If You Had Controlling Parents

by Dan Neuharth

  Herb, forty-four and successful in the medical field, was a ten-year-old curly-haired boy with a cherubic expression when his Cultlike, Perfectionistic father stepped onto the corporate ladder of a large Midwestern manufacturing company. As his parents struggled to fit in with the corporate social set, Herb’s and his younger brother’s lives changed dramatically. Their father, consumed by his climb up the company hierarchy, intensely examined corporate nuances of office size, seating at meetings, and the makeup of golf foursomes to see who might be edging him out for advancement. This scrutiny eventually extended to Herb. He had to dress right—as well or better than other corporate sons—even down to his country-club swim trunks, which had to be ironed before every visit. He had to think right, getting only top-notch grades, since this might reflect on his father’s chances for advancement. Most of all, he had to act right, behaving “like a perfect little gentleman.” Before company social functions, Herb’s father would rehearse how Herb should greet his father’s superiors or anyone else his father wanted to impress, saying their names in a strong, clear voice and giving a firm handshake.

  “Everyone talked about how well-behaved and good-looking my brother and I were and my parents just glowed,” Herb says. “I felt like we were just dough to be molded into a final product.”

  Herb’s father, like many Cultlike parents, needed to feel superior to others: “His attitude was, ‘We are special, our race is special, our religion is special, and our corporation is special.’ He would always remind me that we had an ancestor who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He’d tell me, ‘Don’t trust anyone whose name ends in a vowel.’”

  Herb’s father’s infatuation with appearances left his son feeling anything but special: “I felt that I just didn’t figure in his life. I don’t know what it was about me that he objected to.”

  To compensate, Herb tried to be perfect. When he was a senior in high school, friends invited him to join the decades-old class ritual of painting their class year number on a local bridge. Herb asked his father for permission to go: “I felt like such a schlemiel. Here I was, asking permission to do something you’re not even supposed to ask permission for and my father saying it was okay to do something like that once in a while.”

  Over time, Herb developed a “doofus” persona. He got depressed, became a loner, and abused drugs. Today, he still feels like a “black sheep” despite his postgraduate degree and good job.

  Self-Assessment

  My parent(s):

  Strongly identified with a military, social, religious, or corporate group or credo

  Tolerated little dissent, questioning, or uncertainty

  Distrusted strangers and “outsiders”

  Saw rules and beliefs as more important than relationships or feelings

  Viewed situations in black-and-white terms

  Next: Chaotic Parenting

  The next style of controlling parents, Chaotic parents, combines elements of two earlier styles, Smothering and Depriving parents. While Smothering parents overwhelm children with too much or the wrong kind of love and attention, and Depriving parents starve their children with too little love and attention, Chaotic parents both deprive and smother. Unable to maintain a constant demeanor, they seesaw between overwhelming closeness and rejecting withdrawal.

  6

  CHAOTIC PARENTING Life in the Quicksand Lane

  The weak can be terrible because they try furiously to appear strong.

  —RABINDRANATH TAGORE

  Key Characteristics of Chaotic Parents:

  Control through mystification and unpredictability

  Extreme difficulty setting consistent limits

  Use double binds, mixed messages, and bizarre reasoning

  Radically changeable behavior

  Potential Consequences of a Chaotic Upbringing:

  Confusion about emotions

  Hypervigilance

  Reduced trust in others

  Life becomes an emotional roller coaster

  Brittany, a twenty-three-year-old sales representative, can’t put out of her mind the time she came home ten minutes past her curfew when she was sixteen. Her Chaotic, Abusing mom sprang from her chair and grabbed Brittany by the arm, wrenching and twisting, then digging her long fingernails into Brittany’s flesh. Screaming that her daughter was a “tramp,” she sent Brittany to her room. Forty-five minutes later her mother knocked on Brittany’s door, and wearing a big smile carried in a gourmet dinner she’d cooked for her, complete with a rose in a bud vase. Brittany’s childhood was full of such about-faces. It wasn’t unusual for her alcoholic mother to ground Brittany, then within an hour tell her to go visit friends.

  When Brittany was seventeen, her mother got her a prescription for birth control pills and proclaimed her progressiveness by letting Brittany’s boyfriend spend the night with Brittany at their house. When the couple came down to breakfast the next morning, her mother called Brittany a “slutty whore” and threw the boyfriend out.

  Brittany’s mother bore a key trait of Chaotic parents: an inability to maintain an emotional middle ground. Unlike Smothering parents, who are too close, and Depriving parents, who are too distant, Chaotic parents encompass both extremes. “She’d go from babying me to practically kicking me out,” Brittany exclaims.

  Chaotic parents often mete out harsh punishment, then pander. In their effort to stay afloat in a churning emotional sea, Chaotic parents counterbalance their most recent emotional excess by racing to embrace its opposite. Out of desperation, they often solicit outside authorities for help. Brittany’s mother once called the police after she had pulled Brittany’s hair and her daughter had in turn scratched her. When her mother demanded that the police arrest Brittany, they refused. One of the officers took Brittany outside and gave her his card in case she ever again needed help with her mother.

