Rebuilding Self-Trust After Toxic Parents

I think one of the biggest things is you are constantly scanning your environment for something bad's going to happen. You cannot trust what's in front of you. You really have no self-worth, so you're constantly expecting to be humiliated, dismissed, discarded. You don't trust people because you can't trust that you have any good in you.

You can become very afraid of people because, if your parents are scary, and those are the first great loves of your life, then really other people also become very scary. I think that you can very easily start to feel responsible for other people's feelings. So now you're the one doing all the work in the relationship because you feel safer if you're the one doing everything.

You feel some level of false control when you do that because really giving isn't, in some sense, an act of having some control. It's sort of safer than the vulnerability of receiving.

You also may find that not only are you over-functioning, but you might overshare. And then, when you overshare, you can get very insecure, like, "Oh my gosh, what if now no one likes me? What if I look bad? What if I look insecure to other people?" And you just can start doubting your memory, your judgment. It's really dismembering emotionally to be raised under a parent who makes you doubt everything inside you and outside of you.

The scapegoat, hands down, is almost always the most sensitive child. A lot of children with ADHD can become the scapegoat as well. They are considered very difficult. The child might remind the parent of their own parent or someone that they don't like, but ultimately the most sensitive child ends up being the scapegoat because the sensitive child wants to share reality with people, and so they tend to speak their feelings a little more freely.

This is not what toxic parents want to do. They don't want to be brought into any level of accountability. They don't want to give explanations for their mistreatment.

They need a scapegoat to offload all of that accountability onto someone else. So that's why they won't come to the family's repair space, where they would be sharing reality, because they really don't want to hear the truthful version of events. They want to tell the false narratives.

Any stress, any negativity, any poor treatment, anything about the family that looks bad gets dumped on the scapegoat, and it frees everybody else in the family from having to experience the truth.

And as an adult, I think that you really need to consider the gifts of being a scapegoat. You're the worst treated because you're the most feared. That is a superpower. I've been the scapegoat, but I look at it as I have that power to see truth through chaos, and I remind myself as an adult that this is a wonderful thing.

Because I have that, I was able to question my family system and get out. Whereas the golden child in most family systems would never question the system, so they never get out. So they never have the freedom from those patterns, and the golden child tends to carry those on into the next generation, and the scapegoat is the one who stops it.

So, as an adult, just remember what a gift it is to be the scapegoat, even though it's horrific growing up that way. As an adult, it's your superpower.

Eye rolling, a tone of voice, stomping. They minimize your feelings by telling you that you're dramatic, you're too sensitive, and then they blame you for your behavior. So they bait you very passive-aggressively or aggressively into a response, and then when you're angry and you're reacting, they call you an abuser. Or they will blame you for their response: "Well, you're the one that makes me angry. If you didn't act like this, I wouldn't respond like this."

So, at the end of the day, really everyone is feeling like you're overreacting, or your parents are doing that, and you're always feeling like, "How does this always come back on me?"

"Why don't I have any sense of rightness in any of this?"

And another thing that they do when you're trying to address memories with them, especially memories of childhood, they will tell you that none of those things happened. And they will tell you that you're making things up, or, "Why can't you let bygones be bygones?" They consistently act as if you are just out of your mind and mentally ill because you're confronting them on something that they really, really don't want to discuss, and they don't want to take accountability for.

I think you really need to start with what you know. You've been living in this, and I would write down and document in a journal everything that's happened, how those things happened, when they happened, how they affected you, how they made you feel.

And I think when you do that, your feelings become incredible information about truth. And in my book, You Are Home, it really is a documenting process. It's almost like putting facts into evidence, making accountability lists, and then you start to realize you weren't the bad one, but many bad things were done to you. You might have had the appropriate reaction to those things.

But I think as you build trust in yourself, and you can pull your story apart, and you recognize that it was the parental system or family system that was toxic and not your response to them, you can start to rebuild.

And I think that your feelings are always great information, and I think that you need to start setting small boundaries in relationships, remembering that boundaries are designed to keep people in your life. You need to learn to treat your needs as real, even if no one else sees those needs as valid. You don't need your needs validated by anyone else but you.

And so I think as you work on self-trust, it's developing a very loving relationship with yourself, in a sense of you're going to go on an adventure to get to know yourself. Document everything, because when you do that, you have facts and evidence. You have how everything went down, why you reacted the way that you did.

These things start to make sense, and then you start to naturally feel far more trust in yourself, your feelings, your instincts, your beliefs, and your impulse to set boundaries when you have it: that it's an instinct, and your body is communicating with you. So writing really does bring you into the soul of who you are, and it also brings you directly to truth. Once you're aligned with truth, self-trust is much easier.

Any guilt that you have for setting boundaries, which again are designed to keep people in your life, would be maladaptive guilt.

Meaning you're feeling guilty for something that you're not doing wrong. When you're going to go set boundaries, you're doing something right. Not only right by you, but also right by them. Because your boundaries will tell them exactly who and what they need to be and do to stay in your life.

If there's not a mutual respect between people as established by boundaries, and you're trying to set boundaries, these aren't things that you should feel guilty for. Now, why do we feel guilty? We feel guilty because we've been programmed to feel guilty. We've been programmed to believe that we are not allowed to have any boundaries with our parents, and that is just not true.

But I would tell you that it would be important to expect discomfort anytime you're setting boundaries on anyone, but especially the powers that be, because they are your parents. When you set boundaries on parents, they get offended if they're toxic. They can't believe you're going to set a boundary on them. They're so offended, and they terrorize you for it, causing you to carry this immense guilt simply because you set a truthful boundary asking for mutual respect and repair.

Again, these types of parents aren't interested in sharing reality with you. They don't want to share in truth. They really just want to have power to have everything be their way. So they're very allergic to boundaries.

They have no interest in respecting them because they see it as an affront to their ego. They can't even see you.