Susan Forward Quotes

Love is a verb, not a noun. It is active. Love is not just feelings of passion and romance. It is behavior. If a man lies to you, he is behaving badly and unlovingly toward you. He is disrespecting you and your relationship. The words "I love you" are not enough to make up for that. Don't kid yourself that they are.

Anger is a normal human emotion and all children experience it to some degree, but many parents have difficulty dealing with it. Often they mistakenly see their children's anger as an indication of their failure as parents. When a child throws a tantrum, most parents believe that they have lost control, and they feel helpless. Children need to express their angry feelings, but within reasonable limits. They must be taught that the feelings of anger are all right but that this doesn't mean that they child may kick the dog, hit someone, or break things. When a parent teaches a child how to ventilate her feelings in appropriate ways, he teaches a very important lesson.

My father never did any of the things that my friends' fathers did with them. We never tossed a football around or even watched games together. He would always say, "I don't have time - maybe later," but he always had time to sit around and get drunk.

We all need to say what we think and feel. When we block the normal channels of expression, the emotions find other ways to manifest themselves. Some of those manifestations can be very destructive. When a woman in a misogynistic relationship disowns her angry feelings, they often return disguised as illnesses. For many women, suffering is the only way they know to express their rage.

Perfectionist parents seem to operate under the illusion that if they can just get their children to be perfect, they will be a perfect family. They put the burden of stability on the child to avoid facing the fact that they, as parents, cannot provide it. The child fails and becomes the scapegoat for family problems. Once again, the child is saddled with the blame.

Many toxic parents compare one sibling unfavorably with another to make the target child feel that he's not doing enough to gain parental affection. This motivates the child to do whatever the parents want in order to regain their favor. This divide-and-conquer technique is often unleashed against children who become a little too independent, threatening the balance of the family system.

When a child is not permitted to express her pain, one of the important, destructive messages she gets is that if she is feeling bad it is due to her own deficiencies. Coupled with this is likely the message that if she needs comfort, then she is ugly and repulsive to others.

Love involves more than just feelings. It is also a way of behaving. When Sandy said, "My parents don't know how to love me," she was saying that they don't know how to behave in loving ways. If you were to ask Sandy's parents, or almost any other toxic parents, if they love their children, most of them would answer emphatically that they do. Yet, sadly, most of their children have always felt unloved. What toxic parents call "love" rarely translates into nourishing, comforting behavior.

Children growing up in alcoholic homes are buffeted by unpredictable and volatile circumstances and personalities. In reaction, they often grow up with an overpowering need to control everything and everyone in their lives.

Incest is almost always a devastating experience for
the victim.

Fear in intimate relationships operates on several levels. On one level there are the survival fears - fear of making it financially on your own, fear of being poor, fear of being the sole provider and nurturer for your children, and fear of being alone - which keep women from leaving abusive relationships. But fear is present in the misogynistic relationship long before the woman begins to think of leaving.

The more compliant she is, the more her feelings and needs are ignored, the angrier the girl becomes, and then the more compliant she becomes in order to deal with the anger. This cycle is the track that every mistreated child runs.

Occasionally surrendering or backing down is part of the compromise necessary in any working relationship. But when a woman repeatedly gives in to her partner so that her needs take second place to his, she cannot maintain her self-esteem. Many women give up the battle for activities and friends of their own because they feel so drained by the bigger battles in the relationship; this one doesn't seem worth the But it is a battle worth fighting, because it is one of the more subtle ways in which the woman can become isolated. What makes it so subtle is that initially she may feel flattered. It may appear that her partner is so in love with her that he doesn't want to share her with anyone else. In reality, however, he is gradually making her renounce the people and activities that are important in her life.

When your lover is a liar, you and he have a lot in common, you're both lying to you!

Manipulative parents have a field day on holidays, spreading guilt as if it were Christmas cheer.

Most of us are very sensitive about our roles as mothers. If the misogynist feels his partner is betraying him for the sake of the children, he may begin to attack her adequacy as a mother. However, her maternal adequacy is rarely the real issue. The children are simply scapegoats for his anger. He is simply exploiting his partner's fears of inadequacy to get her to acquiesce to his demands.

What makes a woman vulnerable to mistreatment at home, no matter how well she functions outside, is the belief that her need for her partner's love is the most important thing in her life. The prizes of success, financial gain, status, and prestige pale in comparison to that need. In addition, our true natures and weaknesses generally become obvious only in our intimate relationships. The faces we put on for the outside world may have little to do with how we feel about ourselves, how we expect to be treated, and what we will accept from our partners.

