<p>My father left home and did not support us. My mother was a single mother who struggled and never was in a position to support me. This was a good thing in a sense because I knew early on I would have to rely on myself to go to school - I was fortunate enough to be on athletic scholarship and thus could go. I certainly wasn’t stuck at a boarding school dependent on my parents. </p>
<p>So my message to the original poster may seem strange. But I never had anywhere near the vitriol this poster has towards her parents. Maybe it was because I separated emotionally at such a young age. But my parents were like most anyone else, with lots of pluses and some minuses too. I would recommend she see them as people, and find strategies to deal with them. If those strategies don’t work, move on, on your own. The poverty may stink, but the freedom is a lot of fun. It is not easy to adopt a worldview entirely independent of your parents when you are young, but it is often necessary to do so.</p>
<p>“Some day,” a wise person once told me, “you’ll have a family of your own.” I’m very close to some of my family, and I love all of my family, but the knowledge that as an adult I would have the freedom to have as close or distant a relationship with whomever I wanted-- that was somehow comforting in the darker times when I was younger and felt trapped in some bad situations.</p>
<p>Deep breath. Find strength within, and with your friends, and build up your support network. Good luck.</p>
<p>When Parents Are Too Toxic to Tolerate
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
You can divorce an abusive spouse. You can call it quits if your lover mistreats you. But what can you do if the source of your misery is your own parent?</p>
<p>excellent article. Funny thing is MY parents ARE TOXIC to me but NOT to my openly gay brother (not that they SHOULD be toxic to him). They STILL look down on me. I lost favor in their eyes when I was 17 and never got it back.</p>
<p>when I was hospitalized in psych hospital for 8 1/2 MONTHS due to “adolescent adjustment disorder” (I kid you not, that was the diagnosis), we had family therapy sessions. After a couple, the doctor forbid my parents from any contact with me for months. He said, and I quote, “if I could put your parents in here, I would, but I can’t, so you’re here instead”. This was the beginning of my adult life. I was able to finally put aside the notion something was wrong with me, like my parents had been telling me for years.</p>
<p>They never were close with me son, their ONLY GRANDCHILD, because I had a baby out of wedlock. They felt that by taking my son for a few hours or days, they were giving me a break and that since I chose to have this child w/o a husband, I didn’t deserve a break. I made my bed and they were going to force me to lie in it.</p>
<p>I had to call my 79 yo dad last week and BEG him to call my son on his 20th birthday. </p>
<p>My parents are both college educated people, an electrical engineer and an elementary school teacher. Heard from my mother when my son was little and she was still teaching fulltime “I spend my whole week with kids, I don’t want to spend my weekends and vacations with them”. I am NOT kidding!</p>
<p>International student. May have happened in a country where there isn’t a CPS. We’re luckier than we seem, sometimes…</p>
<p>Good article, sueinphilly. It’s also good to see that neurons in the hippocampus can be redeveloped in adulthood… Physical evidence that you CAN heal from these sorts of stressors is very reassuring!</p>