So I’ve been recommended this book soooo many times by friends, therapists, etc. I’ve started reading it and I just cannot get past this part where he’s talking about parents and he says ““Even if you have the sense that you’d rather chew a handful of thumbtacks than warm to your parents, this step cannot be bypassed, no matter how long it takes” This just feels ridiculous to me. My parents are exceptionally horrible people who manipulate, abuse, and take advantage of anyone and me especially. But here I’m being told that the key to truly experiencing joy, life, or deep relationships is to expose my self to my parents presence which will most likely cause more trauma. Like wtf do I even do with that. My decision to cut them from my life was literally one for my own health
“Some parents can’t be reconciled with, without further abuse” omg thank you! I needed to hear that fr. It’s so hard sometimes when a lot of there resources out there are for coping with less severely abusive childhoods where reunification can be beneficial to both parties.
I agree. Personally I think anything talking about reconciliation should be targeted towards abusive parents, regardless of how severe the abuse is. Their victims shouldn't be tasked with work that is the parents' responsibility.
His phrasing really bothered me too. I have a perfectly fulfilling life, without my parents, thank you very much. It's so weird.
I was curious and looked at some reviews online and found this one, which really supports what you're saying:
Like another reviewer who wrote "avoid if you've overcome a toxic family", I think this book does not serve them well or anyone who was abused or severely neglected by primary caregivers, at least not initially in their healing process (and maybe not at all).
Imagine this advice being given in other abusive situations!
ugh.
parents are people first. no special treatment.
My therapist is a trauma specialist with a PhD and he has told me to get MORE distant with my one living parent . Not less. He's told me so much about how interacting with her has and continues to affect me for the negative. And a lot of my growth has necessitated me breaking from the enmeshment prison she has had me in for my entire life.
My therapist also encourages me to not self harm doing damaging things just to please society, book authors, or whatever. He says I don't owe them anything and that I need to put myself first. I don't need to be any more loving and accepting of terrible people who exhibit terrible behavior that has a terrible effect on me. He says I've done way too much of that and it's time to set up some non-negotiable boundaries and look out for me first and foremost. People being allowed in close to me is a priviledge and not a right.
Thank you for this comment. This helps a lot.
You're welcome 💜
I can accept that there are valid reasons that my parents are how they are, but they are still the same people who caused me irreparable harm and I'm too busy with my own healing to attend to them. They can get fucked for all I care.
Ooh, I'm very grateful I saw this, I've considered buying in the past and now I won't! Any book that says having empathy for your parents is necessary is one I immediately throw away. Very f*cking irresponsible, you don't tell readers to go warm to their abusive ex either.
I've been very slowly making my way through a book about cutting ties with your parents, and it's so validating to read all these different stories from people, and have an author say: this is why it was the healthy choice for this person.
That's what we need, not more 'have some empathy' bullshit.
What’s the name of that book? I’ve been moving toward fully cutting ties myself.
It's a dutch book that hasn't been translated, so this is probably useless information, but it's called 'Breken met je ouders' by Marloes Hospes.
Also you can have a sort of generalized empathy for them, in a sort of "I understand that you were passing down inherited trauma" way, and also recognize that further contact with them is a pointless waste of time and will only harm you more.
I read a novel that encapsulates that insight very well: "Will and Testament" by Vigdis Hjorth. It's a kind of blow by blow of the inner conflict around dealing with family members who want to pretend like the abuse never happened.
Yes, for me, now, it's only an intellectual understanding. I can connect the dots of generational trauma, and see how my family got to where it is. But I don't feel any real empathy towards abusers because of it. I think that's partially because of being manipulated to feel sorry for them for so long, and also because they're indifferent to my suffering.
It's not healthy to care about those people, and it's simply dangerous.
And that sounds like a very cathartic novel, I don't read a lot of fiction, but I might if it's this theme!
Yeah I couldn’t get past that part either.
I can accept my parents had their own horrible childhoods that they overcame. I can accept that they did better than their parents. I can accept that they are just people with flaws.
Honestly, that’s more than I had to do. I don’t owe them anything. I’ll do the best I can for my own kids. And I will hope it’s good enough, but they won’t owe me anything. As my dear friends says, “you don’t get a participation trophy for being a parent.”
That sounds like a godawful book
I think it could potentially re traumatise when people suggest you should just “seek reconciliation”? If you have cancer, people don’t say “just love the cancer and everything will be okay”. I’m at the place where I can forgive but I won’t allow the perp any place in my life- why would I?
Yeah I just read “The Dance of Anger” and the author also encourages finding a way to stay in contact with toxic family members, and that if you don’t, patterns will keep repeating. It really bothers me because the book was pretty much fantastic but why do I have to stay in touch with abusive people who think they’ve done nothing wrong and have caused so much harm?
That sounds like a truly horrible book for CPTSD. Your instincts are spot-on! Words of wisdom on this sub are: Do not look for healing at the feet of those who broke you.
Maybe donate that book to the library and read "CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving" instead.
I second this recommendation!! Forgiveness is the last thing a survivor should be concerned about, there are so many more useful tools that are covered in this book.
Thanks I’ll definitely check that out !
Thank you for the head-up. The statement you quoted is immensely upsetting for me, and I imagine the same would apply for us here. As other posters said, we don't owe our abusers anything.
I also went through reviews/descriptions/interviews related to this book (I don't think I want to spend time reading the actual book -- put it frankly, it will be a waste of time); I have strong concern about recommending this book to anyone. The author's interview on Psychology Today was especially illuminating. There is so much magical thinking, it is obvious that the author is not even trying to convince trained behavior scientists (including myself) -- this is a self-help book, not a psychology book. And we know what kind of "self-help" this book offers -- the book "helps" its readers by offering the extremely simplistic explanation to complex problems in their life, "everything is because of intergenerational trauma!"
