My Toxic Family: How to Survive Parental Rejection and Become Happy

Are your parents perfect, but it feels like you were swapped at the maternity hospital?

Did you grow up like grass and spend your whole life “surviving”?

They blew every speck of dust off you, but somehow your life didn’t work out.

At 30, are you afraid to buy jeans without your mom’s approval?

Did you quit your job to serve your dad?

Do you think you’re to blame for everything? And you even broke the little chapel too?

… How do you imagine bad parents? Those who beat and drink?

While reading your letters, I saw that child abuse is multifaceted and hides behind a façade of both aggression and indifference, as well as sacrificial love. Whether you grow up “on scraps” or are served breakfast in bed; whether they turn you into a second Mozart or “forge character” with kicks and insults—the result is about the same, plus or minus.

So that’s why so many of us, adults, are unhappy! That’s why we don’t know what our calling is, and why we’re mentally and physically unwell, living and communicating with people who don’t love us, use us, and humiliate us!

That’s where low self-esteem and the feeling of worthlessness come from.

That’s where self-censure, envy, and the guilt that corrodes the soul come from.

That’s where the shame of “not measuring up” comes from.

Life crises and dead ends…

Psychosomatic illnesses, depression, neuroses…

Panic fear of loneliness…

And that’s where social problems come from!

Don’t you see the connection? Read on and you will.

Think it doesn’t concern you? Read again and make sure. For now I’ll say only this: child abuse—more or less—is happening behind almost every door…

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Of all the lots that fate has dealt living creatures, none is more unfortunate than the one given to children.

Saltykov-Shchedrin