The misogynist's control over his partner is like the roots of a plant: it spreads into many areas of her life. Her work, her interests, her friends, her children, and even her thoughts and feelings can be affected by his control. Her self-confidence and self-esteem can be so damaged as to bring about significant changes in the way she feels about herself and how she relates to the rest of the world.

Reality Check
His lying is not contigent on who you are or what you do. His lying is not your fault. Lying is his choice and his problem, and if he makes that choice with you, he will make it with any other woman he's with. That doesn't mean you're an angel and he's the devil. It does mean that if he doesn't like certain things about you, he has many ways to address them besides lying. If there are sexual problems between you, there are many resources available to help you. Nothing can change until you hold him responsible and accountable for lying and stop blaming yourself.

The lies we tell ourselves to keep from seeing the truth about our lovers don't feel like lies. They feel comfortable, familiar, and true. We repeat them like a mantra and cling to them like security blankets, hoping to calm ourselves and regain our sense that the world works the way we believe it ought to.
Self-lies are false friends we look to for comfort and protection - and for a short time they may make us feel better. But we can only keep the truth at bay for so long. Our self-lies can't erase his lies, and as we'll see, the longer we try to pretend they can, the more we deepen the hurt.

The misogynist use either direct control or indirect control to gain his objective. He may directly state, plead, or demand that you give up a job, a class, or a friendship, or he may begin to attack indirectly those areas that are threatening to him, making it so miserable for you to continue with them that you give them up just to keep the peace. But, no matter what method your partner uses, the result is the same: You have seriously limited your world to suit his needs.

Children from high-drama households often grow up with the idea that tension is an integral part of love. Therefore, the girl who grows up in a high-drama family is an ideal partner for the charismatic, explosive misogynist. The fighting, the tension, and the drama are "normal" and familiar to her. She views the swings from despair to joy, from love to hate, from abuse to intense lovemaking as proof of love.

Children need to make mistakes and discover that it's not the end of the world. That's how they gain the confidence to try new things in life. Toxic parents impose unobtainable goals, impossible expectations, and ever-changing rules on their children. They expect their children to respond with a degree of maturity that can come only from life experiences that are inaccessible to a child. Children are not miniature adults, but toxic parents expect them to act as if they were.

Every time that I take out a woman, I hear my father's voice saying, Women love to trick men. They'll take you for all you've got if you're stupid enough to let them.

Criticism is the fountainhead of control.

Society has traditionally reinforced the idea that girls are inferior to boys, that girls can't take care of themselves, and that women need men to take care of them. We've all seen men portrayed in the media as stronger, more competent, and smarter than women, while women are often portrayed as highly emotional, indecisive, scatterbrained, passive, illogical, manipulative, and even malevolent. Such stereotypes further damage a young girl's ability to see herself as a strong and worthwhile person. Coupled with these views is the disparity between the accomplishments for which boys are admired and those for which girls are admired. While girls may be praised for their manners and appearance, boys are often praised for academic achievements and physical strength. Girls may also be discouraged from exploring and mastering life and encouraged instead to develop skills to manipulate others to negotiate in the world for them. What these girls are getting are lessons in helplessness.

Because children are totally dependent on their parents for their physical and emotional survival, their need for parental love is absolute. The normal need for bonding with the parent becomes more intense if the parent withdraws love and becomes a figure of fear and anxiety. The more frightening the parent, and the more he threatens to pull away, the more fiercely the child will cling to him in an effort to regain the parent's goodwill. To the confused child, the angry parent, who both loves and hurts, is a giant. This giant controls the child's life through the use of fear and the manipulation of love. The child must be constantly designing her behavior either to avoid the parent's wrath or to get the parent's approval.

What makes a controlling parent so insidious is that the domination usually comes in the guise of concern. Phrases such as, "this is for your own good," "I'm only doing this for you," and, "only because I love you so much," all mean the same thing: "I'm doing this because I'm so afraid of losing you that I'm willing to make you miserable.

Unhealthy families discourage individual expression. Everyone must conform to the thoughts and actions of the toxic parents. They promote fusion, a blurring of personal boundaries, a welding together of family members. On an unconscious level, it is hard for family members to know where one ends and another begins. In their efforts to be close, they often suffocate one another's individuality.

