Cutting Ties With Toxic Family Quotes

Moment of Insight: Sometimes you have to let go of what is killing you, even when it’s killing you to let go.

Moment of Insight: Overexplaining is a trauma response.

A toxic mother talks but never listens, and she gives advice but never takes any. And we have to deal with all of this because she’s our mother.

The longer we ignore red flags, pretend they don’t exist, the more we disconnect from ourselves.

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.

you cannot heal in the same environment that is poisoning you.

Being enabled to tell my story and through it help others, I feel that all the pain I have endured and continue to handle has and is coming full circle. Every evil done to me is being made up to me tenfold.

Experience tells us that certain people are not ever going to change. This is a reality, and this is the reality we need to deal with when it comes to our toxic family members. The Bible clearly tells us that evil people—those who have hardened themselves to that which is good—do not change, not because they can’t but because they won’t.32

Because emotional abuse is impossible to prove, we often have an incredibly difficult time describing or putting into words what exactly has happened to us that is so bad. We know things were not or are not normal, but we don’t know why. Emotional abuse moves quickly. Just as we’re about to put our finger on it, it seems to slip away. Without a clear set of concrete, provable terms, many of us question if our abuse or neglect was real. Did it really happen? Or are we just making it up? We reason that if we were truly abused, our abuse should be easy to explain.

Moment of Insight: People pleasers often start off as parent or family pleasers.

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.

Do you fear a relationship’s ending because you see it as abandonment?

Moment of Insight: Survivors of family abuse live life with the heart of an orphan.

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.

If you choose to rescue or protect people from the natural consequences their behavior merits, you render them powerless.

Toxic people do not think, operate, or play by the same rules we do, and our failing to recognize this sets us up by default for manipulation and unhappiness.

I do not hate my toxic family members. I also do not need them.

Without this validation, children learn to give in to what others seem sure about.

As we recover, we start to remember and connect with who we really are. We start connecting with the image of that amazing person we always thought or hoped we had the potential to be.

Dysfunctional families despise the truth-tellers and whistle-blowers. They are all about admiring the Emperor’s new clothes, and they turn on anyone who dares to mention the nakedness.9

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.

Prone to Cling or Run Because we had no balance in our emotional worlds growing up, when we start developing other relationships in life, our insecurities create us into runners or clingers. I have actually been both in my life.

To have our experiences flat-out denied or otherwise invalidated is called gaslighting. Our perceptions of reality are continually undermined, causing us to lose confidence in our intuition, our memory, or our powers of reasoning.

To avoid needless misunderstandings, it is helpful to reflect back to our children what they have communicated as confirmation we have heard them correctly. Once understanding is established, we can encourage, guide, and praise them.

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.

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.

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.

A child should never feel as if they need to earn a mother’s love. This will leave a void in their heart all of their life. A mother’s love needs to be given unconditionally to establish trust and a firm foundation of emotional intimacy in a child’s life. If love is withheld, a child will look for it in a million other ways, sometimes throughout their lifetime unless they come to some sort of peace with their past. The emotional foundation we give our children at home is foundational to their life. We cannot underestimate the value of home and the power of a mother’s love.12

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.

I love this quote: “Never argue with an idiot. People watching won’t be able to tell the difference.” When we are attacked and defending ourselves, we end up looking just as bad as our attacker, and our attacker will make sure to focus on only our reaction rather than what they did to cause our reaction.

When we are raised in toxic families, we often go through a time period, and for some of us, a lifetime, of repeating the toxic patterns we were raised in with other people in our lives. We do this until we decide we’ve had enough pain and choose to genuinely examine our patterns and stop the craziness for good.

Bree Bonchay, author of I Am Free, explains that we relate to our toxic family members as if they are normal healthy people who possess a conscience, self-awareness, and a sense of integrity. Because of this inherent trust in them, we believe their words. We know that we don’t lie or manipulate so we believe our toxic family members would never lie to or manipulate us. We give them the benefit of the doubt because we believe they genuinely love us. Because we believe they truly love us, we cannot believe they could ever or would ever do anything to intentionally hurt us. When we believe in this way, we are essentially projecting our own good qualities or character traits onto the toxic family members we love. So when they don’t respond in the ways that a loving, kind, healthy person would, we are left feeling hurt and confused and questioning ourselves, believing we must somehow be to blame for their lack of love and understanding.

