If You Had Controlling Parents
Page 10
Smothering: Overbearing scrutiny
Depriving: Conditional love
Perfectionistic: Pressure to perform
Cultlike: Rigid rules and beliefs
Chaotic: Unpredictability
Using: Needing to be number one
Abusing: Bullying
Childlike: Inducing guilt or pity
Certain style combinations tend to cluster. Parents who are predominantly:
Smothering may also tend to be Perfectionistic and/or Using;
Depriving may also tend to be Perfectionistic and/or Abusing;
Perfectionistic may also tend to be Smothering, Cultlike, Using, and/or Depriving;
Cultlike may also tend to be Perfectionistic and/or Using;
Chaotic may also tend to be Abusing;
Using may also tend to be Depriving, Abusing, Cultlike, and/or Smothering;
Abusing may also tend to be Depriving, Chaotic, and/or Using;
Childlike may include any of the above styles. Childlike parents also tend to seek mates who are Cultlike, Using, Perfectionistic, and/or Abusing.
Splintering of Self
Unhealthy control can fracture a child’s psyche, just as too much force can fracture bones, because it causes a splintering of self—chasing away some parts, jailing others, and inflating still others. If you grew up controlled, you didn’t have any way to stop the hurts and losses. That these hurts and losses came at the hands of those who said they loved you only tends to deepen your grief.
In the interviews with those who grew up controlled, I listened to so much hurt. I remember Robin, whose solace from her Using, Depriving mother came from pretending that a floor mop was a twin sister. I remember sitting with Jorge as he recalled, through tears, being locked in a small room by his Abusing, Chaotic mother, with only a little barred window through which he could see other children playing outside. I remember Roberta, toilet trained at ten months and denied naps as a child by her Depriving mother, describing how each night in bed she hummed Perry Como tunes, struggling to stay awake for her father’s good-night kiss when he came home from work.
Growing up controlled brings so much trauma…
“I had this holocaust at both ends,” said Shirley, daughter of an alcoholic father and fundamentalist Cultlike mother who banned Christmas presents after realizing that “Santa” had the same letters as “Satan.” “My father was always yelling, ‘The economy is failing and you’re gonna die. Work, work, work!’ And my mother with her hellfire and damnation.”
So much sadness…
Rosemary, the daughter of the severely Abusing, Using mother, who has battled obesity most of her life, remarked, “People say to me, ‘Rosemary, why do you have such sad eyes?’ and I want to say, ‘Have you ever met my mother?’”
So much loneliness…
“If I’d gotten a few hugs and a few moments of conversation in my childhood, it might have changed a few things,” said David, the son of the Depriving parents who forbade his pursuing his great love of photography. “Eventually, I built a wall around myself and shut down.”
So much weariness…
“In my family, I felt like an alien,” recalled Sharon, the daughter of the Smothering Holocaust-survivor father. “I felt like I got beaten down again and again. I eventually got the fight beaten out of me.”
So much deprivation…
“I feel cheated out of a basic intimacy I craved but couldn’t ask for,” said the daughter of a Depriving mother.
So much time feeling unloved…
“I was convinced that my mother didn’t love me. I always felt I was some sort of accident or mistake,” recalled Shari, the gifted daughter whose Depriving, Abusing mother never came to her academic award ceremonies.
“I felt as if I was taking up their time. I felt I shouldn’t have been born,” said Samantha, whose Depriving, Abusing mother had banished her daughter’s first bouquet of roses to the garage.
“My mother’s attitude was, ‘If you try hard, someday you will be worthy—perhaps—of my love,’” remembered Tina, whose Smothering mother had made her wear a sign reading, “Please Do Not Feed Me.”
“My father seemed to love me only when I did what he wanted,” mused Herb, the son of a Cultlike, Perfectionistic corporate-climber father.
So many What-ifs and If-onlys…
“Would I be so timid today if my father had seen a doctor and gotten a tranquilizer?” wondered the daughter of a tense, Perfectionistic father.
The daughter of a Chaotic mother mused, “I wish Mom could have loved me and set me free instead of her weird back-and-forth love.”
One man raised in a Chaotic home said, “I wish someone had told me, ‘You are going to grow up, make it through this, and you are going to be okay.’”
Growing up controlled means a million moments of hurt. Since children who grow up controlled are…
Not given many essentials for a healthy development
Deprived of resources for healthy coping
Confronted with forces as powerful as “brainwashing”
…it is to your credit that, if you grew up controlled, you came through your childhood as intact as you are.