It reminded me of a friend of mine who was telling me that their problems were because of the intergenerational trauma. Sure, I know this person has serious internegerational trauma -- but I so wanted to tell them "no, it is because of the untreated CPTSD/DID" (I did not tell them though....). I thought that all these talks about intergenerational trauma would do no good if the obvious CPTSD/DID was not being attended for. And this is coming from someone who is most certainly a product of intergenerational trauma; the father of my abusive mother had the classic "intergenerational trauma experience", so to speak. After all, if it was all intergenerational trauma, how comes that her siblings came out as normal human beings, and my cousins become well-adjusted adults?
I get what you’re saying - and I also think it’s difficult or impossible to say what comes first, the CPTSD or the intergenerational trauma.
My sister as an adult is fine; I have severe depression, anxiety, and PTSD. I’m the one who became mentally ill, like my great grandparents who were institutionalised. I’m the one who became suicidal, like my 3 grandparents who killed themselves. And the family history in the Holocaust also affected me more than my sister, though in ways I don’t have the space or energy to explain here.
Why did I react differently than my sister?
It could be because of CPTSD. I was much younger than my sister when we went through family traumas: our house burned down twice, our mother was very sick and couldn’t take care of us. On top of that, my sister was beating me up from age 3, not the other way around. And I was the one who was sexually abused, first when I was very young. So I never developed safe attachment. (Ironically the author of the book believes most if not all autoimmune issues come from attachment problems.)
But that doesn’t prove those early traumas were more significant than the intergenerational stuff. I was pretty much from birth, much more sensitive and emotional than my sister, who was violent and angry. I was peaceful to the point of dissociation - which in turn made me a good victim for abusers. And what creates personality from birth other than genetics?
Who’s to say what came first? Did the CPTSD make me more open to the intergenerational trauma? Did the intergenerational trauma make me more susceptible to the CPTSD? These are chicken and egg questions that I can’t imagine we will ever be able to answer.
My point being, intergenerational trauma, like parental neglect or abuse, can affect even siblings in deeply different ways, for reasons of personality, environment, and age. The absence of those effects in one sibling doesn’t prove that the intergenerational trauma were more or less significant than the CPTSD.
Well, I am pretty intergenerational trauma was a contributing factor to what made both my abuser and yours. However, the proximal cause of my CPTSD is NOT intergenerational trauma -- the proximal cause is my abuser, and other traumatic experiences I had myself. My grandfather most certainly had terrifying experiences, but that was not what caused my CPTSD. And not only that focusing on "intergenerational trauma" does not seem helpful at all in healing my own traumas, it strikes me as dehumanizing my own experiences.
To be honest, I don't think we can take seriously anyone who thinks autoimmune issues comes from attachment problems. Attachment problems are serious problems, but they are not the root of all problems....
I’m not sure why you’d write off the connection between attachment and autoimmune issues. Have you read Gabor Mate’s work? His latest book, one of the big themes of it is exactly that - how attachment trauma leads to physical illness. You may not agree with him, but he is considered one of the world’s experts on complex trauma, so I don’t think his ideas can be dismissed offhand.
The other thing to consider is that intergenerational trauma manifests in the way our grandparents raise our parents, and the way our parents in turn raise us which can make us especially vulnerable to abusers - whether those abusers are in the family, or someone outside of it.
Yeah this book pissed me off. I thought it was going to be more about intergenerational trauma more clinically. But yeah I did not finish because it just read like shitty parent apologist to me
I don’t agree with or defend that statement.
I will say that still, I found that book amazing and revelatory. It explained for me the way nothing else has, where some of my mental and physical health issues came from. For me it had many profound benefits that outweighed the parts I disagreed with.
He crazy or smoking some good stuff.
Does he explain how to deal with unmediated schizophrenics because that was the parent I was dealing with.
Hi mom how are you doing?
“God sent me a squirrel, the squirrel is keeping the demon away, that tried to kill me last night”
That’s nice mom
“I named the squirrel”
A squirrel actually did come nest in the hoarded house. I called to get to talk to my sister.
So he is crazy or high if he thinks all parents are going to be able to have a relationship or come to an agreement or understanding that what they did was abusive. It was never worth it to try and rationalize common sense with my mother even when she was better and on medication.
I stopped reading this book almost immediately. I was super disappointed in how invalidating it was
Anyone pushing that nonsense can just fuck right off. I mean, I did feel sorry for my nmother as she wasted her life on abusive mind games instead of making a place for love in her life, so she never got to experience happiness. That was her choice though.
When she was elderly and frail, I helped her out a bit. I took time of work a couple of times to care for her, and I spent vacations with her when she was ill, and she would start pleasant, then turn vile.
How can we warm to monsters who just want to harm and use us?
Yeah I had this book in my cart for quite a while but I saw someone mention that this was the narrative so I decided not to purchase it.
I stopped reading ⅓ of the way through. This book just didn’t resonate with me at all and wasn’t worth it.
Have you read Pete walker’s CPTSD from surviving to thriving?
He straight up recommends reducing contact from minimal to zero with toxic parents.
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All my experience with male therapists is that they've encouraged violating boundaries whether that's someone else's boundaries or your own
Oh I disagree with his sentiment here wholeheartedly, and I agree with you that it's ridiculous.
I don't understand this narrative some people have that somehow by reconciling with our parents we'll have a better life, or be more fulfilled or whatever. Some parents can't be reconciled with, without further abuse.