So in our senior year in high school here in the US, we do this coming of age dance called a prom, where you ask somebody to go, you get a date, you get a fancy dress, you rent a tuxedo, you find a way to kind of get to this place. There's photos. It's this whole wacky coming of age thing. Renting a tuxedo in nineties money would've been about a hundred dollars for me, but my family was pretty chaotic with money.
We were lower middle class and that income was usually greatly affected by parental alcoholism, so it could have been a lot better than it actually was. But I had been working in my junior year, I usually did landscaping in the summers and I worked in pizza places during like the academic year. And this was the first year that I actually filed my taxes.
'cause I made enough money to kind of do that. And when I filed my taxes, I was getting a tax return of about $250. Which would've covered the cost of the tuxedo, how we would get there to photos, all of it. And I would remember after we filed, I would come home every day, like the month later, check the mail every day.
I would ask my mother, Nope, I haven't seen it, you know? You know, just keep looking. It'll come. They're slow on that kind of stuff. So I would kind of check and check and check. And no check was coming before the prom. I'm getting super anxious and I'm debating about whether or not going, I'm debating about whether telling my girlfriend at the time, like, oh, maybe you have to find somebody else, you know, which would've been really horrendous for her leaving her in a situation.
It just would've been a massive bummer. And finally, just like days before this dance, I asked my mother who had been drinking that day. If she saw the check and in a rage she raged at me that she actually took the check 'cause she needed it. And I was sort of stupid for not recognizing that. And this was one of the few times that I really got visibly mad with my mother and it usually really didn't kind of go well.
The thing with my mother was is she was a master at shaming you for having a normal reaction. You know, she lied to me. She stole the check, she manipulated and she told me for like a month that this thing hadn't come leaving me in that kind of anxiety, ultimately it was my fault. For being upset because you know, the gaslighting on her end was really highly effective.
But that's like for another video. This video is about the sneaky things that goes on in the background of a toxic family. And if you're thinking that my mother was desperate, she was desperate for that check and probably had good financial reasons to maybe rob Peter and hopefully to pay, Paul would pay.
You're kind of missing the point of the video. A boundary got crossed, right? And you know, had she asked and explained if I had been given the choice to hand over the check for her and just kind of wait for more money to materialize, which kind of that always happened in this wacky family of mine, the boundaries would've been a lot more cleaner.
And I know that the money would've materialized and that final hour anyway. And I remember I ended up borrowing like 150 bucks from a friend that I played in a band with at the time who was older, who had kinda had. Had that kind of scratch and um, I was able to borrow a sibling's car, take my car to the, it worked out okay, but there was this trauma around that boundary crossing.
So when we think about boundaries, we usually think of someone establishing something like, I'm not gonna be engaging in gossip. With you, with other people. If you continue, I'm gonna have to leave the conversation. That's like kinda what we think about like a boundary. But boundaries in family life are different, and they're different in parenting.
They are hopefully built in as boundaries and not really negotiable, you know, especially in raising children. What I mean by that is for abusing a child emotionally, physically, or sexually, that means to cross those. Built-in boundaries that we all sort of should know about. And you're also crossing as a parent, your own boundaries in doing that.
And keeping good boundaries in place is expected of an adult who is in charge of a child's development. So here are some examples in this video of how the toxic parent has some really sneaky. Unnamed boundary crossings that kind of don't come up until later in adulthood as it was for me. And I'm also gonna talk about what would've been healthy parenting alternatives that's gonna help you hold the abusers accountable in your own sort of healing work.
So in the format of this video, I'm gonna talk about each issue, but I'm also gonna name what boundary got crossed in terms of parenting, how it can affect us as adults in terms of our triggers. How can you overcome this issue if you struggle with it? And again, what would've been healthy parenting around that issue?
So here goes the first boundary issue is what I'm calling, nothing to see here, nothing to see here is when a parent denies reality. Kinda like what my mother did there, or exhibits cognitive dissonance in their parenting. So the most pointed thing that I see in this boundary crossing is that a toxic parent assumes their child won't notice things when children are often way more perceptive and emotionally intelligent than we think as a society.
