If You Had Controlling Parents

by Dan Neuharth

  When Using parents feel slighted, they often become enraged. Many a child of Using parents can tell stories of going into restaurants or stores and watching, petrified, as their parents fumed over perceived bad service, bullying waiters or clerks whom they saw as too slow or not sufficiently deferential.

  Using parents themselves were generally terribly misused or tormented as children. Because they received little approval, they grew up feeling unworthy and inadequate. As a result, they demand worship from their children—a reflection of their desperate need for self-esteem. Using parents are justifiably angry about their pasts, yet despite their great capacity for gaining access to their rage, they seem remarkably disconnected from most emotions. Ellen recalled, “Sometimes my mother would look really mad and I’d ask her if she was upset. But she’d always deny it, so I could never figure out if my perceptions were true or false.” To Ellen, her mother seemed bitter and self-centered: “She seemed to have no reference for how she treated people and how others saw her.”

  Her mother’s behavior cost Ellen dearly. In school she was the model student—quiet, obedient, and with good grades—but had no friends: “I never looked up. I had zero personality.” She was afraid to dance, date, or listen to rock and roll. Her childhood was riddled with allergies, sleep disorders, chronic headaches, and eczema, all of which cleared up when she went away to college.

  Self-Centered

  Magda, a thirty-six-year-old civil servant, recalls her sixth birthday as an occasion for joy—for her father. He bought her a box kite, something he’d always wanted for himself. “He always got me things he wanted. He would play with them until they broke, all the while ignoring me and any questions I had. Afterward, he’d think we’d had a good time.”

  At first, Magda’s father had a soft spot for his daughter. “He was quite taken with me as a baby,” she says today. “He’d get down on the floor and do baby talk with me.” But as Magda grew older and began to be more independent, her dad seemed to lose interest: “I was a cute, adorable little pet until I started developing my own opinions.” When Magda was nine, her father left the family.

  Magda’s father had a classic trait of Using parents: immaturity. By ostensibly choosing toys for her that he played with himself, he reverted to being a child. Using parents give themselves free rein to have tantrums, expecting others to compensate for their excesses. Children of Using parents rarely have a chance to be children because Using parents take up all the room for childishness in the family.

  Like Magda’s father, many Using parents see their newborn children as “blank canvases” who are totally dependent on them and on whom they can make their mark. Many derive a sense of mission from the early days of parenting; they see it as a “project” they imagine will fill their unmet needs or distract them from their problems. But when the children begin developing stronger identities and move toward independence, their parents feel angry and betrayed. Feeling rejected by their “creations,” these parents emotionally—and sometimes physically—abandon them.

  Magda’s adult legacy has been relationships with men in which she has felt little right to voice her needs—and often fears being deserted by partners after even a minor disagreement.

  Jealous

  Using parents see life as a series of situations in which only one person can win and victory must come at others’ expense. The parents don’t want to lose, even if it means their children end up the losers. This may explain why such parents often seem jealous of others’ success or good fortune and become intent on spoiling others’ joy.

  On her high school graduation night, Robin, now a fifty-three-year-old design artist, proudly clutched her red-and-white tassel as she climbed into the backseat of her parents’ car. After the ceremony, her mother grumbled to her father, “Well, I suppose we have to do something special for her.” As they drove around aimlessly, Robin’s parents began arguing over what they should do to celebrate. Each parent vetoed the other’s suggestions, with her mother and father eventually screaming at each other. Robin cowered in the backseat, tearfully asking to be taken home.

  The evening had been only the latest in a long string of burst bubbles. When Robin brought home an eighth-grade report card with a teacher’s note reading, “You deserve all the luck in the world,” her mother snapped, “Luck doesn’t just happen; you have to go out and make it happen.”

  Often it seemed that her mother was downright mean. When Robin was twelve, her piano teacher told her she had real musical promise. Within a week, her mother, who seemed jealous anytime her daughter was acknowledged by others, stopped paying for Robin’s lessons.

  Her mother seemed jealous of Robin’s relationship with her stockbroker father. When Robin would sit raptly listening to him talk about his day, her mother would shoot her dagger looks and would be cool toward her for days after. And, when Robin got engaged, her mother’s first words were, “What if you discover something bad about him?”

  Robin grew up feeling terribly alone. During our interview, she tearfully told me that when she was ten, she’d take a floor mop out of the closet for solace: “I’d pretend the mop was a twin sister and my best friend. Can you imagine—a floor mop?”

  Robin’s Using, Depriving mother was also hypersensitive to real or imagined slights from others: “After interactions with people, my mother would say, ‘Did you see how she looked at me? Did you see how she talked to me? Did you see how anxious they were to leave?’”

  Robin dutifully listened to her mother but had nobody to listen to her: “No one noticed my pain. I tried so hard to be good. I always blamed myself for not being perfect and lovable.” Her self-image was so poor that when a junior high counselor announced she was going to be part of a special class, Robin assumed it was for “dumb kids.” After the counselor told her that it was for smarter children, she replied, “No, that can’t be. I’m too dumb.”

  Recalls Robin: “I was dumbfounded. I had no clue as to my abilities.”

