Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

Everyone should read this book! It gives you valuable insight into not just your parents but yourself

You know that handful of books you think of as your top five keepers if you had to get rid of all the others? This is one of mine. Growing up, I hated my mom. I was abused in every way except sexual. As victims of abuse well know, the mental abuse is much more damaging than the physical. I thought moving out as a young adult would end the tyranny, but no... Only the physical abuse stopped. When my first child was a baby, I was still dealing with my psycho mother and was very close to removing her from my life forever. Then I found this book. I was in tears on almost every page, as my feelings were validated so intimately I thought she had to be writing about me personally. It was like she reached into my soul and called out my deepest hurts and said, "You are allowed to feel this way. I understand how you are affected by this toxic person, and I am going to help you make it stop." Now, this book isn't designed to help you feel better about everything that is going on internally. It is not going to tell you how to be okay with everything that happened and how you feel about it inside your mind. It is written with the intent of taking real action to affect REAL CHANGE in your relationship. In order to overcome the hurt caused by those in your life, you will learn how to take control of the situation by setting boundaries and changing the rules of how you will be treated in the future. It is not for the faint hearted. The advice in this book will be difficult, and you will be tempted to resist her advice. It will make things harder for awhile, depending on how much control your parents have and how willing they are to let it go. In the case of my mom, she resisted this change with all her might. It wasn't very pleasant for awhile there. But I will tell you it was ABSOLUTELY WORTH IT. Now, my relationship with her is pretty darn good! We aren't as close as she'd like us to be, as it is hard to let someone that hurt me that deeply into that vulnerable space again, but it's no longer a source of pain. Now, along with this book I also inserted some therapy in the mix, so please continue the work on yourself to be at peace with your past. I have referred to this book SO MANY TIMES over the years, and I recently bought the Kindle version as well. There is a young adult in my life that is currently dealing with her own toxic parent, and I felt this book would help her. I offered to loan her my paperback copy, but she is still living with her very controlling parent and they would find the book in their occasional random invasion of her privacy... So, I downloaded the Kindle version and gave her access to my Kindle app. She read the book and is working on utilizing the advice now. You can overcome your toxic parent, and if you are truly willing to reclaim your life, this book is a must have.

Toxic Parents is a great resource for anyone who is suffering abuse at the hands of a parent. Susan Forward is an internationally recognized therapist and writer, who has also hosted her own ABC talk radio program. As the director of Luke 17: 3 Ministries, a ministry for Adult Daughters of Abusive or Controlling Birth-Families, I must say that, next to the Bible itself, I have found Toxic Parents to be an invaluable resource for dealing with relatives who will destroy you if you allow it. When you love a family member, and treat them with love, it is hard to understand, or believe, that they would return your love with abuse and maliciousness. But unfortunately, that is reality for many of us, and this book helps us to come to terms with that, and protect ourselves from our family's destructiveness. Do your parents still treat you like a child? Do they control you with threats or guilt or manipulate you with money? Does it seem that no matter what you do, it's never good enough? As a child, did you have to take care of your parents because of their problems? Do you still? Toxic Parents explains the dynamics of a dysfunctional family in a very easy-to-read format. Types of toxic parents are discussed in detail, such as inadequate parents, controllers, alcoholics, verbal, physical, and sexual abusers, as well as the family system and why parents behave this way. Some topics covered are: Spoken and Unspoken Rules, Obedience No Matter What, I Don't Know Where You End and I Begin, No One in This Family is an Alcoholic, The Family Balancing Act, and Fear of Anger. We are shown the rigid mechanisms by which toxic parents cope, such as Denial, Projection (accusing or blaming the child), Sabotage, Triangling (confiding in or enlisting the child against someone else), and Keeping Secrets. The reader is given steps to reclaim her life and instruction on assertiveness, how to state what you are or are not willing to do, and how to confront your parent, including old, ill, or deceased parents. The chapters on confrontation are especially valuable, teaching what to expect and how to handle your parents' reactions( 'It never happened', 'It was your fault','I said I was sorry', 'We did the best we could','Look what we did for you', etc.), as well as your siblings' reactions and reactions from other assorted relatives. Toxic Parents teaches you that you are not responsible for your parents' behavior, teasing, neglect, abuse, or unhappiness, their problems, or their choice to do nothing to solve their problems. Your parents are responsible for their own lives and their own actions. This book will help you decide what kind of a relationship, if any, you can have with your parents. It helped me recognize much of what was going on in my own dysfunctional birth-family, and is a very valuable tool for anyone who needs help in understanding and freeing herself from a situation that is poisoning her life. It will open your eyes- and I highly recommend it to anyone dealing with "parent" issues in their adult lives.