Complete separation and time away allow us to recover and to remember—perhaps even finally establish—how to express who we really are. We are people who are deserving of love, good fortune, and acceptance. We cannot get to this point in our recovery if we don’t let our toxic family members go and focus on healing ourselves.

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.

We enter the world of love and relationships with such little confidence that we have a hard time believing that others could be genuinely interested in us. Because of this, we are too afraid to ask for what we need from others. We fear rejection. To us, rejection from others only proves our toxic family members must have been right about us. We have been programmed to believe that having needs of our own bothers other people, so we don’t ask for what we need and end up stifling ourselves by constantly acquiescing to others to stay in relationships we don’t even want to be in. In this way we end up perpetuating the emotional loneliness we were raised in.

Can two walk together, unless they are agreed?’ Amos 3:3 ‘Does This Person Belong in your Life?’ A toxic relationship is like a limb with gangrene: unless you amputate it the infection can spread and kill you. Without the courage to cut off what refuses to heal, you’ll end up losing a lot more. Your personal growth - and in some cases your healing - will only be expedited by establishing relationships with the right people. Maybe you’ve heard the story about the scorpion who asked the frog to carry him across the river because he couldn’t swim. ‘I’m afraid you’ll sting me,’ replied the frog. The scorpion smiled reassuringly and said, ‘Of course I won’t. If I did that we’d both drown!’ So the frog agreed, and the scorpion hopped on his back. Wouldn’t you know it: halfway across the river the scorpion stung him! As they began to sink the frog lamented, ‘You promised you wouldn’t sting me. Why’d you do it?’ The scorpion replied, ‘I can’t help it. It’s my nature!’ Until God changes the other person’s nature, they have the power to affect and infect you. For example, when you feel passionately about something but others don’t, it’s like trying to dance a foxtrot with someone who only knows how to waltz. You picked the wrong dance partner! Don’t get tied up with someone who doesn’t share your values and God-given goals. Some issues can be corrected through counselling, prayer, teaching, and leadership. But you can’t teach someone to care; if they don’t care they’ll pollute your environment, kill your productivity, and break your rhythm with constant complaints. That’s why it’s important to pray and ask God, ‘Does this person belong in my life?

People with pathological personalities, on the other hand, respond more like regressed, stubborn, vengeful bullies. They are never wrong. They are above apologies. They never question if they could have or should have done anything differently. And everything in their lives is an embellished drama of how they have been victimized by others.

We unconsciously gravitate toward relationships and situations that are familiar to us because we know how to deal with them. As children, we don’t recognize, or at least we don’t want to acknowledge, the flaws in our parents, because seeing them as flawed or substandard is scary. But by denying the painful truth about our parents, we aren’t able to recognize similarly hurtful people in our future relationships. This form of denial or lack of the ability to recognize the pattern causes us to experience the same painful heartbreak over and over. We just don’t see it coming, even when all the signs are right before us. Instead, we keep believing that things will be different each next time, but the different doesn’t come.

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.

It is important to understand that loving someone doesn’t always mean having a relationship with that person, just like forgiveness doesn’t always mean reconciliation. Reconciling, in many cases, only sets us up for more abuse. A significant part of our healing will come in accepting that not reconciling with certain people is a part of life. There are some relationships that are so poisonous that they destroy our ability to be healthy and to function at our best. When we put closure to these relationships, we give ourselves the space to love our toxic family members from a distance as fellow human beings where we do not wish harm upon them; we simply have the knowledge and experience to know it is unwise to remain connected with them.

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.

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.

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.

I have come to realize since breaking free of my toxic family members that I was justifying insanity to stay connected with them. The longer I am free of their manipulations, I notice that more memories surface of instances of manipulation I didn’t even have the time to focus on at the time they were happening because the next manipulation was already in play. Now I can see that even the smallest things that were going on or that were said to me all served to push me down.

Fear People When we grow up under volatile, immature, chaotic, and selfish family members, we are nurtured to believe that people are scary and cruel. And when we are raised to question our lovability and worth, how can we trust that others will see us as worthy? Because conflict was so high growing up in our toxic family, many of us learned to agree with the poisonous dynamics as a way to find or keep the peace. We may have also lived our lives trying to please and prove our value to our parents.

