Sherrie Campbell - But Its Your Family . . .: Cutting Ties with Toxic Family Members and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

But Its Your Family

But Its Your
Family

Cutting Ties with
TOXIC FAMILY MEMBERS
and Loving Yourself
in the Aftermath

Dr. Sherrie Campbell

NEW YORK

LONDONNASHVILLEMELBOURNEVANCOUVER

But Its Your Family

Cutting Ties with TOXIC FAMILY MEMBERS and Loving Yourself in the Aftermath

2019 Dr. Sherrie Campbell

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Unless indicated otherwise, Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain. Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible , copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

ISBN 978-1-64279-099-3 paperback

ISBN 978-1-64279-100-6 eBook

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018905885

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To my daughter Londonyou are my Reason in life

On the surface, its confidence.

Its strength. Its resilience. Its focus. Its independence.

Its determination. Its power.

But beneath that same surface, theres just a little girl.

A little girl who has had to learn how to fight.

How to overcome. How to push through the pain. How to never give in.

How to never give up.

Beneath that same surface, theres just a little girl.

A little girl who has had to learn to get back up after every time shes fallen.

Whos had to learn that life is all hustle and no handouts.

On the surface, its beauty. Its elegance. Its class. And it looks so easy.

So simple. So flawless.

But beneath that same surface is a story that most will never know.

I am that little girl.

I am the family scapegoat.

Toxic family dynamics are a heart-centered topic for mesomething Ive done a tremendous amount of research and reading on to help me navigate through the healing of my own life. Here I want to share with you what Ive learned along the way. In my first book, Success Equations , one of the life lessons I talk about is how important it is to share what we have learned with others. In But Its Your Family , Im applying this life lesson toward you and toxic family dynamics. Whether you are a survivor of such a destructive upbringing or you care for someone who is, I pass along what follows to show that such a family life need not be the end of the matter but a critically important beginning. A beginning that leads into a much better life.

I weave threads of my story as well as stories of many of my patients and friends throughout this book to validate and further prove the research I present. As wonderful and validating as the research has been for my own healing, I am a believer that lifes greatest teacher is always experience. I havent just studied the psychological patterns and family dynamics behind the concepts. I have lived deeply in the mires of them my entire life. The mission I have is to help educate, identify, and bring clarity, closure, and healing to those of us who need this particular kind of information in order to move on and establish personal peace and happiness.

As a clinical psychologist, I am convinced that the one and only place authentic healing can take place is from the truth of our reality, no matter how ugly it may be.

Family may seem like a simple concept to many, but more than anything its a concept heavily loaded and without a simple definition. In its most simple terms, the definition of family is one of a legal or genetic bond that exists between people. Yet, for many people, family means much more than that. Family is the place where home is. In this case, home is the originating place of unconditional love and support. If our family was healthy and we had a bad day, we couldnt wait to get home to take respite in the love and comfort we received in our home and from what our family members had to offer us.

Healthy families provide its members with an emotional and spiritual bond through the sharing of similar values, beliefs, traditions, shared experiences, and activities. Healthy families offer its members unconditional and nonjudgmental love and support. Family members feel surrounded by people who care about who they are and how they feel, and they each take an invested interest in helping each other grow into human beings who feel hopeful and positive toward self, others, and life as a whole. The dream common to all children is to have two parents who love them, who will be there to witness their most amazing accomplishments, to celebrate with them, and support them when they are down or when they have failed in one way or another. Healthy families provide all this and more.

On the other hand, for those of us who were raised in toxic family systems, the concept of home is quite different. Home equates to the creation of fear, anxiety, a lack of acceptance, and a lack of unconditional love and support. Home was the place we least wanted to be. Growing up in a toxic family is a hollow, confusing, maddening, and lonely experience. When we are raised by toxic parents, we live in a unique kind of crazy where we feel more like things to manage and keep on a schedule rather than as human beings to love, nurture, and care for. We leave childhood feeling emotionally homeless. Having a healthy home and family life is the dream we never got to experience growing up. We may have even glanced into the windows of other homes and felt envy for what we never had.

The most challenging aspect of psychological/emotional abuse is that is deniable by our family members and impossible to prove. Our family members dont believe they are abusing us because, by definition, they view themselves as perfect, and perfect people dont do imperfect things, such as emotionally manipulate their children. We as their children dont realize were being manipulated because we believe the lies our toxic family members tell us, convinced everything is our fault and that we are the ones who are broken and destroying our family members.

Toxic family abuse is always two-fold. The first layer of abuse is the original poor treatment by our toxic family members, namely our parents. The second layer is their denial of the ways in which they treat and harm us, irrespective of the evidence as it manifests in our behavior and in our tragically low levels of self-worth. The sinister and obscure nature of their emotional abuse leaves us alone to pick up the crushed pieces of our self-worth and all aspects of how we function in life, love, and relationships. When we try and explain our fears of love, life, and people to others, we tend to come off sounding needy, desperate, and paranoid. This is because psychological abuse is not equipped with a clear set of descriptive indicators that our toxic family members find undeniably true. Consequently, to them at least, we can rarely if ever prove what has happened to us. All of the descriptors are subjective and therefore debatable, just as our toxic family members need for them to be. Because emotional abuse is impossible to prove, we often have an incredibly difficult time describing or putting into words what exactly has happened to us that is so bad. We know things were not or are not normal, but we dont know why. Emotional abuse moves quickly. Just as were about to put our finger on it, it seems to slip away. Without a clear set of concrete, provable terms, many of us question if our abuse or neglect was real. Did it really happen? Or are we just making it up? We reason that if we were truly abused, our abuse should be easy to explain.