Читать книгу The Gaslighting of the Millennial Generation - Caitlin Fisher - Страница 16

The working title of this chapter is “Millennials are Killing Family Values,” but I’m not sure it will stay that way. I’ll cover a lot of “value”-related ideas in the chapters about relationships and parenting, but “family values” encompasses so much. What it boils down to is that this chapter is all about the way Millennials make their families (usually parents) shake their heads and mutter about what disrespectful kids they raised. Because, of course, the idea that Millennials are entitled and disrespectful jerks needs a foothold, and parents thinking it about their own children locks it in for the rest of society to whine about.

Here’s the thing about Millennials. If something or someone treats us badly or makes us feel like crap, we say a hearty “No thanks.” This means changing the landscape of the workplace when managers treat us like machines instead of people. This means making a ton of noise about sexual assault and sexism, even though it gets us labeled problematic and routinely told that we’re making something out of nothing. This means we’ll cut off family members who treat us poorly, and we are unapologetic about it.

From #MeToo, which I’ll discuss in more depth later, to the general willingness and empowerment of young people to call out racism, sexism, economic injustice, and other societal issues, we’re making a big fuss. And it’s changing society for the better, from large-scale protests to tiny battles across the Thanksgiving dinner table. We have no time or space for people who treat other people poorly.

In the last two years of my life, I have made the decision to cease contact with both of my biological parents. When I stopped talking to my mother, she threw all my stuff away and wrote me out of her will. When I stopped talking to my father, he accused me of being the problematic common denominator. And yet, I’m the healthiest and happiest I’ve ever been, now that I no longer feel responsible for being their version of a good daughter.

Remember this: It’s not your job to be what someone else expects of you. You are not obligated to “respect” someone who does not treat you well.

A Little Bit Screwed-Up

If you are anything like me, you got to adulthood a little bit screwed-up by your childhood. I know that no one had a perfect childhood, but it’s important to understand that the way your parents speak to you as a child is the way you learn to speak to yourself as an adult.

I believe that the majority of parents love and support their children—but they can still make mistakes in parenting. This is why it’s so important to apologize to your kids when you mess up. Acting like you’re the authority of all authorities and expecting your children to blindly respect you even when you’ve hurt them is a recipe for you getting pissed-off when they finally stop talking to you in their thirties. Ungrateful brats.

No matter what issues you have as an adult, they are probably buried somewhere in your childhood. The way we experience life as adults is framed and experienced through the scripts we learned as children. When we are kids, we are absorbing and assimilating new information so fast. There is so much being learned, so constantly, it’s a wonder our heads don’t explode.

Unfortunately, we also learn coping skills through childhood traumas, and those things tend to stick with you well into adulthood. Sometimes they are beneficial, and sometimes they leave you wondering what is wrong with your damn brain. We grow up with the example of our parents as our barometer of normal, even when outsiders can see that our family is definitely not normal, for better or worse.

Here’s a delightful example: Georgia Moffett, daughter of actor Peter Davison (who played the fifth iteration of the Doctor in the British TV show Doctor Who), said in an interview, “My father, Peter Davison, played the fifth Doctor. I went to school with the daughter of Colin Baker [the sixth Doctor], so I was sort of under the impression that everyone’s dad was Doctor Who.”

This is a prime example of how children use their families as the measure of normal against other families. For this same reason, children of abusive parents may continue the cycle of abuse against their own children because they assume that it was normal behavior. Children of healthy families tend to be healthy and respectful in their own parenting practices.

In my case, I never remember seeing or hearing my parents argue, but I felt tension. Then they divorced when I was seven. In my marriages, I never wanted to argue or fight because I had never seen how that was done in a healthy way. I expected that you just lived with the tension until your breaking point, because that was how I witnessed the dissolution of a marriage as a child.

After our parents’ divorce, my sister and I moved to Texas to live with our father for a brief stint. I was around twelve years old. I remember telling my dad that I loved him, and he said, “You say that so much that it seems like you are trying to convince yourself of it.” I remember feeling like my stomach had been filled with ice, and I had an uncomfortable tightness in my chest. I felt slapped. And with that one offhand statement from a man who was under a lot of emotional strain and vented it at his daughter, I learned that my love cannot be trusted, it must be proven.

Before I figured this childhood issue out, I practically gave myself to death in romantic relationships, never wanting to give the other party reason to doubt my love or think I had to convince myself to love them. I became very easily taken advantage of and taken for granted because of how hard and deep I threw myself into making sure my partner knew I loved them. I never even stopped to notice if that love and attention was being reciprocated.