  When Brittany was three, a car accident put her in a coma. Doctors told her mother that Brittany had only a 25 percent chance of survival. Yet her mother insisted on every test possible and never left her daughter’s bedside. Now Brittany wonders, “After such a close call, you’d think she’d be happy I lived. So why did she abuse me so?”

  Brittany articulates the fundamental, terrifying question that haunts many controlled children:

  If they love me, why do they hurt me?

  The answers, too scary for young minds to contemplate and young hearts to accept, include:

  Maybe they don’t love me.

  Maybe they don’t want me.

  Maybe they are not in control.

  Maybe they hurt me for no reason.

  Maybe they will hurt me no matter what I do.

  Rather than face these thoughts, children adopt other answers, still discomforting but less terrifying:

  They hurt me because I am bad.

  They hurt me because I deserve it.

  They hurt me because they love me.

  Such answers allow children to grasp inexplicable events. If a child feels responsible for parental behavior, then he or she can control something by trying to change. Yet these rationalizations take a toll. Brittany still finds it extremely hard to tell when people are being duplicitous. She struggles to find solid emotional ground and suffers depression and low self-esteem.

  Confusing Messages

  Ina, a fifty-three-year-old social worker, was fourteen when she looked into her mother’s taunting face, knowing chocolate cake was missing and that she, of all six children, was being called the thief. As Ina denied it and began to cry, her mother triumphantly said, “See, I knew you took it. If you weren’t a thief, I wouldn’t get a rise out of you.”

  Ina’s childhood was saturated with no-win situations. Through bullying and crazy reasoning, Ina’s mother put her children in constant binds. She warned Ina to watch out for “kidnappers,” then gave her daughter adult-strength sleeping pills when Ina developed night terrors about being kidnapped. Her mother ordered Ina to be smart and pretty, with top grades and lots o
f dates, yet discouraged her from acting smart or feeling pretty around the house.

  Curfews and other household rules were ignored one day, rigidly enforced the next: “I never knew what the rules were until I broke them. Sometimes I’d do something and get no response. The next time I’d do it, my mother would explode.” If Ina disagreed with her mother, she was labeled a “paranoid schizophrenic”; her mother even invited neighbors over to watch her daughter “act crazy.”

  Ina walked on eggshells because she never knew the rules, just as Brittany never knew her mother’s next mood. “For years I thought I was nearly crazy, but since my mother labeled me a paranoid schizophrenic I was ashamed to ask for help,” Ina confesses. “It took years before I realized I was not crazy. I grew up in a crazy home. When she’d ridicule me, I’d tell her I didn’t think she loved me. Then she’d say, ‘How can you say that? I told the neighbors the other day how wonderful you are and how much I love you.’ It left me feeling totally confused.”

  Chaotic parents like Ina’s mother don’t experience their inconsistent limits and mixed messages as erratic because their sense of who they are tends to vacillate. When they’re sending a mixed message or enforcing a double standard, their actions are consistent with their momentary sense of self. As that sense of self changes, their actions change. Children of Chaotic parents can grow up thinking crazy things are normal because, for their parents, they were.

  One major bind facing children of Chaotic parents is how to negotiate their needs for autonomy and intimacy. If a son or daughter wants to visit friends instead of staying home, Chaotic parents often act rejected and hurt. If the child stays home, Chaotic parents often become critical or rejecting. As a result, children of Chaotic parents feel guilty desiring either independence or closeness.

  Chaotic Lifestyle

  A similar sense of chaos can exist in some families with a parent who is mentally ill. While these parents are not to blame for their chaotic actions—they are ill, not bad—their controlling behavior can leave their children overwhelmed by chaos.

  At ten, Celina, now a thirty-seven-year-old teacher, stood at the edge of the living room gathering up the courage to ask her mother a question, knowing requests often sent her mother into a panic. The family apartment was steadily accumulating stacks of flyers and newspapers and degenerating into chaos, and Celina needed a spot where she could practice her clarinet. Finally, she meekly asked for practice space. This time, unaccountably, her mother said yes. Many other times she had said no.

  Celina’s mother was a paranoid schizophrenic who had emerged, ostensibly stable, from a psychiatric hospital two years earlier. Estranged from Celina’s father, she raised her daughters on her own, and although earlier considered mentally stable, signs of her mental illness soon reappeared. She neatly stacked and labeled Celina’s toys, but didn’t allow Celina to play with them. She would buy three sizes of each item in Celina’s wardrobe because she was paranoid about Celina’s trying on clothes in the store. Celina and her brother couldn’t go in certain rooms of the house because their mother feared that exotic diseases lurked there. The family often dined out because their mother was afraid to eat at home. Celina spent much of her childhood doing homework in restaurants.

  Summertime threw Celina’s mother into a panic over planning what to do with the kids when school was out. Fall upset her because she had to go to the store to get new school clothes. When Celina was thirteen and asked for her first bra, her mother flew into a rage. “Bras? We can’t have bras in this house,” she screamed. Celina only got a bra when it was required for gym class.

