"Poisoned Love": Healing childhood trauma and reshaping a new self

In this shocking classic of psychological healing, Dr. Susan Forward points out that many parents today have been "poisoned": controlling their children, verbal abuse, physical abuse, etc., these behaviors unintentionally deeply affect their children. It hurts their children, and many people are still unable to get out of the shadow of this harm. Based on her many years of family psychotherapy experience, Susan analyzed the various symptoms of toxic parents through a large number of classic cases, described the harm, analyzed the causes, and pointed out countermeasures. Helping people who have been hurt by toxic parents or are still hurt by toxic parents to gain courage and strength, heal childhood trauma, and rebuild a new version of themselves.

Dr. Susan Forward is an internationally renowned psychotherapist, speaker, and author. Her books "Forced Love" and "Depressive Love" are the number one New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of "The Abandonment of Innocence", "The Money Devil" and "Emotional Blackmail". She was the darling of media talk shows, hosted a talk show on ABC for six years, and established California's first private sexual abuse treatment center.

Craig Buck is a film and television writer and producer who has written about human behavior issues for many magazines and newspapers across the United States.

Looking back on all the ideas about family in the world, parents love their children. But what is "love"? Since "love" makes people feel relaxed and happy, warm and comfortable, why do we always feel angry, sad, anxious and sad in our families? So can the "love" our parents give us really still be called "love"?

Many people find themselves struggling with the dilemma of whether they are being abused or if they are "neurotic." ?

In a healthy family, parents can withstand some of the anxiety caused by change, tolerate the diversity displayed by their children, and understand and acknowledge that "this is just a stage in life." ".

But for toxic parents, when the children begin to have their own sense of independence, they begin to be dissatisfied with the long-term negative behavior pattern of the toxic parents. When the communication method is no longer effective, they are more likely to regard the child's rebellion and personality as an attack and challenge to their own authority. They maintain their authoritative position by reinforcing the child's helplessness and dependence.

The deeper the poisoning of parents, the deeper the influence and control over their children. Children have to put aside the independence and sense of autonomy they need, and first go to please the gods who have been in their eyes since childhood. They are ordinary parents and cannot pull their parents down from the "altar".

If parents use their identity and status to suppress their children, underage children will involuntarily increase their dependence and believe that they are "not grown up" or "unfilial". In this way, they also believe more that they need the protection and support of their parents.

Such negative words will destroy our confidence again, frustrate our attempts to reconstruct memory, and make us doubt our own memory and cognition. In this way, our ability and confidence in perceiving facts will be greatly frustrated, and it will be more difficult to rebuild self-confidence.

Children also have the right to be "children". They have the right to be playful and naughty, do whatever they want, and spend their childhood irresponsibly. Although as the children grow up day by day, parents do have the right to ask their children to gradually cultivate their children to take on family and social responsibilities to adapt to the independent life in the future. Nurture them towards maturity, but this should never be at the expense of childhood.

A child who needs to take on the responsibility of maintaining the family has his own needs as a child ignored, so he can only continue to deny his own needs in order to cope with loneliness and lack of emotion.

When the harm caused by a parent is due to inaction, the relationship between the child and the toxic parent in adulthood is difficult to detect. Whether they “mean no harm” or are “doing their best,” parents who shirk responsibility are actually seriously hindering their children’s positive development.

The pretense of a “normal family” is particularly harmful to children, forcing them to deny the reliability of their own emotions and perceptions. Developing self-confidence can be especially difficult if a child has to constantly lie about what he thinks and feels.

This sense of loneliness makes the family sink deeper and deeper into the quagmire. Since the size of the family is relatively small, keeping secrets between family members will give rise to an extremely twisted sense of loyalty. , strong and irrespective loyalty to parents will evolve into the child's nature and sow unhealthy seeds for decision-making when they grow up. This kind of undiscriminating loyalty is extremely destructive and restrictive in children. After leaving home, it often affects their lives.

For children, the parent-child relationship is the first and most important interpersonal relationship to teach them: the people closest to them will also hurt themselves and will continue to lie and deceive, so this kind of addicted family Most of the adult children have a fear of approaching outsiders, and the unpreparedness, mutual trust, and openness that should exist in normal interpersonal relationships have long been destroyed to the core.

It is easiest for parents to impose criticism on their children as a means of control. No matter what their children do, they can always find reasons for criticism. Children become the punching bag and scapegoat when their parents encounter setbacks.

