Thank Your Wicked Parents has at its core a shocking but undeniable truth:
Some parents are wicked and repeatedly lash their helpless children with abuse
and humiliation. Other parents, while not intentionally malicious, nevertheless fail
to provide their family with the loving kindness that they need and deserve. But the
author also offers a positive message: While uncaring, cruel parents can’t change
the long history of their abuse, grown-up children should not only let the misery
of the past go, but also learn from the lessons that their parents unintentionally
taught them through their actions. In other words, the pain of the past can be
transformed into blessings.
A unique book, Thank Your Wicked Parents is intended to offend abusive parents
and, more important, to provide their adult children with a new perspective on the
past and a path to a far brighter future.

Richard Bachis the author of seventeen books, including Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions, and The Bridge Across Forever. His works have been translated into over forty languages throughout the world, and have sold in the tens of millions. His focus is on ideas that have the power to change the world.

Foreword

Aren't you the adventurer, dear reader, to open this book no matter the title says, "Look out!"

The reason you've done this mad thing is that it's time to remember that there's no such thing as a disaster which doesn't have a blessing right close alongside.

No, such, thing.

Even when we've been helpless children at the mercy of parents who haven't a trace of caring for us, who lash us over and again with abuse and humiliation, they're lashing with lessons they don't imagine.

Who decides our disaster's a blessing?

We do.

Who proves that's true?

Us.

It's ever been so--we can let justice destroy us, become victims of our tests, or we can determine not to let that happen. Ever.

How can we do such a thing?

Simple, and just this side of impossible--we follow the example of children who've done it before us. That is:

We live prayers of stubborn defiant gratitude, unending prayer-in-action till disaster's a memory.

Sometimes our gratitudes are hissed through clenched teeth, sometimes a curse or two added to make us smile at our courage, but prayers they be, not frightened requests but affirmations of victory in the midst of fire around us.

Here are a few children's prayers of gratitude (expletitves deleted) that for centuries have changed the lives of those who decided to become undestroyed.

Some parents drive us crazy, for instance, with wordplay: They know that "mother" means "biological parent" and it also means "loving nuturing caring female caretaker of her children." What's a kid to say, then, while he's getting beaten senseless by his biological parent and she screams, "Why can't you love your mother?"

That's worth breathing a prayer: "Thank you for whipping me into understanding the richness of our language."

Trust your children, one day, to remind you of other prayers you haven't considered. And bless the day you'll find their page:

"Thanks for looking out for me when I was helpless, and for always seeing the best in me, so that I'll spend my life ever your friend."

-- RB