Here are some examples of the nothing to see here. Boundary crossing. Uh, an example is the parent who exposed their children to secret adult relationships. The parent who like took you into the apartment of the person they were having an affair with. Assuming you wouldn't be affected by that or would you wouldn't even notice, or you wouldn't even ask questions.
I've even had clients who were just told that they should just play with the other person's kids during that time. Another example is the parent who breaks laws or social norms or rules. Believing that you won't notice, um, or even being hypocritical, kind of telling you not to do the thing that they just did.
So another is the parent. This is a big one. The parent who breaks big promises and ignores that they just did that. You know, as a side note, a sign of a toxic parent making promises is usually they think making the promise is enough for a child. So like, such as not showing up for a birthday when you're a child of divorce, or they never show up without any kind of explanation.
Another example is say the parent who swore off alcohol and substances and like the next day stops by the liquor store while you're in the car, while they're running errands and ignores the fact that they were just in there for like a half hour or drank in front of you, or something like that. Another example is the parent who just had an.
Burst or a fight with your other parent or, or someone else, and then acts like nothing else happened. Um, another example is the parent who treats you very different from another sibling and doesn't acknowledge that the parent with a deep secret, such as having like a prior marriage but didn't tell anybody or children from a prior experience.
Sometimes this comes out later in life. But that boundary crossing has been going on the whole time since they had such secrets. So the boundary that got crossed here is ignoring a significant event that you just witnessed or where you were put in the middle of which or greatly affected you. We have learned from the behavioralist and psychology that ignoring somebody is the most powerful form of conditioning them, and it's powerful because it conditions a child not to ask questions or trust their own reality.
So many of us did ask questions, and you were probably met with some rage statements like mind your own business or Don't worry about it. It's fine when you witness a parent openly cheat on another, it is your business. You're right there and it's not fine. But the manipulation of a child's trust in their perception is really strong and effective when they cross this.
Boundary. The hard part in all these situations is when we saw stuff with our own eyes and we didn't get confirming help with it. Like say from a healthy adult, it stays with us, and children need a lot of help confirming a reality around them because otherwise their own natural intuitive compass and perception takes some damage.
I know that that happened to me. Here's how this boundary crossing can affect us in adulthood. The boundary crossing can affect us in terms of trusting what we see. We might have partners, coworkers, friends, or even strangers who are sketchy in ways, and our inner child just does what it tolls and kind of goes.
No big deal, I guess, or who am I to know what's going on or who am I to judge? Probably fine. And also the reverse of that can be true and we be, we can become highly distrusting and not give good people the benefit of the doubt or our inner child always reserves of level of distrust for another person, even if they are trustworthy.
So we can also have direct intense triggers when someone says it's fine. You know, raise your hand out there if you have a trigger when you're upset and someone's like, it's fine. Even if it's innocently, we can have some big feelings around that. Here's how to overcome this trigger if you struggle with it.
Being aware of this history of the boundary crossing and being aware that it's a trigger is really, really helpful, and I think we all have to practice how. A manipulative, sketchy parent is very different than the people we are experiencing within the present, even if they're, you know, nefarious. And most importantly, we are different.
We have the right to our perception, we have the right to ask questions, and we can also reclaim seeing the other person's humanity instead of just convincing ourselves that they're sketchy. So it can kind of go. Both ways. So we are also adults now, and we don't have to take real sketchiness as just acceptable behavior.
And I know that that feels like a contradiction, but we all need some help discerning from a supportive person, like say a therapist or a fellow traveler or something like that in figuring out if we are right or wrong about people on our perception. 'cause remember, there's a lot of damage that happened to our perception.
And finally, what would healthy parents do about this one? A healthy parent would help their children confirm what. They see, yes, mom and dad had a fight, but we're managing it and you did nothing wrong. It's not about you. Or, yes, I didn't put the shopping cart back in its right place because we were running late and I was worried about leaving your baby brother alone with you in the car.
We can't always be perfect about the rules or yes. Your mother has a big drinking problem and I'm worried about her, but she can't do that around us. It's not safe confirming that reality. All of that addresses reality and supports the child's perceptions with some help. Moving on to the second one. It's something that I'm calling, it's not confidential.
