toxic parents

I’m going to take a quick break today from our series on the Jerusalem church. I am presently reading Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life* by Susan Forward. A paragraph really jumped out at me yesterday. I’d like to share the paragraph with you.

The single most dramatic difference between healthy and toxic family systems is the amount of freedom that exists for family members to express themselves as individuals. Healthy families encourage individuality, personal responsibility, and independence. they encourage the development of their children’s sense of adequacy and self-respect.

Unhealthy families discourage individual expression. Everyone must conform to the thoughts and actions of the toxic parents. They promote fusion, a blurring of personal boundaries, a welding together of family members to know where one ends and another begins. In their efforts to be close, they often suffocate one another’s individuality.

–Read on my Kindle, Location 2644-2653.

As I was reading, the thought came to me about congregations. Doesn’t this apply to congregations to? Consider the following adaptation.

The single most dramatic difference between healthy and toxic congregational systems is the amount of freedom that exists for the congregation’s members to express themselves as individuals. Healthy churches encourage individuality, personal responsibility, and independence. they encourage the development of their members’ sense of adequacy and self-respect.

Unhealthy churches discourage individual expression. Everyone must conform to the thoughts and actions of the elders/preacher/brotherhood concensus/watchdogs. They promote fusion, a blurring of personal boundaries, a welding together of church members to know where one ends and another begins. In their efforts to be close, they often suffocate one another’s individuality.

That just really hit me and I thought I’d share. What do you think about it?

By the way, there are definitely associate links in this post. Help a guy with two housepayments out and click on one of them to buy some stuff.

*While I highly recommend Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life to learn about damaging parenting, how to avoid it and overcoming the results of it if you grew up with it, I warn you that some of the content is disturbing as it describes the extremes of toxic parenting. Further, the author did not edit the language of the clients she used as illustrations. Therefore, there is a great deal of what many of us would call foul language.