Confronting toxic parents - your experience?

[ItsMeAndMyPuppyNow]

I'm reading Susan Forward's "Toxic Parents" , in which she recommends telling inadequate/abusive parents, in person or in writing, what they did to you, how it affected you as a child, and how it continues to affect you as an adult.

She acknowledges that this is difficult to do: difficult for the adult child of toxic parents to take that step, and difficult because a toxic parent is highly likely to deny, minimise or blame in reaction to such a confrontation.

So I wanted to know what MNers' experience with such a confrontation has been: how cleansing for yourself, and what immediate and longterm fallout it created in your relationship with your parents, and your wider family.

Hi
My own experience of confronting my mother was pretty fruitless to be honest. It felt useful to say out loud how she and my stepdad had affected me but I shouldn't have expected it to touch her in any way. She just doesn't understand the impact they had on me and ends up putting my 'outburst' down to tiredness rather than anything deeper.
I would suggest that writing a letter is a good idea to put those feelings in a concrete format but if you give it to your parents to read, make sure you have someone supportive around you. They may not be prepared to listen x

Yeah, I did this - a letter, after they were just unforgivable. It helped to write the letter and I showed it to DH and some very close friends and their support was invaluable.

My narc mother didn't read it it. My enabling father said "it upset me so I didn't read past the first paragraph". As usual, I was the one causing problems and they were the poor people struggling with an evil malignant child.

To be honest, though I was gutted for ages about that (I wanted an explosive catharsis and for things to change), that reaction helped me give up hope that things would ever be different.

However as I say, my mother is NPD and my father has his own issues which come from protecting a narc from the world for 35 years - differently toxic parents could react better.

Yes I too wrote a letter. I have had no contact since November last year. It has been the best time of my life. I would urge anyone that has truly had enough and tried their hardest to move on - life is too short to have poisonous people in it.

Apparently my words left her in pieces and they have never tried to contact me since. I sound so cruel - but the things they did to me are unforgivable.

I respect (very much) the posters who took this route. But my advice would be to deal with it without confronting them. That's what I did - froze her out for a few months, had counselling, learned to keep her fully and properly and effectively at arm's length. Learned to live my life, accept that she was never ever going to 'get it', apologise, explain, be a better mother. My dad too actually - crap enabler.
You have my sympathy, darling. Good luck x

I wrote a letter outlining examples of a couple of incidents and some other stuff, but to have gone into detail about everything would have been too long and too painful. I also used it as a way of cutting off contact as well (though said they could write to me).

My mother wrote back basically ignoring most of what I'd written and accusing me of some unbelievable stuff (literally - she accused me of causing her to crash the car despite being over the other side of the city at the time. It was because I caused her a lot of stress in her opinion ).

I knew what her reaction would be but I wanted to be able to say at least I tried.

I did this on the advice of a psychotherapist. I was too scared to do it face to face, and it would have been difficult as she lived over 50 miles away, didn't drive and was over 80.

She is completely motivated by money, and, as it was topical at the time when I wrote the letter in 2002, said that I would have been better off as a Roumanian orphan.

The outcome is that she:

drafted a will to specifically leave things of sentimental value that my late df promised me to other people
adopted a Roumanian orphan to whom she has left £5000
nominated the tenant of her garage as her next of kin and given him control over her financial affairs
drafted a will that she left lying around to defraud her sister (for the final time) of family furniture that she'd stolen, that caused the final stroke that killed my aunt, who was the mother I never had
told everyone that would listen after her sister died that she had no family

Sadly I was, and am, too much of a coward. I left it until I had left the country to make a complaint to the police about her procuring me to be abused as a child - to the extent of inviting a known abuser into the house for 2 weeks - he parked his brand new Merc outside (1968 - wonderful for a narc), and allowing me to be penetrated vaginally before I could talk.

Still, I'm free(ish), but will be continually to be haunted by the things I could have done with my life if I hadn't had her as a mother. To me it feels a bit like someone who has massive head injuries in an accident, who knows they can no longer do things, but has vague glimpses of what life could have been.

Good luck with what you do, but beware that there may well be fall-out, and ensure that you have support in place to cope with it.

Jesus, tb. How can you say you're the coward, when she's the one who clearly can't face up to what she has done?

Ditto to whatsallthehullabaloo thinking she sounds cruel.

I'm so sorry for all of your experiences.

xxx

I didn't confront as tbh I couldn't see the point. I also didn't want to waste any more of my emotional energy on them. I've never heard of an instance when there's been a positive outcome. That helped me actually as it was one less thing I felt I 'ought' to be doing.

I verbally confronted by parents in a row about 20% of the issue and they blamed it all on their upbringings (they weren't great) however my "issues" are nothing to do with my upbringing.

My advice would be write the letter as a cathartic exercise but don't waste your energy sending it.

Goog grief tb. I am so, so sorry.

I wrote a letter to my mother after not speaking to her for 18 months. Told her exactly what she had done in a non-emotive way.

Did nothing - she never answered, and I don't expect she ever will.

It made me feel better though, in a strange way. I knew she wouldn't call me and say 'you are right, I am sorry' so I had no expectation.

tb wish I could give you a hug in person. Have a virtual one.

OP (love the name btw) - I'm watching this thread with great interest as I'm considering doing likewise. Thank you to everyone who shared their stories.