Children who are not encouraged to do, to try, to explore, to master, and to risk failure, often feel helpless and inadequate. Over-controlled by anxious, fearful parents, these children often become anxious and fearful themselves. This makes it difficult for them to mature. Many never outgrow the need for ongoing parental guidance and control. As a result, their parents continue to invade, manipulate, and frequently dominate their lives.

But the misogynist can get very mad over virtually nothing. He explodes over the most insignificant events. He exaggerates, he maximizes - he makes mountains out of molehills. Perhaps his partner forgot to pick up the dry-cleaning, or the toast came out too dark, or maybe they ran out of toilet paper. He treats her momentary fall from grace as if it were a federal crime.

People can forgive toxic parents, but they should do it at the conclusion - not at the beginning - of their emotional housecleaning. People need to get angry about what happened to them. They need to grieve over the fact that they never had the parental love they yearned for. They need to stop diminishing or discounting the damage that was done to them.

When we are children our families take care of our basic survival needs; they are also our first and most important sources of information about the world. It is from them that we learn how to think and feel about ourselves and what to expect from others. Our emotional foundations are created by the ways in which our parents treated us, the ways in which they treated each other, the kinds of messages their behavior communicated to us, and the ways in which we handled that information internally.

Enmeshment creates almost total dependence on approval and validation from outside yourself. Lovers, bosses, friends, even strangers become the stand-in for parents. Adults like Kim who were raised in families where there was no permission to be an individual frequently become approval junkies, constantly seeking their next fix.

It is behavior, not words, that has the greatest impact on a child. When a mother tells her daughter not to allow a man to control her or abuse her and then models the opposite in her own relationship with her husband, the girl will respond only to the behavioral message, not the verbal one.

When a girl is sexually abused, layers of secrecy and shame are added to her self-blame. The incestuous aggressor always projects the guilt for his crime onto the child he is molesting. The girl then learns to see herself as dirty and worthless. Having accepted humiliation, and exploitation as the conditions of survival during childhood, the girl is likely to reenact that same abuser/victim relationship with men in her adult life.

I also believe that forgiveness is appropriate only when parents do something to earn it. Toxic parents, especially the more abusive ones, need to acknowledge what happened, take responsibility, and show a willingness to make amends. If you unilaterally absolve parents who continue to treat you badly, who deny much of your reality and feelings, and who continue to project blame onto you, you may seriously impede the emotional work you need to do.

Just as verbally and physically abused children internalize blame, so do incest victims. However, in incest, the blame is compounded by the shame. The belief that 'it's all my fault' is never more intense than with the incest victim. This belief fosters strong feelings of self-loathing and shame. In addition to having somehow to cope with the actual incest, the victim must now guard against being caught and exposed as a 'dirty, disgusting' person

In fact, not only have a good many formerly abused children grown into nonabusing adults, but a number of these parents have great difficulty with even modest, nonphysical methods of disciplining their children. In rebellion against the pain of their own childhoods, these parents shy away both from setting limits and from enforcing them. This, too, can have a negative impact on a child's development, because children need the security of boundaries. But

No matter how toxic your parents might be, you still have a need to deify them. Even if you understand, on one level, that your father was wrong to beat you, you may still believe he was justified. Intellectual understanding is not enough to convince your emotions that you were not responsible.

Our culture and our religions are almost unanimous in upholding the omnipotence of parental authority.

The misogynist genuinely believes that his rage toward his partner is due to her deficiencies. It is easier for him to attack her than to deal with the real sources of his rage. He feels justified in acting out rage on women. Part of this justification may come from his experiences at home as a child, but a great deal of it comes directly from our culture.

Remember that you always have the right to be treated with respect, and to protest unfair treatment or criticism. It's vital to reinforce those rights with boundaries.

Unfortunately, there is no magic key. The misogynist's outbursts as well as his tenderness generally have little to do with how his partner is behaving. He is driven by his own inner demons. Therefore, there is no way to guarantee his good moods or eliminate his angry ones.

Children expect different things from each parent. Traditionally, the mother is expected to protect and defend the children, while the father is seen as head of the household, primary wage earner, problem solver, and disciplinarian - roles that often seem to entitle him respect and devotion no matter how he behaves. Many abused children blame their mothers as much as or even more than they blame their fathers for the abuse they experienced. A boy's additional need to identify with his father makes it even harder for him to find fault with his father, even if his father is brutal. But the boy is free to get angry at Mother when she does not protect him from abuse, because she is expected to be the fountainhead of all love and comfort.