Children who are overly controlled by anxious and fearful parents often become anxious and fearful, and never truly mature. When they enter adolescence or even adulthood, many people are still interfered and manipulated by their parents and cannot escape the need to be guided and controlled by their parents.

Poisoned parents are unable to cope with and face this kind of emotion, so they never cut off the kite string that parents have for their children - they must firmly control their children to feel at ease. Once children show a determination or willingness to be independent, they feel betrayed and abandoned.

At first, we were all fulfilling our parents’ little wishes, choosing a major they liked, working in a city close to them, meeting people they liked... thinking that there would always be a chance to wait until the moment of our own choice. However, in the end we will find that it is getting harder and harder to please our parents. It is like a race. Parents are the ones who set the finish line, and they keep moving and pushing forward. There is no way for us to reach the finish line.

In front of some parents who are particularly controlling, their children's lives seem to be integrated with their own lives and become an extension of their own lives. At this time, if the child wants to get rid of this suffocating control, it will cost too much - that is, doing everything that is different from the parents' wishes, including denying what they originally desire.

It seems that you have truly become your own master and taken the initiative. However, your excessive desire to rebel overwhelms your free will, leading to counterproductive results. This is not healthy. The rebellion is hardly in our best interests.

Here we have to look at the damage caused by parents and their death separately. The damage has been caused and does not end with death, just like the control of parents does not end with their death. Same.

This kind of direct and vicious abuse ignores the children's feelings, continuously attacks the children, and affects their developing self-image.

We can also tell jokes, but from the mouth of parents, to a child who is ignorant of the world and has no ability to distinguish, its frequency and cruelty make this joke abusive.

If a child cannot feel at ease even speaking in front of his parents and is accused of being humorless and incompetent, how will he/she cope with the language of all kinds of people as an adult?

Parents who pursue perfection in this way may not necessarily be a loser in their career, but they may also be a success. However, they have not found a suitable place to vent their pressure. Instead, they use their closest family members as a punching bag.

Because of their own success or failure, they like to place their hopes on their children, thinking that their children are their "second life". If their children can be perfect, then the family will be perfect, and they will be even more perfect. They place the burden of pursuing a stable life on their children, thereby avoiding the fact that they, as parents, cannot provide it.

Most parents who like to spank their children lack the ability to control impulses. Whenever they have strong negative emotions and nowhere to vent, young and error-prone children become their outlet. This Spanking is almost always a trigger-happy response to stress.

Most parents who like to physically abuse their children also come from families full of violence. After they grow up and start a family, most of them reenact the scenes of their childhood.

Many people were never loved by their parents as children and later became the parents of others, so they have huge emotional flaws and unfulfilled desires. Emotionally, they are still children. They view their children as their surrogate parents because their own parents never met their huge emotional needs.

They spank their children, and then beg for their children’s forgiveness, and even hope for their children’s forgiveness. Parents are unable to convey their confusion and pain to their children, but still want to get comfort from their children. This role reversal makes it even more difficult for children to understand the truth of the matter.

Children are fragile and vulnerable targets. Not only will they not fight back, they will also become quiet because they are intimidated. But the real source of parents' anger is not here at all. If it is not resolved, the next time they vent their anger will still fall on these poor children. These cowardly parents are unwilling to face their own problems and find comfort in every brief moment of venting, throwing all the pain onto their children.

Most sexual harassment incidents occur between acquaintances. If you think that biological parents will not harm their children, you are wrong.

The parent who acts as an accomplice may be timid or afraid of getting into trouble, or may be out of dependence on his or her spouse, or wants to "maintain" the family status quo. He or she will often tolerate the abuser, or simply sit on the sidelines. Being frightened and acting passive and incompetent seems to erase one's role as a silent accomplice in the abuse.

This kind of incompetent parent wants to preserve the false integrity of his family, so he will deny all the facts that undermine the stability of the family, especially such unspeakable scandals.

The same goes for abused children, who often experience both joy and pain, intermittent moments of terror and tenderness. This is because parents continue to make promises of love while abusing their children. The child's world is still very small, and parents are still the only source of love and comfort for the child.

Every child who was sexually abused in childhood inevitably feels dirty, hurt and weird. They cannot face their sexual desires in adulthood because sexual behavior is too similar to childhood sexual abuse; they also They are unable to correctly handle their sexual relationship with their partner because the unhealthy and distorted intimate relationship in childhood never gave them clear guidance and correct direction.