The, it's not confidential. Boundary crossing is rooted in not allowing a child their autonomy and abusing them around privacy. So when this boundary is crossed, the child feels like the parent can inform anyone of their private life, leaving them feeling greatly exposed and greatly embarrassed. It's also a boundary crossing of trust.
Like some other examples in this video, um, a young child usually assumes. That a parent is safe to share with and the toxic parent exploits that, and usually for either entertainment or their own paranoia regarding their own childhood of trauma or simply their own poor mental health. Here are some examples of this boundary crossing.
It's not confidential, often looks like the most common one is reading one's journal or diary reading their. Phone, text and emails getting into a teen's computer, um, if that's possible and confronting them in dramatic ways. And as a side note, if a parent feels that their child is in real danger, sometimes we have to investigate their online activity to prevent them from.
Perpetrators online, perfectly valid. I, well, I'm, I'm talking about something different though. In this example, I'm referring to a parent violating privacy to potentially police what the child thinks about them or maybe what they may be saying to other people about that parent. Not so much about the child being safe, which is a big difference there.
The boundary crossing is more, I have to know what you're telling the school counselor about me, uh, and not so much that the child might be in danger online, such as with chatting. With adults who are pretending to be their child's age, but they're adults. So other examples of it's not confidential is when a parent openly discusses publicly the child's inner world or personal struggles, like a trigger warning on these.
A parent who tells the relatives at the holiday who someone just got their period, and that's a whole new thing that we have to deal with, grandma. Or you know, stuff like your sister told me not to say anything, but she thinks she can ask that boy out. I said, maybe wait until she gets her braces off because, oh wait, here she comes.
You know, like that's a betrayal. Or guess who disobeyed us and went out the other night and now we have to write a letter to the school counselor about how what they're doing isn't working. And I have to deal with it. You know, this is all very public. Private information that the person is really giving out at the child's expense, even if the child is acting out.
You know what I mean? Like that's, that can be valid as well. Notice how these examples that I just gave are about the parent drawing attention to themselves and their own, like victimhood or their burdened aspect of being a parent at the expense of their child. And they, these might seem petty to you, but consider them in terms of, in like in adult terms, like as if you were all roommates with someone and one of your roommates said that at like a party, guess who to.
Scott there, you know, like that kind of stuff. We wouldn't have people like that in our life using embarrassing knowledge about us as entertainment. So although we probably may have had friends like that at some point, but only in families is it seen as kind of acceptable because children are like property.
Especially to toxic parents. So even in our adulthood, we might have confided in a mother that we are thinking of going through a divorce and we're really struggling. Um, and despite telling them not to say anything else in the family, you see your sister posting it about your potential upcoming divorce on social media.
Even before you told the person that you want a divorce from, so, and it's not confidential, the boundary that gets crossed is really about respecting a child's personhood and practicing tact, meaning protecting information that they have or, or protecting their emotions kind of from others and protecting children and others from shame.
Like it's very shameful to say those things at a holiday. Children are already developmentally highly sensitive to other people's opinions, and a toxic parent can weaponize that. The boundary crossing is also heavily rooted in betrayal of intimacy in the family between the parent and the child. So letting the world know that you've gotten your first period or your first crush, or using your mistakes as entertainment breaches, a sense of your own autonomy and trust in others.
There's also a quality of feeling. Used as a toxic parent, again, is usually enjoys these kind of leaks and confidentiality. They like the drama, they like the attention. In some ways, they really kind of live for it. How this boundary crossing can affect us in adulthood. We can be hypervigilant about what we share with others.
We can be neurotic when, when we come up in conversation between other people and have a big reaction. What do you mean? They mentioned me. How? Why WTF and the person is just like, they just mentioned that they worked with you in the past. You know, we can, this can make us kind of paranoid this, these childhood experiences we can overly anticipate betrayal.
After confiding in someone I've had clients struggle with, with their journaling and dialoguing with me at home because their inner child is convinced that someone is gonna read their inner thoughts, read that journal, um, despite living alone and despite not being in danger of that, it feels viscerally real to them and we can become.
Highly sensitive to innocent teasings or light jabs. Um, how to overcome this trigger, while it sounds like counterintuitive and, um, to hypervigilance, which really isn't good for us. We need to reclaim not taking things as seriously as we do, and recognize that this boundary crossing is really from childhood.
