If You Had Controlling Parents

by Dan Neuharth

  Childlike. Feeling incapable or needy, Childlike parents offer their children little protection. Childlike parents, woefully uncomfortable with themselves, encourage their children to take care of them, thereby controlling through role reversal.

  Of course, most controlling parents are a combination of styles, with one, two, or three predominating. My father, for example, was a Perfectionistic-Cultlike-Using parent. And, as you will shortly discover, certain style combinations tend to go together—both within an individual parent as well as between controllers who marry.

  Next: Portraits

  The next chapters contain portraits of adults who grew up with parents having at least one of these eight styles. By matching your experiences against theirs, you can see your family’s early atmosphere more lucidly.

  Recognizing these controlling styles can also help you to identify your internalized parents—the “inner critics” we all carry in our heads. In Part Two we’ll revisit these eight styles and use them to help you free yourself from your inner critics.

  You might also notice whether one or more of these eight styles strikes a chord in the way you, in your worst moments, relate to others. Recognizing these unwelcome inheritances will enable you to dismantle those emotional land mines left over from early control.

  2

  SMOTHERING PARENTING Life Under a Microscope

  You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And I should die there smothered.

  —D. H. LAWRENCE

  Key Characteristics of Smothering Parents:

  Control through overbearing scrutiny

  Fear rejection or being alone

  Cannot differentiate between their own wants and those of their children

  Discourage their children’s individuality

  Potential Consequences of a Smothering Upbringing:

  Lack of healthy interpersonal boundaries

  Difficulty with intimacy and commitment

  Intense dependency

  Poor body image

  Reduced initiative

  Slight, porcelain-skinned Margaret, a thirty-three-year-old attorney specializing in family law, grew up with a lawyer father who loved heated discussions, always insisting that Margaret argue with him and defend her positions. Unfortunately, he never allowed her to win, badgering her until she capitulated.

  At age nine, Margaret began reading a book about a veterinarian, which her father covertly confiscated since he wanted her to be a doctor, not a vet. When Margaret asked where the book had gone, her father responded with, “What book?” When she was twelve, Margaret developed a taste for bland foods—vanilla ice cream, white bread, and potatoes—so her father endlessly shoved the spicy foods he preferred under her nose. As sixteen-year-old Margaret was writing her college application essays, her father grabbed them, read them disapprovingly, sat down at the kitchen table, and rewrote them. When seventeen-year-old Margaret was packing for college, her father began yanking clothes out of her suitcase, telling her exactly what and how to pack.

  Feeling overscrutinized is the hallmark of growing up with a Smothering parent. While Smothering parents can seem incredibly caring, their form of love can breed unhealthy dependence. The endless attention they bestow has its price, for when a Smothering parent is always there for the child, the unspoken agreement is that the child will always be there for the parent.

  Smothering parents seem unable to see their children as separate human beings but, rather, see them as worlds to be controlled. Therapists call Smothering households “enmeshed,” full of what family therapy pioneer Murray Bowen called emotional “stuck-togetherness” or what author Jane Middleton-Moz has termed emotional “superglue.” At their core, Smothering parents cannot let their children be independent because it reminds them of the fact that their children will eventually grow up and pursue their own lives. This prospect leaves many in-your-face parents feeling abandoned and invalidated.

  Margaret recalls, “My father had this uncanny way of questioning, of saying, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure?’ You couldn’t say no. After all, as a lawyer he convinced people for a living.” Margaret coped by mentally replaying conversations with her father every night. “I’d lay in bed and tell him off, telling him that this was counterproductive to my growing up. But I would never dissent out loud.”

  Margaret acknowledges that her father, who had Perfectionistic as well as Smothering characteristics, may have had good intentions. But his heavy-handed actions, like rewriting her college application essays or repacking her bags, left her feeling like her “feet had been chopped off.”

  Uniform Feelings

  While some parents, like Margaret’s dad, want their children to mimic their thoughts, others focus on uniformity of feelings.

  Sharon, a thirty-one-year-old graduate student, grew up under the emotional thumb of her father, David, a Jewish Holocaust survivor. David was a newborn when his parents managed to get him to a Catholic orphanage just before they were sent to concentration camps. Miraculously, both parents survived, although they became estranged, and David’s mother subsequently found him. For years David’s parents passed him back and forth, even resorting to abduction. Perhaps as a result, David could not stand for his own child to be out of his sight. “Even when I was four or five he carried me around like I was a baby,” Sharon says.

  This intense attention was not always positive. In her adolescence Sharon’s father called her “Buck Teeth” and told her, “Your thighs are as big as mine.” He defended his remarks as “good character-building.”

  At sixteen, after her parents divorced, Sharon confided to her father that she was having a hard time adjusting to her new stepmother; her dad became furious and branded her “self-centered.”

  It wasn’t until years later that Sharon realized her Smothering father was self-absorbed. “He has this chasm in him: people in blackness, screaming, climbing walls, being gassed. I have it too. It is in our psyche. But because he has this pain inside him he thinks that nobody else’s pain is as great. He could never hear me out when I felt hurt.”

