Adult Children of Emotionally Abusive Families: Overcoming the Pain, Dysfunction, and Trauma of Growing up in a Toxic Family

A groundbreaking guide from a leading expert on emotional abuse that reveals how one person’s harmful behavior can ripple through an entire family.

From bestselling and internationally recognized expert and therapist Beverly Engel comes Adult Children of Emotionally Abusive Families, the first comprehensive book to explore how emotional abuse doesn’t just affect couples—it shapes entire family systems, often damaging children in ways that last a lifetime. With decades of clinical experience and a compassionate, empowering voice, Engel exposes the unseen epidemic of emotional abuse in families, where tension, control, criticism, and shame become normalized, and every member suffers the consequences.

While emotional abuse is finally being discussed in popular culture, Engel makes the urgent case that we still aren’t talking enough about its impact on children—and how parents, both the abusive and the abused, may be unconsciously perpetuating cycles of harm. Through real-life case studies, questionnaires, checklists, and healing exercises, she provides an accessible roadmap for recognizing toxic dynamics, stopping the spread of abuse, and most important, helping victims who were or are still being emotionally abused by their families to heal.

While a strong and healthy family can provide a sense of protection and security for its children, what happens when, instead of being a port in the storm, families become the storm itself—bombarding the children with constant conflict and trauma? This is what this much-needed book is about.

Whether you witnessed your parents emotionally abusing one another, are a victim of an emotionally abusive parent, or the victim of a sibling who passed the abuse on to you, Adult Children of Emotionally Abusive Families will offer you the support, validation and concrete tools you so desperately need in order to heal. And if you are an abusive or abused parent or sibling who passed the abuse on to others in your family, this book will offer you compassion and understanding to help you begin to make changes that can alter your life and the lives of those in your family.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press Essentials