By the age of twelve, I discovered through constant reminders from my mother that I was fat, lazy, and worthless. My sister and I were put on diets from a young age and were shamed for being hungry, wanting sweets, or going up a pants size. I internalized the message that fat people don’t get loved, and I would never find a man to love me because I was fat and lazy: nobody wanted to be with someone like that. The objective of my life became to become pretty and find a man, because I equated that with happiness. So, as an adult, I often went along with whatever a man wanted to do because I didn’t want to be rejected.

Moral of the story: I am just as screwed-up as you are.

The bad news is that your childhood is over, and it happened, and you can’t go back in time and actually change it. The good news is that you can still work on healing your childhood wounds in order to become a healthier adult. For many, a therapist is helpful in these endeavors, particularly if you were abused by parents or others in childhood, either emotionally, physically, or sexually.

Sometimes, this healing involves cutting your parents or other family members out of your life. And this is one hundred percent okay to do. Even if it makes them angry or they write you out of the will or they say really mean things about you. Even if they say you are a disrespectful child and they don’t understand why you don’t respect your elders.

Pro tip from me to you: Respect is a two-way street, and you don’t owe anybody shit.

The Ways Our Parents Fail Us

I know what you’re thinking. How is childhood trauma a Millennial issue? It’s not—but we are the ones behind an “epidemic” of family estrangement. According to psychologist Joshua Coleman, “Parenting has changed more in the last forty years than it did in the few centuries before that… The principles of obligation, duty and respect that Baby Boomers and generations before them had for their elders aren’t necessarily there anymore.”9 (Shout out to my Gen-X friends who are joining us in this unsavory destruction of society.)

In a post on Bustle, writer Gabrielle Moss shares my difficulty in finding data to support this bubble of estranged Millennials who don’t call their parents to gab about their day like besties. She says: “We don’t want to raise our voices to say, ‘I didn’t get told I was special, I was told I was a piece of crap who ruined my mother’s life,’ because we’re afraid to find out that we really are wrong, twisted, different from everyone else.”10

It’s important to note that, while child abuse, neglect, and other traumas are being called out more publicly and freely than in generations past, actual rates of abuse are trending on a major decline. Consider the following excerpt from Millennials Rising, published in 2000:

In this new era of hypersensitivity, people have been alarmed by government reports that child abuse is on the rise. In particular, the 1996 National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect caused a great stir by reporting a huge jump of over 50 percent in the rates of most types of child abuse…between 1986 and 1993. Research by the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System shows the problem getting sharply worse in the early ‘90s and then better in the late ‘90s. All these scenarios are troubling: Is the rate of child abuse really going up?

The answer is: probably not. What the government numbers track is not the actual incidence rate, but the official intervention rate. And in the Millennial child era, experts suspect that rising interventions parallel a rising willingness by neighbors, teachers, nurses, and officers to report possible cases of abuse. As for the trend in actual incidence, the best personal survey data…point in the opposite direction: toward a dramatic decline of over 40 percent in the rate of parental violence against children from 1975 to 1992.11

—Neil Howe and William Strauss,

Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation

Millennials are not unique in having experienced traumatic childhoods. But when we are mistreated, abused, neglected, etc.—we talk about it. Hence, I’ll be exploring these factors of abuse in my book about Millennials, because we’re working to normalize and destigmatize talking about abuse. We’re not keeping the family secrets anymore.

Poor parenting has an infinite number of sources and explanations but often takes one of two main tracks in how it is inflicted upon a child: ignoring or engulfing. While there are myriad ways a parent or caregiver may inflict trauma and suffering onto a child, this chapter will deal more with emotional trauma from parents who fail to meet a child’s psychological needs for love, approval, affection, and more. The ongoing struggle of children who did not receive emotional support growing up can and will follow them into adulthood and impact their ability to function in the world, in personal and professional relationships, as I mentioned before.

What More Could You Want: The Ignoring Parent

The “ignoring” parent fails to show up for the child’s needs. On the most extreme end of this spectrum, there is neglect and abuse: not feeding a child, abusing a child physically or sexually, failing to provide a child with adequate clothing, and so on. In general, the non-extreme variety of ignoring parents tend to their children’s physical needs but fail to meet their emotional needs. These emotionally neglectful parents may leave a young child to cry when upset or tell them to get over it or shut up. They may shame or bully their child, overtly favor a sibling over the ignored child, or not pay attention to their child’s emotional symptoms like depression or anxiety. The feeling of this parent is something in the neighborhood of, “You have a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and food to eat, so what more could you want?” The answer, of course, is love, support, and attention, which are fundamental building blocks of healthy adult relationships.

