Keep Your Ground- An adult child of emotionally abusive parents who has finally set up boundaries is disrupting the landscape of the adult parents’ lives. Depending on the abusive parents’ personalities, they will react in some or all these ways: The abusive parents will try to manipulate the adult child back to the fold, play the “we’re old” card, use friends and other family members to get the adult child back into the appointed role, threaten the adult child with outrageous statements, smear the adult child’s reputation, spread gossip about the adult child to explain the adult child’s “sudden disappearance” in the parents’ lives, ignore the child as “punishment” for setting boundaries, send siblings as flying monkeys to badger the adult child back, use the “grandchildren miss me so much” card, send abusive cards, leave cruel messages, etc. That all will distress the adult child… but, in the end, all that matters is that the adult child protects his heart and guard the treasure that God made him to be (rather than serve in the image that the adult parent attempted to make him). True friends will listen to your story and believe you. True therapists will help you in your new life as a “real grown-up” freed from the clutches of the abusive parent. Keep your ground. And remember the following C.S. Lewis quote: photo credit: unknown About these ads Share this: Print Related Prepare Yourself for Backlash When Going No Contact [Advice for Adult Children] In "Adult Survivors of Emotional Child Abuse" The Adult Survivor: Remembering the Truth vs Longing for What Could Have Been In "Adult Survivors of Emotional Child Abuse" Speaking the Truth Even If Your Voice Shakes (It Won't Always) In "Becoming Real" This entry was posted in Adult Survivors of Emotional Child Abuse, Becoming Real, Child Abuse, Emotional Child Abuse, No Contact, Toxic Relationships and tagged ACoNs, adult children of narcissists, adults with an emotionally abusive childhood, becoming who you are meant to be, celebrating yourself, emotional child abuse, emotionally abused children as adults, living in truth. Bookmark the permalink. Post navigation ← Interview With the President of Prevent Child Abuse America [Podcast] What to Do About Father’s Day? (Ideas for Estranged Adult Children or Those With Late Abusive Fathers) → 18 THOUGHTS ON “ENDING THE TOXIC RELATIONSHIP AND GIVING YOURSELF TIME AND SPACE TO FIND YOURSELF” kat on May 10, 2013 at 11:30 pm Reblogged this on Me: Finding the Missing Pieces and commented: found this on theinvisiblescar. it was so helpful to me, i wanted to share it. Log in to Reply Soul Survivor on May 30, 2013 at 10:03 am THis piece leaves me in tears. I had left my toxic parents to live 6,000 miles away from them in a country I love, where I feel safe despite constant wars and political hostilities, but got lured back when my father became ill and my extremely toxic mother couldn’t handle him alone, yet refused to make use of offers of help from all of their friends. The tug of the umbilical cord was too much for me, and now I find myself enslaved. I am working on breaking free again, even though it will cost me my reputation and probably my inheritance. But my life is literally in danger, as I have developed high blood pressure as a result of the simmering rage I constantly feel when I am there http://bipolarforlife.me/2013/05/18/rage-can-kill-you/ Log in to Reply Editor of The Invisible Scar on October 25, 2013 at 6:00 am Soul Survivor, Please be safe… Take care of yourself, and remember you deserve to be safe and in peace. You do not deserve to be in situations that enrage you… Peace. Log in to Reply Lisa on June 12, 2013 at 7:22 pm Reading your posts leaves me feeling empowered and confident that I have made the right decision to go NC with certain toxic family members. thank you for giving me a voice. Log in to Reply Editor of The Invisible Scar on October 25, 2013 at 6:02 am Lisa, You are very welcomed. Peace to you… Log in to Reply Sarah on July 25, 2013 at 12:01 am Stumbling across these words of guidance has given me a new sense of calm in my toxic suituation with my parents.I feel empowered to break the cycle of abuse. I can now go forward, in trying to be a fantastic parent to my own beautil boy who i am so grateful for. Log in to Reply Editor of The Invisible Scar on October 25, 2013 at 6:02 am Sarah, Glad to be helpful… The hardest part is to find your voice and say, “Stop!” But the word is powerful and wonderful, and though it is difficult to say at first, you will find yourself stronger and stronger every time you take care of yourself and stand up for yourself. You can do it, Sarah. You can totally do it. Onward and upward! Log in to Reply Pingback: Ending the Toxic Relationship and Giving Yourself Time and Space to Find Yourself | The Road Back To Me Laura P. Schulman, MD, MA on October 26, 2013 at 6:18 pm I know I’m not alone in this, but having grown up in an abusive family, I have no role models of what a healthy relationship feels like. Even after 30 years of ongoing therapy, the people I have chosen to be in intimate relationship with have all turned out to be toxic. It’s like it’s programmed into my brain and heart. I wish people came with labels on their foreheads: “safe” or “toxic.” At sixty years of age I have concluded that I am incapable of choosing a proper safe mate. I wish. there was a screening service for that, but even that would not catch all the NPDs that look so normal on the outside! Log in to Reply DS on November 18, 2013 at 1:09 am Hi Laura! Whether you realize it or not, you DO have a screening service that you carry around with you wherever you go. You just have to retrain yourself to pay attention to it. If you were raised in an abusive family, you were probably taught to