Toxic Parents Quotes

“Children who are not encouraged to do, to try, to explore, to master, and to risk failure, often feel helpless and inadequate. Over-controlled by anxious, fearful parents, these children often become anxious and fearful themselves. This makes it difficult for them to mature. Many never outgrow the need for ongoing parental guidance and control. As a result, their parents continue to invade, manipulate, and frequently dominate their lives.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“Many toxic parents compare one sibling unfavorably with another to make the target child feel that he's not doing enough to gain parental affection. This motivates the child to do whatever the parents want in order to regain their favor. This divide-and-conquer technique is often unleashed against children who become a little too independent, threatening the balance of the family system.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“Just as verbally and physically abused children internalize blame, so do incest victims. However, in incest, the blame is compounded by the shame. The belief that ‘it’s all my fault’ is never more intense than with the incest victim. This belief fosters strong feelings of self-loathing and shame. In addition to having somehow to cope with the actual incest, the victim must now guard against being caught and exposed as a ‘dirty, disgusting’ person”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“If the family you chose before your birth no longer supports your path towards fulfilling your true destiny, it is never too late to find a new tribe.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“Just because someone is your family doesn’t mean you have to keep them around if they are toxic or abusive. Don’t let people guilt you.”
― Winnie Nantongo

“A child, without toxic interference, will naturally become the person they are meant to be. André Chevalier”
― Nikki Sex, Abuse

“Parents who feel good about themselves do not have to control their adult children. But [toxic parents] operate from a deep sense of dissatisfaction with their lives and a fear of abandonment. Their child's independence is like the loss of a limb to them. As the child grows older, it becomes ever more important for the parents to pull the strings that keep the child dependent. As long as toxic parents can make their son or daughter feel like a child, they can maintain control.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“I learned a long time ago that it's not our fault if our parents are monsters. We can't take responsibility for that, or we're twice damaged. All we can do is try to go forward in a different way.”
― Cinda Williams Chima, Deathcaster

“When it came time for me to go to bed, my mother beckoned me to her, and kissed me, and whispered, "I know I'll never have another anxious moment with my own dear laddie." I pondered these words before I went to sleep. How could I reconcile this motherliness with the screeching fury who had pursued me around the kitchen with a whip, flogging me until she was gorged with — what? Vengeance? What was it? Once, when I was in my thirties and reading Freud for the first time, I thought I knew. I am not so sure I know now. But what I knew then was that nobody— not even my mother— was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface.”
― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

“Meanwhile, this only child helped to make up the pattern of his background, she was a necessary ornament to his private domestic life. There was something pleasing about the possession of a wife and a child, they formed another link in a chain of power.
A son would have grown up - proved difficult. A son was hard to control, and lived all the time in the hopes of inheriting money and position. There need be none of this trouble with a daughter. Daughters could be managed, all they had to do in life was to look attractive.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Julius

“She would be the victor, she would never be possessed. Nothing could hurt her now. In her life she would go out and do as she pleased and take the things that waited for her, She and Papa were two branches on a tree, and he had tried to see if he was stronger than she. He thought he had won. He thought he had beaten her down and she would let him go on thinking this as long as it suited her. She would keep him by her side and draw upon his strength; his life was her life, his flesh and blood were her flesh and blood, but it would never be he who was master. She held him between her hands and he did not know. When two forces came against each other and struggled and battled for supremacy one of the two must suffer and be hurt.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Julius

“Why should you mind?' she said.
He brushed the remark away.
'How do you think I'm going to live if I'm never to be certain of you, day or night?' he said to her.
She shrugged her shoulders.
'It's not my affair if you choose to make a fool of yourself,' she told him.
There was a pause and then she said: 'You might have known this would happen. I'm nearly twenty-five, my life's my own, after all.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Julius

“If a toxic parent does not want to live in sin, they must not provoke their children to sin—especially by using the holy & righteous word to do it.”
― Zara Hairston