In this very sane and easy to read book, Susan Forward and Craig Buick lay out various problems with parents and ways to deal with them so as to break the cycle of generational abuse. It’s an excellent roadmap for confronting what’s going on and becoming self-defining. This kind of inner work isn’t for wimps. It takes enormous courage and the authors are clear about the fact that it upsets the apple cart of family dynamics. So much so that many people end up having to minimise their interactions with parents or even disconnect entirely. The payoff is freedom from guilt and shame and more energy to live an authentic life; to give and get genuine, healthy love instead of the counterfeit version you grew up with. It was written quite a while ago, but it’s as relevant as if it came out yesterday. Can’t recommend it enough.

I've tried reading a few books of this style. But this is the first that I felt really I really got something out of. Make sure to take your time with the exercises as they can be very revealing!

All I can say is wow. What a brilliant book. I had been in denial about the abuse I'd suffered and the damage it had caused, thinking I'd dealt with it and left it in the past - and not really understanding how deeply it affected me and all my adult relationships and decisions, and ultimately how much my depression and anxiety and self-loathing has been caused by my childhood. Because of this book I was able to face for the first time not just the overt abuse by my father, but the damaging passivity and guilt induced by my mother, and how much I needed a mother to protect me and mother me, and how instead from age 3 I took on the role of mother for her; always trying to save her from him and comfort her when she was crying. Meanwhile no one ever comforted me or cared for me, and Dad was known to me and my sister as' the ogre', as this terrifying figure we always tried to hide quietly from before he unleashed his anger at us. I feel in touch with my feelings now, and free of the crushing burdens of guilt and resposibility towards them both for the first time. I realise now I was an orphan really as I have been trying to rescue my mother since as far back as I can remember up until I read this book, and I was tring to make Dad love me, which will always been impossible. I was giving love to them both but receiving nothing but anger and callusness and selfishness back, and jealousy too. They have both saboutaged me in my careerand my hobbies, under supposed looking out for my best interests. I have been brutalised and have lived in fear my whole life and felt some how that everything was my fault and somehow if I kept trying to please them they would love and care for me the way parents should. I have been controlled and manipulated by them both, cancelled plans, forced not to move more than a couple of miles away, and coerced into doing what they want even as an adult. I feel at last able to see reality clearly and calmly, and put the responsibility for their behaviour where it belongs, which is on them. It is not up to me to make them happy, and what they both did to me and my sister was so wrong and we did not in any way deserve any of it. I feel free enough to make my own decsions without fear of their judgement or anger or tears, because at last I can see how it's my life not theirs, and they have taken enough of me over a lifetime. This book really shone a light on what my toxic parents did to me, and it was like a revelation. This book made me sad, it made me angry at them both and angry at myself for being blind for so long, but unltimately after grieving, it made me free. I'm 39 years old, but feel as though a weight has been lifted and I can start my life properly for the first time, with hope and strength and a vastly improved self-esteem. I can't recommend this book enough. I am so glad I bought it, not just for me, but for my sister too who found it as helpful as I did.

This book is absolutely amazing. For me the author has very un traditional approach and ideas that resonnate with me. This book really helped me understand why I act the way I act, better understand my fears and help me dealing with them. At the beginning I was a bit disapointed because there was no solution given in sight. But be patient and get to the end. The author structures the book the following way: 1) you can identify your issues (examples are provided) 2) she explains why people act one or the other way 3) she provides a recovery plan (that is fantastic in my opinion) You just have to be open minded

This book was recommended by my Wife and I will be thankful to her forever :) For starters, this book is NOT about parent-bashing. This book clearly explains what makes parents toxic and what does not. We have been conditioned by society to put parents on a pedestal, but we need to come out of it. We need to understand that they too are as human as their children are. An example : the father of one girl, told her, "you'll always be my little failure". This destroyed her, and for the rest of her life she felt inadequate and suffered from serious low-confidence It is true that we may have learned good manners from our parents. Almost everyone is vocal about it. But what they are not vocal about or deny, is the fact that deep down, most negative characteristics we have, can be found in the way our parents treated us when we were kids ..... and continue being toxic to us even when we are grown-ups with a family and our own kids .... and the cycle continues ... ... but you can heal yourself. In very simple language, Dr. Susan gives real life examples of parental toxicity and its ill-effects, along with steps to heal yourself. Everybody should read this. I mean everybody.