NOTE: Course discontinued due to insufficient registration.
Get the Tools and Support You Need
to Free Yourself from the Harm of Family Toxicity
This self-paced course will guide you through actions that you can take to improve your relationships, confront toxic families, and escape the cycles of toxicity and abuse.
You'll learn how to:
- Recognize toxic and abusive family behaviors
- Communicate openly and honestly with family
- Assert your needs and boundaries effectively
- Create distance between yourself and your abusers
- Decide whether zero contact is right for you and how to implement it
- Build healthy support systems, friend groups, and new relationships
While addressing abuse from those most trusted in your life is never easy, this class will give you tools to help you begin the process of setting boundaries, standing up for yourself, and fostering healthy relationships.
SCHOLARSHIP FUND
If you cannot afford the full course cost, we’ve set aside $1 out of every $4 into a Scholarship Fund. So if you think the course can make a difference in your life, cost doesn’t need to be a barrier!
This Course Includes:
From the Course Leader
Abuse of any kind has lasting consequences. I’m living proof. When the abuse comes from the people in our lives on whom we’ve depended for support, safety, and sustenance, we’re left wondering whether to make excuses or just give in and accept it. I did both for decades. I’m here to tell you that we each owe it to ourselves to speak up against abuse and work to end it.
I designed this course from a place of distance from my own abuse, where speaking up about toxic families no longer carries as much fear and worry as it once did. It’s with that clarity that I can say that the lies we learned from abusers, especially as children, are deeply damaging and more indicative of our abusers’ faults than any of our own. They’ve taught us that toxicity is normal. It’s not.
We took that false narrative, the idea that we deserved mistreatment, and carried it from frightened childhoods into burdened adulthoods. I know that while living with abuse it’s hard to envision a life without it, and that even after the worst is over it’s hard to believe that we’ll ever really escape. But this course will help you understand that freedom from toxicity is real and possible. It will also help you to determine for yourself what that freedom looks like for you.
This course will help you…
- Speak up when you’ve been hurt
- Have your emotions heard and validated
- Set up boundaries between yourself and your abusers
- Control who is allowed into your life
- Walk away whenever you need to
I can think now of all the times in my life when I wouldn’t have given a course like this a chance. Seeing it on this side of the computer screen has shown me why I should have. If you’re currently in a toxic situation, if you’ve been stuck there in the past, if you think nothing will change; this is the course for you. And I’ll do my best to make it speak directly to you.
Register now to reserve your spot and join an amazing community of feminists working together toward healing.
I’ll see you on the inside!
Miranda
MIRANDA JAYNE BOYD
Course Leader
Miranda Jayne Boyd is a writer, activist, and musician. They’re also an abuse survivor. They believe in the right of everyone to avoid harm, especially at the hands of family, and their articles on navigating zero contact with family have been read and shared by tens of thousands of readers. They also manage the weirdest little shop in Las Vegas.
Ready to get the support you deserve
to heal and break the cycle of toxicity?
The Course Action Plan
Introduction
The first step to any healing is naming the problem. What harm has the abuse caused? These issues are deeply rooted in the destruction of self-esteem caused by familial abuse.
As an introduction to the process of escaping abuse, this section will help you understand that you are not alone in your experiences, you aren’t the only one who’s faced toxicity and abuse, and you too can overcome it just like we have.
Here’s what we’ll go over:
- A broad look at what constitutes abuse in families.
- How you too can regain your sense of self-worth.
- A call to examine your own life, both as a child and an adult, and think deeply about what you want out of this course and your own, less toxic, future.
Module 1 – Recognizing Toxicity and Abuse
Some forms of abuse are easier to recognize than others. Physical violence is usually obvious. Subtler toxic behaviors like gaslighting, neglect, and covert incest are insidious in their implementation and effects.
This section will examine some common types of toxic behaviors in families, then begin to explain how such behaviors can be overcome.
We’ll look at:
- Common types of abuse that show up in toxic families.
- The difference between physical, emotional, and psychological violence and the effects each play on the adult.
- How supposedly innocuous things like political and social views can still be abuse.
- Learning how to recognize these tactics in the moment and years after the fact.
Module 2 – How is the Impact of the Toxicity Showing Up in your Life?
It’s easy to say that toxicity is harmful. I say it about a thousand times throughout this course. What’s more complicated is looking honestly at ourselves to see how we’ve been affected by the hurtful events of our past.
This section is all about the inner questions we have to ask in order to assess where we are now and where we want to be. It will also address one of the most crushing aspects of coping with abuse and toxicity: guilt.
What you’ll do:
- Take a blunt look at self-esteem.
- Develop an understanding of how mental illnesses including depression and anxiety are directly related to the realities of being an abuse survivor.
- Gain some tools on how to deal with guilt.
- Create a call to preserve future relationships by not self-sabotaging or continuing abusive cycles.
Module 3 – You Deserve to Be Happy and Loved
To someone who’s suffered abuse, believing that we deserve to be happy is an uphill battle. It took me years to relearn to love myself.
This section will help to show you that you do indeed deserve to be happy and that beliefs about your own value have been misshaped by people who had no right to do so. It will also highlight ways to reclaim control over your own happiness and self-image.