ignore your own needs and feelings and focus exclusively on the desires of your abuser(s), so you have little practice with attending to your instincts and acting out of self-care and self-preservation. When you meet a toxic person, I’ll bet you a dozen doughnuts that you unconsciously go into appeasement mode, which can be a prelude to the abusive relationship cycle. You might be feeling apprehension, heightened alertness, and/or a gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach in the presence of this person that’s telling you to stay away, but since you’ve been trained from birth to take abusive nonsense from disordered people and not fight back rather than to relate to others as equal, reasonable partners, you probably ignore these internal distress signals as symptoms of some personal inadequacy or other and you psychologically subjugate yourself to this individual — and they know it. Because you were taught to accept this unbalanced and unnatural interpersonal dynamic as normal, you might find yourself developing a relationship with this person that you label “friendship” (or whatever), and the parasitic downward cycle begins. You feel drained, demeaned, and used through the course of this relationship, however long it lasts, and you look around at other people who have happy, balanced, fulfilling relationships with friends and romantic partners and wonder why this type of relationship repeatedly eludes you. The trick to stopping this unhealthy cycle is, first, to trust your gut and train yourself to detach and self-reference. Focus on how you feel around someone rather than on how you can appease them to avoid an attack or some other type of invasion, and acknowledge your appeasement impulse. (This is important in learning to break the cycle so you can develop new interpersonal habits.) If you’ve experienced in your life what I have in mine around toxic individuals, you might find yourself automatically slipping into a servile posture, both physically and mentally, in relationship to them without consciously acknowledging to yourself that you’re doing it, and this is a factor in how toxic people find those they exploit. (Please note that I’m speaking for myself here, but I’m aware that many non-PD AcoN’s and children of other Cluster B types tend to do this.) Aside from the excellent resources on The Invisible Scar, you might want to check out the following articles on http://lightshouse.org for some specific behavioral tools to screen out potentially toxic people and learn to focus on healthier people in order to make room for them in your life: http://lightshouse.org/try-someone-else.html#axzz2kwJ1p1LC This article provides some general self-presentation tips for engaging with people assertively (not aggressively) and screening out potentially toxic individuals. These will take practice. http://lightshouse.org/lights-blog/how-to-use-body-language-repel-toxic-people#axzz2kwJ1p1LC Like the above, these tips will take practice. Also, if you tend to feel any free-floating anxiety, you might practice some self-hypnosis exercises to dissipate it (or work with your therapist on this). Cluster B types sniff out anxiety the way sharks sense blood in the water, and I’ve noticed an immediate shift in my psychological leverage with them to my benefit when I achieve calm, relaxed alertness in their presence. http://lightshouse.org/poppies-oats–a-few-small-requests.html#axzz2kwJ1p1LC Here’s how to listen to your intuition about people and test for Cluster B tendencies. http://lightshouse.org/lights-blog/how-to-say-no#axzz2kwJ1p1LC Here’s how to say no. http://lightshouse.org/lights-blog/the-problem-with-being-too-nice-part-one#axzz2kwJ1p1LC http://lightshouse.org/lights-blog/the-problem-with-being-too-nice-part-2#axzz2kwJ1p1LC Although all of the previous articles should provide you with important tools, both of these articles deal most directly with your stated issue – how to relate to solid people instead of slipping into the clutches of toxic individuals. You might find Al-Anon, in addition to your therapy, helpful in teaching you detachment from the habit of locking into struggles with problem people. Although Al-Anon is designed for friends and families of alcoholics, many alcoholic families have PD issues to some degree, so you’ll probably identify fairly closely with the situations of other attendees. Try to find a meeting where you feel the most welcomed and comfortable. It will take some time and focus to socially recalibrate yourself, but you and your life are worth it. Because we AcoNs have been raised to respond to unhealthy interpersonal cues rather than to healthy ones, we often simply lack the skills to function socially and emotionally among healthier individuals, so we tend to ignore them or otherwise nudge them out of our lives without realizing we’re doing so. If you have the opportunity to spend time around psychologically healthy individuals whom you genuinely like and respect, you might observe how they interact with others and absorb their techniques in order to rebuild your interpersonal toolbox. (Of course, I don’t mean in the freaky “mirroring” way used by some PD people.) It took me until I was 40 to realize what had happened to me and how it had affected my life, but I refuse to let it control me any longer. I’m now 50, and regardless of how much life I have left, I will not live it enslaved as I had before. I likewise wish you freedom from your enslavement, and I hope the above helps. Log in to Reply Laura P. Schulman, MD, MA on December 5, 2013 at 2:07 am Wow, you’ve given me a whole toolbox! Thank you so much! I just hope, at 60, I can teach this “old dog” new tricks. I’ve been looking at the multigenerational nature of dysfunction on both sides of my family, and