When we were children, our family system made up the entirety of our lives. The atmosphere in the family directly affected the trajectory of our growth. At this time, our ability to distinguish was not enough, and we placed too high expectations on our parents. Trust, so many of our concepts are directly applied to our parents' worldview.

But please don’t forget that our parents also grew up in their own parents’ families. A poisoned family system is like a series of car collisions on the highway. If part of the damage cannot be eliminated by itself, it will accumulate and be passed on to the next generation. Your entire family will accumulate over generations or even dozens of generations. The emotions, rules, principles and beliefs that have come down are all contained here.

"Psychological separation" refers to the individual's separation from the family he originally relied on to form his own independent personality.

The most significant difference between a healthy family and a toxic family system is how much tolerance and acceptance parents have for their children's psychological separation, that is, how much freedom family members have in expressing their own personalities. degrees of freedom. A healthy family encourages each family member to have his or her own development trajectory, encourages children to develop a sense of responsibility, and encourages children to express themselves.

This excessive sense of responsibility will make every decision we make revolve around our family rather than our own interests or preferences. Our emotions and our actions no longer belong to ourselves, but to ourselves. Completely become a vassal of the family.

In unhealthy families, toxic parents are horrified by every setback in life, large and small. They find ways to vent their fear and loss, and have no taboos at all about having young children at home. child. Although their methods are quite clumsy, they are already familiar with it and have many little tricks.

Denial is the toxic parent's first and most adept way of coping with the situation at home. They deny how bad the situation is and downplay the mistakes they have made.

In families where the relationship between parents is not harmonious, toxic parents will forget the role of the child and try to use the child as a weapon or form an alliance against the other parent, turning the child into a deformed alliance. one of the parties.

They exist in the way parents do things and circulate in the behavior of parents towards each other. Or parents may hint at these rules in their attitude towards us.

The penetration of these rules and concepts that have never been truly spoken is the most terrifying thing, like killing people invisible and cutting off things that belong to us bit by bit.

It is unnecessary and even dangerous to forgive our parents in order to feel more at ease and change our lives.

Forgiveness has two meanings: giving up the desire for revenge; pardoning the guilty party's responsibility.

Although we will get great pleasure from revenge in a short period of time, this will only plant the seeds for future conflicts. We cannot live with peace of mind and must always be vigilant about revenge. The shadow of the world will bring us troubles, which will undoubtedly consume too much of our energy and emotions.

Unconditionally pardoning a person's crimes, this kind of "repaying evil with kindness", is actually very difficult to achieve and is not good for one's physical and mental health.

This kind of long-term negative emotion is like an object falling from a high altitude. It should have bounced heavily like a ball, but at this time it hit the ground. Our earth itself needs to bear all the weight. Stress and pain. ?

In this kind of toxic parent-child relationship, if you no longer vent your sadness and anger to the person who hurt you, then you will have to bear it on yourself, which will only make us Hating one's own powerlessness.

We are full of justice for the misfortune of others, but swallow the bitter fruit of our own misfortune, so why should we be too harsh on ourselves?

We have the right to be angry at the pain and misfortune we have encountered, and we also have the right to feel sad because we have not received the love we longed for from our parents. We have the right not to downplay the hurt we have encountered, We don't need this kind of "forgiveness", we don't need to "pretend that nothing happened". It is difficult and painful to admit this fact, but we must also admit our scarred childhood.

Our goal is not to "forgive," but to achieve emotional and spiritual peace and healing.

If you make all the major decisions in your life based on what your parents would think, then in the end you will lose your last place of freedom.

Since we are connected to each other in a family, it is natural and normal to have various reactions and emotions, but this does not mean that we need to be responsible for these emotions.

Wrong concepts also bring us a lot of painful emotions. In the process of getting along with our parents, we have corresponding emotions because the concepts deep in our hearts are triggered, although we may not be aware of this ourselves.

Once we clarify whether and what kind of concepts are affecting us, and where the emotions we express come from, it will be much clearer to make decisions.

The confrontational type is not so easy to distinguish. Children with the confrontational type seem to have escaped the restraint and control of their parents, but due to the intensity of their emotions, the repetitiveness and expectation of their parents' reactions, and Whether the behavior is mainly directed at their parents rather than out of their own wishes shows that the inextricably entangled relationship between confrontational children and their parents cannot be severed.

Emotional independence means that you truly understand and accept your own emotions, be loyal to yourself, and become yourself. In this way, you are not only independent, but also have a healthy connection with your family, and your parents become themselves. .

