I remember being so desperate for change in 2017. I was about to graduate law school but my life was a complete fucking mess. A mentor of mine was trying to get me to go back to my past, to take a look at what happened with my parents growing up. Doing this combined with a recommendation from my therapist to read Toxic Parents by Susan Forward would clear the way, in a way, that I’d never known. I still have the email reply from Susan after I asked to work with her one on one because every last page in that book resonated with me.
I wanted to share some insights and excerpts from it should you find yourself in this position and are looking for a book which will cover everything on this topic, especially throughout this holiday season. We are all weighed down by the decisions of our caretakers but for some it sits heavier and more unresolved, nagging at you to figure it out. Until we investigate, it is usually a mystery to us as to why we act the way we do, are the way we are, think the way we think - and the only temporary answer we can manage/come up with is that there is something wrong with us. Especially and I want to emphasize this, when we unconsciously choose over and over to keep the fantasy of the “good family” alive. We blame, shame, and criticize ourselves to no end, in an effort to understand ourselves “It must be that I’m just a fuck up” because I can’t say my caretakers fucked up.
Let me give you some examples. Why can Luis never stand up to his boss, finding himself consistently verbally abused at work? Why, every time Samara goes through a break up, is she stricken by the same behaviors, unable to discontinue the pattern of not eating, sleeping, or even showering for months? Crisanto dreams of being a singer and actor, but works as a doctor at a local hospital and also happens to find herself drunk every Saturday night, alone, in her apartment, crying over what could never be, why? When Nairobi arrives at a party, why can they never walk inside without calling someone inside to come out and get them, anxious beyond belief to walk in alone? I use these names/pronouns as this stretches across all cultures, backgrounds, genders and origins. This is not unique, we all have the baggage. But we believe it’s our fault until we dig deeper and see, no. It is not my fault. I went through profound trauma, and the pain I feel is a natural response to that. It’s okay to feel the way I do, my emotions are real and valid. Susan covers all of this and more. Here are some things I learned from using her book and know this isn’t a one and done it takes courage, effort and showing up for yourself over and over, through many years to get to the heart of what you personally experienced. And you may think I never was abused, molested, there was no incest or alcoholics or drug addicts. But there may have been workaholism, there may have been emotional frigidness, there may have been a death or illness you witnessed (even outside the family) or something else that impacted the rest of your life that you’re unaware of. We all walk around with parts of us that are corpse-like until we explore those parts. On to Susan’s book:
There’s an exercise to recount why you feel the way you do based on beliefs that you hold. Ex. I feel scared when my father yells at me because I have to make it up to my father for being such a bad person. I feel stressed when my mother threatens to withdraw her love because without my mother I am nothing.
She discusses how if we were made to believe that our caretaker’s feelings were our responsibility (this includes being forced into the role of our caretaker’s emotional dumping ground), that we will walk around with an unconscious belief that we can control other people’s feelings - that we can “make” our caretakers as well as everyone else happy or sad.
There’s an exercise in which you write out all the ways in which you were not responsible for specific things that happened, and then conversely write out who is responsible to put the responsibility where it belongs because this is not about blaming, it’s about adjusting your belief system so it no longer affects you negatively.
She talks about nondefensive responses and position statements, and if you can understand and practice them, you’re more likely to stay in your own power because “the moment you argue, apologize, explain, or try to get them to change, you have handed over much of your power.”
She has a section dedicated to dead parents.
Her urging throughout the book for you to start telling yourself the truth and to start absolving yourself is so sincere.
I remember my mentor at the time saying how can you ever be a healthy wife or mother if you haven’t dealt with this? I wrote that next to a part towards the end of the book in which Susan writes “what you don’t hand back you pass on, if you don’t deal with your fear, your guilt, and your anger at your parents, you’re going to take it out on your partner and your children.” This was a wake up call for me because more than anything do I one day want to be a wife and mom, and that can easily be replaced with husband and father, or spouse and parent. We are all out here doing the best we can to understand who we are and we want to achieve things and do them the right way, we will fuck up but we want to catch ourselves, we don’t want to be afraid to be the villain in our partner’s or children’s stories but if we own it, if we say sorry, if we admit we are wrong when we are instead of repeating toxic lineage traits of pride and trying to be perfect, if we hold ourselves accountable in front of our partners and children and put the shame down, then we are doing things differently. We are rewriting history of generations past and giving our children this gift as well so they do not take it on the way we did, and we are also taking care of our partners and their inner children, we are helping them heal and rewrite their past cycles with this work. Thinking about it from this perspective (but also if you don’t ever want to be a spouse or have children) you are clearing your own karma and a way to a better happier safer more whole life.
Jennifer Diane is a witch scholar, writer and model based out of New Jersey. Since 2017, she has not stopped gathering self-help resources in an effort to grow where everything was dead. Her offerings include resources on Darkness Thriving, books and zines at Endeavors of Horror, one on one sessions for The Darkness is the Light, and radical truth on the Enlightenment through Hellfire podcast.