The ignored child grows up to be an overachiever, hoping time after time that they’ll finally get their parents’ attention. Or they grow up to be a self-saboteur, knowing that their efforts have never mattered and will never matter, so why bother? Children of neglectful parents may develop anxiety (how can I do this so I won’t mess up or disappoint someone?), depression (what’s the point in trying, no one cares), substance abuse problems (I just want to feel something or not feel anything), and eating disorders (I just want to control something in my life).

My own childhood was one with an ignoring parent; my mother just didn’t know what to do with emotions. She dropped out of school and left home to live with her grandmother at age fourteen and subsequently grew up very fast. She then expected her children to also act like miniature adults, despite the fact that play and imagination are more developmentally appropriate than scrubbing and re-scrubbing the bathtub. My sister and I grew up feeling like we had to chase Mom’s approval through achievement in school and by performing our chores flawlessly. Laziness was the ultimate sin in our house.

From menstruation to sexuality to body image, my mother had no idea how to encourage growth, competence, or confidence. As a twelve-year-old, I asked her if I was fat. She approximated my BMI in her head, ran it through the filter of newspaper articles she had read about obesity in children, and left her response at “Yes.” When we had “the talk” about sex, I learned nothing of sexual pleasure or safe sex practices, but I did learn that it was the only thing guys want and that if I “came home pregnant, the only help [she] would offer me is the number to Planned Parenthood.” There was no safe space to learn what it means to be a girl or woman beyond “Don’t talk with food in your mouth.” It was all about image and propriety, never about what we needed emotionally. My childhood was spent aimlessly but thoroughly applying myself toward different projects in the hope that something would make her notice me as a person and not an extension of a mop.

When my physical needs demanded a trip to the doctor to investigate shortness of breath in gym class, I was prescribed an inhaler for exercise-induced asthma. My mother told me it was a fake inhaler the doctor prescribed me as a placebo and I just needed to lose weight. When I asked to go to therapy at age fourteen because I was suicidal, she let me see the open bills on the kitchen counter and did nothing to stop me from feeling guilty over needing care. At the same time, she told me I didn’t have depression and there was nothing wrong with me. When I was actually diagnosed with not only anxiety but severe anxiety at age twenty-eight, I was shocked. I assumed on some level that I had been faking it or making it up.

Countless friends and acquaintances have had similar experiences with their own parents.

Long story short: when parents act like the needs of their child don’t matter, don’t exist, or are a burden, it affects the child in fundamental ways into adulthood.

In a 2003 study published in Child Abuse & Neglect, Volume 27, Issue 11, researchers investigated whether emotional abuse/neglect are predictors of psychological and somatic symptoms in adulthood. They found that “a history of emotional abuse and neglect was associated with increased anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress and physical symptoms, as well as lifetime trauma exposure.” The conclusion of their study states, “Long-standing behavioral consequences may arise as a result of childhood emotional abuse and neglect, specifically, poorer emotional and physical functioning, and vulnerability to further trauma exposure.”12

Another study highlighted a connection between childhood abuse/neglect and personality disorders.13 Specifically, researchers found that emotional abuse was a significant predictor of borderline personality disorder, and all forms of trauma (sexual, physical, and emotional abuse) were predictors of paranoid disorder. Emotional abuse of boys correlated to self-mutilation.

Simply put, an emotionally ignored child is likely to have any number of negative outcomes and maladaptive behaviors as an adult. Children who were raised with emotional abuse face two dangers when raising kids of their own. They may repeat the cycle, having never experienced a healthy example, or they may swing so far in the opposite direction, in an attempt to be different, that they end up stifling their children in a completely different manner with the same result. Of course, it is also possible to learn healthy coping skills and break the cycle.

I’ll Never Let Anything Hurt You: The Engulfing Parent

You might think at first glance that being attached at the hip and making sure to be engaged in every aspect of a child’s life is indeed more loving, effective, and helpful than being outright neglectful. However, the over-parented child often has similar emotional upheavals and feels just as lonely and ignored. When a parent is there to make every decision, to catch every fall just before it happens, the child never learns to crawl, walk, run on their own. They never have a mistake to learn from. Subsequently, they feel lost and confused when they finally leave the nest.