And that boundary crossing was really, it felt highly personal because it was highly personal. So if you struggle with taking things personally, that's where that stuff comes from. We should practice reminding ourselves that we are adults with some power now, and we can also recognize that people can talk about us both negatively and innocently.
We're not. At the same level of danger of exposure like we were as kids. We can also get out of relationships with people who are similar in that oversharing way and might complain about us to others, and we can also recognize that of, of our partner brings us up in conversation with somebody else. It doesn't always mean that it's nefarious.
If you struggle with this, you'll know what I mean. Whether we're going through development or in later years. Healthy parenting means that the parent respects our business as well as our emotions. They consider that if you're going through, like say, body changes when you're a tween or going through a breakup as an adult, they feel for you going through it and aren't interested in making an already hard process on you.
Worse. It's a very important point here. A healthy parent also models for their children and family, how to consider others in the world. Um, people who are like more well adjusted, whoever those, whoever those folks are, they don't feel compelled to tear someone down or gossip about a classmate or a coworker because they come from families that kind of value the feelings of others.
They have some good boundaries in that way. So moving on to the third one is something that I'm calling your here for me. Your here for me is about a parent crossing the boundary of roles and responsibilities in their parenting and looking to the child to supply their unmet needs. Some examples of your here for me are.
A toxic parent makes you into, say, a surrogate spouse or a source of comfort, um, or is potentially living vicariously through you heavily needing emotional care from you and has maybe parentified you in taking care of them as well as others and the families such as your siblings. So your here for me can translate into, you are here to make my life easier or even worse, like you are an opportunity for me.
So at its root, this is a role reversal. The child does not have the experience of being a child. It's elevated to adult status. I've talked about this in other videos. It can also manifest where the parent lives vicariously through the child, crosses that boundary of autonomy choice and prevents the child from really building a healthy sense of self.
'cause it's so wrapped up in the parent. These boundary crossings are seductive to children actually, because children are wanting to be included in the adult world. I think children generally want to be with the older kids. Especially young children, they, and they wanna know what's happening in the adult world above them because they kind of feel like kind of excluded from it.
You know, when a toxic parent over shares about their love life or their problems, children who are also highly empathic, become super available and engaged in that parent's life. It's not like they're given a choice. It just kind of, you get absorbed in addition, in a surrogate spouse situation and oversharing about like their.
Partner, a child's relationship with their other parent gets incredibly damaged when a parent shares secrets or character assassinates their actual spouse and partner. So there's all kinds of boundary crossings going on with that one. Does anyone out there have a toxic parent who made you their therapist to help them cope with your other parents?
You know, I have the saying that as children, we knew too much. Which is really evidence that we were really robbed of healthy autonomy and healthy development. If we were in the middle of all that stuff, knowing things, some of you may have heard stuff like, I didn't have to marry your father, I could have done better.
Or, how does that really affect the relationship with your father, even if that father was abusive to you, and you may have really disliked him like that. Still. A lot I've told clients in these situations that they really knew too much. They knew what was going on. They knew their, their parents' limitations, which is another version of knowing too much.
And if we know too much, again, we really lost out on healthy development. So this is really a horrendous boundary crossing that differs from being honest and age appropriate with the child. If the, if the parent, if the other parent is abusive, the boundary that was crossed is autonomy. And using the child as a resource that one would look to or expect from, say, like an adult therapist or a partner.
So the child fills those roles for the toxic parent. The toxic, abusive and dysfunctional parent crosses the line and seeks their own unmet childhood needs again, and adulthood needs in a child who is perhaps often more available. Than the adults and often easier to interact with. What I mean by that is perhaps a toxic parent seeking help from a therapist is really intimidating.
Who might challenge that toxic parent about making better choices and setting better boundaries. Often children of single parents become this source due to the parent. Having not being able to really manage adult relationships, so the child becomes everything. Another example is the child who is parentified and is also a surrogate spouse.
Like I mentioned, the toxic parent has crossed a boundary there and made the child into a partner to help raise other children, providing emotional support for the parent, an emotional intimacy that they're not getting anywhere else. So how this can affect us. In terms of our adult triggers, children who experience this ongoing boundary crossing can struggle with any of the following fast, intense relationships where there isn't really a process of getting to know the person romantically or otherwise.
