Any negative behavior that causes emotional damage or contaminates the way a person sees themself is toxic. A toxic parent treat their children in such a way as to make those children doubt their importance and their worth. They may doubt that they are deserving of love, approval, and validation. The truth is that you, like every other small person on the planet, deserveds love, warmth, and to know how important you are. You’re not useless at life. You have bought in to the messages that were delivered by a parent too broken to realize what they were doing. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.
It’s easy to distance yourself when you’re dealing with toxic people, but what if those toxic people are your parents? It’s hard getting any kind of break when you see them every day. Boundaries almost don’t even exist. The word “family” that ties you together, even though the word feels foreign as it rolls limply off your tongue as you say it. You may not have had a choice being born and brought up by the people you call your mom and dad. However, you do have a choice in how you choose to react towards them. It is possible to heal from toxic parenting.
It begins with the decision that the legacy of shame and hurt left behind by a toxic parent won’t be the way your story will end. Read below about some tips on how to cope with a toxic parent.
Talk to Someone
If your parents are the last people you want to talk to when you run into problems, rely on others instead. Choose people who you can trust and lean on in times of trouble. You can seek help from your friends, a teacher, counselor, or co-worker. When you face stress and difficulties, your body releases the chemical oxytocin that prepares you to reach out to others so that you don’t have to go through hardships alone. Build a support system you can depend on. Create a list of contacts you can call when you find yourself at a breaking point. Just because your parents aren’t the most approachable people, doesn’t mean there aren’t others you can talk to.
Be Independent
If you still live with your parents, figure out how to establish financial independence and work towards that goal. These things take time, and it certainly won’t happen overnight. But in the meantime, learn to budget your money and find a job that you are good at that will help to sustain you when you are eventually on your own. If you have parents who don’t respect the boundaries that you set, they will use money as a weapon to keep you under their control because they still provide for you. Recognize and understand that trick.
Learn to take care of yourself and be self-sufficient. Work towards the goal of moving out. Once you’re out, there’s not much they can do to keep you under their control. Physical space can do wonders. With freedom comes more responsibility, but with freedom, a new life can also begin.
Don’t Expect too Much
Understandings seem impossible to reach and it feels like you and you parents are constantly operating on two different pages. As much as you want to have deep, meaningful, or fun conversations, it seems like neither can be achieved when everything gets discolored through toxic words. I just want to let you know that your thoughts are valid and important. Remember that you can still be the bigger person anyway by doing your best to keep in touch with your parents, but know that you might not necessarily get the connection you want from them.
Break Free
Although you may share a few similar personality traits, habits, or quirks with your parents, know that you are still very much your own person and not the people who have raised you. If you recognize that your parents are being toxic, understand that you don’t have to follow those same behavioral patterns. Instead, you can break out of them and remember how not to be the source of hurt you’ve been exposed to. It’s great to have role models we can look up to in life, but learning what not to become can influence us even greater to grow into better people.
Express Your Emotions
Just because your parents may not respect your boundaries, it doesn’t mean you can’t create a safe space for your emotions. Even though you may come from a household that didn’t foster and nurture the habit of talking things out, doesn’t mean your emotions have to be locked away forever. In fact, that will only hurt you more in the long run by denying an essential aspect of who you are. If your parents don’t see your emotions as valid, let them out elsewhere. You can do this by journaling or blogging. Just because your parents failed you in this sense, doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to continue denying what you feel.
Don’t be Drawn to Similar People
You might find yourself drawn to people who have similarities to your toxic parent. There’s a really good reason for this. All of us are driven to find an ending to things that remain unresolved. Because love, warmth, and nurturing are such an important part of child development, yet so elusive for the child of a toxic parent, it’s very normal for those children to be driven to find a resolution to never feeling loved, secure or good enough. They will look to receive what they didn’t get from their parents in others and will often be drawn to people who have similarities to their toxic parent.
With similar people, the patterns will be easier to replicate, and the hope of an ending closer to the desired one, parent love, will seem easier to fulfil. That’s the theory. The pattern often does repeat, but because of the similarities to the parent, so does the unhappy ending. We don’t consciously seek these people out. Therefore, we need to be very aware of the traits to avoid them.
If this is something that’s familiar for you, it’s possible that you are being drawn to the wrong people because they remind you of your toxic parent. Somewhere inside you where your wanted things stay hidden is the wish that you’ll get from them what you weren’t able to get from your parent in someone else. Look at the people in your life and explore the similarities they have with your own parents. What do they do that’s similar? What do you do that’s similar to the way you are in your relationship with your parents? Which needs are being met? What keeps you there? The more awareness you have, the more you can make deliberate decisions that aren’t driven by historical wants.
Create a Healthy Space
Sometimes the best way to deal with a toxic situation is to distance yourself from your aggressors. This includes limiting conversations and limiting engagement in unhealthy activities with your parents. Begin by identifying which behaviors, gestures, or comments trigger conflict between you and your parents. You can never change how your parents react, but once you become aware of what the triggers are in conflict, you can manage the way you react to them. If you detect that a situation is turning sour, simply walk away from the situation. There’s no need to add fuel to the fire.
Coping with toxic behavior from parents can be very emotionally draining and can take a toll on your self-esteem, so self-love is very important. Begin to dedicate more time to yourself! Involve yourself in healthy, fun activities. Take up a yoga course, learn a new skill, or pick up a few new books to read. Now would also be a good time to foster relationships with new people and dedicate more time to your established friendships that may have been placed on the back-burner. After all, you’re going to need support!
Is your relationship with a parent toxic?