As I have matured, I have become more of a runner. If I start sensing things aren’t right in a relationship and I feel I’ve done my best to express myself and there is still no understanding with my partner, I start to run. I start to feel that if I can’t be understood on something not all that deep, then my partner will have a really hard time understanding me when things become more significant and intense. I falsely interpret this to mean that I am a burden, so I unconsciously start preparing for plan B.

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

Like toddlers, toxic people base all their decisions on what they feel rather than on what is right. The thought of any consequences of their actions pale in comparison to getting what they want in the moment. Contrast this with healthy people: they think before they act and are mindful of how what they do may negatively impact themselves or others. Toxic people cannot tolerate consideration of others. When trying to have a conversation with them, they are self-referential rather than self-reflective. When you share something about yourself with such people, they immediately turn the account into a story about them. The self-referential side of toxicity turns toxic people into the greatest one-uppers, name-droppers, and liars you’ll ever come across. You cannot have a mutually beneficial conversation, where there is a natural back-and-forth flow. Sharing does not exist when communicating with toxic people. Of course, healthy flawed people sometimes do some of the same things that toxic people do. The difference, however, between ordinary and toxic lies is in the subtleness, persistence, and consistency of a toxic person’s behaviors.

Peck states in his book The Road Less Traveled that children feel if their parents are willing to suffer with them, they will tell themselves “then suffering must not be so bad,” and they will become more willing to suffer when on their own. In other words, children come to trust that there is nothing unsafe or wrong with them when they are suffering. In order for parents to be present to and suffer with their children, their children need three simple things from them: time, love, and attention. Toxic parents provide none of these things, certainly not in any healthy ways.

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—

Out of our insecurities, we strive to be needless in relationships. We take on the belief that we are the person who has to do all the work because who could possibly love us if we’re not the person doing all the work. We have learned we don’t deserve love. We have learned we have to work hard for it. We know that if anyone is going to be wrong or needs to change, it will, without a doubt, end up being us. This is a horrible way to be in a relationship because if the relationship fails, due to no fault of our own, we interpret relationship failures as we didn’t do enough and that we are, in truth, fundamentally unlovable.

Low Self-Worth Danu Morrigan teaches that the reason our toxic family members impact us throughout our lives is because they are responsible for programming our beliefs. We respond automatically based on the core beliefs we were raised on. It makes logical sense then that, when we are loved well as children, we gather that evidence and conclude that we are valuable, lovable, and worthwhile. If, however, we were not loved enough and we were consistently neglected and shamed, we draw conclusions from that evidence too: We were not loved by our toxic family members because we were not lovable; we were neglected because we weren’t worth taking care of; and we were humiliated because we are shameful. Healing

Here are some clues regarding what to look for when looking for love: •When love is present, there is very little chaos. •When love is present, there is conversation. •When love is present, there is no gossip or backstabbing. •When love is present, there is support and nurturing. •When love is present, there is acceptance. •When love is present, there is ease and room for joy. •When love is present, there is clarity. •When love is present, we feel stable. •When love is present, we can be ourselves. •When love is present, we are not consumed with worry. •When love is present, we have a sense of community. •When love is present, we feel happy. •When love is present, we live in a state of trust. •When love is present, we experience contentment.

In my own therapy, my therapist said to me that as long as I believe that I am the problem, I will harbor a hope that things in the relationship with my toxic family members can change because I have the power to change myself. We erroneously believe that if we try to be good enough, successful, or perfect, maybe our toxic family members will change their minds about us. But they don’t and they won’t. Now if the problem isn’t within us, then that creates a horribly scary feeling. That means we’re powerless to make any positive changes in how our toxic family members treat us. I certainly know that I can do nothing to change anything in myself that would ever make a difference in my relationships with my family members. At one time, this rocked my world. But now, I just feel relief. I am no longer brainwashed by them into believing that I am the bad kid, the problem child, the difficult one. I know the truth about my family and have accepted it.

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.

As the wise Dumbledore said in the Harry Potter series, “Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases the fear of the thing itself.

Reflect on the power you would feel if you no longer made yourself a slave to what other people thought of you. List which actions to protect yourself would increase your feelings of empowerment.

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.

Not so for those of us who were raised by emotionally self-absorbed parents.

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.

Erikson’s third stage spans the ages of three through five. This stage is about being purpose-driven. You are learning to apply more inventiveness and creativity to your independence. You are becoming less self-centered and more social.

The fifth stage spans ages twelve to eighteen. During these years you are learning and trying on the roles you will occupy as an adult. Erikson suggests that two identities are developing in this stage: sexual and occupational.

Erickson’s sixth stage runs between ages eighteen to forty. You are developing the capacity to give and receive love.

It is here, through this discovery process of your development, that you will come to rediscover your True Self. To be your True Self means you do not worry about pleasing other people or living by someone else’s standards. You live as your natural self without compromise.

In Sharon’s adulthood, when her mother has failed to accept or understand Sharon’s feelings, the mother’s response is a sarcastic “I just can’t say or do anything right with you.” This is scapegoating at its finest.

Labels from a Toxic Family System Labels from a Healthy Family System Bossy Natural leader, imaginative Defiant Holds strong beliefs; daring, resolute Demanding Knows what they want; forthright Dramatic Expressive, enthusiastic Fearful Careful, discerning Fussy Has strong preferences Hyperactive Energetic, passionate, on the go Impulsive Spontaneous, intuitive Oppositional Advocates for a different perspective Rebellious Finding their own way Stubborn Persistent, determined, unwavering Talkative Enjoys communicating Tattletale Seeks justice, respects rules, fair Unfocused Multitasks, pays attention to many things Attention-seeking Advocates for needs, seeks connection

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.

Moment of Insight: Closure does not come from not feeling the pain anymore. Closure comes from actively healing your pain.

I address the aftermath of cutting ties, because when people hear the words “cutting ties” or “no contact,” they may automatically assume those who cut ties are angry, bitter, immature, spiteful, spoiled, jealous, entitled adult children who are being cruel and unreasonable toward our family members. Nothing could be further from the truth. Cutting ties is not about malice, hate, stubbornness, a lack of forgiveness, being spoiled, or exacting revenge. Severing ties is exclusively about self-care.

You are allowed to be happy, to be yourself, to say no, to state your opinions, to love who you want, do what you want, and say what needs to be said—and to do all of this freely. This is how life should have always been for you.

You deserve to be loved, especially in your less-than-perfect moments.

Our toxic family members may tell us they love or hate us, but they only do so to provoke a strong reaction out of us. When we’re loving them, it’s a sweet and potent experience for them, but they will get bored with that so they will switch things up. Out of what seems like nowhere to us, they will become those hateful, cruel, discarding, schoolyard bullies who ignore us, gossip about us, smear us, and make us feel as if we are the worst people on earth. This puts us into a state of intense confusion.

It is important to understand that loving someone doesn’t always mean having a relationship with that person, just like forgiveness doesn’t always mean reconciliation.

The greatest gift that boundaries offer is the distinguishing line between where another person stops and you start. It is at the firm separation between yourself and the other that your instincts alert you to when something sacred in your personal/emotional space has been inappropriately violated. Setting a boundary to protect that sacred space helps you avoid further hurt and/or misunderstanding at this line.

Love yourself as if you were your own child.

These people usually do not mean any harm, but that doesn’t mean their inquisitiveness doesn’t cause harm.

Moment of Insight: You do not treat people the way you have been treated by your family members and call it love.

Right or wrong, it is my belief that empaths should be in therapy. Life is intense for you. You see things. You feel things. You know things. Sometimes these things hurt, but you must also embrace that everything that hurts also has the potential to heal.

Exercise. Exercise has proven time and time again to be better at stimulating the mood hormones than psychotropic medications. Further, exercise increases the neuroplasticity of the brain, which keeps you functioning at full potential. Movement, no matter how you choose to move, is also a creative outlet for your emotions, providing a physical outlet of expression and release.

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.

Moment of Insight: Your primary supporters must back your decision to sever ties with your family by following suit themselves.

Never argue with an idiot. People watching won’t be able to tell the difference.

We were never "too sensitive." We were intuitive. We saw the abuse we endured for the cruelty and manipulation that it was.

As they moved into a nonreactive parenting style, at first they felt as if they weren’t disciplining their son at all, that they were allowing him to get away with the unbelievable. They found this approach frustrating and painful. I explained to them that we cannot parent toxic people with the parenting skills we would use with healthy children. When someone is toxic, we have to apply an inverse technique to parenting, which involves not rewarding bad behavior with any attention or emotional reaction.

In children, it develops from feeling invisible to their self-preoccupied parents. To add to our loneliness and confusion, our toxic parents often look and act normal, and they provide for our food, home, and shelter, but they do very little to connect or bond with us emotionally. Because of this, we leave our childhood with gaping holes where true security should have been. I have been told countless times by many people, “I just love your mom.” I am sure they do. She often treated other people’s children with more kindness than she showed me. But such positive comments made about my mother only served to make me feel even lonelier and crazier. If everyone loved her so much, why didn’t I? I erroneously assumed the flaw was in me.

For healthy mothers, the most gratifying part of mothering is watching their children unfold in their own unique and independent ways. For a toxic mother, the natural passage of their children into their independence is experienced as an act of betrayal against her. If toxic mothers are not getting the attention they crave from their children, they experience their children as inconveniences who stand in their way of doing what they want to do for themselves.

Toxic mothers are image-oriented rather than love-oriented.

The quality of time our parents devote to us indicates the degree to which we believe we are valued.

Toxic family members will see expressions of forgiveness as weaknesses to exploit. Don’t give in to their tactics this way. If you need to forgive them for your own healing, then do it, but keep it to yourself.

I had to start the process of grieving the loss of my hope—the hope that kept me going back again and again for my family’s “love.” And that’s what I never received even though I worked so hard for it. I was continually discarded. Best-selling author Shahida Arabi says to the claim that our toxic family members don’t know what they’re doing or that they don’t know any better is completely false. She says that “anyone who has the intellectual capacity to blame-shift, gaslight, project and stage a smear campaign to escape accountability has the intellectual capacity to be aware of their own blame and to process it when the victim says ‘this hurts’.”2 Healing Moment

toxic parent will provoke an independent child to anger in order to feel superior and to “prove” the child’s flaws.3

Toxic fathers don’t consider the needs and interests of anyone but themselves. In my home, if we spent time with our father, we had to spend our time doing what he wanted to do, doing things he enjoyed. He didn’t care about taking part in our interests unless he could somehow narcissistically feed off of them, as he did with my brother’s athletic life and career.

Toxic fathers get the majority of their gratification outside of the family. They tend to crave an excitement for entertaining others and are more concerned about what others think of them rather than having any concern for what their children think or feel about them. Toxic fathers view their children’s love for them as automatic—something they deserve for just being fathers.

new, uninterrupted quiet time away from their poison has given me the opportunity to think rationally about what I have had to endure. It feels good to be and act rationally rather than fearfully.

It doesn’t matter how well we do, how loving we are, or how much we give, do, or have. None of it will ever be enough for a toxic person. Instead we become like Gumby. We bend and flex and bend and flex, all to no avail. Our toxic family members are totally unable to act with reason. They are so needy that they cannot be filled no matter how much we give out. We are like hamsters on a wheel. We work hard and run fast but fail to get anywhere with our destructive family. This is how life will forever be with them, because our toxic family members will not change. They love the power of making us feel as if we are not enough. They find things wrong with us where there is nothing wrong with who we are, what we do, or how we treat them.

If it’s hurting you more than it’s healing you, love yourself enough to let it go.

They are unaware and unfamiliar with what emotional abuse and manipulation look like and how deeply they impact our self-worth and fulfillment in life. We have to come to a place within our own self where flourishing in our life supersedes the opinions and lack of understanding other people have of our situation.

Due to their frequent religious and spiritual misunderstandings, far too many of us suffer under their beliefs—beliefs that urge us to “hang in there” with our toxic family members, to give them nothing but our love and respect, claiming that if we just continue to be “good,” our toxic family members will eventually begin to appreciate our kindness and start showing us the love we desire. The hard truth, however, is that we must come to accept that our toxic family members do not love or respond to goodness or kindness in the same ways that healthy people do.

Healthy parents do not view their children as things, slaves, or psychological mirrors. Healthy parents view their children as growing and developing precious human beings. Children are loved with empathy and seen as sensitive, innocent, scared, elated, and curious about life. From the time children are very young, healthy parents are prepared for the fears in their children to be high and their self-esteem to be low, especially during certain phases of their life. For this reason, healthy parents remember from the day they conceive that their children are little people in need of their help, discipline, and guidance. Children need certain essentials to learn resilience, to love themselves, to care for others, to learn about failure, and to learn to turn their pain to the positive. To raise healthy children, parents need to be both tough and tender.

Saying I love you takes away fear and provides our children with the confidence and security they need to sustain them throughout life.