When toxic parents are not all right or wrong

When you finally admit you have toxic parents, you may feel confused if you remember good times. The truth is, no one is all good or all bad, and all human beings have nuance.

You remember the rare time your narcissistic mother held and soothed you after a heartbreak. This may have been genuine or a manipulative ploy to gain your trust.

Either way, it felt good and that’s not the way you’re used to your mother making you feel. As a result of this rare display of affection, you second-guess yourself and think she might be a good mother after all.

But, a good enough parent will help you with your emotions consistently, not so that it stands out as an anomaly. Toxic parents, on the other hand, make you suppress your emotions through their lack of support.

They leave you feeling as though you must take care of your own needs when you are far too young to do so. This leads to the emotional dysregulation common among childhood trauma survivors.

When you’re left alone with your emotions or forced to detach from them, you’ll become afraid of them. This leads to emotional bypassing in which you use strategies to avoid feeling your feelings.

These include addictions and avoidance techniques which can be devastating to your relationships. Not to mention your sense of self-worth.

Toxic parents force you to fantasize

As a child you had to convince yourself that your parents had your best interests in mind. The alternative - that they didn’t really care - felt intolerable because you depended on them.

This false narrative you developed to survive doesn’t change easily. That’s why your inner child will grasp onto the memory of the one or two (or however few times) your toxic parents treated you kindly.

Even though your adult knows better, the child inside wants to believe there’s hope of making the fantasy a reality. That is, an uncommon display of affection (even if it’s a manipulation tactic) becomes evidence your parents weren’t so bad.

The traumatized brain tends to think in black and white. It’s a way of making sense of the world when you had no guidance.

That’s why you might put someone on a pedestal when you meet them. But when their humanity shows and they make a mistake, they topple from high standing in your eyes and you may even cut them off.

It’s another reason why the rare times toxic parents “get it right” you think they must be good. Black and white thinking says bad people are 100% bad, but in reality no such person exists.

Black & white thinking

So, if you’ve finally come to terms with the fact you were raised by toxic parents, resist the urge to reverse your judgment due to rare acts of kindness. And refrain from pretending those kind acts never happened.

You can retrain your brain out of black and white thinking. If you reject the memory of something nice your parent did to uphold your new narrative, you’re still lying to yourself.

Instead, accept that we are all human, even narcissists and other toxic people. It’s what they did on a consistent basis that affected you and created the trauma you’re now healing.

Same goes for you if you’re a parent yourself. What you do consistently is what makes you a good enough parent or not.

If you do right by your kids at least 30% of the time, research shows that’s good enough. If you’re dealing with complex trauma from a narcissistic mother or father, chances are your parents missed this mark by a mile.