Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members Quotes

“Moment of Insight: Sometimes you have to let go of what is killing you, even when it’s killing you to let go.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Core needs for children include, but are not limited to, receiving adequate levels of time, love, and attention, along with meeting their needs to feel heard, validated, and understood. When these needs aren’t met, there is no way to rewind to the beginning of life in a way that enables any outside love relationship to heal or meet your core needs. Research naively suggests we seek other relationships outside our family to supply our basic needs of love, acceptance, and emotional support. Although other love relationships are fundamental, necessary, and important to our overall well-being, I believe it is not only inappropriate for us to put this type of pressure on others to fill the needs our family neglected, but this request is also impossible to satisfy. It is unwise and emotionally dangerous to assume anyone could meet the core needs that can be met only by the family we were born into. The unfortunate message from this type of information is that other people can heal our wounds and meet our core needs when, ultimately, we need to learn to heal our own wounds and meet our own needs.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“you cannot heal in the same environment that is poisoning you.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“1. Acknowledge and grieve the abusive and dismissive ways in which your family has mishandled your humanity. List the misdeeds done to you, and acknowledge where you didn’t get the validation or compassion you sought and deserved just out of basic human decency. One of the greatest ways to bring these memories up is to write to a F*ck You For list. I do this often with my patients. Begin each sentence with F*ck You For, and complete the sentence with the painful, angering, or frustrating memory. This exercise helps move you from feeling like a victim to taking the trash out. It places accountability on the right people. It also illuminates areas of growth for you, as you may feel anger at yourself for how long you allowed yourself to be passive or submissive to the members of your family you felt had power over you.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Moment of Insight: Communication is not the key to successful relationships. Comprehension is. It does not matter how much you communicate with someone if they are committed to their own narrow and inflexible narrative.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Moment of Insight: Overexplaining is a trauma response.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“You have challenges with assertiveness and setting boundaries. In psychologically abusive families, asserting yourself is not an option. At any moment of trying to stand up for yourself, your efforts were more than likely ignored, gaslighted, or punished. So you enter relationships with fears of criticism, rejection, abandonment, and punishment (CRAP). Because of this CRAP, you fear setting boundaries.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“You tend to be perfectionistic. Never feeling you have achieved enough or are enough can cause you to over-function. Over-functioning signals to other people that they can use you. All it takes is for someone to make you feel imperfect, and you reflexively jump into action. There’s a saying: Perfection is trauma all dressed up.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“When I was forced to accept, in one moment as an adult, just how evil my family members could be, I stopped calling them by family title names. I have been calling them by their given names ever since. This has done wonders for me and for many of my patients, psychologically. I want the same for you.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Moment of Insight: Closure does not come from not feeling the pain anymore. Closure comes from actively healing your pain.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Keep in mind, severing ties is not about winning or losing. You either have freedom and happiness, or you don’t. You need to simply not care whether other people think you’ve let your family win. In fact, I do not care if my family thinks they won. I did not lose anything. I have everything they do not: my freedom and my happiness.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Beyond my own example, a healthy family member would make sure to let you know that any time you felt ready to heal and talk, they would always be available; that they are deeply sorry the relationship is in such a bad place and for their part in that.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Secondary abuse occurs when these secondary people inadvertently blame, criticize, and question your reactions to the hidden abuses they may not be able to see. Many of them will try to “talk sense into you.” Their questioning and pressuring is secondary abuse.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Respect your limits. Become mindful of when you are taking on too much, apologizing too much, agonizing too much, giving too much, or not asking for enough in return. It is okay to delegate some of what you need to do to those who are available and eager to help.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Empathy lets you know that you are not alone and that you will be okay. However, empathy can be a curse when you unknowingly empathize with a toxic person who uses your soft-hearted nature to further exploit and manipulate you, thereby driving you into deeper and deeper levels of insecurity.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“This drives you into codependent relationships. You are so afraid of being rejected that you learn to prefer a false sense of security to true love.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Moment of Insight: Survivors of family abuse live life with the heart of an orphan.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“When you are bold, you learn very quickly who is genuine in your life and who is not. This is a gift. The masculine energy brings clarity—no gossip, no drama, just clarity. This type of clarity helps you to become more discerning and move on from people and situations who cannot and do not support you in being the true, lively, vibrant person you are meant to be.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Healing C-PTSD with the Three C’s What your family members did not provide can be gained in what many researchers refer to as rewiring—a great skill to master. For example, when you are in the throes of an emotional flashback, you can replace the negative inner critic with something more productive and positive. You can train yourself to use the Three C’s Technique (catch it, check it, change it) to disrupt the negative tapes of your childhood.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Do you fear a relationship’s ending because you see it as abandonment?”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Foundational anxiety is not a brain chemistry issue but rather an attachment issue. When your core attachment foundation is unstable, so are you. Susan Forward teaches that “an unpredictable parent is a fearsome god in the eyes of a child. As children we are at the mercy of our god-like parents. If we never know when the next lightning bolt of neglect, abuse, or manipulation will strike, we live in fear. The fear of its strike and the anxiety of not knowing when it is going to hit becomes deeply ingrained and grows in us as we grow.”10”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Further, because you received so little emotional connection from your caregivers and no one showed you appropriate ways to speak or behave—a helpful model called mirroring—you may find it hard to recognize, label, communicate, and express your emotions when asked to describe them.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Moment of Insight: When children cannot understand or find answers to what is happening to them, they will automatically believe that it is their fault.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“This first stage of life runs from birth to eighteen months. This is when you learn that either you can trust your parents/caregivers and the larger world around you or you cannot. If the care you receive is consistent, predictable, and reliable, you can develop an innate sense of trust that your critical needs (for being fed, cleaned, held, soothed, protected) will be met. By developing trust in infancy, you also develop the virtue of hope.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“The psychosocial theory of life span development developed by Eric Erikson9 can show you how, when, and why your crippling feelings of self-doubt were created. His theory shares how and why the emotional damage done has such a lasting impact throughout life. In my experience, once a person understands how, why, when, and where the damage happened, this knowledge places them more securely on the path to recovery.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Moment of Insight: People pleasers often start off as parent or family pleasers.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Love yourself as if you were your own child.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“If you choose to rescue or protect people from the natural consequences their behavior merits, you render them powerless.”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“Define your limits: You must decide what you will or will not tolerate. Pay attention to feelings of resentment: Such feelings let you know when someone has been forcefully imposing their personal expectations, views, demands, or values on you without your consent or interest. Be direct or be silent: There are two ways to set boundaries. First, be direct with the person or people crossing your boundaries by telling them how you feel when they engage in the behaviors that create your discomfort. This method works best in relationships that are mutually reciprocal and open to feedback. With toxic people, the second method—”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut

“How can I betray what is abusive and is already betraying me? Can we betray betrayal?”
― Sherrie Campbell, Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut