Parenting In Richard A. Friedman's When Toxic Parents

A lot of parents in the world lack certain traits good parents have because their own parents may have inflicted poor parenting skills upon them throughout their own childhood, such as emotional, verbal, and physical abuse, which are all things that can be avoided and improved upon to make the relationship between parents and their children better. Have you ever made an opinion about something to your parents and they responded in a way that degraded you? This is just the bare minimum of what a toxic parent could be. A large majority of parents will lean to a form of parenting that results in actions that might cause mishaps between the relationship between the parent and the child, which can impact the child in the long run in ways that most …show more content…
Friedman’s, “When Toxic Parents are too Toxic to Tolerate,” who helps and heals people from destructive pasts and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), he has had a patient, a woman in her late 60’s whom he treated, tell him, “Once, on my birthday, she [her mother] left me a message wishing that I get a disease.” And another, “He [another patient of his, a man in his mid-20’s] had recently come out as gay to his devoutly religious parents, who responded by disowning him. At a subsequent family dinner, his father took him aside and told him it would have been better if he, rather than his younger brother, had died in a car accident several years earlier.” Cruel acts such as this can serve long-term effects to the minds of the children of these parents. Both acceptance and cooperation of the minds between parents and their children play a key role in maintaining a healthy and happy relationship. There are endless ways to heal from toxic parenting, but the most important is forgetting about the false analogies that was made by the parent to their child. “Decide that the lifetime of messages that have left you scarred are wrong.” --- “With the deliberate decision to move forward, there are endless turns your story can take.”(Karen Young, The Goodman Project). The process of healing from a toxic parent does not happen overnight. Depending on how toxic they may be, perhaps if they were as toxic as the parents in the examples above, healing from parents like these is not always easy, because when toxic parenting gets to a form that drastic, sometimes the best thing to do is to let them go. The damage toxic parents may cause is not a lifelong sentence of doom and gloom. As a child blossoms out of a relationship like this in their independent years, it is often expected of them to reparent themselves in a way that eliminates the negative descriptions their parents could have often given them. Reevaluating a list of painful behaviors to mentally relive