  In the midst of a divorce when she was interviewed, Sharon had often picked controlling men as partners. “My heart just opens to men, like it did to my dad, and I get taken advantage of,” she admits.

  I do not minimize the trauma of the Holocaust or the legacy of emotional difficulty facing survivors and their descendants. That Sharon is suffering the impact of the Holocaust a half century later is testimony to the enduring potency of that trauma. For Sharon’s father, like many other Holocaust survivors, generating life through child raising became a sacred pursuit. As one Holocaust survivor told The New York Times on the fiftieth anniversary of the death camp liberations, “Our vengeance was rebuilding life” through children.

  When Sharon’s father sought to “rebuild life,” the uncertainty and horror of his crucial early years, as well as his parents’ ongoing rift, almost certainly led him to focus intently on his daughter in an effort to protect her. Perhaps David, having lived as an orphan until age four, was also unconsciously trying to live out through his daughter the childhood he had never had. Unfortunately, his grip was too tight for Sharon’s optimal emotional development.

  Uniform Siblings

  While some Smothering parents control their children’s thoughts or feelings, others make their children conform to each other. Boys and girls in many large but non-Smothering families sometimes feel they’re just faces in the crowd. Smothering families take this conformity to extremes.

  Colleen, a thirty-three-year-old graduate student, is the oldest of seven children from an Irish-Catholic family. She vividly recalls being fourteen and sitting in her assigned seat at the family dinner table. Her father would signal each child in turn to report on what had happened at school that day. If one refused, none could talk. Though her parents may have had egalitarian aims, Colleen felt trapped in a tyranny of sameness. On family car outings, when any of the children misbehaved, her father hit whoever was closest,
whether that child had misbehaved or not. If the innocent victim protested, Colleen’s father would say, “Who cares? You all need to behave.”

  This conformity left Colleen feeling devalued. “Who we were wasn’t important. All that mattered was how we fit into the family,” Colleen said. “We were all just nobody special.”

  Yet in ways never acknowledged by her Smothering parents, some differences were allowed, and even fostered. Her brothers’ activities received more attention than Colleen’s or her sisters’: “My parents went to my brothers’ hockey games but never came to my basketball games. I felt like one of the things most snuffed out was my feminine side. My parents acted like the only way to be valuable was to be like a man.”

  In her adult life Colleen has found it difficult to express her feelings or honor her intuition. She has repeatedly found herself in struggles with authority figures and has been unable to sustain a long-term intimate relationship.

  Uniform Values

  Some Smothering parents become overbearing in encouraging their children to adopt their values.

  At age six, Cui, now a twenty-seven-year-old sales representative, lay in bed reciting her multiplication tables as her father stood over her. This nightly ritual was part of her immigrant Chinese parents’ campaign to stress academic achievement. During grade school, whenever Cui’s mother’s friends visited, her Smothering, Using mother would hustle Cui off to her room to retrieve her awards for academic excellence.

  “Mom used me as a showcase for her friends,” Cui recalls. “I was like the chess-champion daughter in The Joy Luck Club who was forced to play and was valued only when she won. When I saw that movie, I started crying during the opening titles and didn’t stop until after the closing credits.”

  Cui was raised with the expectation that she would become a doctor. But when she told her parents during her sophomore year at Princeton that her premed grades weren’t high enough, her parents were crestfallen. Within minutes her mother brightened and said, “Okay, then you’ll be a lawyer!”

  Smothering parents are unaware of how little they see their children as separate. They easily make incursions into their children’s lives because they do not see their actions as intrusive. Cui says, “I got strokes for external accomplishments, never just for being the person I am. I feel like I have lived my life to please others.”

  Both Cui’s parents came to the United States in their teens, cut off from their families, after narrowly escaping from China before the 1949 civil war broke out. Their struggle to fit into American culture is familiar to many immigrant and multi-ethnic families. In addition, in the Chinese culture great value is placed on academic achievement, and individual freedom and responsibility is viewed differently than it is in American culture. But in their efforts to adopt American values, Cui’s parents lost sight of their daughter’s needs.

  Uniform Lifestyle

  While Cui’s parents pressured her to adopt certain values, other Smothering parents pressure their children not to, even when those values reflect what is deepest in a child’s heart.

  Sally, a thirty-five-year-old computer programmer, recalls the time when as a college sophomore she was pulling her Volkswagen beetle into her family’s driveway during spring break. Her father came out to help her unload her luggage and, noticing a pink triangle bumper sticker, asked what it meant. As she carried in her suitcase, she told him that the pink triangle was a symbol of lesbian and gay liberation. Returning to continue unloading, Sally found her father scraping the sticker off her car, telling her, “That’s not the kind of thing you want on your car. The kind of attention it will attract, you don’t want.”

  “That was my coming out,” recalls Sally, who’d known she was a lesbian since she was thirteen, but had not told her parents. Her dad has not mentioned her sexual orientation since the incident. “My father still gives me talks about dating and how I have to get out there to find a good man,” Sally says, smiling.

