Top 90 Susan Forward Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Remember, tears are like rivers that start in one place and flow to another – they can help carry you to healing.”

— Susan Forward

2. “Whether adult children of toxic parents were beaten when little or left alone too much, sexually abused or treated like fools, overprotected or overburdened by guilt, they almost all suffer surprisingly similar symptoms: damaged self-esteem, leading to self-destructive behavior. In one way or another, they almost all feel worthless, unlovable, and inadequate.”

— Susan Forward

3. “People can forgive toxic parents, but they should do it at the conclusion – not at the beginning – of their emotional housecleaning. People need to get angry about what happened to them. They need to grieve over the fact that they never had the parental love they yearned for. They need to stop diminishing or discounting the damage that was done to them.”

— Susan Forward

4. “Remember that you always have the right to be treated with respect, and to protest unfair treatment or criticism. It’s vital to reinforce those rights with boundaries.”

— Susan Forward

5. “The “family secret” is a further burden for abused children. By not talking about the abuse, the battered child cuts off any hope of emotional help.”

— Susan Forward

6. “Verbal abuse is as damaging as physical abuse, and in some cases, it does even more damage to a child. Insulting names, degrading comments and constant criticism all leave deep emotional scars that hinder feelings of self-worth and personal agency.”

— Susan Forward

7. “Children soak up both verbal and nonverbal messages like sponges – indiscriminately. They listen to their parents, they watch their parents, and they imitate their parents’ behavior. Because they have little frame of reference outside the family, the things they learn at home about themselves and others become universal truths engraved deeply in their minds.”

— Susan Forward

8. “What is so distressing about the use of denial as a tactic is that you are left with nothing to deal with. It creates a sense of desperate frustration. There is no way to resolve a problem with someone who denies the existence of certain events and who insists that what you know to be real never happened.”

— Susan Forward

9. “The misogynist genuinely believes that his rage toward his partner is due to her deficiencies. It is easier for him to attack her than to deal with the real sources of his rage. He feels justified in acting out rage on women. Part of this justification may come from his experiences at home as a child, but a great deal of it comes directly from our culture.”

— Susan Forward

10. “Like a chemical toxin, the emotional damage inflicted by these parents spreads throughout a child’s being, and as the child grows, so does the pain.”

— Susan Forward

11. “It’s amazing how people can change behind closed doors.”

— Susan Forward

12. “An unpredictable parent is a fearsome god in the eyes of a child.”

— Susan Forward

13. “Most people expect that a woman who is being mistreated by her partner will pull away from him. However, in a misogynistic partnership, just the opposite happens. Nothing bonds a woman to a misogynist more addictively than his swings back and forth between love and abuse.”

— Susan Forward

14. “As long as you continue to react so strongly to them, you give them the power to upset you, which allows them to control you.”

— Susan Forward

15. “But the misogynist can get very mad over virtually nothing. He explodes over the most insignificant events. He exaggerates, he maximizes – he makes mountains out of molehills. Perhaps his partner forgot to pick up the dry-cleaning, or the toast came out too dark, or maybe they ran out of toilet paper. He treats her momentary fall from grace as if it were a federal crime.”

— Susan Forward

16. “Repressed rage can be one of the major sources of stress to the body. In fact, it can actually begin to wear the body out. Rather than deal with their unacceptable rage at their partners, many women unconsciously redirect their anger inward, back onto themselves. The more a woman does this, the more internal damage she is likely to do to herself.”

— Susan Forward

17. “All of us develop our expectations about how people will treat us based on our relationships with our parents.”

— Susan Forward

18. “The misogynist use either direct control or indirect control to gain his objective. He may directly state, plead, or demand that you give up a job, a class, or a friendship, or he may begin to attack indirectly those areas that are threatening to him, making it so miserable for you to continue with them that you give them up just to keep the peace. But, no matter what method your partner uses, the result is the same: You have seriously limited your world to suit his needs.”

