108 Quotes by Susan Forward

She was battered incessantly, regularly, all the time. I'm not saying 24 hours a day, but the incidents of battering were extraordinarily high.

Enmeshment creates almost total dependence on approval and validation from outside yourself. Lovers, bosses, friends, even strangers become the stand-in for parents. Adults like Kim who were raised in families where there was no permission to be an individual frequently become approval junkies, constantly seeking their next fix.

In families like Fred's, much of a child's identity and his illusions of safety depend on feeling enmeshed. He develops a need to be a part of other people and to have them be a part of him. He can't stand the thought of being cast out. This need for enmeshment carries right into adult relationships.

When you are reactive, you are dependent on the approval of others. You feel good about yourself only when no one disagrees with you, criticizes you, or disapproves of you. Your feelings are often far out of proportion to the events that evoked them. You’ll perceive a small suggestion as a personal attack; a minor constructive criticism as a personal failure. Without the approval of others, you have a hard time maintaining even minimal emotional stability.

Instead of promoting healthy development, they unconsciously undermine it, often with the belief that they are acting in their child’s best interest.

People can forgive toxic parents, but they should do it at the conclusion – not at the beginning – of their emotional housecleaning. People need to get angry about what happened to them. They need to grieve over the fact that they never had the parental love they yearned for. They need to stop diminishing or discounting the damage that was done to them.

We can only speculate why, but physically abusive parents seem to share certain characteristics. First, they have an appalling lack of impulse control.

Children soak up both verbal and nonverbal messages like sponges – indiscriminately. They listen to their parents, they watch their parents, and they imitate their parents’ behavior. Because they have little frame of reference outside the family, the things they learn at home about themselves and others become universal truths engraved deeply in their minds.

Children from high-drama households often grow up with the idea that tension is an integral part of love. Therefore, the girl who grows up in a high-drama family is an ideal partner for the charismatic, explosive misogynist. The fighting, the tension, and the drama are “normal” and familiar to her. She views the swings from despair to joy, from love to hate, from abuse to intense lovemaking as proof of love.