Hello Bravesoles, welcome back to our channel. Chronic invalidation in toxic families occurs when family members frequently dismiss or insult each other's feelings and thoughts, leading to feelings of unworthiness. This harmful pattern can be passed down through generations, as people who grow up with it may unintentionally do the same to their children. Breaking this cycle is important for mental health and requires recognizing the problem and learning healthier ways to communicate and validate emotions. It's about understanding that everyone's feelings are valid and important, and changing these deep rooted behaviors might need support, like therapy, to heal and move forward. Hi, I'm Dr. Mario Bouquet. I'm a licensed psychologist. Let's get into some toxic family traits that you just thought normalizing. Toxic families have patterns of chronic invalidation, meaning that several family members or a family member that escape go to to have the experience of chronically being put down or their experiences being minimized in some way. What this can do to a person or what it can do globally to the family unit is that people can start feeling like the invalidation that they experienced is something that they should inherently believe, consciously or unconsciously, and it starts becoming a part of an internalized message in which the person believes that they are not worthy because the experiences that they had were not validated, they weren't deemed worthy enough to listen to to affirm. All of that starts becoming a part of the internalized messages that a person then lives their life with and can possibly even carry on into the next generation if they don't actually become aware of the fact that the toxicity was embodied in their family unit by way of chronic invalidation that was then passed on to them and that they can very well also chronically invalidate themselves and others. Another trait that is seen widely within toxic family units is the trait of manipulation, and oftentimes people tend to manipulate a family member or globally, family members tend to manipulate each other in order to actually get what they want from each other. They haven't necessarily learned how to acquire what they need from the family without that method of manipulation. And so the ways that they try to give love is usually marked by manipulation. The ways that they try to achieve something within the family unit is marked by manipulation. You probably have like had some sort of family member or a person in your life that has stonewalled you or has retracted their love so that you can give them what they want or need and then they give you the love back. And that is a process of manipulation. That is part of the ways in which families don't give you that experience of unconditional love without you actually giving something to them. The tricky thing about this is that it can leave you feeling like you need to give something to people or you need to over expand yourself in relationships in order to receive love. And so that messaging starts becoming a part of just the ways that you believe that love is supposed to be manifested in your life by way of you giving people things to the point of depletion sometimes and then you can actually receive love from others. Toxic families often maintain secrets as a way to keep things seemingly stable and avoid bringing shame upon themselves. These secrets serve to preserve harmful patterns of behavior within the family, as revealing them could lead to upheaval and confrontations. When someone threatens to expose these secrets or deviates from the family's unwritten rule of keeping them, it can cause significant turmoil and conflict within the family structure. Essentially, these secrets act as a double-edged sword. They're kept to avoid immediate pain, but in doing so, they reinforce a cycle of toxicity that prevents healthy growth and communication within the family. Some family members may have your experience in chronic guilt, especially when you try to adhere to some sort of independence in your life or you try to navigate away from the family unit in whatever way, whether you're getting your own place or you're going off to college or you're deciding to elicit some type of boundaries within the family unit, they suck you back in through the experience of guilt-tripping you and elicit this experience. If the guilt is powerful enough, meaning that you've been already socialized enough within the family unit to really give into the guilt, then it's likely that you're going to be doing it even in your adult life. Basically, when these kinds of codependent patterns in which you are sucked into a family unit and a cycle in which you have to oversupply and supply people's needs and feel depleted as a result of it, then it leaves you with the experience of also modeling that forward and feeling and so in relationships, you have to embody this codependent pattern. There are a lot of secrets that are typically maintained within these family units. It leads you to understand that sometimes the family understands that the way that they operate is in some ways toxic or will be shunned by the general public. It makes more sense to simply keep the secrets within the family unit and not be ashamed for what is happening within. Also, if a secret around whatever is happening in the family be it abuse, any kind of aggression or if it's that the family has something else that they don't want to divulge to the general public, it maintains the status quo. And toxic families are very much aligned with maintaining the status quo and not disrupting the ways that things have been for the entirety of the time that the family has been together or even for generations. Toxic families often display a negative and pessimistic view of the world, which can create a sense of helplessness and hopelessness among family members. This negativity can also lead to a suppression of different opinions, making the family environment rigid and less open to change or dialogue. This environment makes it difficult for individuals to feel supported or to grow positively within the family. And so those family secrets really uphold the very same patterns that everyone has gone accustomed to. If you deviate from that, then it causes a lack of equilibrium and things start getting pretty chaotic. And so it's also a way that the family is maintaining what they know to be the type of stability that they've been able to sustain, albeit toxic. These families are also profoundly negative and pessimistic and have these kinds of cup half empty types of ways of looking at life and exhibit those kinds of ideologies around life in reference to others and in reference to people even within the family unit. And it can make you feel really heavy, like you're always under a dark cloud, like you're always having the experience that negativity is all around you. And that is a breeding ground for helplessness and for hopelessness. Now don't you dare have a different opinion than the people that are in the family that are either holding up the popular opinion within the family or are the people that are in a position of power and are very explicit about holding those positions of power. Toxic family environments often struggle with setting appropriate boundaries, which can be either too strict or too lenient. This lack of balanced boundaries can impede individual development and personal freedom, as members may find it challenging to establish stable relationships or environments outside their family. Essentially, the inability to define healthy limits within the family can lead to difficulties in navigating social interactions and achieving personal independence elsewhere. Usually, there is a high level of rigidity around opinions that are held in the family unit and anybody that is stepping outside of that rigid way of thinking can actually be scapegoated and overpowered and sometimes situations can even become dangerous for that person. And so the consequence here, apart from that, is that it also creates this experience of a person not feeling like their opinion is valid, not feeling like their opinion has space and potentially even self-silencing in future experiences or in experiences outside of a family and even with it. But you knew this was coming. Unhealthy boundaries. These are either too constricted or too loose are sometimes seen as the types of boundaries that don't allow for there to be opportunity to live with enough freedom and enough holding within a family unit. And so when you don't have the stability that is necessary within the family, it makes it so much harder to actually replicate that stability outside of the family unit. To break the cycle of toxicity, it's important to recognize toxic traits within a family. By becoming aware of these behaviors, individuals can avoid repeating them in their own future relationships. Ending a pattern of generational toxicity involves a deliberate effort and a deep sense of self-awareness. This approach empowers people to foster healthier relationships and environments for themselves and those around them. And finally, being a part of a toxic family can really have an enormous impact upon the ways in which you also navigate the families that you create forward. And that means that the same behaviors that were modeled to you were behaviors that were likely internalized in some way or another that you then have to become so supremely aware of so that those toxic traits are the ones that you're bringing into your experiences with your own partners, with your own children, and with people even outside of your family units because those same patterns can be replicated in the workplace, in friendships, and in so many other social situations. And so it's incredibly important to be attuned to the ways that toxic family traits show up, how they show up in you specifically, and how you're modeling those forward so that you can stop the cycle and stop the generational toxicity. Thank you for watching. If you have any additional family traits to share, please share them in the comments section below. Don't forget to like and subscribe for more insightful content like this. Take care and see you on our next video.