BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Dr. Susan Forward's Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them. When you were a child... Did your parents tell you were bad or worthless? Did your parents use physical pain to discipline you? Did you have to take care of your parents because of their problems? Were you frightened of your parents? Did your parents do anything to you that had to be kept secret? Now that you are an adult... Do your parents still treat you as if you were a child? Do you have intense emotional or physical reactions after spending time with your parents? Do your parents control you with threats or guilt? Do they manipulate you with money? Do you feel that no matter what you do, it's never good enough for your parents? In this remarkable self-help guide, Dr. Susan Forward drawn on case histories and the real-life voices of adult children of toxic parents to help you free yourself from the frustrating patterns of your relationship with your parents -- and discover an exciting new world of self-confidence, inner strength, and emotional independence.

If you or someone you love grew up with an emotionally unavailable, narcissistic, or selfish parent, you probably struggle with residual feelings of anger, abandonment, loneliness, or shame. For anyone who endured a nightmare or a wasteland instead of a nurturing childhood, The Toxic Parents Survival Guide will offer you the clinical insights and the day-to-day tools so you can break the chains of toxicity that bind you in a mess you didn't create. Psychologist Bryn Collins pulls back the layers to explore the very complicated relationship with an emotionally unavailable parent. Whether they were unavailable because of addiction, mental illness, or being overly controlling or an iceberg, this imminently practical book will help validate your frustration and emotional struggles, help you set clear boundaries, and learn how to un-mesh yourself and move forward to a place of strength and peace without any guilt. Using case studies, quizzes, and jargon-free concepts, Collins profiles the most common types of toxic parents and offers the tactics and tools you need to change and break free of these painful associations. Your wounds can be healed and you can move forward. The Toxic Parents Survival Guide will help you find different ways of dealing with your parents' painful legacy so that you don't suffer and don't pass along emotional unavailability to the next generation or your current relationships.

How does the toxicity associated with particular parenting styles affect attachment? How do the contaminated views of themselves that children of poisonous parents have affect their relationships into adulthood? Like physicians, clinicians do not want to amputate, but they sometimes find it necessary in order to preserve the health of the larger system. Poisonous Parenting shows clinicians how to recognize the effects of poisonous parenting in adult children and how to heal the scars created by parents' toxic attitudes and behaviors. Readers will come away from the book understanding ways to counteract the effects of poisonous parenting so that clients can recover and lead a healthy life. They'll also learn techniques for determining when a relationship can be salvaged, when to proceed with caution, and when to disconnect in order to keep the poison from spreading.

How to recognize and cope with Parent Frustration Syndrome (PFS): negative thoughts and feelings about your children"

Toxic Mom Toolkit by Rayne Wolfe takes on super toxic mothers with humor, kindness and practical tools to help readers build a peaceful and happy life. The book includes Wolfe's memoir of growing up brave and scrappy in 1950's San Francisco, the daughter of three mothers: an absent birth mother, an abusive adopted mother and a wonderful step-mother. Coupled with her honest memoir, are mini-memoirs of women from all over the world, whose stories of growing up with toxic mothers shine light on the varied ways in which toxic parents can hurt, damage and undermine their children even into adulthood. There are helpful self-tests; positive affirmations and prompts; tools for contact and boundary setting; and lots and lots of wisdom wrapped in laughter. Toxic Mom Toolkit offers readers a starting point for the messy work of gaining perspective, setting boundaries, and breaking the cycle of toxic parenting. Join the Toxic Mom Toolkit community on Facebook.

In this compelling book, Elan Golomb identifies the crux of the emotional and psychological problems of millions of adults. Simply put, the children of narcissist—offspring of parents whose interest always towered above the most basic needs of their sons and daughters—share a common belief: They believe they do not have the right to exist. The difficulties experienced by adult children of narcissists can manifest themselves in many ways: for examples, physical self-loathing that takes form of overeating, anorexia, or bulimia; a self-destructive streak that causes poor job performance and rocky personal relationships; or a struggle with the self that is perpetuated in the adult's interaction with his or her own children. These dilemmas are both common and correctable, Dr. Golomb tells us. With an empathic blend of scholarship and case studies, along with her own personal narrative of her fight for self, Dr. Golomb plumbs the depths of this problem, revealing its mysterious hold on the affairs of otherwise bright, aware, motivated, and worthy people. Trapped in the Mirror explores. the nature of the paralysis and lack of motivation so many adults feel stress and its role in exacerbating childhood wrongs why do many of our relationships seem to be "reruns" of the past how one's body image can be formed by faulty parenting how anger must be acknowledge to be overcome and, most important, how even the most traumatized self can be healed. Rooted in a profoundly humanist traditional approach, and suffused with the benefit of the latest knowledge about intrafamily relationships, Trapped in the Mirror offers more than the average self-help book; it is truly the first self-heal book for millions.

If you or someone you love grew up with an emotionally unavailable, narcissistic, or selfish parent, you probably struggle with residual feelings of anger, abandonment, loneliness, or shame. For anyone who endured a nightmare or a wasteland instead of a nurturing childhood, The Toxic Parents Survival Guide will offer you the clinical insights and the day-to-day tools so you can break the chains of toxicity that bind you in a mess you didn't create. Psychologist Bryn Collins pulls back the layers to explore the very complicated relationship with an emotionally unavailable parent. Whether they were unavailable because of addiction, mental illness, or being overly controlling or an iceberg, this imminently practical book will help validate your frustration and emotional struggles, help you set clear boundaries, and learn how to un-mesh yourself and move forward to a place of strength and peace without any guilt. Using case studies, quizzes, and jargon-free concepts, Collins profiles the most common types of toxic parents and offers the tactics and tools you need to change and break free of these painful associations. Your wounds can be healed and you can move forward. The Toxic Parents Survival Guide will help you find different ways of dealing with your parents' painful legacy so that you don't suffer and don't pass along emotional unavailability to the next generation or your current relationships.