  Sally’s father had intruded into her business all her life. He insisted she finish her vegetables, serving anything she didn’t eat the next morning, cold, at breakfast; making her eat brussels sprouts was a regular punishment. He would wake Sally each morning, pulling the covers from her if she tried to sleep for a few extra minutes. “He was very invested in his family,” Sally says. “It never felt malicious or malevolent, but we were not supposed to have independent wills. Disagreeing would have meant ‘I don’t love you’ to him.”

  Excessive Scrutiny

  Some Smothering parents scrutinize their children in the most invasive ways possible.

  When forty-eight-year-old social worker Tina was four, her mother thought Tina was too thin, so she hovered over her at mealtimes until she’d finished the huge helpings prepared for her. But when Tina was six, her mother decided her daughter was too fat. She put her on a crash diet and, whenever Tina was outside the home, taped a sign to Tina’s back reading, “Please Do Not Feed Me.”

  Her mother, a nurse, scrutinized Tina’s bodily functions and provided frequent “home remedies”: enemas if Tina had not had a daily bowel movement, douches as early as age nine, and penicillin shots stolen from the hospital at the first sign of Tina’s having a cold or a sniffle. “Growing up was like being a patient in a sick ward,” Tina admits.

  Her mother picked out her daughter’s clothes without consulting her. Tina recalls pictures of herself as a somber little girl with bangs and a turned-up nose, wearing garish outfits four sizes too big. “I was overfed, horribly dressed, had thick glasses, and was very nervous,” Tina remembers. “I’ve seen people in wheelchairs, shrunken and paralyzed, who have a better body image than I had.”

  Like many controlled children, Tina had little privacy. She and her siblings were forbidden to close doors; they showered, used the toilet, and slept, all with the doors open. “It wasn’t until I went away to college that I realized this was not normal.”

  Tina found that it was fruitless to be herself except in her private world of imaginary playmates and someday hopes. The smothering scrutiny in her childhood has translated into an adult feeling of “bottled-upness.” For much of adulthood Tina has lacked confidence in her choices, expected others to think poorly of her, and found it hard to ask for what she wants.

  To Smothering parents, a child’s dissent means rejection, and a child’s independence means “I don’t love you.” Margaret’s mind, Sharon’s feelings, Colleen’s individuality, Cui’s temperament, Sally’s sexual orientation, and Tina’s body were too separate for their parents to tolerate.

  Self-Assessment

  My parent(s):

  Overscrutinized my personal habits

  Did not tolerate differing viewpoints or tastes

  Had trouble coping with strong emotions

  Tried to dictate my career and life choices

  Seemed to have difficulty being alone

  Next: Depriving Parenting

  While Smothering parents engulf their children with too much attention, the next style of controlling parents, Depriving parents, do exactly the opposite. They emotionally abandon their children by withholding love, support, and attention, which gives them commanding power.

  3

  DEPRIVING PARENTING Playing “Take Away”

  When my mother was disappointed in me she’d become inaccessible and emit a silent scorn. I could have withered away to nothing. It felt like death.

  —SAMANTHA, 40, AN ARTIST

  Key Characteristics of Depriving Parents:

  Control through withdrawal, disapproval, or banishment

  Become emotionally unreachable

  View happiness and good fortune as scarce

  See love as a commodity to be withheld when the parent is displeased

  Potential Consequences of a Depriving Upbringing:

  Self-doubt

  Depression

  Lowered expectations and confidence

  Feeling unloving and unlovable

  Slowed development of social skills<
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  Forty-year-old artist Samantha, a pretty, curly-haired blond in the throes of puppy love at thirteen, blushed when her eighth-grade boyfriend gave her roses, her first. Rushing home, she breathlessly asked her mother for a vase. Instead, she got a sour look and an order to put the roses in the garage. For the next week, Samantha spent a good part of her days in the hot, dusty garage, watching her roses slowly wilt.

  Samantha’s mother also became downright sullen when Samantha wanted something. At seven, on a daylong shopping trip with her mother, Samantha asked to go to the bathroom and was told, “Shut up. If you ask one more time I’m going to leave you behind in this store.”

  By age fourteen Samantha had become interested in spirituality and asked to go to a Christian summer camp. Her mother informed her that she couldn’t go because of a family vacation that had already been scheduled. Yet the camp date arrived and nobody went anywhere. “When my mother didn’t want to do stuff she’d say we had a family-schedule conflict,” Samantha remembers. “She just didn’t want to inconvenience herself.”

  Conditional love is the trademark of Depriving parents. As long as their children conform to their desires, these parents lend emotional support. But when they’re disappointed, Depriving parents withdraw their love—remarkably, instantly, and utterly. This leaves children so unsure of their standing that they’re desperate to please. They learn that love is ephemeral and erratic or contingent upon good behavior. They also learn that they have little control over whether they receive love. Whereas Smothering parents tell their children what they should want, Depriving parents tell their children simply not to want.