You can divorce an abusive spouse. You can call it quits if your lover mistreats you. But what can you do if the main source of your misery is your parents? No parent is perfect. But just as there are ordinary good-enough parents who mysteriously produce a difficult child, there are some decent people who have the misfortune of having really horrible parents.

As a therapist, I’m sometimes perplexed as to how to best serve people who have parents like this. While it’s usually wise to try and salvage relationships, what about those that are really harmful? And what about when it’s your relationship with parents? Yikes!

If you wonder if your parents are truly horrible or merely slightly unkind, I suggest you keep an open mind and consider whether maintaining a relationship with them is really good for you at this point in your life. As a child, you had no choice, but now, when you do have a choice, should you let go of toxic parents?

I recently read a case history of a man in his mid 20s who had come out as gay to his devoutly religious parents. They responded by disowning him and telling him that it would have been better if he, rather than his younger brother, had died in a car accident several years earlier. If you’re like me, your jaw hit the floor as you read that sentence. And yet, this guy still hoped he could get his parents to accept him and his sexuality. As a therapist, what would you do with a client who didn’t want to “give up” on having a relationship with parents like that? If this man were my client, I’d recommend that he consider, at least temporarily, giving up a relationship with such openly cruel parents. I would say he needs to protect himself from the psychological harm they inflict.

On the other hand, parent-child relationships are rarely all good or bad; even the most abusive parents can sometimes be loving, which is why severing a bond with your parents – no matter how horrible they are – is bound to be tough. However, if this guy were my client I would work with him to see the psychological cost of maintaining a relationship with such awful parents and urge him to take better care of himself

It’s hard to let go of our parents, no matter how horrible they are. As children, we are hard-wired to bond with our parents; it’s how we survive. Even if our parents are awful, we depend on them for our survival, so we’ll often do anything we can to stay “connected”. Unfortunately, involvement with these kinds of parents can be traumatic, especially when we are children. And research shows that prolonged childhood trauma can be toxic to the brain, e.g., prolonged stress can kill cells in the hippocampus, a brain area critical for memory. Having horrible parents may be harmful to our brain, not just hurt our feelings.

We can’t undo history, but we can remove ourselves from destructive relationships. Therapy helps us heal, as does talking with friends we trust and relatives who can give us some insight about our parents and our childhood. Neurobiology gives us more reasons to be optimistic: We can, in essence, “rewire our brain” by having positive, loving experiences as adults that create new neural pathways in our brain that will eventually replace the old neural pathways that our horrible parents may have created. The bad news: Horrible parents are damaging, both psychologically and physiologically. The good news: Much of this damage can be undone.