Toxic Parents by Susan Forward Read Free Book Online Page A

pattern.
    Unconsciously, Ken was still rationalizing his father’s abandonment by taking the blame. As a child, he had assumed that some deficiency in himself had caused his father to beat a hasty retreat. Having arrived at this conclusion, self-hatred was bound to follow. He became a young man without purpose or direction in his life. Despite his intelligence, he was restless and unhappy in school and looked to the army as a solution to his problems. When that didn’t work he turned to drugs in a desperate attempt to both fill his inner emptiness and deaden his pain.
    Ken’s father may have been an adequate parent before the divorce, but afterward he was woefully deficient in providing even the minimal contact that his young son so desperately needed. By failing to do this, he significantly impaired Ken’s developing sense of worth and lovability.
    There is no such thing as a happy divorce. Divorce is invariably traumatic for everyone in the family, even though it may well be the healthiest course of action under the circumstances. But it is essential for parents to realize that they are divorcing a spouse, not a family. Both parents have a responsibility to maintain a connection to their children despite the disruption in their own lives. A divorcedecree is not a license for an inadequate parent to abandon his or her children.
    A parent’s departure creates a particularly painful deprivation and emptiness within a child. Remember, children almost always conclude that if something negative happens within the family, it’s their fault. Children of divorced parents are particularly prone to this belief. A parent who vanishes from his children’s lives reinforces their feelings of invisibility, creating damage to their self-esteem that they’ll drag into adulthood like a ball and chain.
    It’s What They Didn’t Do That Hurts
    It’s easy to recognize abuse when a parent beats a child or subjects a child to continual tirades. But the toxicity of inadequate or deficient parents can be elusive, difficult to define. When a parent creates damage through omission rather than commission—through what they don’t do rather than what they do do—the connections of adult problems to this sort of toxic parenting become very hard to see. Since the children of these parents are predisposed to deny these connections anyway, my job becomes especially difficult.
    Compounding the problem is the fact that many of these parents are so troubled themselves that they evoke pity. Because these parents so often behave like helpless or irresponsible children, their adult children feel protective. They jump to their parents’ defense, like a crime victim apologizing for the perpetrator.
    Whether it’s “they didn’t mean to do any harm,” or “they did the best they could,” these apologies obscure the fact that these parents abdicated their responsibilities to their children. Through this abdication, these toxic parents robbed their children of positive role models, without which healthy emotional development is extremely difficult.
    If you are the adult child of a deficient or inadequate parent, you probably grew up without realizing that there was an alternative tofeeling responsible for them. Dancing at the end of their emotional string seemed a way of life, not a choice.
    But you do have a choice. You can begin the process of understanding that you were wrongly forced to grow up too soon, that you were robbed of your rightful childhood. You can work on accepting how much of your life’s energy has gone down the drain of misplaced responsibility. Take this first step and you’ll find a new reserve of energy that is suddenly available to you for the first time—energy that you’ve exhausted on your toxic parents much of your life, but which can finally be used to help you become more loving and responsible to yourself.

3 | “Why Can’t They Let Me Live My Own Life?”
    The Controllers
    L et’s listen in on an imaginary