How To Deal With Toxic & Emotionally Abusive Parents – Shaykh Omar Suleiman

How do I remain obedient to emotionally abusive parents?

Welcome to faith IQ, a web series that goes into exploring questions that you guys submit about Islam. Before we begin, if this is your first time here, make sure you hit that subscribe button up top and hit that notification bell. So you are notified as to when our next videos are up. So today's video, we have shakaama live man here to help us address and explore the question of how do you deal with or how do you be obedient to to emotionally abusive parents? Now, before you answer the question, I want you to help us first qualify, because a lot of times what somebody might be like, Oh, that's emotionally abusive, may not be there, just you know, scolding them, right. versus

something actually being emotionally abusive. So if you can help clarify and define qualifying what that means, I think that, you know, these terms are in need of being qualified. And they're also a case by case. So sometimes there are people that are verbally abusive, but you know, there's a fine line between someone who's being a jerk and someone who's actually like hurting and harming and causing serious harm with their words. I think that you start from the place that, you know, it's become really hard to talk about these issues in public, because everyone has a very personal story, a little story, and they hear a football about obedience to parents, and they say, what about

emotional abuse? Yeah, well, the father and the sooner addressing the default, which is that Allah has given the parents a right over the child. Yeah, particular honor over the child, just like the default is that they brought you into this world. And so they have rights over you and honor them. And that's something that we should take seriously. But the exceptions are there. Yeah. And like there's a story from on top of the law and who are young man was brought by His Father, and the Father was complaining about him. And then the young men actually had his own grievances normal the law and who said that, you know, the father had had hurt him or forgone his rights before he could

have any rights clean back from him. So okay, there are terms there are times where even in the center for the price predecessors, someone like, Bob where, you know, he's like, Well, no, you have no right to complain about your child because of what you've done to your child. Right. So the best way to deal with this is usually for someone to actually look at both talk to both parties, okay. And to see, you know, where the lines have been crossed. So there's got to be a detailed look, because, cuz somebody might be like, Oh, my parents are being emotionally abusive, but then it's a question of like,

maybe a child, maybe it is abuse if a child has never been scolded in their life before? No, and they're right. But there aren't, you don't want to diminish emotional abuse, emotional abuse can even be worse than physical abuse. Well, what are some cases that you've kind of come across? where something is like, Oh, yeah, this was emotionally abusive? Well, sometimes a parent constantly making remarks about their child's weight, okay, to a point that they're calling them names, calling them you know, okay, basically make it like, they might not actually be fat or obese, especially in the case of women. Right. And like, there are a lot of parents that are really insensitive, and that

go on their go on their kids, and there's just really, really too much with it. Right? So they're gonna make comments about their food and make comments about their appearance, and no one's ever gonna want to marry you. And no one's all things like that. So those are that's really abusive, that can have serious detrimental effects emotionally, psychologically, and things of that sort. So I feel like the parent or the adult that does that, don't even recognize that they're being abusive, right. So that's why counsel, sometimes they do and some, a lot of times, they think it's actually to the benefit of the child, yeah, taking out frustrations on the child, so

and it just becomes too much for the child to bear. So the child is, in fact, recipient of emotional abuse, but the parents don't recognize that they're doing that. And they think that what they're doing is to the benefit of the child. Now, the end of the day, having counselors and therapists, and people actually sit and sort of sort that all out is something that's very important. There are Islamic guidelines to it. Yeah, Islamic guidelines, sort of guide certain elements. And then there's the psychiatric and the counseling and the therapy part of this, which is like, Okay, if it's reached this point, how do we how do we actually solve this? But the thing though, the challenge,

especially people have an immigrant disposition. Rarely, especially the adults will rarely ever even consider the thought of going to therapy, or going to account. Yeah, so there are there are, there are layers, right, yeah, there is, you know, talking to an aunt or an uncle or someone that can relate that the parents can relate to. Okay, so it doesn't necessarily have to be a professional counselor. Not for every case. Okay. Not for every case. Yeah, I mean, it's ideal, but there's financial cost to that there's time there's getting buy in from everybody. It's hard to get everyone to it. You know, I think we need to remove the stigma around that as a Muslim community, because

that's part of growth is to is to actually have someone help you sort through those types of things. But

yeah, I mean, I think that the point of this is, is certainly that,

you know, you you need to you need to try to find ways to mitigate this as much as you can and have, you know,

I have an aunt and uncle someone step in at least, maybe shatter the

the the idea that I'm doing nothing wrong. Yeah, you know that nothing's abusive about this, I'm not saying anything, you know what, and often, you know, the justification will come, my parents did this to me, right like, like the way I'm talking to my kids, if they saw the way my parents talked to me. And, you know, that's that's not the best way to resolve that's not the litmus test. And sometimes look, sometimes, you know, a child will, will say they're being emotionally abused. And it's not really emotional abuse, right. And that's something that can be,

you know, deciphered once it's sort of all brought out there and serious discussions can happen about it. So I think that the point is, is that,

you know, everyone has a very unique situation. But generally speaking, it's better to solve this, even if a child if a child feels like they're being emotionally abused, even if it's not really emotional abuse, that should be enough to warn a parent willing to sit down with someone to sort of help sort through the situation. Gotcha. Now, there's a, you know, this idea of silica Raheem, right, which is goodness towards parents.

Where does that line begin, and in the context of emotional abuse? Well, if there's an imminent threat, or danger or harm, which is usually in the realm of the physical, right, then that's where, you know, it's permissible as a rockstar for a person to, to its concession to that very particular person to sort of omit that and to do what they have to do to take to take heed and to and to protect themselves. Right.

When it's in the when it's in the realm of the verbal, then, you know, I think, you know, as a child, I still want to fix it with my parents, right, I can't just give up on that, because our relationship is far too sacred. So then the doctrine of silicone hand will be invoked of maintaining ties will be invoked, not to say tolerate the emotional abuse, but try to find a way to make it work with your parents, making them aware of the emotional abuse, and still wanting to honor that link that you have with them. So this will kind of require that there be a healthy level of communication between the parent and child. If that doesn't exist, it's gonna be very difficult to be able to

achieve that though. Right? Yeah. And that's, then that becomes the problem. That's what needs to be alluded to that. Look, we were not able to talk, we're, you know, we're having major communication issues. And again, you're right. You know, a lot a lot in particularly the immigrant community would be really resistant to any type of counseling, like, what do you tell my counselor? Yeah, but I do think that you might be able to find someone sympathetic to you within the family corpus that can that are within the family itself that can then go and talk to that person that at least bring it to a conversation, start the conversation. So essentially, if we were to sum this up, step one would be

to be like, Oh, you know what, this is a problem, right? I'm as a child, I'm affected by this. Can we talk about it? Right? And if you can achieve that, then perhaps there could be

an understanding to be made or to be met, where the parents be like, Hey, you know what, that wasn't nice of you. That wasn't parent parental of me, right.

And so I guess the question now is, for anybody who's going through what they might deem as emotional abuse, the first place to start would be to have that initial conversation, right? Yeah, absolutely. You got to have the initial conversation. Got it. Alright guys, hope you guys found that a value of benefit.

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