If you experienced neglect or emotional, physical, or sexual unsafety growing up – it’s possible you were parented in a toxic family.

This isn’t about shaming parents who are good enough. Parents are not perfect – they make mistakes. But adequate parents take responsibility by trying to repair any ruptures they cause.

No – this is about persistently negative and damaging patterns of behaviour amid a belief system that – as adults – causes us to live in perpetual emotional FOG – Fear, Obligation, and Guilt.

Toxic – really?

The word toxic might be trendy and – perhaps – overused. But – sadly – it’s also an accurate description of some parents’ behaviour.

FOG is a response to the traumatic environment we grew up in.

At the same time – denial is a primitive defence that allows us to minimise what happened – offering powerful protection from the emotional pain of facing the truth. But it comes at the cost of taking responsibility for how you were treated and continue to be affected. Because – well – if it’s not their fault, it must be yours.

As you struggle to reconstruct your experience, it’s common for toxic parents to deny how you were treated – avoiding responsibility.

Denial is also reinforced in wider society, by maxims like ‘honour thy parent’ and other nonsense.

In the book Toxic Parents, Susan Forward details several archetypes of toxicity including, controlling parents, inadequate parents, and verbally abusive parents.

E.g. Inadequate parents shirk their parental duties. The child is expected to take on this role, so parental needs become the focus. This focus on others’ needs can lead to co-dependency in adult relationships.

Toxic family system

Toxic parenting sits at the top of a toxic family system which has beliefs, underpinning the rules of behaviour to be followed.

This system dictates our reality and the basis for decisions about who we are and how we see the world.

In my toxic family, a belief was that children ‘owe’ their parents. Understanding beliefs like this, is the first step to questioning and rejecting them.

But you can’t question something until you know it exists – which can impede healing. That’s why the toxic family test is useful.

Toxic family test

Childhood trauma specialist, Patrick Teahan indicates a range of dynamics associated with parenting in a toxic family system. They include lack of accountability (denial or victimhood), poor relationships (affairs etc), contempt and criticism (sadistic approach), poor boundaries (boundary crossing), and duplicity.

He’s also devised a toxic family test providing a way of evaluating and assessing how toxic your family system actually was.

I’ve done this test and wanted to share it with you. It’s a useful tool to aid healing, as it helps to increase awareness of the types of behaviour considered to be toxic.

But facing reality is challenging because you must let go of any idealised image that you have of your family.

While that can be painful, it does allow you to place responsibility for what happened to you where it belongs – with your parents.

If you do take the test, please take care as the questions can be activating.

No toxic people?

Some people believe – and some of these people are therapists – that there are no toxic people, only toxic behaviour. We ALL have capacity for change they will say. It must be lovely to live in that world – I’d like to visit sometime.

But from my lived experience and as a therapist, I don’t believe that it’s true.

Sure, there are instances where a parent has undergone therapy or a period of reflection and has sought to make amends. Or has recovered from substance abuse and transformed.

But high levels of toxic behaviour are usually fixed, enduring, and so deeply embedded into personality that it’s not possible to distinguish the two. This makes the reflection required for change unlikely.

Also, what do messages like this do to survivors of childhood trauma? They might cause further guilt and second guessing around setting boundaries, impeding necessary actions to ensure ongoing safety in the relationship with family.

The toxic family test can help to provide a frame of reference that was missing in childhood when things might have seemed ‘normal’.

If you’re confused about whether what you experienced was really toxic, you’d like to begin your healing journey, or just need to be heard and validated, please reach out for support.