Are you the child of toxic parents? Allow yourself to be angry with them.

In a child’s symbiosis with toxic parents, the most terrible and difficult thing is the inability to express oneself, including healthy anger. After all, in order to express yourself, you need to feel the right to it. And in order to feel it, you need to feel your boundaries and recognize your value, which a child from a toxic family either does not know how to do at all, or does not know how well.

Why is it hard to show your anger?

Often children in such families go through a psychological drama consisting of several acts:

1. Mother is the most important object of the psyche, therefore it is impossible to express aggression against her – this is aggression against oneself.
2. If you show aggression even a little, then in response, as a rule, it shows even more aggression.
3. Aggression against the mother accumulates, there is no opportunity to throw out this feeling on her.
4. In order not to throw out the accumulated anger at the mother, the immature psyche of the child resorts to protective means, among which the strongest are identification with the aggressor, shame, guilt and fear.

As a result, the child grows up in a state of contradiction: on the one hand, anger accumulates, and on the other hand, fear, guilt and shame intensify, preventing it from being thrown out. The more anger accumulated at the mother, the more bad the child considers himself. And so on ad infinitum.

The symptoms of such a crisis, accompanied by high internal stress, can be different: neurosis, tics, physical weakness and illness, nightmares, enuresis, allergies, self-punishment, weakening of social contacts, decreased intelligence, poor school performance, and so on.

How to help yourself

If an adult learns to express healthy aggression towards toxic parents, guilt and shame about it will gradually begin to disappear from his life. Here is a short guide for those who want to learn it:

1. It must be recognized that there is a conflict of conflicting feelings inside: healthy anger fights guilt and shame. For example, defending an opinion, you feel embarrassed for yourself, because you behave unworthily and inadequately.

2. You can then tell yourself that you have every right to your feelings. In general, you have the right to feel everything: the psyche is subjective, feelings are also subjective, this is normal. Therefore, if a brother, sister, relative or acquaintance says that you can’t treat your parents like that (“She’s a mother!”, “He’s a father, very old!”), Just try to keep in mind that you have the right to your feelings , whatever they may be.

3. Next, you need to take three more steps:

1. Telling yourself that healthy anger against the aggression of “toxins” is normal, because they violate your boundaries and use violence.
2. To see that guilt and shame for this anger are imposed and inadequate, have nothing to do with the real state of things.
3. Start showing healthy anger to protect your boundaries without falling into guilt and shame. This is not about moving to retaliatory violence, but about defending your interests with words and legal actions. For example:

• not answering the question of a toxic father when he persistently asks how much you earn;
• turn down a toxic mother who wants to come over the holidays and babysit her granddaughter (actually, give you total hell);
• respond appropriately, without getting into useless arguments when you are ridiculed for going to dance or knitting wicker baskets.

Standing up for yourself is difficult and scary at first, and that’s okay. If everything were simple, then many adults would not have problems with separation from their parental family. Over time, this skill is honed and becomes habitual.

What happens as a result

Contact with your experiences can cause a surge of feelings, from joy to anxiety. After some time, internal tension will gradually decrease, and the emotional background will return to normal. There will be a feeling that you no longer need to fight with yourself, fight with guilt and shame.

By showing anger, we defend our boundaries and gradually move from a state of fusion with our parents to a state of separateness. This is part of the separation, that is, the transition from symbiosis to autonomous existence.

Over time, there will be more vitality, because the anger contained in the Ego will turn against an external object (toxic parents), will cease to be used against itself. We get tired when we fight with ourselves. On the contrary, it is easier for us to fight external aggression: we understand what is happening, where to move and what to do. Difficult, but generally easier.

In a conflict with toxic parents, the main thing is that you end up feeling good, so that the tension from the struggle is accompanied by a feeling that you are doing everything right, getting your life back. It’s like sports: when we train, we get tired of the load, but at the same time we enjoy the fact that we gradually move forward, improve our result, better control our body.

Separation is the path to a creative self, and the choice of methods for dealing with “toxins” is also creativity, from which you will gradually become better. You will gain independence and psychological stability, confidence in communicating with others.