Free Toxic Parents by Susan Forward Page A

currently dating, using that trust as a weapon to gain control of his life.
    I’ll always remember the day he came in and told me that he’d fought off a wave of jealousy the night before and come away with a particularly warming sense of victory. He looked at me with tear-filled eyes and said, “You know, Susan, there is simply nothing in my current reality to justify my being as afraid as I was.”
    “I F EEL L IKE I C AN’T B REATHE ”
    Barbara, 39, a tall, slender composer of background music for television shows, came to see me in a devastating depression.
I wake up at night, and there is an emptiness, almost like a death inside of me. I was a musical prodigy, played Mozart piano concertos at age five, and had a scholarship to Julliard by the time I was twelve. My career is going great, but I’m dying inside. I was hospitalized for depression six months ago. I think I’m going to lose myself. I don’t know where to turn.
    I asked Barbara if something specific had happened to precipitate her hospitalization, and she told me that she had lost both her parents within three months. My heart ached for her, but she was quick to try to dissuade me from empathizing:
It’s okay. We hadn’t spoken in a few years, so I felt like I’d already lost them.
    I asked her to tell me what had caused this separation.
When Chuck and I were planning to get married a little over four years ago, my parents insisted on coming and staying with us to help with the wedding. That was all I needed . . . for them to be breathing down my neck like they did when I was a kid. I mean they were always meddling . . . I was always getting the Spanish Inquisition about what I was doing, who I was doing it with, where I was going.. . . Anyway, I offered to put them up in a hotel since Chuck and I were under enough stress before the wedding, and they really got crazy. They told me that unless they could come and stay with me, they would never speak to me again. For the first time in my life, I stood up to them. What a mistake that was. First, they didn’t come to the wedding, then they told the entire family what a bitch I was. Now none of them talk to me.
A few years after my marriage, my mother was told she had inoperable cancer. She made every member of the family swear not to tell me when she died. I didn’t find out until five months later, when I ran into a family friend who expressed condolences. That’s how I found out my mother had died. I went straight home and called my father. I don’t know, I guess I thought we could patch things up. The first thing he said was: “You should be happy now, you’ve killed your mother!” I was devastated. He went on to grieve himself to death three months later. Every time I think of them I hear him accusing me and it makes me feel like a murderer. They’re still strangling me with their accusations even though they’re both six feet under. What does it take to get them out of my head, out of my life?
    Like Eli, Barbara was being controlled from the grave. She spent several years feeling responsible for killing her parents, which devastated her mental health and almost destroyed her marriage. She became desperate to escape her sense of guilt.
Since they died, I’ve been very suicidal. It seemed like the only way to stop those voices in my head that kept saying, “You killed your father. You killed your mother.” I was so close to killing myself, but you know what kept me from doing it?
    I shook my head. She smiled for the first time during our hour together and replied:
I was afraid I might run into my parents again. It was bad enough that they ruined my life here on earth; I wasn’t about to give them a chance to destroy whatever I might find on the other side.
    Like most adult children of toxic parents, Barbara was able to acknowledge some of the pain her parents had caused her. But that wasn’t enough to help her transfer her feelings of responsibility from herself to them. It took some