I'm living overseas at the moment and I must say, I'm loving being away from them. I feel truly free to be me for the first time in my life. I've also started an ongoing 'daydream' where I have created my ideal parents in my head. I imagine myself having conversations with ideal parents about how to handle RL parents. I know this probably sounds very odd but it's really helping me work out how woefully awful they've been as parents.

Hmm, that does sound odd doesn't it! It's helping though!

OP, please keep sharing your thoughts.

Sorry I disagree about sending a letter. IME of (2) other people doing this it didn't end well. All they got was denial and the parents turned it around on them which i believe hindered their recovery. My counsellor suggested writing a letter. I said "I will never send it though". She said it wasn't necessary to send it. I did write it but have never let anyone read it including the counsellor. It did help me though to get my feelings down on paper. Can I recommend my favourite book (it started me off on the path to recovery) and have read it several times over: "if you had controlling parents how to make peace with your past and take your place in the world"

'you must remember wrongly, we never hit you'
'you must remember wrongly, we always gave you the medical attention needed'
proper denial going on here...

Itsmeandmypuppynow

You must put yourself first. Your mother only put herself first and NOW is YOUR time to be happy and for her to realise that she has lost you now and that she is responsible for it. You can choose your friends - not your family.

No, neither my sisters nor myself have confronted our mother becuase it would make no difference at all.

My sister confronted my dad verbally though. He was very very shaken by it as my sister just unleashed such venom and anger and bitternes that this was impossible to ignore.
He is apologetic, he is holdng his hands up and took full responisibility for everything my sister said to him. Almost like being hit by a sledgehammer, he was profoundly affected.

My sister on the other hand has felt no peace by doing this. She is still bitter, viscious and furious all of the time.

I would recomend writing it, but i personally would not gain anything by sending it.

I confronted my mother in an email, about 5 years ago, and she trotted out all the classic lines. 'We did the best we could','I can't remember that', 'You made us do that to you', 'It was because you were so bad' etc, etc,etc. My GM also got in on the act to confirm how awful a child I had been.
I cut contact for 6 months but we did start communicating again for a bit. Then it all broke down again 18 months ago and we had no contact for almost a year. Recently she has started sending chatty emails like nothing ever happened. She's just asked if she can skype the kids. I'm trying to sum up the energy to tell her 'no way' at the moment.
I love not having to worry about what she's going to try next and while I'm willing for her to continue to have some contact with her grandchildren, I'm loathe to allow too much contact.

I've had three verbal confrontations with my parents...first one when I was 17 - it was put down to teenage angst...second one 10 years later - it was put down to hormonal angst, due to my DC's being small...last confrontation just before Xmas - again hormonal angst due to me being menopausal.

Their opinion is...whatever happened is in the past...so leave it there and forget that it ever happened. They do all the verbal "I know we got some stuff wrong when you were a child..." and then carry on as if nothing was said. They behave in the same way with the same manipulations that they have always used.

My sister has confronted them twice verbally.

My bother has confronted them once via a letter - he just couldn't do a direct confrontation.

Nothing changed - we should ALL just let the past go and pretend nothing was ever wrong.

I am no contact with my parents and siblings.

Since I went no contact (from what I can gather on the family grapevine my) sister and brother are now very LC also - duty calls only - Mother/Fathers day and B/Days.

Oh as far as fallout is concerned - not sure about siblings - but as for myself...I gained nothing but a whole bunch of anxiety waiting for the phone call, visit or letter to arrive contaning their venom.

As it was I ended up with a whole load of silent phone calls, B/Day cards for the kids with emotional blackmail messages and their trump card of them disinheriting me.

They now have nothing left to 'hit' me with that I can not cope with.

No confrontation here as my DM would be the one who "got" the physical and emotional abuse as a result.

I was very angry with my father for behaving appallingly when I had got out of hospital following a mastectomy. I felt I had little to lose, and given what had happened, he had no right whatsoever to treat me in such a lunatic way..
I doubt that I will bother to do it again. I don't think he understands and I don't think he is in any position to change things. So, we rumble on. I think we generally get on a bit better, but not because I got angry.

Thank you all for replying and sharing your experiences.

The experience shared by all, it seems, is that the parents are unable to accept responsibility, whether they are confronted or not.

So with that knowledge, the question I will now ponder is how useful I will find it for myself to confront them, knowing that the point of the exercise will be for me to let it out to them, and not their reaction to my statements.

Thanks again to all, very much.

It might not be what you are looking for ItsMeAndMyPuppyNow but one of the things I did that got rid of some of my angst was to write a letter and burn it.

I took a long time writing the letter, it was addressed to them and everything very much as if I was going to post it.

I kept the letter and re-read it and added to it as necessary then when I was ready I took the letter and burnt it in an old biscuit tin outside page by page until it was all gone.

Somehow the act of setting alight all my angst seemed to help it disperse.

As I say it may not be enough for you and you need the direct approach...but as you seemed to be looking for ideas I'd though I'd offer up what helped me a bit.

It's actually one of the ideas I've been toying with, MizzyTizzy! Glad to hear it worked for you.

I saw my therapist today and spoke about the anger I'm holding inside. She offered to have both me and my mother in for a session for me to say what I wanted to her in a safe environment. Then when she saw how my eyebrows shot up to my hairline at the very idea, she suggested we could just speak to an empty chair as if it were my Mom. I'll be doing that next week! We'll see how it goes.

I know this is an old thread but does anyone mind if I resurrect it?

You could start your own thread YouOld, if you like. Sometimes resurrecting old threads can cause your post to get buried and forgotten IYSWIM.