  The chaos took an early toll. Celina recalls being four years old, playing on the floor, when her mother and father began a vicious screaming match: “I remember taking some part of myself and burying it in the wood floor, pretending I was an innocent child and didn’t notice the chaos. It’s as if a part of me is still buried away in the floor.”

  Celina’s mother was desperately trying to control a world in which, because of her mental illness, she felt in free fall. “It was scary that she could change from an incredible yumminess to being a terrifying creature,” Celina recalls.

  Her mother also stressed that Celina not draw attention to herself, which further confused Celina. Once, after enrolling Celina in an acting class, she warned her daughter to “be inconspicuous” in the class. At times the older woman seemed to think her children were parts of her. When people asked Celina how she was feeling, her mother would say, “We’re tired.” As a result, Celina had difficulty in individuating. As a grade-schooler answering a question in class, Celina would begin, “My mother says…”

  When Celina’s mother’s condition worsened, she threatened to turn on the gas and kill herself and her children if Celina’s father returned and tried to take them away. Petrified, Celina would wait until her mother was asleep, then tiptoe to a window and open it. She did this even during frigid Minneapolis winters in case her mother decided that that night was the night to turn on the gas. Still, Celina didn’t tell anyone about her chaotic home life for fear that she would be put in foster care.

  Today Celina is trying to heal through therapy, support groups, and friendships. “I’ve always felt as if I have a Swiss bank account about learning, loving, and intimacy but nobody has given me the account number,” she shares. “I want the number that will open my Swiss bank account.”

  Celina’s case is, of course, an extreme example, since schizophrenia is at one extreme of the mental illness spectrum. Yet the common thread among Chaotic parents is communication rife with double binds and mixed messages. Chaotic parents are bandied about by feelings, fears, and needs, and that mercurialness envelops their children in a cyclone of confusion.

  Self-Assessment

  My parent(s):

  Had trouble finding an emotional middle ground

  Put out confusing and erratic rules and messages

  Applied discipline in ways that were too harsh, too loose, or inconsistent

  Showed abrupt about-faces in behavior and feelings

  Alternated between blind acceptance and total rejection of me and others

  Next: Using Parenting

  The next group of controlling parents, Using parents, actively take from their children in order to satisfy their own needs.

  7

  USING PARENTING “Me First” Child Raising

  The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

  —EDMUND BURKE

  Key Characteristics of Using Parents:

  Control through demands for loyalty, admiration, and obedience

  Terrified of losing or feeling one down

  Emotionally immature

  Insensitive to others’ needs and feelings

  Potential Consequences of a Using Upbringing:

  Feeling used

  Poor self-image

  Mistaken ideas about love

  Difficulty in developing good emotional self-care habits

  When Ellen, a forty-nine-year-old volunteer worker, was nine, she stood at the vanity mirror putting curlers in her mother’s hair. Next, she plucked her mother’s eyebrows and painted her nails. Later, Ellen sat next to the tub while her mother took a bath and talked about life. Finally, she brushed her mother’s hair and told her how beautiful she looked.

  For another mother and daughter, such a scene might bring the coziness of mutual sharing and intimacy; for Ellen there was nothing cozy or reciprocal about the evening ritual. If she put a curler in wrong she’d get a tirade or a slap in the face. Other than her scripted comments about how beautiful her mother looked, Ellen was expected to be silent while her mother complained about real or imagined slights.

  Using parents tend to see life in terms of what they can get out of it. When children’s needs conflict with parental needs, the children are seen as nuisances, problems, or threats. Like Ellen, children of Using parents spend their lives feeding their parents’ hunger for attention, approval, and love.

  Elle
n’s Using, Abusing mother used her daughter as servant, listener, and emotional punching bag. She called Ellen a “mistake” and often told her, “I gave up a good life for you.” She frequently blamed Ellen for the C-section scar she received in giving birth to her. This is a classic Using-parent bind: Ellen was made to feel that her very existence had hurt her mother, an act over which Ellen had no control and one that she could do nothing to remedy.

  When Ellen was eight, her mother, embarrassed and furious because Ellen swam poorly in a swim meet, dragged her home and forced her to take off her swimsuit, walk naked to the garage, and throw the suit in the trash. She often punished her daughter by backing her in a corner and forcing her to drop her hands so that she could slap her. The slaps hurt, but making Ellen drop her hands added a deeper injury because it blocked her instinct for self-defense. By teaching children not to defend themselves, Using parents increase the risk that their children may end up in unhealthy relationships or may develop self-abusive behaviors.

  Ellen’s father had died when she was two and her mother had quickly remarried. Claiming Ellen’s dad had been unfaithful, her mother destroyed all pictures of him. As Ellen grew up, she hungered to know more about her father, but her mother would never discuss him. After an aunt told Ellen she looked like her father, she asked her mother, begging, “Do I look like Dad?”

  To which her mother coolly replied, “I don’t know. I never noticed.”

  Using parents’ self-esteem rises a notch when they put someone else down. Even today, when Ellen wears a dress her mother likes, the older woman angrily demands, “Why didn’t you buy me that?” When Ellen wears a dress her mother dislikes, her mother snidely asks, “What’s that you’re wearing? You look like a clown.”