When you put aside the ideas, emotions and behaviors that your parents or others want to impose on you, and can choose your own ideas, emotions and behaviors without restraint, then you start to face your own emotions. , and began to "define self".

To express your position means to express what you can do, what you are willing to do, what you are not willing to do, what things can be discussed and what things cannot be discussed. In this way, you can clarify your thoughts and concepts and understand what Things are important to us.

Don’t underestimate this look back. Many of our current pains are due to too many false facts from the past being internalized in our hearts and controlling our present, unless we can be realistic about our responsibilities. Take stock or we will continue to live with the baggage of shame and self-pity.

My parents failed to take on their fair share of responsibilities, making my childhood a painful one with too much responsibility.

On the surface, such parents do not seem to abuse you, because they have their own worries, illnesses and considerations, but this is a kind of hypocritical violence, which is also an emotional cold violence. As parents, they Not caring about us enough, not being considerate enough about us, whether it is due to being powerless or not caring at all, this is standard incompetence.

Don’t verbally or physically attack the person you’re angry with. This does no good to either party and may leave a mess that’s difficult to clean up.

After realizing what our parents did to us, we first feel angry, then sad, then powerless and desperate, and finally forgotten and dull. This is just like falling out of love or the end of any intimate relationship, it has its own own cycle.

Every time we have to "be strong" and face life, or care about other people, or pretend to forget something bad happened, it's like digging a little bit away from our roots, so that one day , the final shovel will bring us down, leaving us emotionally shattered.

It will be difficult at the beginning, and in the middle we may think of giving up because we can’t be perfect. It may seem easy to go back to the old habits, but the weak child in your heart cannot wait for you forever. You must know that he/she is still waiting for your rescue. You have to rescue him/her. Believe in yourself. is powerful.

If you don’t take the initiative to remove these toxins, they will be passed on to the next generation and even those around you.

It takes courage to challenge your parents like this. We seem to have tolerated it for too long and have forgotten to struggle and save ourselves. We dare not face our parents and are afraid to admit that there are many things that we have never learned before. Facts that are obtained from parents and will never be obtained in the future.

First of all, we must be mentally prepared to face all the refutation, denial, blame, anger and other emotions that our parents may have.

Secondly, we cannot bear a lot of negative emotions ourselves, so a strong social support system will be very helpful.

Furthermore, you need to practice it well. Just like the debate competitions we have all watched or participated in, we need to list what we want to say and the possible reactions of the other party, and practice it repeatedly.

Finally, and very importantly, we must realize that we are not responsible for our childhood misfortunes before we can take action.

No matter whether your parents’ reaction is silent, intense or even unable to continue the confrontation, you must know that trying your best to speak frankly to your parents is already a big step, without hurting yourself or the other party. Next, try your best to finish what is in your heart, and at the same time know when to suspend or end the conversation.

A safer approach is to consult your parents’ doctor, discuss with the doctor the possible consequences of emotional stress, and judge based on the parents’ own situation to ensure that our parents will not have major health problems. .

In any case, it will take some time to experience the long-term benefits of confrontation, maybe a few weeks, maybe a few months, and eventually you will find that confrontation brings you neither excitement nor loss. , but gradually improved self-confidence and continuous accumulation of psychological energy.

?No matter what happens, you are a winner because you have spoken out about your fears, and this fear that has accompanied you has made you hide your tail in front of your parents for too long. Speaking up is the first step to eradicating it, and you're already doing a great job.

Love is not mixed with torture and pain. We are given "love" this way, but we are taught this way. The true meaning of "love" is respect, care and acceptance. .

Parents' apology and willingness to take responsibility also convey to children the message that it is everyone's right to make mistakes, as long as they can take responsibility. By apologizing, you and your child model caring behavior.

There is no test for a person to become a parent. In fact, this can be a very scary thing.

If we have become parents, we should realize that educating children is not the responsibility of any parent. If one parent has already begun to export toxins to the child, then we, as the other parent, must not Stay silent again.

You can be a little more forceful here because the hurt that comes with violence is very damaging.

Intellectually, we know that the love and care we did not receive in childhood are more difficult to obtain now, but it is still difficult to accept psychologically if we want to truly let go.

You can also continue to wait for your parents to approve you as an adult, but this right is actually in your hands. Once you give up the fight, you will find that you have too many things to worry about and practice. No more time is spent arguing with parents.

Becoming an adult who is truly responsible for oneself does not happen overnight. We all need to stumble up and down, inside and outside, in all aspects, feel anxiety, experience fear, and occasionally feel guilt. , occasionally confused.