Toxic Parents Read Online Free PDF

responsibilities and household duties, but never at the expense of childhood.
    How We Learn to Be in the World
    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. Parental role models are central to a child’s developing sense of identity—particularly as he or she develops gender identity. Despite dramatic changes in parental roles over the last twenty years, the same duties apply to parents today that applied to your parents:
     
They must provide for their children’s physical needs.
They must protect their children from physical harm.
They must provide for their children’s needs for love, attention, and affection.
They must protect their children from emotional harm.
They must provide moral and ethical guidelines for their children.
    Clearly, the list could go on much longer, but these five responsibilities form the foundation of adequate parenting. The toxic parents we’ll be discussing rarely get past the first item on the list. For the most part, they are (or were) significantly impaired in their own emotional stability or mental health. They are not only often unavailable to meet their children’s needs, but in many cases they expect and demand that their children take care of the parents’ needs.
    When a parent forces parental responsibilities on a child, family roles become indistinct, distorted, or reversed. A child who is compelled to become his own parent, or even become a parent to his own parent, has no one to emulate, learn from, and look up to. Without a parental role model at this critical state of emotionaldevelopment, a child’s personal identity is set adrift in a hostile sea of confusion.
    Les, 34, the owner of a sporting goods store, came to see me because he was a workaholic and it was making him miserable.
My marriage went to hell because I never did anything but work. I was either gone or I was working at home. My wife got tired of living with a robot, and she left. Now it’s happening again with the new lady in my life. I hate it. I really do. But I just don’t know how to loosen up.
    Les told me he had trouble expressing emotion of any kind, particularly tender, loving feelings. The word fun , he told me with considerable bitterness, wasn’t in his vocabulary.
I wish I knew how to make my girlfriend happy, but every time we start to talk, somehow I always steer the conversation back to work, and she gets upset. Maybe it’s because work is the only thing I don’t screw up.
    Les continued for the better part of a half hour trying to convince me of how badly he messed up his relationships:
The women I get involved with are always complaining that I don’t give them enough time or affection. And it’s true. I’m a lousy boyfriend and I was a really lousy husband.
    I stopped him and said: “And you’ve got a lousy self-image. It sounds as if the only time you feel okay is when you’re working. How come?”
It’s something I know how to do . . . and I do it well. I work about seventy-five hours a week . . . but I’ve always worked my tail off. . . ever since I was a kid. See, I was the oldest of three boys. I guess my mom had some kind of breakdown when I was eight. From then on, our house was always dark, with the shades drawn. My mother always seemed to be in her bathrobe, and she never talked much. My earliest memories of her were with a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and glued to her goddamned soap operas. She never got up until long after we were off to school. So, it was my job to feed my two younger brothers, pack their lunches, and get them to the school bus. When we got home, she’d be lying in front of the tube or taking one of her three-hour