  Using parents tend to see life primarily in terms of how it affects them. At a time when Robin was nervously caring for her six-week-old infant, suffering from the flu, and facing a stack of unpaid bills, her mother visited, expecting to be waited on. Seeing her mother giddily playing with the baby, Robin asked, “How come you never treated me like that?” Her mother departed, screaming, and wouldn’t talk to Robin for weeks.

  Using parents have little ability to see their children’s emotional needs because they cannot consistently provide for themselves emotionally. If they were wounded as children and never got help, their wounds developed into an emotional abyss of unfulfilled dreams and unmet needs. Using parents are terrified of exploring this void; instead, they look to others to fill it. Children of Using parents learn that their primary job is to do nothing that will pose a problem for their parents.

  Perhaps because Using parents feel empty, they try to accumulate wealth and status—just as some Perfectionistic and Cultlike parents do. They tend to have contempt for others who do or have less than they do, envy others who do or have more, and possess an underlying fear that if they were to lose their own status or belongings they’d be worthless. Robin’s mother, for example, talked longingly of her youth, telling stories of servants, beautiful linens, and being treated like a princess. Yet Robin wonders how much of this was true; an aunt once hinted that Robin’s mother grew up with cold, remote parents and was often shuttled off to relatives for months at a time without any explanation.

  Just as perplexing to their children, many Using parents often are admired by others from outside the family. The children wonder what’s wrong with them because they see a tormentor instead of the charming, witty, attractive mother or father others tell them they are so lucky to have. As we’ll see in Part Three, healing from a controlling parent involves, in part, honoring your own experience and perceptions, despite others’ views, so that you can have a full-palette view of your parents.

  Narcissistic

  Although the style
of Using parents is most similar to what we think of as unhealthy narcissism, all eight styles of controlling parents share it. Narcissism is a distorted sense of self that leads one to see and treat others as unequal. The American Psychiatric Association’s fourth Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (661) describes narcissistic individuals as those who tend to:

  Have a grandiose sense of self-importance

  Be preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited power or beauty

  Believe they are special and unique

  Require excessive admiration

  Feel entitled to be obeyed

  Take advantage of others

  Be unwilling or unable to recognize others’ needs and feelings

  Envy others or believe others envy them

  Act arrogantly

  Psychiatrist Charles Whitfield, in Boundaries and Relationships (134), observed that narcissistic parents tend to:

  See others primarily in terms of whether they can be useful or threatening

  Blame others rather than accept responsibility

  Try to dominate and control people, places, and things

  Be emotionally unaware, numb, or hypersensitive

  Project their character defects onto others

  Be hypersensitive to criticism or rejection

  Inappropriately express or internalize their anger

  Be perfectionistic

  Lack empathy

  Feel draining to be around

  One of the most poignant moments in all my interviews was at the end of my interview with Ellen, whose mother, you’ll recall, was a notably narcissistic parent who blamed her daughter for the cesarean she was forced to have in giving birth to her.

  Ellen, twenty-nine years after dropping out, has returned to college to get a degree in art, her lifelong love. As we talked, she sat on her apartment patio by the water, the setting sun painting her profile a rosy orange. During our interview Ellen’s forty-nine-year-old face at times looked sixty-nine, creased by exhaustion and grief. At other times she looked twenty-nine, peaceful and calm as she spoke of the strength and peace she has derived from setting emotional boundaries between herself and her mother.

  “I used to try and recall happy memories with my mother but I gave up. It hurt too much that I had a mom who never once said, ‘How are you today? You look wonderful!’” Ellen said. “I have never confronted her with all her abuse. She would probably not even know what I was talking about. So, limited contact is probably the best solution for me.”

  When her mother dies, Ellen expects she will have much sadness but few regrets about having sought an arm’s-length stance from her mother: “Maybe in my memories she’ll be kinder than she has been in reality.”

  I asked Ellen if there were anything else she wanted to add. Meditatively running her finger along the rim of her teacup, she took a long breath and confessed, “I really, really loved my mother. But my mother didn’t take care of that love for so many years. Eventually, my love just went away.”

  Self-Assessment

  My parent(s):

  Demanded loyalty, attention, and admiration

  Competed with me or tried to spoil my happy occasions

  Used other people to satisfy their own needs

  Seemed hypercritical or hypersensitive

  Seemed immature, self-centered, or childish

  Next: Abusing Parenting

  The next style, Abusing parents, embodies many characteristics of Using parents. But while Using parents do most of their damage through emotional abuse, Abusing parents add physical or sexual abuse or intimidation to the equation.

  8

  ABUSING PARENTING “Do It or Else” Child Raising

  I would have been better off raised by wolves.

  —ROSEMARY, 55, A MANAGER

  Key Characteristics of Abusing Parents:

  Control through brute force

  Blame their children for “making” them abuse

  Feel they have the right to abuse

  Have poor impulse control

  Potential Consequences of an Abusive Upbringing:

  Depression

  Addictions

  Hypervigilance

  Assumption that abuse is deserved

  Difficulty in trusting others

  Jorge, now a thirty-two-year-old psychiatric aide, was twelve and had just come home from school when his mother shrieked his name from her bedroom. That was the signal for him to come and be hit. As always, he resolved not to cry when his mother hurt him.

