The Toxic Parents Survival Guide: Recognizing, Understanding, and Freeing Yourself from These Difficult Relationships - Softcover

Collins, Bryn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0757321046 ISBN 13: 9780757321047

Publisher: Health Communications Inc, 2018

Synopsis

If you or someone you love grew up with an emotionally unavailable, narcissistic, or selfish parent, you probably struggle with residual feelings of anger, abandonment, loneliness, or shame. For anyone who endured a nightmare or a wasteland instead of a nurturing childhood, The Toxic Parents Survival Guide will offer you the clinical insights and the day-to-day tools so you can break the chains of toxicity that bind you in a mess you didn't create.

Psychologist Bryn Collins pulls back the layers to explore the very complicated relationship with an emotionally unavailable parent. Whether they were unavailable because of addiction, mental illness, or being overly controlling or an iceberg, this imminently practical book will help validate your frustration and emotional struggles, help you set clear boundaries, and learn how to un-mesh yourself and move forward to a place of strength and peace without any guilt. Using case studies, quizzes, and jargon-free concepts, Collins profiles the most common types of toxic parents and offers the tactics and tools you need to change and break free of these painful associations.

Your wounds can be healed and you can move forward. The Toxic Parents Survival Guide will help you find different ways of dealing with your parents' painful legacy so that you don't suffer and don't pass along emotional unavailability to the next generation or your current relationships.

About this title

From the Author

Bryn Collins, MA, LP, is a Renaissance woman. In addition to her writing, she has a busy counseling practice in Eagan, Minnesota, where she sees adolescent and adult clients who are dealing with relationship issues. She is also an entertaining speaker on the issue of relationships. Bryn has been married to Rod Collins for almost thirty years. Their companions on their life journey are three dachshunds.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part One

What Is Emotional Unavailability?

Emotional Unavailability Defined

At its most basic, emotional unavailability is that feeling you have when someone holds you at arm's length and tells you it's your fault or smothers you out of your own life and experiences and then tells you it's not good enough.

Obviously, life isn't that simple, so let's break it down. People who are emotionally unavailable are unwilling or unable to invest emotions in a relationship. This takes many forms.

Sometimes emotional unavailability looks like busy-ness―someone in your life who just doesn't make space or time for you while reassuring you by telling you how important you are to them. They are always overcommitted and have an excuse for not interacting with you.

Sometimes it takes on the behavior of distance―the unmeltable iceberg. Other times emotional unavailability hides in secrets and lies. It can take the form of constant nagging or extreme hovering or smothering.

At its core, emotional unavailability is the inability of one person to connect with another in an emotional, appropriate way. Instead, the relationship is unstable, unmanageable, mysterious, and/or unfulfilling.

The reasons for emotional unavailability often come down to learned behavior in childhood or mental illness/personality disorders. People who are raised in a home or series of homes in which there is a disrupted emotional connection―or none at all―can carry that disruption into adult life and their own parenting style. Please note I said, 'can.' Not everyone who grows up in an emotionally disrupted system carries it forward. Many people whose childhoods were fire (abuse in all its horrible forms) or ice (negligence or stoic) have broken the patterns of the past and become wonderful, emotionally available, appropriate parents.

Mental illness has received a lot of attention recently but not always for the right reasons. Mental illness, like physical illness, occurs in a range of degrees from mild life disruptions to schizophrenia and everything in between. It can be one episode or a lifelong pattern. It can be mild and manageable or devastating and pervasive. No matter what form mental illness takes or how complicated or simple the treatment may be, mental illness has an impact on a family.

For example, perhaps the most common diagnoses of mental illness involve depression and anxiety. Unfortunately, these two diagnoses tend to run in families with both genetic and environmental underpinnings. I often hear clients say, 'My family is so anxious. We are all worriers.' Or they might observe, 'Everyone in our family is depressed. We're all on medication.' Mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia do have a genetic link, which, coupled with environment and experience, can show up throughout a family.

Personality disorders, on the other hand, are a pattern of behavior and personality quirks that have expanded and solidified to become an impediment to life functioning. While mental illness is often helped by medications coupled with therapy, personality disorders do not usually respond to medications, in general, and with some rare exceptions, don't change dramatically with therapy.

Anything that keeps people distant from their own feelings or those of others fits the definition of emotional unavailability.

