A parent who keeps hurting youStep 1 of 8

Before you read on

Read this first. Some of what gets called a difficult parent is not difficult, it is dangerous, and this course is the wrong one for it. If you are frightened of a parent or a relative, if you have been threatened, if someone is holding your passport or your documents, if you are being pressured into a marriage or threatened over travel or marriage, if someone controls your money so that you cannot leave, if a child in the family is being harmed, or if you are having thoughts of not wanting to be alive, then stop here. Go to the course called When home is not safe, and reach a service today. Forced marriage and honour based harm need a service that handles exactly that, not a general counselling line. Nothing here is scored, and nobody is being told what is happening to them.

Lesson 1 of 6

Difficult, and then the other thing

Every parent is difficult sometimes. Every family has a version of the same argument that comes back at every wedding. That is not what this course is about, and if that is what you have, you probably do not need it.

This is about something narrower. A parent whose behaviour towards you has a shape to it. Where the same thing happens in the same order, year after year, and you come away from it smaller.

The hardest part is that it usually has no single incident you could point to. Nothing you could describe to a friend that would sound like anything. That is not because it is not happening. It is because the parts that do the damage are the parts that leave nothing to show anyone.