The engulfing parent may take on the responsibility for the child’s social life and activities, which may range from mildly controlling to outright projection of the parent’s own unachieved desires, later foisted upon the child whether they want to participate or not. These are the pageant moms, the bequeathers of family businesses, the sports enthusiasts who argue with umpires. Did they ever ask the child what they wanted to explore?

Rebecca reflects on a difficult childhood and an overbearing mother who attended middle school dances and even a job interview with her:

At the time, I didn’t know any different. We had just moved from Los Angeles to Eugene, Oregon, and I had only been to private Christian schools. This was my first time going to public school, so having my mom, twin sister, and disabled brother tag along [to the dance] seemed normal. Once I got to high school, I realized it wasn’t normal. Neither was my home life.

I don’t think I really understood my home life until I started going to public school. I was raised in church and church schools and had a very sheltered childhood. My parents divorced when I was ten and that’s when my family moved to Oregon. I’m the youngest of seven and my oldest siblings made it hard to be a teenager. Instead of asking or taking an interest in my life, my mom assumed that I was repeating anything my older siblings had done. I rebelled in high school and was sent back to private school. I moved out when I was sixteen and it took a long time for me to learn to be on my own. My mom always made important calls for me and I still have anxiety over talking on the phone.

My mother going to my first job interview with me was embarrassing. I didn’t want her there and I think she answered more questions than I did. Obviously, I didn’t get the job.

I even think the way I parent has been affected. I don’t want to be my mother, but sometimes I can’t let my three-year-old be a three-year-old. When my child plays with things that can make a mess or lead to any possible injury, I stress out and start to hover. My husband has told me more than a few times to just let it go and take a step back. I didn’t see my childhood or my mom in a bad way until I moved away from her, and even then it took many years.

This case is more extreme than the typical helicopter case would present, but a surprising number of people in my social circles had similar stories about overbearing parents. Engulfing parents may behave this way because they were ignored as children and want their children to have a better childhood. They may have their own anxieties that cause them to be overprotective or overinvolved. But, to quote Dory from Finding Nemo, “You can’t never let anything happen to him…then nothing would ever happen to him!”

The over-parented child grows up to be an overachiever, because their childhood was full of activities and it’s the only way they know to live. Or they grow up to be a self-saboteur, because they’re so tired of having everything planned out and they never want to feel like they are in the spotlight ever again. Children of overbearing parents may develop anxiety (I’m not actually as great as Mom thinks, someone will find out I’m faking), depression (I’m so tired and I can’t try anymore), substance abuse problems (I don’t even know who I am, maybe something can help me), and eating disorders (to be anything less than perfect will destroy me).

If the parent isn’t outright controlling and pulling the social strings, they may be overparenting as a helicopter parent. Just as Millennials have their share of HuffPo and Buzzfeed articles, so do the children of overbearing helicopter parents. Of course, many times these groups are one and the same.

“The parents of most Millennials are either Baby Boomers or, for the younger Millennials, Gen Xers. This need for verbal approval and reinforcement correlates with the way detached parenting was normalized in the 1960s and ‘70s, when Boomers grew up. As a result of not being babied or supervised themselves as children, as well as cultural shifts in parenting norms through the progression of technology, these generations overcompensated in their involvement with their Millennial children.14 Thus, “helicopter parents” were created.”

—Ilana Bodker, How Baby Boomer Parents Molded the Millennial Generation

Adult children of helicopter parents often call their parents for advice before decisions. Not just big decisions about buying a home or getting married, but any decision or question, like how long something is supposed to go into the microwave or thinking about changing a hairstyle. They’re also often perfectionists who have an almost pathological need to achieve more and more, but these achievements are more likely to make their parents feel proud or satisfied than the actual person doing the work.

Unfortunately, and very confusingly, helicopter parents of adult children will try to become friends or buddies with their grown kids rather than maintaining a healthy psychological (or even physical) distance. While it can be comforting knowing that Mom and Dad are just a phone call away, it’s not always healthy. In ages past, when a young adult graduated high school and started college, their parents would drop them at the dorms with their books and their duffel bag before scooting on home and sending a letter or two before seeing them for a semester break. These days, we have email and Facebook and cell phones and parents can keep tabs on their kids, even though they’re no longer “kids,” from afar, in an instant.

