I do think it’s important to understand one’s own emotions. I think what too many parents say to their child as normal childhood emotions emerge is “don’t feel”.

I remember a session I had when I was talking to my therapist and trying to cover a lot of ground in that session. I needed a sense of relief and I did not want the session to leave me feeling worse then I already felt.

At one point as I was talking about a challenging event my therapist gently asked me to stop and he said. “what you just shared is traumatic” and let’s just sit with that emotion. It made me realize how I was racing through bad events and not actually giving myself permission to just sit with the emotions. I realized how much I had unknowingly been encouraged to think my emotions were an inconvenience.

I had a discussion recently with a person that had a problem with hate. The desire to want someone dead is bad. What the true hate is about is how a person hates whatever another individual might be doing that is causing them to struggle in themselves.

IMHO the individual that engages hate is a very damaged person. It’s beyond useful anger, yes anger is useful and can provide extra energy to problem solving. But hate is not helpful in terms of problem solving and health resolution.

Hating makes a home in dark triad disorders. (Yeah I know I am using labels). However if someone goes along not understanding emotions and learning to identify them and sit with them and learn to find personal resolve that person may struggle with hate that can lead to many unhealthy problems.

The thing about growing up and maturing is that as we experience life and other people we also learn to develop more life skills. One thing I have learned is that not all adults have healthy life skills. I can look back and recognize the lack of healthy life skills in my own parents. And I can also see the impact that had on me. However, I also got to know my parents and I realized how their generational messages affected them. I also could see them come to realize things they regretted about themselves. They both made me realize that we all learn all our lives.

When someone says “I am an adult and I know better”? Well not necessarily knowing “better” in terms of “healthy”.

I have gone through so many challenges the last years of my parents lives that genuinely traumatized me repeatedly. I have relived things from my past that I had no idea I could relive. What I have been very slowly come to realize is how I unknowingly held onto emotions from my childhood caused by the dysfunction I witnessed in my own family.

That saying I see once in a while “we may not remember exactly what another person says but we never forget how that person makes us feel”. This is a very true statement. I think it’s important to learn about one’s self and how your family environment impacted you.

I had so many challenges with my older sister that I reached out for help for. The one thing my sister would say is she had no interest in looking at her childhood and that there was nothing back there that would help her. She kept saying how she needed to focus on the now. However, how she was handling the now was so horrible that what she failed to realize was she was drawing from her past in very unhealthy ways. So much so that she even frightened her own parents who were much too old and frail to deal with her.

Her behavior got so increasingly disturbing that it triggered me to start experiencing flashbacks. I definitely needed help to understand that. I shared everything I was experiencing. As a result in therapy I began to hear different labels and that I was dealing with a very disordered person. There is such a thing as toxic behaviors or dysfunctional behaviors. I heard NPD and BPD and just very disordered to an EVIL person that everyone was trying to avoid.

What I began remembering was one very angry child. And one thing that angered her was she hated having younger siblings. And while I was too young to know that, I did feel it.

This is something I cannot fix or change. And it’s been just one ugly life experience that had been going on for way too long. Sometimes the only thing one can do is distance as much as possible. It’s hard and yet even though it’s been so horrible I don’t hate her, nor do I care to punish or even wish dead. That would not bring me any personal pleasure. I only feel disappointment and sadness. There is no win either but instead doing my best to reach an end and walk away.

Not quite sure how to grieve it all either. I feel sad for her in that everyone wants to distance from her, everyone.

I may have used the term toxic myself. I don’t think the labeling will just stop. We are always trying to find words to describe behaviors that can affect us badly.

What is important is to pay attention to how we may contribute to problem relationships. To pay attention to what we ourselves do that may put us in a relationship scenario that will be unhealthy.

For myself in what I had to deal with in my sister was I had to distance as much as possible. It was very hard but anytime I tried to engage and be with my parents my sister would create some kind of unhealthy drama. And my parents got too old and frail to handle her drama.

It was very hard but she showed she did not even care if her drama upset everyone present including other patients and staff at different health care facilities.