Boundaries were really loose growing up, so there's no real healthy blueprint. They can also struggle with having an identity of their own because their forming identity was really, again, like enmeshed and their sense of self was really wrapped up in providing for the parent, not becoming an individual, not knowing how to be in relationships without being of service.
And when you are the focus, it feels greatly uncomfortable or foreign. Another is struggling with control issues. The toxic parent often will ask their, you know, child for advice, but then often doesn't take it. And this is really a setup in our adulthood about being overly focused on what people close to you are and aren't doing.
You knew too much, right? Um, how do you overcome this issue if you're struggling with it, like with the others? It will be a healing process to change and heal from these boundary crossings. Things like shadow work, inner child work, group work, like the group work that I do in RRP are some really good modalities to work on this.
Also helpful things are like EMDR, which essentially involves processing and finding some anger, hopefully about being set up for this stuff, and the loss of healthy development, which means. Being, really being able to become an individual in safety. So when triggered by this, it's essential to reconnect with our inner child around autonomy, letting people fail, reciprocal relationships, and not just caretaking or being so available.
Um, even, even if it feels really far. And even if you don't know how to do that, like that's the place to be working on in, in your healing. The anger about childhood will greatly help you regroup about the present struggle that you're having and put the accountability and upset on the parent in the past.
So what would healthy parenting look like around this issue? Um, healthy parents know their role is to provide and to connect, not to use their children as an emotional resource. Or to just have the child mirror them. So healthy parents, they're guiding, they're teaching, they're helping, they're not using.
A healthy parent understands that they are there for the child and they've invited the child into their life. The healthy parent doesn't overshare or overburden and recognizes the child's like age appropriate autonomy and developmental needs. For example, say in Parentification, the healthy parent is aware that even though that the oldest child might wanna help, that they.
Don't burden them with the entire role of helping out the younger siblings. 'cause it's like doing them a favor. There is, you know, helpful helping, but even the child knows that the parent is really in charge of things and they can rely on them to do that, that it's not up to them. Moving on to the fourth and final one is something I'm calling my beliefs.
Are yours now in this last boundary crossing, we'll be talking about personal beliefs, trauma beliefs, spiritual religious beliefs in the toxic parent that they force onto their children who have to kind of absorb them. It's also what the toxic parent is modeling. It's kind of impossible. To not be influenced by your parents' values, by their politics, their religion, their gender, their opinions about things or themselves.
We're talking about something different here. Toxic parents often attempt to create little images of themselves or little parrots to repeat their worldview in their children. It's really about the parent. Raise your hand out there if you were encouraged to have negative beliefs about same men. Or women or a race or a culture based upon your toxic parents' beliefs.
Like if you didn't subscribe to a certain religion that the parent believed in, then you were officially doomed. There's a superiority in this stuff, which you'll, you'll hear about this boundary crossing can really run deep. 'cause as children, we often go into the world. With a lot of shame about these beliefs.
A lot of, some of us go into the world still believing some of these beliefs unconsciously or consciously, or that we never subscribe to the parents' beliefs at all. But there's such shame about who we are. 'cause I think that our inner child kind of beliefs that they're a representative of their family when they go out into the world, enforcing beliefs on a child, in my mind, is a betrayal about their own process of discovery, autonomy, their ability to think critically.
And a toxic parent can directly verbally force these beliefs, or they can influence these beliefs from what they model. Some examples, a parent believing that one of the genders is lesser than the other, and I'm, I'm thinking about cisgender traditional households or a parent believing or often demanding to subscribe to a religious belief, demanding that of their children.
And other people, or a parent being racist or lamenting to their children about how the other in society is ruining society, or a parent believing that, say, affluent people are the best, a parent believing that poor people are the best. A parent believing the entire group, that an entire group of people are evil, like a culture, a nation, or homosexuality or trans people or people assimilating into another culture on and on.
Pick the scapegoat and they're all about it. A parent believing that there is no point in trying to get better, that the cards are stacked against them. That's like another example of these beliefs. A parent believing that their family is extra special and superior to others in some way. Children raise.