In a 2013 study at California State University, Fresno, management professors Jill C. Bradley-Geist and Julie B. Olson-Buchanan explored the consequences of helicopter parenting.15 In their review of existing research, they found studies indicating a positive correlation between helicopter parenting and anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem…in two- and four-year-old children (emphasis mine). Also discovered was a correlation between helicopter parenting and neuroticism and dependency. Helicopter parenting is also associated with recreational use of pain medications and taking prescription medication for anxiety and depression.

To really drive home that the challenges of the helicopter-parented children and the challenges of the Millennial are intricately linked, there is also research linking over-parenting and entitlement mentality.16 What else can you expect for a generation raised without the opportunity to struggle and learn from their mistakes? When you’ve gone from age zero to eighteen with your parents doing everything for you, is it any wonder that the world now accuses you of being an entitled narcissist?

Back to the Bradley-Geist and Olson-Buchanan research at California State. Their survey of college students explored general parental involvement and over-parenting as they correlate to various work-related outcomes. Students with overly-involved parents were found to have lower social and general self-efficacy, as well as “maladaptive responses to workplace scenarios.” Those who had been raised with a helicopter parenting style were more likely to choose workplace solutions that relied on someone else, rather than taking personal responsibility.

“Without a strong sense of self-efficacy, or the belief that one can accomplish tasks and goals, young adults are likely to be dependent on others, engage in poor coping strategies, and fail to take accountability in the workplace.” So, what’s a grown adult to do, when they realize they’ve been raised to be essentially helpless?

If you were raised by helicopter parents (or, more likely, a helicopter parent, as single parenthood correlates with over-parenting), all is not lost. You are not merely an entitled blob of dependent workplace goo, waiting for a group project you can hide behind. There is hope for you to become a functional adult in society and avoid harming the development of your own children. This is the ultimate danger of toxic parenting: in an attempt to avoid hurting your children the way you were hurt, you run the risk of swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, hurting them anyway. It happens with parenting just like it happens on a societal scale, one generation blaming the next because they don’t understand why their efforts didn’t do what they wanted.

Adverse Childhood Experiences

One of the most well-known studies related to childhood trauma is the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study first conducted by the CDC and Kaiser-Permanente from 1995 to 1997.17 The ACE study investigated the correlation between adverse experiences in a subject’s childhood and negative outcomes later in life. The more ACEs someone experienced as a child, the more risk they have for outcomes such as alcohol abuse, depression, illicit drug use, and suicide attempts. There is also a correlation linking ACEs to early initiation of sexual activity, higher risk for domestic violence, higher risk of sexual violence, and increased rates of sexually transmitted infections, adolescent and unintended pregnancies, and fetal death. Similarly, there is an increased risk for smoking (including early initiation of smoking), and health outcomes like liver disease, heart disease, and pulmonary disease. Finally, factors such as poor work performance, financial stress, and poor academic achievement are also linked with ACEs.

What are the ACEs?

The ACEs studied in the late 1990s are common and affect children into their adulthood, possibly for their entire lives. These experiences include:

• Physical abuse

• Sexual abuse

• Emotional abuse

• Physical neglect

• Emotional neglect

• Mother treated violently

• Household substance abuse

• Household mental illness

• Parental separation or divorce

• Incarcerated household member

I believe that traumatic childhood circumstances are linked to the perception that Millennials are entitled and narcissistic. The Baby Boomer Generation skyrocketed the divorce rate in the United States, and divorced parents are one of the ACEs studied. Obviously not every child of divorced parents was neglected or abused, but a divorce is almost always emotionally traumatic. Add to the general trauma of a divorce other ACEs, like witnessing domestic violence or alcohol abuse in the household, and the effect snowballs quickly from a couple of ACEs to a whole pile of them. It can be argued that the Boomer Generation was one of the first that made it socially acceptable to divorce, and I’d argue that they were victim to plenty of ACEs themselves. As we continue to name and study these factors, it’s easier to see the pattern has repeated itself for generations.

Imagine that someone born in the 1950s grew up with either ignoring or engulfing parents. They may have grown up with corporal punishment or been forced to “respect their elders” even if their elders were toxic toward them. Or they may have been a golden child, loved and adored and allowed to do whatever they pleased, but suffering from the lack of boundaries. They may have had to tiptoe around alcoholism, or maybe they tried to ignore domestic violence in the home.

These children grew up and got married and had kids of their own, and maybe they struggled to find a balance between preserving the idyllic parts of their own childhoods and trying to ensure their children had a better life in other ways. As the prevalence of divorce expanded, and as women developed more agency and financial independence, the times were definitely a-changing.