— Susan Forward

19. “You can learn, but you’ve got to give yourself time to pick up the basics, to practice, and maybe even to fail once or twice.”

— Susan Forward

20. “It is behavior, not words, that has the greatest impact on a child. When a mother tells her daughter not to allow a man to control her or abuse her and then models the opposite in her own relationship with her husband, the girl will respond only to the behavioral message, not the verbal one.”

— Susan Forward

21. “As you gain more control over your past and present relationship with your parents, you will discover that your other relationships, especially your relationship with yourself, will improve dramatically. You will have the freedom, perhaps for the first time, to enjoy your own life.”

— Susan Forward

22. “The only way emotional assaults or physical abuse can make sense to a child is if he or she accepts responsibility for the toxic parent’s behavior.”

— Susan Forward

23. “Inherent in his fear of this dependency is the equally dreadful fear that she will leave him. His terrors of being alone, of being unable to cope, and of being overwhelmed by an insatiable neediness all grip him again. Chronologically he is an adult, but psychologically he is still a frightened child.”

— Susan Forward

24. “Yet if there’s one thing I know with absolute certainty, both personally and professionally, it is this: Nothing will change in our lives until we change our own behavior. Insight won’t do it. Understanding why we do the self-defeating things we do won’t make us stop doing them. Nagging and pleading with the other person to change won’t do it. We have to act. We have to take the first step down a new road.”

— Susan Forward

25. “When you are reactive, you are dependent on the approval of others. You feel good about yourself only when no one disagrees with you, criticizes you, or disapproves of you. Your feelings are often far out of proportion to the events that evoked them. You’ll perceive a small suggestion as a personal attack; a minor constructive criticism as a personal failure. Without the approval of others, you have a hard time maintaining even minimal emotional stability.”

— Susan Forward

26. “Instead, incest occurs in families where there is a great deal of emotional isolation, secrecy, neediness, stress, and lack of respect. In many ways incest can be viewed as part of a total family breakdown. But it is the aggressor and the aggressor alone who commits the sexual violence. Tracy described what it was like in her house:.”

— Susan Forward

27. “When your lover is a liar, you and he have a lot in common, you’re both lying to you!”

— Susan Forward

28. “Incest is almost always a devastating experience for the victim.”

— Susan Forward

29. “The family drama may look and sound different from generation to generation, but all toxic patterns are remarkably similar in their outcome: pain and suffering.”

— Susan Forward

30. “I also believe that forgiveness is appropriate only when parents do something to earn it. Toxic parents, especially the more abusive ones, need to acknowledge what happened, take responsibility, and show a willingness to make amends. If you unilaterally absolve parents who continue to treat you badly, who deny much of your reality and feelings, and who continue to project blame onto you, you may seriously impede the emotional work you need to do.”

— Susan Forward

31. “The incest victim’s need for self-punishment often leads her into self-abusive behaviors like alcoholism, drug abuse, or prostitution.”

— Susan Forward

32. “Abused children have a caldron of rage bubbling inside them. You can’t be battered, humiliated, terrified, denigrated, and blamed for your own pain without getting angry. But a battered child has no way to release this anger. In adulthood, that anger has to find an outlet.”

— Susan Forward

33. “No matter how toxic your parents might be, you still have a need to deify them. Even if you understand, on one level, that your father was wrong to beat you, you may still believe he was justified. Intellectual understanding is not enough to convince your emotions that you were not responsible.”

— Susan Forward

34. “Our culture and our religions are almost unanimous in upholding the omnipotence of parental authority.”

— Susan Forward

35. “Loving behavior doesn’t grind you down, keep you off balance, or create feelings of self-hatred. Love doesn’t hurt, it feels good. Loving behavior nourishes your emotional well-being. When someone is being loving to you, you feel accepted, cared for, valued, and respected. Genuine love creates feelings of warmth, pleasure, safety, stability, and inner peace.”

— Susan Forward

36. “Children growing up in alcoholic homes are buffeted by unpredictable and volatile circumstances and personalities. In reaction, they often grow up with an overpowering need to control everything and everyone in their lives.”

