The key ideas

Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

Susan Forward, Craig Buck, 1989

You are long past five, yet childhood guilt awakens around your parents. Psychotherapist Susan Forward explains its possible origins, describes types of hurtful parents, and challenges compulsory forgiveness. A book about returning other people’s guilt to those it belongs to.

Who it is for

For adults who still feel childhood guilt and anxiety around their parents and want to understand where it comes from.

Forgiveness is appropriate only when parents do something to deserve it.

What the book is about

“I’m long past five. Why do I still feel guilty like a small child around my parents?” If that question sounds familiar, Susan Forward has an answer, perhaps an unexpected one.

Forward is an American psychotherapist who spent years working with adults raised by hurtful parents. In 1989, she wrote this book with Craig Buck. It draws on client stories and her own method rather than research. It is an experienced practitioner’s model, not a scientific law.

The book diagnoses neither you nor your parents. Some pages address difficult experiences.

Idea 1. Godlike parents

Why does a hurt child so often blame themselves rather than the adult?

Forward begins with an image from Greek myths. To a small child, parents are godlike parents, like the gods of Olympus: all-powerful, unpredictable, with the child’s entire life dependent on them. Admitting such gods are cruel is too frightening. Deciding something is wrong with you feels much safer.

Forward believes this creates two beliefs carried into adulthood: “I am bad, and my parents are good.” “I am weak, and my parents are strong.” Her client Sandy, an adult woman with depression, spent years blaming herself for her strict parents shaming her in her youth.

An adult hears a harsh comment from their mother and first thinks “I probably did something wrong again” rather than “that was hurtful.”

In Forward’s model, self-blame may once have protected the child by preserving faith in good parents. In adulthood, this old defense sometimes continues where it is no longer needed.

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About the author

Susan Forward is an American psychotherapist and bestselling author on family relationships, including Emotional Blackmail. Craig Buck is her coauthor on this book.

All books by this author: Susan Forward, Craig Buck

Terms from the book

  • Denial
  • Self-blame
  • Toxic parents: Forward’s term for parents whose harmful behavior recurs and becomes central to a child’s life. The author’s concept, not a medical diagnosis.
  • Godlike parents: An image from the book: Forward believes young children see their all-powerful parents this way because they depend on them completely.
  • Confrontation: Forward’s method: a calm conversation or letter to a parent about what happened, the feelings it caused, its effect on your life, and what you want now. The author’s advice, not a compulsory step for everyone.

All terms

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