In the following chapters, we explore many other examples of parental emotional unavailability in depth. Briefly, we'll talk about the following:

• Inconsistent parents. One day they're tyrants, the next they're almost indifferent. One day there are impossible rules; the next, no rules at all. We like people to be predictable. Parents who are not predictable create trust issues.
• Just Not Good Enough. No matter what you do, no matter how much you achieve, no matter how others honor and respect you, you will never be good enough to this parent. Expectations are a moving target. You get blamed for not reading their minds and living up to every moving target.
• In His/Her Own Reality parents. New World Order. Chemtrails. The Yeti. FEMA death camps. Martians making crop circles. The Zombie Apocalypse. Whatever they obsess about, it becomes their sole focus. It's not abusive or malicious but rather a distancing from life and reality―yours and the rest of the world's―and a distancing from relationships.
• Hovering controllers are parents who plan and watch everything their child does. These children grow up to be adults who know nothing about boundaries, making decisions, managing disappointment, or handling a crisis. Adult children of hovering controllers have to learn boundaries and be able to set them with parents who want nothing to do with boundaries and everything to do with your personal business.
• Brainiacs are parents who read all the books and blogs, listen to all the 'experts,' and follow every fad without thinking about the consequences to their kids. Their parenting is cerebral, and their kids are projects. As adults, the children of brainiacs have trouble trusting their own judgment and look to outside sources for wisdom and ignore their own good instincts.
• Glory Days parents are adults who desperately want not only to be friends with their kids but also their kids' peers. They might be in competition with their kids in sports, or for boyfriends or girlfriends, or dress in clothing appropriate for a much younger person. They might also compete intellectually or professionally or even with experiences. Their adult children need to learn about and set boundaries. They also need to learn how to disengage from the competition.
• Blame Gamers. It's your fault even if it isn't. The Blame Gamer is looking for someone other than her or himself to take responsibility for or accept the blame for any event in which they might look bad or be accountable. Parental Blame Gamers use their children as scapegoats. They have poor or non-existent boundaries. The consequences to the family are dissolution of trust and a weakening of bonds between parent and child.
• Users and other emotional vampires are parents who treat their adult children like a personal life bank. 'Borrowing' money, cars, clothing, jewelry, and time with no effort to repay, appreciate, or restore is typical behavior. When, or if, confronted, they first make excuses, then become petulant or angry, accusing the adult child of betrayal. This behavior creates huge internal conflict for the adult child. We'll talk about ways to say no and not give in.
• Mentally ill and personality disordered parents. Mental illness affects not only the sufferer but also the families and children around them. Adult children of parents who are mentally ill have a lot of challenges. We'll talk in depth about diagnoses such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder (also known as manic depression), and schizophrenia. We'll also talk about personality disorders, those personality traits that are extremely maladaptive and ingrained, such as Borderline Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Passive Aggressive behavior, and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. We'll look at management tools and self-protection.
• Addicted to __________. Just as the adult children of persons who are mentally ill have major challenges dealing with the effects of the parents' behaviors, so also do those whose parents are or were addicted to alcohol or drugs, or habituated to shopping, lying, sex, or other behaviors and substances. We'll look at those effects and ways to overcome them.
• Abusive parents. Abuse takes a lot of forms―verbal, emotional, physical, sexual―none of them good. Adult children who have survived abuse can be angry or fragile. Sadly, they can also be abusers themselves. If you are a survivor of parental abuse, we will look at ways to move into healing and healthy patterns for yourself and your kids.
• Absent parents. Losing a parent to death, divorce, abandonment, or geography is hard, particularly if there is unfinished business or there are unanswered questions―or if the parents have used the child or adult child as a mediator or a messenger to an estranged parent. Finding ways to reconnect to resolve those incomplete relationships―with or without the absent parent―involves good boundaries and realistic expectations.
• Toxic parents. Sadly, some parents are not only incompetent or distant but genuinely toxic for their children by virtue of extreme abuse, extreme addictions, cults, extreme mental illness, or criminal behavior. For the adult children of toxic parents, we talk about closing that relationship safely and healing your heart.
• Stepparents, grandparents, and in-laws. These parental surrogates can either be great allies or great problems. They have the title but not necessarily the power, and sometimes their reach exceeds their grasp and they create issues within the family. Finding an appropriate way to help them define their role is extremely important.

©2018 Bryn Collins. All rights reserved. Reprinted from The Toxic Parents Survival Guide: Recognizing, Understanding, and Freeing Yourself from These Difficult Relationships. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. Publisher: Health Communications, Inc., 3201 SW 15th Street, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442.

Edition details

• Publisher: Health Communications Inc
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0757321046
• ISBN 13: 9780757321047
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264