Toxic Parents Book Report

My report is on the book Toxic Parents by Dr. Susan Forward. I found this book very intrusting and scary in the same breath. I could not understand some of the hurt and pain parents inflict on their children. I do come from a home that was destroyed by divorce, alcohol and drug use. I can relate to some of the stories and it brought up my own struggles and made me question my own parents. I dont know what normal parents are but this book made it clear what is not healthy for children and even adults to deal with from there parents. I dont know where to go with this but I guess I will start off my opinions with the content of the book. I was really shocked by reading other peoples struggles with there familys and was not fully aware of how much
People, including myself had or have no idea (until I read this case) that that was a problem. From this I will go in the false beliefs that we all live with in some sense or another. I was aware of the term behavior and what kinds of processes go into producing certain types of behavior but I was unaware of the relationship between your beliefs and your feelings had any thing to do with self-defeating behavior. To understand this relationship would help correct that kind of negative behavior. I was the type of person to bury my feelings when it came to the strong emotional reactions I had towards my parents. I was always the person that nothing was going to affect me and it seemed like it did not until you looked into my behavior and my feelings. I avoided confrontation with my folks and never won any arguments. I pretty much answered yes to all the questions on the checklist (page 199) and I have just started to regain my feelings as a person in the last year. I will now go into the dinosaur in the living, part of this book or the alcoholic parents part of the book. This I can totally relate to and I live with these burdens and emotions, and abuses
The part of this book I found most apauling is the sexual abuse that goes on. That really made me upset and I felt extremely bad for anyone of those cases. The one case that sticks in my head is the man Paul whos mother abused him sexually. He was having a tremendous amount of problems sexually. I couldnt believe what was said about how he felt like he was cheating on his mother* I never really thought mothers abused their children sexually, and I guess I wished that were the case obviously that were not the case. We live in a strange world and it kills me to think something as beautiful as sexuality can be used as weapon of destruction. The fear these people must have went through had to be paralyzing and the act its self is just a scary thought to begin