Take Your Power Back from Toxic Parenting

Anyone in recovery is most likely suffering from the wounds caused by toxic parents. Toxic parents are those who shame, belittle, embarrass, humiliate and abuse their children. Abuse can include mental, emotional, physical and sexual.

Many of us, when we first enter recovery, are inwardly blind to the fact that our parents were indeed toxic. We say things like “Oh, sure my Dad beat me sometimes, but it was for my own good,” or “Yeah, my Mom used the silent treatment and withheld affection to get what she wanted from me, but she was just doing it for my own good.” We use denial to minimalize the painful and damaging treatment we received from our parents.

Recovery is all about getting past the denial. Pain is pain. Suffering is suffering. There’s no minimalizing it. When I first entered recovery and heard other people’s stories I often said to myself “Well, I never suffered anything that bad.” In doing so I minimalized and continued to repress my inner-pain. I lied to myself again and again about how painful my childhood really was.

Well, recovery is all about the TRUTH. And the truth is that my parents were very toxic in the way they dealt with the tough reality of parenting. Did they do the best they knew how? Yes, I think they did. If they could have done better they would have. But the TRUTH is that their way of parenting was still TOXIC and I have to face that fact—as well as facing the scars that their parenting branded into my soul.

Let me make it clear right here and now that this is not about playing the blame game. The Blame Game is all about blaming someone else for all of our problems and then expecting them to be 100 percent responsible for fixing our problems. When we play the Blame Game, we take no responsibility for our own lives because we expect the perpetrators to do so.

Telling the TRUTH in recovery is different. The TRUTH is all about owning what really happened, owning all of our wounds and pain and facing it. We don’t minimalize what someone else did to us that caused us great hurt. We admit that those persons, in this case parents, were abusive and we admit to how painful it was for us. BUT then we choose to take responsibility for fixing ourselves. We acknowledge that we are adults and that no one can heal our wounds aside from us and our Higher Power.

The Blame Game makes others responsible for our lives. The TRUTH makes us responsible for our lives. There’s a big difference. Acknowledging that our parents were abusive and toxic is not playing the Blame Game. It’s owning our reality, our TRUTH.

Toxic parenting destroys a child from within. It destroys a child’s value, a child’s self-love and self-esteem. All of the emotional turmoil that results from toxic parenting then leads a child into addictive coping mechanisms, such as emotional shutdown and addictive rituals. These rituals are often modeled for the child by their parents. The child observes that Mom medicates her bad feelings away with food, or that Dad medicates away his anger with beer, and the child then learns to do the same.


If we really want to succeed in recovery, we must get to the root of our emotional turmoil, since addiction is an emotional dis-ease. This means we must own the pain of our childhoods by facing the truth and taking our power back from the past by being responsible for making our lives better. We do this through therapy and support groups. Let’s do it. It’s time to be the free, precious and happy persons we were created to be.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No One Can Calm Your Codependent Crazies, But You

Image
Ah, the codependent crazies. Those needy, needy feelings. I remember well the deep emotional pain in the pit of my stomach: The throbbing sting of shame, fear, loneliness and anxious desperation. Those feelings that are like fingernails on the blackboard of your soul. They eat you alive from within as they dig deeper and deeper into the black hole of your inner-emptiness. Yes, I remember them well. And I remember evenings of mental and emotional insanity-- squirming with a magazine, pacing back and forth, indulging in chocolate, chasing up and down the stairs hoping the doorbell would ring, and staring endlessly at the telephone for a sign of hope. All I needed was a call from my false higher power; a call that would help me to know that I was OK, that I was needed, that I was worth thinking about in some good way. I was dying to be emotionally caressed on the head like a poodle desperate for the attention of his master. And certainly I had made that other person into my mas...
Read more

Happiness is Something We Cultivate and Share

Who makes you happy? In reality, no one can make you happy. People in your life can enhance your happiness through sharing your interests. Or they can add to your frustrations by pushing your buttons. But no one can be responsible for your happiness or your misery—aside from you. One of the biggest problems for codependents is that we too often enter relationships looking for everlasting happiness. We expect that the person we choose to attach our dreams to should be responsible for making us happy. In our minds, we fantasize that he/she will be focused solely on us, will spend every waking hour with us and will do everything in his/her power to insure that we are as happy as we can possibly be. In other words, we assume this person will meet all of our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual needs in the same way that we plan to meet all of his/her needs. In our little dream world we will smother each other with attention and we will both drip with the honey of happiness. R...
Read more

Where There Is Kindness, There Is Goodness

Image
Author’s Note: The next few meditations will be from a retreat I directed recently called The Good News According to Disney . If you aren’t familiar with the films that are referenced, I’d suggest to take time to see them and to look for the deeper meaning within them. Many people today still live by the biblical adage “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” They actually believe that they will be at peace if they achieve revenge or restitution for any mishap that has befallen them at the hands of another. They believe they will reclaim their personal power once they have achieved their revenge, but this is impossible. Disney’s Cinderella (2015) reveals the true secret to owning one’s personal power and to retaining it no matter what we experience in life: “Have courage and be kind.” On the surface this motto looks a bit simple and wimpy. But in reality, it holds great power. That power comes from the heart of a person, or in this case Ella, who sees the world not a...
Read more

Become the Person You Want to Spend Your Life With Everyday

Image
I really don’t have to say much about the above quote. It says it all and it’s so true. We are too often taught faulty ways of thinking as children. So many of us get the wrong message at very young ages: Love is about finding the right person to love you. Looking back I realize I wasted many years trying to find that “right” person— the one who could love me into loving myself— instead of trying to BE that “right” person myself. It never occurred to me that I needed to love myself, nurture myself and accept myself enough to become the right person— the person I really needed most in my life. After all, what is my life without me? Now I know that I’m what’s been missing from my own life for years. My life is empty without me and without my spiritual Higher Power. This is true for all of us.  Once We find ourselves, become the “right” person God intended us to be, and become the person we want to spend the rest of our lives with, then we attract others into our lives who ca...
Read more