Toxic Parents Read Online Free

your parents were awful to you. I think they misused your religion to punish you. I don’t think you deserved any of it.
SANDY: I committed two mortal sins!
SUSAN: Look, you were just a kid. Maybe you made some mistakes, but you don’t have to keep paying for them forever. Even the Church lets you atone and get on with your life. If your parents were as good as you say they are, they would have shown some compassion for you.
SANDY: They were trying to save my soul. If they didn’t love me so much, they wouldn’t care.
SUSAN: Let’s look at this from a different perspective. What if you hadn’t had that abortion? And you had a little girl. She’d be about sixteen now, right?
    Sandy nodded, trying to figure out where I was headed.
SUSAN: Suppose she got pregnant? Would you treat her like your parents treated you?
SANDY: Not in a million years!
    Sandy realized the implications of what she’d said.
SUSAN: You’d be more loving. And your parents should have been more loving. That’s their failure, not yours.
    Sandy had spent half her life constructing an elaborate wall of defense. Such defensive walls are all too common among adult children of toxic parents. They can be made of a variety of psychological building blocks, but the most common, the primary material in Sandy’s wall, is a particularly obstinate brick called “denial.”
    The Power of Denial
    Denial is both the most primitive and the most powerful of psychological defenses. It employs a make-believe reality to minimize, or even negate, the impact of certain painful life experiences. It even makes some of us forget what our parents did to us, allowing us to keep them on their pedestals.
    The relief provided by denial is temporary at best, and the price for this relief is high. 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. When that happens, we have to face the truths we’ve been so desperately trying to avoid, except now we’ve got to face them during a period of extreme stress. If we can deal with our denial up front, we can avoid the crisis by opening the pressure valve and leting it out easily.
    Unfortunately, your own denial is not the only denial you may have to contend with. Your parents have denial systems of their own. When you are struggling to reconstruct the truth of your past, especially when that truth reflects poorly on them, your parents may insist that “it wasn’t so bad,” “it didn’t happen that way,” or even that “it didn’t happen at all.” Such statements can frustrate your attempts to reconstruct your personal history, leading you to question your own impressions and memories. They undercut your confidence in your ability to perceive reality, making it that much harder to rebuild your self-esteem.
    Sandy’s denial was so strong that not only couldn’t she see her own reality, she couldn’t even acknowledge that there was another reality to see. I empathized with her pain, but I had to get her at least to consider the possibility that she had a false image of her parents. I tried to be as nonthreatening as possible:
I respect the fact that you love your parents and that you believe they’re good people. I’m sure they did some very good things for you when you were growing up. But there’s got to be a part of you that knows or at least senses that loving parents don’t assault their child’s dignity and self-worth so relentlessly. I don’t want to pull you away from your parents or your religion. You don’t have to disown them or renounce the Church. But a big part of lifting your depression may depend on giving up the fantasy that they’re perfect. They were cruel to you. They hurt you. Whatever you did, you had already done. No amount of haranguing from them was going to change that. Can’t you feel how deeply they hurt the sensitive young girl inside of you?