The Price Parents Pay
While control has clear motivations and rewards for parents, they, too, pay a price:
Smothering parents mask their aloneness by stressing conformity, yet live one step from emotional annihilation.
Depriving parents gain power over others by loving conditionally, yet subsist on a coldness of spirit.
Perfectionistic parents hide their flaws by coveting superiority, yet can never cease their eagle-eyed search for flaws or for anyone who may be superior to them.
Cultlike parents avoid doubt and invalidation by proclaiming their certainty, yet cannot escape their gnawing fears that they will be proven wrong.
Chaotic parents keep others off balance by being volatile, yet live without a safe emotional harbor.
Using parents try to escape their emptiness by feeding off others, yet never fill their emotional void no matter how much they take from others.
Abusing parents temporarily discharge the emotions they cannot handle by attacking others, yet sit atop a barely contained volcano of rage and guilt.
Childlike parents escape others’ demands by lowering others’ expectations of them, yet feel tiny in a world of giants.
How to Accelerate Your Healing
For many children of controlling parents, a valuable step in healing is to talk about what happened to you. By telling your story, you air long-suppressed feelings and give meaning to experiences that may have left you feeling meaningless.
The stories in the preceding chapters that struck a chord in you can serve as starting points in helping you discuss your own experiences. After a childhood of not being able to speak up, it’s important to find safe environments in which to talk about what happened. By doing this, you give yourself what your childhood lacked: the chance to talk without interruption, the experience of being seen and heard as you really are, and the opportunity to feel validated. Here are some possible ways in which to tell your story:
With a trusted friend or partner, find an hour or so when you can comfortably talk. Ask your friend to just listen. Tell them that you don’t need them to solve a problem for you; rather, you’d just like to get something off your chest. Tell them to save any comments until you’ve finished talking. Start off by answering the question: “What makes me say I grew up controlled?”
Write down your experience of growing up or record it on audio-or videotape. Then read or listen to it without judgment and with compassion.
Find a therapist or counselor you trust and tell them you’d like to talk about your childhood.
Resources for Naming the Problem
Forward, Susan, with Craig Buck. Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.
Golomb, Elan. Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissi
sts in Their Struggle for Self. New York: William Morrow, 1992.
Love, Patricia. Emotional Incest Syndrome: What to Do When a Parent’s Love Rules Your Life. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.
Miller, Alice. The Drama of the Gifted Child, rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
Shengold, Leonard. Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation. New York: Fawcett, 1989.
Next: Part Two—Understanding the Problem
The first part of this book, “Naming the Problem,” described the many forms of unhealthy parental control. Part Two, “Understanding the Problem,” can help you break the cycle of overcontrol by understanding exactly how it works and why it can have lasting consequences. Part Two will also explore the connections between childhood control and problems in adulthood. Making these connections can allow you to break the “trance” inherited from growing up controlled.
PART TWO
Understanding the Problem
10
HOW OVERCONTROL WORKS
When you solve a mystery, you destroy its power over you.
Discovering how a magician does a trick can clear up your bewilderment. Analyzing advertisements to uncover methods of persuasion is an eye-opening exercise for schoolchildren. Seeing how a con artist cheated you lets you protect yourself in the future. Former members of destructive cults often get their lives back by understanding exactly how they were recruited and indoctrinated.
The same goes for overcoming the effects of growing up in a controlling family. Understanding how and why a parent controlled you can disarm both past and ongoing controls.
Part Two will help you answer the following questions:
How does parental control operate years later despite your best efforts to get free?
How does your controlling-family background connect to problems in your life today?
Why did your parents overcontrol you?
Parental overcontrol is a potent, pervasive process akin to brainwashing. Controlling-family brainwashing has three components:
Twelve kinds of unhealthy control I call the “Dirty Dozen”
Distortions of responsibility through “Truth Abuse”
Manipulations similar to the thought-reform techniques used by destructive cults
The result of controlling-family brainwashing: Children internalize their parents’ judgments and biases in the form of harsh internalized parents—those inner critics who slow our efforts to heal and grow.
The point of exploring this “brainwashing” process is not to recite the litany of our fathers’ and mothers’ “sins.” Our parents had reasons for acting as they did. As we will see in Chapter 14, many controlling parents were emotionally wounded as children and received little compassion from their own parents. Because of that, controlling parents often have insufficient compassion to give themselves or their children.
Exploring controlling-family brainwashing is based on two paradoxes of healing:
To let go of a painful past, you may temporarily need to get closer to it.
To take greater control of your own life, you may need to revisit the days during which you had the least control.