— Susan Forward

37. “What makes a controlling parent so insidious is that the domination usually comes in the guise of concern. Phrases such as, “this is for your own good,” “I’m only doing this for you,” and, “only because I love you so much,” all mean the same thing: “I’m doing this because I’m so afraid of losing you that I’m willing to make you miserable.”

— Susan Forward

38. “Women who were unprotected as children don’t believe they are worthy of love – on an unconscious level, they believe that if they were, their mothers wouldn’t have allowed them to be hurt. “I don’t trust that anything good will happen for me,” a woman who was an unprotected child tells herself.”

— Susan Forward

39. “A man who is raised by a misogynistic father can absorb his father’s contempt for women very early in life. The boy learns that a man must always be in control of women and that the way to get that control is to scare them, hurt them, and demean them. At the same time, he learns that the one sure way to get his father’s approval is to behave as his father does.”

— Susan Forward

40. “When Sandy said, “My parents don’t know how to love me,” she was saying that they don’t know how to behave in loving ways. If you were to ask Sandy’s parents, or almost any other toxic parents, if they love their children, most of them would answer emphatically that they do. Yet, sadly, most of their children have always felt unloved. What toxic parents call “love” rarely translates into nourishing, comforting behavior.”

— Susan Forward

41. “You are learning to trust your own perception of reality. You will discover that even when your parents don’t agree with you or don’t approve of what you’re doing, you will be able to tolerate the anxiety because you don’t need their validation anymore. You are becoming self-defined.”

— Susan Forward

42. “The physical and emotional distress that result from incurring the misogynist’s displeasure can be so painful that women will do virtually anything to avoid it, including tolerate their partner’s irrational behavior.”

— Susan Forward

43. “Children from high-drama households often grow up with the idea that tension is an integral part of love. Therefore, the girl who grows up in a high-drama family is an ideal partner for the charismatic, explosive misogynist. The fighting, the tension, and the drama are “normal” and familiar to her. She views the swings from despair to joy, from love to hate, from abuse to intense lovemaking as proof of love.”

— Susan Forward

44. “A woman who submits to her husband’s abusive treatment is living out the role of victim and behaving more like a helpless child than an adult. She relinquishes the entire adult field to her husband, leaving her children with only one grown-up to deal with: Father. As we have seen, Father can be a very scary person. When Mother abdicates her adult role, she not only deprives her children of a strong maternal figure, but she leaves them with no one to protect them from their father.”

— Susan Forward

45. “Many people are frightened to take a look at the forces that shaped their characters and their backgrounds, believing that the past should be buried and that looking back might mean wallowing in self-pity and old wounds. But self-discovery can open up exciting new choices and options for us. The more we understand what shaped us as individuals, the more tools we have to free ourselves from behaviors that no longer work for us.”

— Susan Forward

46. “When a woman believes that there is a magic key, she is likely to expend all her energy in the fruitless task of trying to find it, and in the process she relinquishes her right to good treatment. Because her emotional well-being is tied to her partner’s mercurial moods, she loses her ability to act in her own best interest’s, to be assertive, and to have confidence in her decisions.”

— Susan Forward

47. “Children have a right to be children. They have a right to spend their early years being playful, spontaneous, and irresponsible.”

— Susan Forward

48. “Secrets help toxic parents cope by turning their families into private little clubs to which no outsiders are admitted.”

— Susan Forward

49. “Denial is the lid on our emotional pressure cooker: the longer we leave it on, the more pressure we build up. Sooner or later, that pressure is bound to pop the lid, and we have an emotional crisis.”

— Susan Forward

50. “In fact, not only have a good many formerly abused children grown into nonabusing adults, but a number of these parents have great difficulty with even modest, nonphysical methods of disciplining their children. In rebellion against the pain of their own childhoods, these parents shy away both from setting limits and from enforcing them. This, too, can have a negative impact on a child’s development, because children need the security of boundaries.”

— Susan Forward