing all the work. We have learned we don’t deserve love. We have learned we have to work hard for it. We know that if anyone is going to be wrong or needs to change, it will, without a doubt, end up being us. This is a horrible way to be in a relationship because if the relationship fails, due to no fault of our own, we interpret relationship failures as we didn’t do enough and that we are, in truth, fundamentally unlovable.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“Without this validation, children learn to give in to what others seem sure about.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“I do not hate my toxic family members. I also do not need them.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“In my own therapy, my therapist said to me that as long as I believe that I am the problem, I will harbor a hope that things in the relationship with my toxic family members can change because I have the power to change myself. We erroneously believe that if we try to be good enough, successful, or perfect, maybe our toxic family members will change their minds about us. But they don’t and they won’t. Now if the problem isn’t within us, then that creates a horribly scary feeling. That means we’re powerless to make any positive changes in how our toxic family members treat us. I certainly know that I can do nothing to change anything in myself that would ever make a difference in my relationships with my family members. At one time, this rocked my world. But now, I just feel relief. I am no longer brainwashed by them into believing that I am the bad kid, the problem child, the difficult one. I know the truth about my family and have accepted it.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“To avoid needless misunderstandings, it is helpful to reflect back to our children what they have communicated as confirmation we have heard them correctly. Once understanding is established, we can encourage, guide, and praise them.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“When we are raised in toxic families, we often go through a time period, and for some of us, a lifetime, of repeating the toxic patterns we were raised in with other people in our lives. We do this until we decide we’ve had enough pain and choose to genuinely examine our patterns and stop the craziness for good.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“To have our experiences flat-out denied or otherwise invalidated is called gaslighting. Our perceptions of reality are continually undermined, causing us to lose confidence in our intuition, our memory, or our powers of reasoning.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“I love this quote: “Never argue with an idiot. People watching won’t be able to tell the difference.” When we are attacked and defending ourselves, we end up looking just as bad as our attacker, and our attacker will make sure to focus on only our reaction rather than what they did to cause our reaction.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“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”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

“Peck states in his book The Road Less Traveled that children feel if their parents are willing to suffer with them, they will tell themselves “then suffering must not be so bad,” and they will become more willing to suffer when on their own. In other words, children come to trust that there is nothing unsafe or wrong with them when they are suffering. In order for parents to be present to and suffer with their children, their children need three simple things from them: time, love, and attention. Toxic parents provide none of these things, certainly not in any healthy ways.”
― Sherrie Campbell, But It's Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath