Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life Multimedia CD Author: Visit Amazon's Susan Forward Page | Language: English | ISBN:
B009CV1D9K | Format: EPUB
Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life Multimedia CD Description
- CD-ROM
- Publisher: Tantor Media (September 27, 2011)
- ASIN: B009CV1D9K
After reading the one-star review by the reader from NY on March 14, 2000, I had to respond. It seems to me this person is awfully defensive and, I suspect, is guilty of some of the behavior that is described as abusive in the book...
No parent is perfect. We all know that. This book is not about demonizing parents. It is about learning to recognize incidents in our lives that adversely affect our behavior and our emotional well-being. I bought this book because of problems my husband and I were having with his parents. Since he was a child, he had been put into a role of emotional partner to his mother. When he decided to start doing some things on his own, she got very upset and started pouring on the guilt. I arrived on the scene at about the same time and became a convenient scapegoat, accused of manipulating him and stealing him away from them. Unfortunately (before I found this book and other helpful ones) things got really bad, and now we have virtually no relationship with my in-laws. It's a very sad situation. However, my husband and I now recognize the games for what they are and no longer buy into the idea that it's our fault for "upsetting" them so much that they just can't be around us. (If I hadn't experienced it myself, I wouldn't have believed that adults could behave in such an irrational manner! ) Reading books like this one and speaking with counselors has provided us with useful insights that will help us interact with them in a healthy manner, if we ever get the chance again.
If you're going through this too, you are NOT alone! Get this book and read it. It helps you recognize behaviors that are harmful to you. It helps you learn to overcome problems in the past and avoid inappropriate treatment in the future.
Open the front cover to this important book by Dr Susan Forward and almost as an introductory note we are told that toxic parents are the inadequate parents, the controllers, the alcoholics, the verbal abusers, the physical abusers and the sexual abusers. This is not a book about parents who get things wrong. As parents we all get things wrong - I know I do, we all do things that perhaps we regret - this isn't being toxic, it's called being human. These mistakes very rarely do harm. A toxic parent on the other hand is an individual whose behaviour scars and harms their child/ren to such a degree that often it can seem like the there can be no resolution to the damage caused. As a result the children grow into adulthood feeling inadequate, unloved and worthless.
This book is about and at the same time is for those adult children.
As children, our parents give us a script, a way of being that we use to filter all that we experience. If that script is one that says ` you are worthless, to be abused - sexually, physically, emotionally ` then all I do in my life, all my actions, my reactions and interactions will be through the filter of my lack of worth.
This is a book for those adults whose sense of worthlessness underpins all they do.
I work as a counsellor and often those I work with tell me that they are responsible for what their parents did. "If I hadn't cuddled Daddy he wouldn't have got in to bed with me", "If I'd done better at school I wouldn't have got punished". A valuable message in this book is that the child is a child not a mini adult. The real adults are the responsible ones and it is they that are accountable for the abuse inflicted on their children.
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