Toxic Family Test

[no_hypocrisy]

https://patrickteahantherapy.webflow.io/toxic-family-test

I am in the process of healing from a toxic/dysfunctional family. Parents and sister and aunt.

My cousin (aunt's son) sent me this NYT article which featured this test. I got 79/100, severely toxic. (BTW, you'll be solicited to sign up for courses. I didn't but I still value the test and its results.)

I knew something was wrong with my family as early as age 10. They attacked me emotionally and mentally. I had to figure out by myself decades later (as recently as last year) what the real problem was. And it wasn't me. It was them.

The first sentence of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina is: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

[WhiteTara]

1. I had to quit the survey because it was so depressing

I don't need to take a quiz to know that my biological family was very toxic and incapable of genuine love for the children of the family.

[Cirsium]

2. Ouch

93/100

[JanMichael]

7. No joke. I got lucky due to no substance abuse.

I got an 87 but with substance abuse it would have been over 90.

Hate to say it but had they been addicts it would have made more sense.

[Cirsium]

8. interesting

Substance abuse does help in making more sense out of the whole thing. It may not be the "right" interpretation, but it is an interpretation and that may in itself be helpful.

You make a very interesting observation. Thanks for that.

[JanMichael]

10. The way I see it they're just stone cold sociopaths.

Straight edge sociopaths. At least if they were drinking or smoking something or taking some pills I could at least think that had some impact on my childhood. Sadly no. They're just assholes.

[Cirsium]

13. right

There was some peace when they passed out or stormed out to the bar.

[JanMichael]

14. I wouldn't know that but I think that might be something

At least they would disappear for a while. Sober people are the worst. Yes I'm joking but you know what I mean.

[CanonRay]

3. Came out worse than aI expected

Welp, they're all gone now, anyway.

[Clouds Passing]

4. EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Hypnosis, Internal Family Systems IFS, Sobriety

All excellent therapies for trauma recovery.

Mothers who are raped are more likely to abuse the “product of that rape”. Developmental trauma is what the child experiences. This becomes so natally ingrained that healing takes a heroic effort.

Unwanted children is no political toy. Birth control must stay legal.

[Laurelin]

5. I got a 60

Not for my first family. I did the test for the family I lived with after my parents died. I knew they were a mess.

[JanMichael]

6. Woo hoo! 87.

[Cirsium]

9. oh boy

Hope you don't mind the smiley. I don't mean to trivialize your experience.

[JanMichael]

11. I'm at the point of trivializing it myself.

I'm approaching 60 those fuckers are still the same. Only now it's just patronizing or gaslighting emails. Which I just ignore. No point in engaging.

[Cirsium]

12. there you go

I hear you on that.

[hunter]

15. My childhood was only moderately toxic by this survey.

My parents had no idea what a "normal" happy childhood might look like but they knew they didn't want their children to suffer the same sort of feral childhoods they'd endured. Me and my siblings were only semi-feral.

My mom's parents both worked in the shipyards as welders during World War II. When they weren't working they'd hit the bars and nightclubs with their buddies, come home, pass out, and repeat. (My grandma was ferocious, she could hold her own with the men. She could out-drink most of them too.)

My mom was a latchkey kid. The nice ladies (prostitutes) who lived in the apartment upstairs looked after her, encouraging her to do well in school and go to college. Not to do as they had done, as the song goes.

As children me and my siblings always had food and shelter but we were expected to be self-sufficient at a very early age. My mom quit doing my laundry when I was eight, for example. If we wore dirty clothes to school that was on us. If we were hungry there was food in the pantry, most reliably bread in the freezer (bought in bulk from the day-old outlet), government commodity cheese and powdered milk, and giant bags of cornflakes. There was also fish my dad caught, and sometimes meat.

My mom had a fierce temper, usually not directed at us. If I got in trouble at school, school administrators were often afraid to call her because she might storm in raising hellfire.

[Ziggysmom]

16. I was an unplanned only child. I got the worst of everything. 79.

[OldBaldy1701E]

17. Yeah.

I myself don't need a test to determine whether or not my family is toxic. I lived through it for the first 30 years of my life.

On a side note, how many of you that had toxic parents have had to deal with the fact that, socially, the parents are seen as perfectly decent parents? I live with this as well. The fact that some people refuse to believe me about my mother (my father's issues were rather obvious) was and is frustrating. It reminds me that a good P.R. goes a lot further than being a good person, and that some people only believe what they want to believe. A lesson I learned rather early, I must say.