lately rediscovering my two first cousins, both of whom have been severely injured by the family idea of how to dominate by means of fear and degradation. Ugh. Both of them are so broken, they can’t even look in the mirror and see it, so I consider myself fortunate by comparison. Your suggestion re: being in the presence of “normal people” and observing how they relate to one another is a good one, but upon reflecting on this, I realize I don’t know what “normal” people look like, because “normal” in my world means sarcasm, put-downs, and false praise followed by a slam-dunk. So I have a theoretical idea of what non-abusive people would be like, i.e., they don’t do those things, but it’s hard to find those sort of people, it seems. Lately I have been coping with it by isolating, which I know is not healthy, but then again it’s peaceful and painless. vestalvespa on December 2, 2013 at 10:09 pm Thank you for writing this. I’m in a situation with my mother-in-law right now that is incredibly toxic, and looks to only get worse unless my husband and I make the choice to completely (or, at least, mostly) cut her off. MIL is addicted to prescription drugs and is very emotionally unstable. She was brutally physically abusive to my husband when he was a child, and has been emotionally abusive to him as an adult. She’s been diagnosed bipolar but even with her medication, I know that her spitefulness and vindictiveness toward me are not due to mental illness but simply her own miseries projected outward. She’s mentioned on more than one occasion that I’m not worth her son’s time, and when she isn’t belittling me, she is ignoring me or refusing to listen when I speak. I don’t take it personally- she’s made a practice of rejecting her son’s girlfriends his entire life- but it wears on a person. I finally got the guts to speak to her regarding my husband and I spending Christmas with my family. She flew into a rage, telling me I didn’t have the “right” to talk to her about her behavior and that she “didn’t know me” and that she was a better daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law (for what it’s worth, I’ve heard this is a generous rewriting of history). She hung up on me. I left her a message to call me when she was ready to talk like an adult…I’m not holding my breath on that. I know my husband wants to walk away. I consider my last exchange with her to be my last and I’ve essentially told him that if he wants any contact with her in the future, I won’t be a part of it. He’s reluctant to cut her off, due to his own feelings of guilt, which I understand. He’s been doing this for 3 decades more than I have. As for me, I feel freer, but I know he won’t until he feels like he can remove her from our lives. I’m from a family where toxic relationships have resulted in no contact before, and I’m a huge proponent of the “being related doesn’t mean you need to be friends” camp. I firmly believe that I owe nothing to people who only eat happiness up, never serving it to others. I sincerely hope that my mother-in-law chooses happiness someday, because I’m through giving her my own. Log in to Reply Laura P. Schulman, MD, MA on December 5, 2013 at 2:12 am I’m so sorry that you’re in this incredibly painful situation. I would like to thank you for saying that even though she is bipolar, her awful behavior is not due to her bipolar, but due to her abusive nastiness. As a bipolar person and author of a mental health blog, I am truly grateful when someone is able to tease apart what is due to the disease and what is due to just plain meanness. You’ve done a great job of that, and I really appreciate it. I hope that you and your husband will find a healthy way of establishing boundaries with your MIL, even if those boundaries turn out to be of the NC type. Log in to Reply Aparna Nair on April 16, 2014 at 7:48 am Thank you…thank you….thank you! Cannot thank you enough for this website. The convictions these articles have given me cannot be put down in words. Thank you once again! Log in to Reply Laura P. Schulman, MD, MA on April 18, 2014 at 12:50 am Reblogged this on Bipolar For Life and commented: An amazing article from an amazing blog. For those of us who are adult survivors of childhood abuse, this site can be a lifesaver, filled with resources. It was only after reading this site that I felt validated in my knowledge that I am an ACoN–an Adult Child of a Narcissist. Even though I can’t move back to the other side of the world right now, and even though the reason for that is that I’m helping my parents in their old age (thereby soaking in the stinking soup of bad relationships), I still find The Invisible Scar to be reassuring and comforting. At last, someone who understands, and has good advice! (And if my therapist is reading this: Yes, B, I know you tried to tell me all this, ten years ago. I’m a slow learner;-) Log in to Reply Timiarah Camburn on April 18, 2014 at 1:36 am Hi. Your blog is very helpful. I lived through several toxic relationships and have NC’d them all. I liked your whole article, but I especially liked the long list of NC/LC benefits. Every item on the list is a true benefit of the procedure. Thanks for creating this blog. Log in to Reply freegift3 on April 18, 2014 at 8:12 am Reblogged this on freegift3's Blog. Log in to Reply hkshuckleberry on April 18, 2014 at 10:49 am Thank you for this article. I am trying to come to terms with the fact that my mother is a toxic person and I have gone NC. I feel safer now most of the time. only when the phone rings, the fear in me rises, for it might be another flying monkey or ‘mother’ herself trying to drag me back into my role as ‘everybody’s caregiver’ or ‘undeserving mishap’. Log in to Reply Leave a Reply You must be logged in to post a comment.