In this are exposed to very black and white thinking, which is often disguised as safety. Like safety. You know, a fundamentally religious parent can rob a child of having their sense of being inherently a good person by terrifying them with a set of rules, which is like the only way to survive in the world or be good, which isn't true.
So what is the boundary that gets crossed in this example? So the boundary that gets crossed is inserting programming in. Without really consent or allowing the child to form their own opinions or having a process, which means really individuating as a healthy adult and becoming an individual outside the family system, healthy parents, that's kind of what we want.
We want them to become their own person in a secondary boundary included in this kind of demands that they think. And act exactly like their toxic parent and fully agree with their worldview, which is pretty self-centered. When you really kind of think about it, and again, this is different than kind of just general values.
So the boundary crossing is a betrayal that suggests that you don't get to be yourself. You need to be a champion of this system or else everything will fall apart into chaos, and it's really burdening the child with often a highly dysfunctional worldview. To be honest, the boundary is also about control.
Enmeshment like an insular kind of group think, and as a side note, it's really often sold as specialness and closeness. We are special because we know the right way to live. And that's what makes us so close as a family. And kids can get really seduced in that they can get some love from a toxic parent through compliance or kind of, you know, cheerleading.
Like, we go to the right church, don't we, dad? Or we don't live like those people do, right Mom, we are better. That kind of stuff. It's a lot and. Whether you bought into it or rebelled, it's a law. How can this affect us as adults in terms of triggers? As childhood trauma survivors, we can struggle with forming our own beliefs in a way that our inner child is often scared of them or not feeling entitled that we have the right to form our own beliefs when it's really a given.
Right? We can also really struggle with being afraid of not living in that system. Them anymore. Sort of like what's on the other side of brainwashing. We see a lot of that in people leaving fundamentalist systems where they're, they feel a bit ungrounded 'cause they're building a new kind of belief system.
I think the biggest trigger with this boundary crossing is about getting enraged. When someone wants to influence us for having lived and manipulation of influence for decades, we can become fiercely independent as a response to living in these systems. Sometimes we can even become too independent, um, and not be able to be part of healthy groups 'cause we don't wanna get wrapped up in that again.
And I think groups are really the place that we can really heal, especially when they're healthy. But it's so hard, like the trigger is around feeling like we have to drink the Kool-Aid to be part of. So another is being highly triggered by someone who exhibits extreme and black and white beliefs. And the rage and the projection of the abusive parent kind of gets directed to that person.
A common trait. I'm not saying the person isn't in, you know. Thinking in black and white terms, a common trait of someone who forces their children to believe what they believe is the quality of self-righteousness, which is really the top tier signs that were triggered in the world, is when we become really self-righteous.
Everyone is wrong but them. Everyone is living wrong except them, and everyone isn't as smart as they are. How do you overcome this issue? If you struggle with it? If you struggle with embracing your beliefs? Out of fear or shame. It's good to reparent the inner child and give them the space and the right and the autonomy to start.
Believing what they would like to believe. You know, like a good exercise is to pick topics and keep asking your inner child, what do you think it's okay to think about? What do you think about these things? It's actually a really nice adult, inner adult, inner child kind of conversation. What is in line with your heart and about who you are?
If you struggle with the rage issue that I mentioned earlier about rage, about someone try to influence you, you can reparent your inner child about what does it take you back to and how are you different Now you have the right to say no, and you have the right to just kind of pass that person by. It doesn't have to affect us as much.
We have the right to decline, and we can be annoyed and we can be more right sized about it. When someone tries to influence us, good or bad, we can also need to accept that in the history of the world. There have always been black and white thinkers. It's, it's pretty miserable. I've been caught up in it.
Maybe you've been caught up in, in yourself, so just to kind of take that in as well. So what would've been healthy parenting As a parent, I have to watch my own beliefs with my child. They'll ask questions about current events. Yes, they know my politics, but I have to guide them in having a choice and a process about how they think about things.
Like that's really the parenting is, what do you think? How do you think about it? What do you, you know, what's the conundrum? I avoid explaining in terms of good beliefs, wrong beliefs, good people or bad people. I try to explain about like what might make people think and behave in specific ways, healthy parents, as with all of these boundary issues.