We’ll explore:
- Where the false images started so we can reshape them more positively.
- Means of mitigating triggers that cause anxiety and pain.
- Practical solutions to feelings like guilt, mistrust, and isolation.
Module 4 – Navigating Contact with Toxic Family Members
You get to control with whom you have contact and how much contact they’re granted. Even when toxic family members push back and intentionally push buttons, even when people argue that you owe it to your family to shut up; you have every right to control your life.
When you’re ready to confront your family, this sections will help provide you tools to say what you need, mean what you say, and move on from the confrontations with confidence in that control.
We’ll come up with:
- A guide to setting up self-protection such as escape plans, outside resources, and physical boundaries.
- A prep kit for blowback and aggressive reactions from family.
- Techniques for staying on topic and now allowing family members to derail the dialog through continual abusive techniques.
Module 5 – Navigating Zero Contact
Some toxic family members will never change. Some will escalate to even harsher levels of violence. Sometimes zero contact is the only option, and that’s OK. You don’t owe anyone a place in your life when they continually betray that trust.
This section will help you determine whether zero contact is a solution for you, how to put your well-being ahead of guilt, how to decide whether to explain that decision to others, and how to execute whatever actions you need to take.
We’ll explore:
- Truth about what zero contact means and what it doesn’t mean.
- How to know whether zero contact is the right move for you.
- What zero contact is really like, from my own experience.
Module 6 – Building a Community of Support
Whether you want to make a clean break or just find moments of respite, having a support system outside of your toxic family is invaluable. This could be friends, other family members, significant others, professional counselors, all of those, or anyone else who enriches your life.
This section will help you find and/or build support through community and professional sources and will show you why such support is so necessary.
I’ll give you:
- A guide to finding the right counselor or professional resource.
- A statement about the importance of friend groups and created families.
- Ideas about how to determine which family members are trustworthy and which ones will follow the examples set by your abusers.
Whether you choose no contact or some contact, confrontation or just understanding, this course is designed to help you make the right decisions for you. You’ll come away from this reading and these assignments with a greater appreciation for what you deserve from family relationships and what you deserve from yourself. No matter your decisions, you have the right to control who you let in your life and how you react to toxic families.
Still not sure if this course is right for you?
OUR 30-DAY
100% RISK-FREE
GUARANTEE
We really want to make sure that this course is working for you.
If you find that it’s not, you can get a full refund anytime within the first 30 days of the course just by letting us know. So there’s no risk to enrolling now and getting the support you deserve!
Pre-Register Today
Just $97
Frequently Asked Questions
Still have questions? Here are answers to some common ones, but contact us if you have others!
When can I access the course?
The course launches on January 16th, 2018, so pre-register to reserve your spot!
How will I access everything?
After signing up, you will receive an email within a hour providing directions on how to access the course intranet on the Everyday Feminism website. From within the course intranet, you will be able to do everything – from accessing the course modules to contacting the course leader. Your access never expires to the course so you can come back whenever you need support.
Will I get all the course modules at once or one at a time?
In order to help you process and apply the course at a reasonable pace, a new module will be released on a weekly basis for eight weeks. We recommend that you spend at least a week on each module but you may find that you need more time. Since the course is self-paced, you can go at whatever pace works best for you!
What do you mean by lifetime access? Will I get access to new updates as they roll out?
Lifetime access means that you will have access to the course for as long as it’s being offered. During this time, you will always been able to access the course modules. This also means if we make any changes and updates to the course in the future, you will have access to them as well.
If I don’t have the extra money to pay for this course right now but I really want to take it, what should I do?
We’ve purposely underpriced this 8-week course at $97 (the equivalent of just $12 per week!) to make it more financially accessible. However, we understand that within our community, even $12 per week may be too much for some.
So here are some ways to manage the fee and still access the course:
- Pay in 3 monthly installments of $33: If you can’t pay the full price all at once, you can pay it in 3 installments. Click here to do so.
- Refer someone: If you refer someone to the course who signs up, have them tell us via the Contact Us form. You’ll get 25% of the fee refunded to you. So if you get 4 friends to join you, you get the course for free! Note that this also retroactive, so it’s ok if you’ve already signed-up, you’ll still get the discount!
- Apply for a scholarship: As part of our commitment to social justice and accessibility, Everyday Feminism has a scholarship fund that receives $1 of every $4 earned from course sales. Click here to learn more.
I’ve taken another Everyday Feminism course. Do I get a repeat customer discount?
Yes, we do give a 15% repeat customer discount as our thank you! If you’ve enrolled in one of other online courses and are enrolling in a new one, please let us know via the Contact Us form. We’ll email you back to confirm that we’re refunding you 15% of the course fee.
Is the course accessible for people with a hearing impairment?
Yes, it is – the entire course is text-based.
Can I take this course instead of getting one-on-one therapy?
The course is not intended to replace therapy sessions with a licensed counselor or psychologist since it is an online course with limited individual support. If you currently are in therapy, this course can be a strong complement and we recommend you discuss it with your therapist before enrolling to see if it’s a good match.
How does the 30-day money-back guarantee work?
We want to make sure that this course is right for you. And if you find that it’s not, you can get a full refund anytime within the first 30 days of the course just by letting us know.