The Baby Boomers didn’t know what to do. Nothing was the same as it used to be. They were growing up during the sexual revolution and had better access to birth control. Feminism was gaining more and more traction, as Baby Boomer women made up 45 percent of the labor force and overtook men in the completion of college degrees. In the midst of all this change, how were the Boomers to effectively raise the next generation?

Part of working through your own childhood traumas with the help of a trained therapist is to put yourself in the shoes of your parents and understand the source of their behavior. This does not mean you have to forgive them, but it can be helpful in understanding that it’s not your fault. Your parents were not perfectly healthy and well-adapted people who mistreated you because of something inherently wrong with you. They were mistreated as well, as were their parents before them. It does not excuse what happened to you, but it gives greater context.

Abuse is never the victim’s fault. When we begin to understand that this applies on a generational scale as well as an individual one, we can see how to break the cycle of generational blame. It’s not that Millennials are suddenly a group of whining, spoiled, entitled brats. Generation X was called a generation of lazy slackers. Boomers had their own challenges from the generation before them. Each generation is prone to lose their own context and ability to relate to the younger crowd when society starts heaping all the blame on the next generation. Let’s stop the cycle.

Solutions for Adult Children of Emotionally Abusive Parents

First, understand that it’s not your fault if your parents ignored or overprotected you. It was nothing wrong or broken within you that caused their behavior. It is okay to acknowledge that your parents hurt you. In fact, they actively impeded your development, independence, and autonomy. You deserve to figure out your own way in life, and you will not feel fulfilled by following someone else’s prescribed path for you or spending your life chasing someone’s approval.

Begin to distance yourself from your parents and set boundaries with them. Depending on their level of involvement in your life, this might be as easy as not always picking up the phone when they call, or it might be as hard as having to sit them down and explain that you need some space. I also implore you to find a good therapist who can help you sift through your brain and establish boundaries with your parents.

It’s possible that, with a lot of work on boundaries and open lines of communication, you can reconcile with your parents. However, a fundamental part of reconciliation is their willingness to admit they harmed you. If they insist that they did nothing wrong or make excuses about why they behaved the way they did, you may end up spending years of your life in the same cycles with them.

Good parents practice unconditional love. They don’t threaten to disown their children or change their locks if somebody comes home with a nose ring. (True story.)

How to Make Sure You’re Killing It

Talk to your child self. One thing you can do, if you have leftover childhood tapes playing loops in your brain and getting in your way, is to dig up an old photo of yourself as a kid. Tape it to your mirror, keep it in your wallet, or snap a photo of it on your smartphone. Now comes the fun part: Talk to yourself as a child. Go back to those moments when your parents or other trusted adults said or did something to you that created a wound in your life. Pretend that you have come upon a child crying over those very things, and comfort the child. Tell the child that it is not their fault, and that they are not worthless, they are not doomed to be alone for their entire life, they are not only worth something if a man loves them. Give the child your love, and understand that it wasn’t your fault.

Act like Spock. This was one thing I did when I started to distance myself from my mother. I just acted like I was an alien or researcher on an investigative mission, observing my mother’s behavior through the lens of someone who didn’t have a history with her. I was able to keep my distance and avoid getting worked up emotionally over things she said to me, because I had this researcher hat on instead of letting her get to me with her not-so-subtle criticisms.

Decide on your boundaries. What you will accept from other people is up to you. If they can’t listen, kick them out of your life. Spend some time deciding what you will and will not accept from people, especially your parents. If they’re still calling you a childhood nickname you don’t want to go by, tell them. If they insist on calling you the name even though you’ve asked them not to, they’re violating a boundary. It’s a small boundary, but it’s a boundary just the same. Communicate your boundaries and stick to them.

Do your homework. Reading books about toxic parents and childhood abuse can be extremely helpful in understanding the ways your childhood experiences shaped your behavior as an adult. I’ve been reading books like this for over five years and still uncover something new with each new title I read. Some of my favorites include Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers by Karyl McBride, Toxic Parents by Susan Forward, and Daughter Detox by Peg Streep.

There is no such thing as perfect. You might cut contact with a parent or family member and then end up running into them, having to see them at a family event, or otherwise initiating contact again. This doesn’t mean you’ve screwed up or you have to start all over again. Go back to the level of contact that feels good for you and don’t worry that you didn’t do it perfectly. You’re fine. You’re doing awesome.