It’s difficult to detect a toxic parent as they’re raising you, and it’s not until adulthood that people realize how damaging their mom or dad’s behavior was.
People usually become aware of that while they go through their issues with a therapist or witness a better parenting model. So, without further ado, here are some indications that you were dealing with a toxic parent:
1. NO COMFORT AT HOME
No place like home, right? Well, people with toxic parents feel uncomfortable being at home since they associate it with fear, stress, anxiety, or impending abuse.
Constantly anticipating your parent to get mad at you or insult you, saying how you are incapable of doing anything right, makes those people feel alienated from their home.
2. NO COMPLIMENTS
Toxic parents disregard and neglect their children, for they focus on their interests and priorities only. If their child gets ill, they will get mad and yell at the child because they don’t want to deal with the actual process of taking care of someone.
Toxic parents often insult and criticize their children, they never give praise to them, which eventually leads to the child’s low self-esteem or depression later in life.
3. NON-EXISTENT APOLOGIZING
Toxic parents never apologize first because they think they have nothing to apologize for, but even if they know they do, they will say nothing.
If you cannot remember your parent apologizing or instead of I am sorry, they used to say something vague like Fine, you might have dealt with a toxic person.
4. A LACK OF CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
Alongside not having many positive, happy memories from your childhood, you may not remember your childhood at all or remember it scantly at least. Our brains suppress disturbing events in order to deal with the traumas.
Not remembering a gentle caress, or a bedtime story, or malicious behavior such as yelling and insulting bring up for a void, a trauma, and sometimes, as a coping mechanism, our brains subdue, deny those things to survive the abuse.
5. DISTORTED BOUNDARIES
Toxic parents will enter your room without asking, check your phone, rummage through your things, and won’t care if they make a mess while doing so.
If you ask them why they did that for, an answer would be: It’s not your problem, mind your business or How dare you to tell me what I can or can’t do!
6. CARE ABSENCE
Toxic parents never hug or kiss their children; they are cold-hearted and self-absorbed. Not only do they barely take care of you – as if someone was forcing them, but they also never ask how your day at school went, nor they care for your achievements; they are indifferent.
On the other hand, if they are sick or tired, they will order you to massage them, serve them – anything for them to feel better. Reversed care is something toxic parents often employ.
7. INATTENTION
Toxic parents change the subject even though you haven’t finished talking yet. They stop you with a question, a reproach or remark of some sort, and you feel like all your words fall on deaf ears.
You have something important to share with them or ask them, but by the time you finish, they are already talking on the phone or texting on social media. Even worse, instead of giving you advice, they point out what you did wrong.
Toxic parents may have defined your childhood, but not your whole life.
There is a way of breaking that grim shadow hovering over you through support and communication.
Your partner, friend, or therapist can help you out. You deserve to be happy.
You deserve to break free from the chains of depression, low self-esteem, or that gnawing sense of unhappiness.