Whether adult children of toxic parents were beaten when little or left alone too much, sexually abused or treated like fools, overprotected or overburdened by guilt, they almost all suffer surprisingly similar symptoms: damaged self-esteem, leading to self-destructive behavior. In one way or another, they almost all feel worthless, unlovable, and inadequate.

Most people have a very difficult time handling anger, even their own. When anger is directed at you, it creates an atmosphere of tremendous tension. With the misogynist, the shouting usually includes insults and attacks on you, which make the experience doubly painful. These verbal assaults can be as frightening and demoralizing as implied threats of physical violence.

The messages we receive as children become the core information we use about ourselves and our position in the world for the rest of our lives. Often, however, we do not consciously realize that this information even exists. One of the greatest benefits of reexamining our backgrounds is that we discover what messages we got from our parents. Although this discovery process is painful, it assists us in our efforts to change our current behavior and even our feelings about ourselves. Messages, after all, are learned; any anything we learned can be unlearned.

As children, because of our dependency, we experience a sense of being powerless in a world of powerful people. If our home environments are unpleasant or painful, we defend ourselves by secretly promising ourselves that when we grow up we will do things better than our parents did. However, because we know only what we learned as children, as adults we continue to seek out experiences and relationships that offer the comfort of familiarity. So, despite our heroic promises to do things differently, we often end up duplicating our childhood situations and relationships.

Many of the time-honored [parenting] techniques that have been passed down from generation to generation are, quite simply, bad advice masquerading as wisdom.

Successful adult relationships, whether between lovers or
friends, require a significant degree of vulnerability, trust,
and openness -

Because so much of the needy mother's energies go into her own suffering, she has little left over for her children's needs. Her son doesn't get the constant maternal support, care, protection, guidance, and validation that he requires. All children yearn to feel safe, protected, and loved by their parents. They also need permission to grow up and become independent people. Paridoxically, people can become independent adults only when their own dependency needs were met in childhood. If their dependency needs were not met, there is an aching emptiness created inside them, and this feeling is carried into adulthood.

[The incestuous father...] may be unconsciously seeking revenge against either his wife or his mother for what he considers a variety of emotional crimes against him.

If the misogynist feels threatened that he is going to lose something that is important to him and therefore be humiliated, it is quite likely to tip the scales toward brutality. For instance, if a woman gets a job after having been at home for a number of years, or if she returns to school or makes new friends who make him feel threatened or left out, he might try to control her by bullying and threatening. If that is not successful, he may resort to physical violence, thinking that he can hold on to her more firmly if she is frightened of him.

The "family secret" is a further burden for abused children. By not talking about the abuse, the battered child cuts off any hope of emotional help.

It's a mistake to think that if we don't remember or don't acknowledge painful experiences they will just disappear. In fact, great damage is done to us by those phantoms and pieces of memories that swim around in the unconscious, the part of us that never forgets. Unpleasant experiences gain power over us by being denied or hidden, but they can be made to relinquish that power when they are brought out in the open.

Many daughters may never have given themselves permission to even 'consider' changing the relationship with their mothers, because they didn't think they had the right to do it.

We can only speculate why, but physically abusive parents seem to share certain characteristics. First, they have an appalling lack of impulse control.

The mother myth gives great cover to unloving mothers, who far too often operate undisturbed while their husbands, other family members, and society deflect any criticism or scrutiny aimed at them. Most societies glorify mothers, as if the mere act of giving birth makes them inherently capable of nurturing. That's simply not true.

Abused children have a caldron of rage bubbling inside them. You can't be battered, humiliated, terrified, denigrated, and blamed for your own pain without getting angry. But a battered child has no way to release this anger. In adulthood, that anger has to find an outlet.

A man who is raised by a misogynistic father can absorb his father's contempt for women very early in life. The boy learns that a man must always be in control of women and that the way to get that control is to scare them, hurt them, and demean them. At the same time, he learns that the one sure way to get his father's approval is to behave as his father does.

In families like Fred's, much of a child's identity and his illusions of safety depend on feeling enmeshed. He develops a need to be a part of other people and to have them be a part of him. He can't stand the thought of being cast out. This need for enmeshment carries right into adult relationships.

