Lack of good maternal roles or healthy relationships with their own mothers can cause some women to become toxic mothers. A woman who has childish tendencies may exhibit toxic behaviors such as being possessive or controlling.
Toxic parents tend to be self-centered, putting their own needs before their children's. Such parents are self-absorbed, emotionally unavailable, and do not have empathy for others.
Impacts on Adult Daughters
The damage from a toxic mother can also lead to lifelong struggles with self-image, communication with others, mental illness like depression and anxiety, addiction problems, eating disorders, relationship issues, and more.
Recognize That You Cannot Make Other People Change
Brown University's advice on keeping yourself safe in dysfunctional family relationships emphasizes the fact that a toxic parent is likely not to change; what can change is their child's level of engagement, boundary reinforcement, and resistance to old patterns.
Effects of Toxic Parents
Those effects can continue well into adulthood. Here are nine potential effects of toxic parents: Mental health disorders in childhood, such depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
The most common toxic behavior of parents is to criticize their child, express self-wishes, complain about the difficulties of raising a child, make unhealthy comparisons, and make hurtful statements1.
If your daughter feels unloved, she may suffer from several emotional problems. Symptoms can include depression, anxiety, self-harm, and more. These feelings are often the result of the way her parents treated her during her childhood.
Some of the common signs of a toxic parent or parents include: Highly negatively reactive. Toxic parents are emotionally out of control. They tend to dramatize even minor issues and see any possible slight as a reason to become hostile, angry, verbally abusive, or destructive.
Emotionally absent or cold mothers can be unresponsive to their children's needs. They may act distracted and uninterested during interactions, or they could actively reject any attempts of the child to get close. They may continue acting this way with adult children.
There are different types of parents and parenting styles, and most want the best for their kids. But some go over the boundaries and become toxic parents. Worse, they don't even know they're being toxic, maybe because their parents brought them up the same way.
According to experts, a major key to distinguishing the two is looking at how long the strife lasts. If things are nasty between you in many different areas of the relationship for years at a time, the relationship itself might be toxic. But if there's only one, sudden issue, that's probably more benign.
The mother wound is the cultural trauma that is carried by a mother – along with any dysfunctional coping mechanisms that have been used to process that pain – and inherited by her children (with daughters generally bearing the brunt of this burden).
Lack of consistency. Toxic communication — such as contempt, criticism, and sarcasm. Controlling behavior and distrust. Abusive — this is also inclusive of emotionally abusive behaviors, such as gaslighting, love bombing, breadcrumbing etc.
A toxic mother creates a negative home environment where unhealthy interactions and relationships damage a child's sense of self and their views of relationships with others. Over time, it increases the risk of poor development in the child's self-control, emotional regulation, social relations, etc1.
It's okay to let go of a toxic parent.
This is such a difficult decision, but it could be one of the most important. We humans are wired to connect, even with people who don't deserve to be connected to us. Sometimes though, the only way to stop the disease spreading is to amputate.
The result of toxic parents
“However, it's totally healthy and appropriate for individuals to set boundaries with family members.” Sometimes, limiting or eliminating contact with a parent is much less damaging than having them in your life.
“When a person's first attachment experience is being unloved, this can create difficulty in closeness and intimacy, creating continuous feelings of anxiety and avoidance of creating deep meaningful relationships as an adult,” says Nancy Paloma Collins, LMFT in Newport Beach, California.
How do I know if I was emotionally neglected as a child? There are several signs such as feelings of detachment, lack of peer group, dissociative inclinations, and difficulty in being emotionally present.
Feeling unloved and unwanted
Many people who frequently feel unloved and unwanted have a history of childhood abuse and neglect, and of not having had their basic needs met—for example, the need to feel safe, secure, cared for, valued, understood, and accepted by parents/caregivers.
“You're a bad mom”
Kids are often quick to say this phrase when they don't agree with a decision a parent made or when they're not allowed to do something that everyone else their age is doing.
Yes, your toxic parents may indeed love you, but because of their nature, they behave and do things that show otherwise. They have particular behaviors that are more dominant than showing you their love through actions.