We give the child space hopefully to become what they want to and have their own process. As a parent, I don't shun religion, nor do I force it. As a parent, I try to teach critical thinking versus like doom mongering. And if I pounded my fist about atheism, uh, being the only way, or if I found a pound in my fist about religion or commandments or rules, I'd be crossing that boundary of taking away choice.
And especially their right to interpretation. Healthy parents encourage kids to think and make decisions that align with their values. The child's values, not the system so much. I mean, given we, we all rules and laws in society. Sure. But you know what I mean. It's. This is, we're talking about something different.
This one is tricky because as I said, it's impossible I think, to not influence your child because as parents we are also teaching them and molding them around what we value. But a big, but here is, are our values coming from a place of allowing space and choice and critical thinking? So some final thoughts.
These boundaries are actually common parenting challenges. Parenting is extremely difficult, especially without having had healthy modeling and having struggling with our childhood trauma of our own, which I'll be talking more about questions like, how do I protect my child from information they can't handle?
How do I talk about big things in the family since they see it and it's happening in front of them, but what's age appropriate? Um, how do I know they're safe without prying? How do I keep them safe in the world without taking away their own process? These are like healthy questions to ask, but for childhood trauma survivors with toxic parents, they never asked those questions.
They weren't interested in these questions. It was just all what you got. So here's a quick draw diagram to focus on healthy versus unhealthy parenting around boundaries. Coming down to motives, motives are really helpful in thinking about your own sort of family system, about if you get stuck on things.
A healthy parent is focused on a child's development from the place of how their actions affect the development, whereas I often say that the toxic parent is just focused on their own comfort. Like in the other column, a healthy parent is really focused on the emotional safety of the child. While I think a toxic parent is often operates on a place of fear or instills fear to control, healthy parents want their child to be their own person, which sets themselves up for not getting into abusive relationships in adulthood while the toxic family models and measurement control and absence of choice.
And it's very possible to raise empowered children who know they don't have to take care of somebody who is being crappy to them, which many of us experience that in adulthood due to the childhood trauma. Healthy parents model, realness and honesty while a toxic parent usually spins reality to manipulate.
So returning to that story about my mother with a tax return check. Let's plug all that in. My mother is focused on her own comfort. Avoiding the discomfort or trouble of telling me she cast a check in my name instead of thinking about the developmental milestones of trusting and relying on others, especially those who are close to me like my mom.
So in terms of safety, she projected that I wouldn't. Freely give over that check and wait for something to come up, which usually did in my family. So we somehow always landed on our feet growing up, and instead she operated under that fear that I would be upset. So I probably got some of her projection there that I would've been disappointed, I definitely would have.
But she was all about the comfort and avoiding that conversation. Hopefully that makes sense. She couldn't handle the hard conversation of people being disappointed in her. Autonomy of a child means encouraging a teen to make their own money, make decisions as best they can, and kind of be learning gradually how to become an adult and be free and independent as best as they can.
My mother used control and manipulation to make it seem like I was the selfish one to be upset about that check, and she turned it around to control the narrative that it was. She was the one that suffered most and I should be more understanding. Does that sound familiar to you? Honesty and realness would've been that uncomfortable conversation about whether she needed that check to pay the mortgage.
I'm sure. I'm sure she did. And whether I'd be open to waiting, that's really kind of all it would've come down to. And lastly, the manipulation was around the lying and taking the check and crafting this whole thing, and then making it seem like I was having an inappropriate reaction to what she sort of needed.
She was a master at that. So I tell that story from a place of teaching, like I've, I've talked. Enough about that kind of stuff in therapy. It doesn't really pain me anymore, but I'm just kind of plugging the math in for that. So these boundaries are really sneaky. And of course, we cannot cross physical, sexual, emotional boundaries as the duty of a, of being a parent, but emotional and mental ones with the toxic parent are often harder to name in place.
I hope this was helpful to you. I would love to hear from you about how these kind of manifested for you growing up in similar ways or ones that I didn't really address here. These reflections and explorations on this stuff can really help us understand why we get triggered the way we do. And hopefully we can have some more control over it while understanding we have some unfinished business to do in our healing work.
So