Remember, tears are like rivers that start in one place and flow to another - they can help carry you to healing.

A woman may believe that because she is suffering she has the right to be taken care of and to be pitied; most important, she may view it as justification for not taking any action to make her life better. However, suffering doesn't change anything. Backdoor, indirect attempts to communicate are never effective because they don't confront the issues. Also, the misogynist is rarely sensitive to his partner's feelings. If he does recognize that his partner is suffering, his attitude is liable to be that it has nothing to do with him. The woman's suffering is considered further evidence of her deficiencies. If she breaks down physically or emotionally, it may only add to his contempt for her weakness. In his eyes, she becomes pathetic as well as deficient.

Women in troubled marriages frequently try to work out their problems through their children. Whether a woman does this through the extremes of overwhelming demands, severe rejection, or smothering control, the results are the same: the boy becomes too dependent on her. Without realizing it, in adulthood he transfers this dependency, as well as the conflicts and fears that go with it, onto the woman in his life. The misogynist saw his mother as having the power to frustrate him, to withhold love from him, to smother him, to make him feel weak, or to make insatiable demands on him - and he now views his partner as having those same powers. The father who doesn't provide his son with any alternative to his mother's influence leaves the boy alone with his fears and his panicky feelings of vulnerability and neediness.

What is so distressing about the use of denial as a tactic is that you are left with nothing to deal with. It creates a sense of desperate frustration. There is no way to resolve a problem with someone who denies the existence of certain events and who insists that what you know to be real never happened.

A woman who submits to her husband's abusive treatment is living out the role of victim and behaving more like a helpless child than an adult. She relinquishes the entire adult field to her husband, leaving her children with only one grown-up to deal with: Father. As we have seen, Father can be a very scary person. When Mother abdicates her adult role, she not only deprives her children of a strong maternal figure, but she leaves them with no one to protect them from their father.

The healing process kicks into gear with with the words "This is what you did to me." That statement is not gentle or polite; it's absolutely direct. In fact, I know that seeing it might feel like a punch in the stomach. I deliberately removed the distancing veil of "objectivity" from the words "This is what you did" by adding 'to me'.

I estimate the number [of incest victims] to be somewhere between ten and twenty million Americans...

Repressed rage can be one of the major sources of stress to the body. In fact, it can actually begin to wear the body out. Rather than deal with their unacceptable rage at their partners, many women unconsciously redirect their anger inward, back onto themselves. The more a woman does this, the more internal damage she is likely to do to herself.

Children have a right to be children. They have a right to spend their early years being playful, spontaneous, and irresponsible.

In addition to threatening to physically harm his partner, the misogynist may threaten to harm himself or his children. He may threaten to cut off all the money, or he may threaten to find someone else and leave if his partner doesn't do what he wants her to. The more a woman gives in to these threats and intimidations, the less power she has in the relationship. Once she feels helpless, her fears become even more overwhelming.

In order to feel safe, the misogynist must control your thoughts, your opinions, your feelings, and your behavior. Therefore, only those friends and family members that support his view of himself or his version of reality will be welcome in your lives. Anyone who may show you a different view of things will probably not be acceptable to him. The misogynist may use a variety of tactics to constrict and narrow your world. One method is to make social contact with other people so unpleasant that you prefer to stay home.

When a child is subjected to verbal attacks, she sees it not as something being done to her but as something she has caused by her own failings. Because children cannot conceive that their all-powerful godlike parents can do anything wrong, they believe what their parents say. The parent's negative opinion becomes the fact on which the child bases her self-image. If the messages the child gets about herself are primarily positive, her self-image will be healthy. But for many children, the positive messages are constantly being canceled out by negative ones.

I looked for the sunniest spot I could find, but you know it was the damnedest thing - it sure looked like the sun and it was bright like the sun, but there was absolutely no warmth coming from it. And this wave of sadness came over me - the sun was just like my mother." (Quote from Heather, a patient)

Strange as it may seem, many people are still controlled by their parents after their deaths. The ghosts that haunt them may not be real in a supernatural sense, but they're very real in a psychological one. A parent's demands, expectations, and guilt trips can linger long after that parent has died.

The hope that he'll change, the search for the magic key, and the intensity of her love all combine to place the woman in a very vulnerable position. Her acceptance of her partner's insults, humiliations, and scare tactics has given him enormous power over her: he can now control her behavior and feelings by the mere switch of a mood. This can be a terrifying position for her.