Each of us has two sets of parents: our actual, physical parents and our internalized parents. An important part of healing from a controlling upbringing has to do with forging a healthier relationship with your actual parents. (Part Three, “Solving the Problem,” will show you many options for doing that.)
But an equal if not greater part of healing comes from forging a healthier relationship with your internalized parents. I use “internalized parents” as a construct to symbolize the negative self-judgments, self-image, expectations, and viewpoints we unwittingly adopted during our years of growing up controlled. Your internalized parents are psychic stowaways, roaming through your psychological and emotional hallways and creating havoc. The better you can identify your internalized parents, the more you can take charge of your present and control your future.
Just as our actual parents brainwashed us as children, our internalized parents put us in trances as adults. They whisper You’re no good, and we believe it. They say You can’t, and we don’t try. They urge us to Go ahead; then, if things turn out badly, they tell us You shouldn’t have, and we lose confidence.
You cannot change your actual parents nor can you change your past. But neither your actual parents nor your past history dictates your future. What can dictate your future is your internalized parents’ judgments and expectations about yourself, others, and life in general. These judgments are nothing more than bad habits. Stubbornly rooted habits, perhaps, given the power of controlling-family brainwashing. But like any habit, they can be altered with work and time. The good news is that because they are inside you, changing your internalized parents is entirely up to you.
As we move farther into Part Two, some readers may experience that resurgence of family-loyalty feelings I mentioned earlier. Remember, by looking underneath the surface of your parents’ control, you are unwrapping the myths and mysteries of your childhood. Controlling families tend to discourage such independent thinking. Even years after childhood, examining your family’s overcontrol can trigger early injunctions and feelings of betrayal. For some readers, this may be the time to refer to the list of the Top 10 Guilt-Inducing Family-Loyalty Thoughts on page 10.
For other readers, exploring your family’s early control may rekindle feelings of having little control over your destiny. But recognizing your internalized parents and understanding how they came to take up residence in your soul can give you the knowledge and power you didn’t have as a child. Also keep in mind that your actual parents have far less hold on you today than when you were a child. There is a lot you can do to free yourself from unhealthy parental influence; much of it you have undoubtedly already done.
1. The “Dirty Dozen” Methods of Overcontrol
In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.
—JUNE JORDAN
Parents can overcontrol their children in twelve powerful ways, some direct and obvious, others harder to spot. I call these the “Dirty Dozen” because when they are excessively applied, they run counter to what children need for healthy development. The Dirty Dozen:
Food control
Body control
Boundary control
Social control
Decision control
Speech control
Emotion control
Thought control
Bullying
Depriving
Confusing
Manipulating
You might notice which of the Dirty Dozen listed in the following chart were prevalent in your upbringing.
The “Dirty Dozen” Methods of Unhealthy Parental Control
Method
Examples
Potential Consequences
1. Food Control
• Dictating what, when and how children eat
• Dominating the dinner-table environment
• Decreased autonomy
• Increased emotional problems
• Risk of eating disorders or addictive behavior
• Poor self-image
2. Body Control
• Excessive monitoring of body functions
• Attempts to dictate dress and personal grooming
• Violations in sense of self
• Diminished free will
• Risk of distorted body image
3. Boundary Control
• Micro-managing children’s sleep habits, household duties and play time
• Violating children’s privacy
• Increased dependency
• Decreased emotional safety
• Feeling always under scrutiny
• Lowered expectations
4. Social Control
• Interfering in choices of friends and date
s
• Discouraging contact with non-family members
• Slowed individuation
• Distrust, gullibility or distorted ideas about relationships and other people
• Lack of awareness of others’ values
5. Decision Control
• Dominating school, career and major life choices
• Second-guessing or ridiculing children’s choices
• Slowed development of “decision muscles”
• Overreliance on parents’ views
• Increased self-doubt
• Ambivalence over achievements
6. Speech Control
• Dictating when and how children speak
• Compulsively correcting grammar or forbidding certain words
• Prohibiting dissent or questions
• Reduced initiative
• Slowed development of communication skills
• Bottled-up feelings
• Reduced confidence
7. Emotion Control
• Overriding, dictating, ridiculing or discounting emotions
• Reduced opportunities to learn how to cope with emotions
• Distorted ideas about how to express emotions
• Disconnection from a precious source of information about one’s self
• Confusion or intolerance when faced with other’s strong emotions
8. Thought Control
• Attempts to regulate morals, values and tastes
• Parental philosophies of life delivered as dogma
• Overzealous attempts to discourage new ideas
• Slowed intellectual growth
• Focus on who’s right and who’s wrong rather than on curiosity and learning