  On this day some of his mother’s chocolates were missing. As Jorge slowly drew alongside his mother’s bed, she dug her nails into his flesh, then twisted his arm. But that wasn’t enough. Today would be worse than usual. She grabbed him by the ear, then held his hand over a lit kitchen gas burner.

  Pulling him back to her bedroom, she got out a belt, ordered him to stand spread-eagled in the doorway, and began whipping him across his back.

  Finally, he cried.

  Eventually, she stopped.

  His mother ordered Jorge to stand where he was until she told him he could move. Two hours later, when his father came in from work, Jorge was still standing in the doorway. His father walked past him wordlessly, as if Jorge were a mere ghost.

  That night was one of many Jorge fell asleep clutching a picture of Jesus. Jorge thought he was being hurt by his parents because he was a bad person. He prayed that some of Jesus’s goodness would rub off.

  Jorge was repeatedly abused by his Abusing, Chaotic mother; his father did nothing about it. Sometimes, when he was alone with his father, Jorge would ask why his mother hurt him and why his father didn’t stop it. “That’s just the way she is,” his father told him. “Behave yourself and let her do it.”

  Abusing parents do things to children that are hard to believe. After thousands of hours of therapy, I still sometimes find incredible some of the horror stories clients tell me—and, if anything, the horror and pain are often downplayed or minimized. Despite the increasing attention paid to child abuse, tyrantosaurus parents like Jorge’s are far from extinct. In 1997, an estimated 1 million children in the United States suffered from child abuse in which excess control was a key factor.

  One thing is a constant in Abusing families: Abused children grow up thinking they deserve the abuse. Jorge, who now works with autistic children, told me, “I used to think that if I could just go over a mistake fifty times and think why I did it, I could get rid of my imperfections.”

  As an adult Jorge struggles with depression, though he is in therapy and has confronted his mother and father about their abuse. He worries that the pain is so deep he may never recover: “Maybe it’s too late for me. Maybe I should concentrate on my children. Maybe only they can make their way out of this family legacy.”

  Destructive

  What sets Abusing parents apart from other styles of controlling parents is their destructiveness, for they seem bent on destroying their children. While Using parents exploit their children’s innate loyalty to get them to go along with being used, Abusing parents simply overpower their sons and daughters.

  At fourteen, Eve, now a forty-four-year-old secretary, sat in her best red dress at the dinner table Christmas Eve as her father carved the turkey for more than a dozen relatives, including three young nieces and nephews. Earlier that week her father had ordered Eve to give away her pet hamster, but she hadn’t had the heart to do it.

  As he cut into the turkey, he looked directly at Eve. Holding up a turkey leg with the carving knife, he shouted, “You didn’t get rid of the hamster, like I told you. I’m going to cut it up with this knife. I’m going to wring its neck.” Eve remembers her cousins squirming and beginning to cry while the other adults looked on in stunned silence. Nobody said anything to her father.

  Caring for small, fuzzy things helped Eve survive emotionally. She put milk out for neighborhood cats; at one point, by her count, she had seventeen cats coming for dinner. But her father threatened to poison or
shoot them. Once he caught a stray dog, tied it to a pole, and “beat it to insanity,” Eve recalled. To protect the cats, Eve stopped putting out milk and frantically shooed them away when they kept coming.

  As a girl, Eve lived in such fear that she spent many waking moments outside her home, hiding in the bushes and pretending they were her real home: “I had one bush be the kitchen and another be the bedroom. I was much more comfortable outside than inside.”

  When Eve was nine, her father threw her across the room and dislocated her hip because he didn’t like the way she said “Yes, sir” to him. The next day, he told her she had to quit gymnastics before she got injured again: “I think he really believed that I dislocated my hip in gymnastics. I don’t think he even remembered doing it to me.”

  Her father’s control extended to her social life. When Eve dated a “hippie” against his orders, her father hit her. When she dated an African American, he attacked her with a steel pipe. When she married a Latino, he threatened to take her out of his will: “I don’t think he did it, though. He wouldn’t have wanted to spend the eighty dollars to have his lawyer change it. But he resented any freedom I had.”

  Eve’s father was as destructive as any parent of the people I interviewed. His abuse induced a legacy of low self-esteem that keeps Eve working in clerical jobs even after getting a master’s degree. Her upbringing has cost Eve mightily in her relationships with men. She has a permanent restraining order against one former lover who beat her. Prior to that, she was married to an alcoholic who battered her for years until she left him. He later killed himself.

  While Eve still fears her father, she turned the tables a few years ago by fighting back. One day her father began chasing her with a lead pipe, threatening to kill her. “I grabbed his arm, stopped his swinging, and gouged him with my nails,” she announces proudly. “He took photos, told all the neighbors I had beaten him up, and said he was going to build a court case. But the balance had shifted. I was no longer going to give in.” Since Eve fought back, there has been no more physical violence between them.