If You Had Controlling Parents

by Dan Neuharth

  • Reduced self-esteem

  • Lack of awareness of other views

  9. Bullying

  • Physical or sexual violence or harassment

  • Verbal or emotional abuse

  • Intimidation

  • Prohibiting children from defending themselves

  • Feelings of isolation and abandonment

  • Increased risk of depression and anxiety

  • Assumption that abuse is deserved

  • Poor impulse control

  • Risk of addictive behavior

  10. Depriving

  • Withdrawing affection and attention when displeased

  • Withholding warmth and encouragement

  • Depriving of safety and belonging

  • Feeling unlovable

  • Increased dependency

  • Reduced confidence

  • Lowered expectations

  • Greater willingness to accept mistreatment

  • Increased risk of depression and anxiety

  11. Confusing

  • Unclear rules, mixed messages, erratic behavior, or baffling communication

  • Increased second-guessing of self

  • Feeling isolated

  • Hypervigilance and anxiety

  • Difficulty making decisions or taking the initiative

  12. Manipulating

  • Shaming, scapegoating, and a host of other disingenuous techniques

  • Distrust of others

  • Feeling valued for appearances instead of for one’s self

  • Internalization of family worries that are not children’s to solve

  • Depression and rage

  Some examples of the Dirty Dozen among those I interviewed:

  1. Food Control

  Controlling parents’ styles are often reflected in how they approach food. Using parents, for example, see dinner as their hour. One Using father demanded that dinner be on the table at five with the TV rolled in so he could watch the news; nobody was allowed to talk. Another Using father talked incessantly about himself, his day, and who was trying to take advantage of him at work. His captive audience wasn’t allowed to leave the table until he finished.

  Cultlike and Perfectionistic parents often have dinner table rituals that must be followed to the letter. One woman recalls, “Every night we girls had to get food on the table on time. My father would be shouting at us, sometimes hitting us.” By adolescence, she had developed anorexia: “I felt like a pawn on a chessboard. Refusing to eat felt like the last bit of control I had over my life.”

  Smothering parents pressure their children to mimic parental tastes. One daughter remembers sobbing over her lawyer father’s “litigation about what kind of breakfast cereal I was supposed to want.”

  One Abusing father literally shoved unfinished food down his children’s throats. Another maintained a standing rule that if his children didn’t eat “enough” vegetables, they would be forced to eat twice the normal helping. “We never knew what the right amount was, so we always had to take enough to cover ourselves,” recalls his son.

  2. Body Control

  One Perfectionistic ex-marine father put his ten-year-old daughter on a calisthenics program of catching a football, boxing, casting, rowing, and shooting baskets—and became furious if she didn’t excel.

  One Abusing mother enforced a nightly ritual her son calls “the concentration camp of the dressing.” He was ordered to bring all his pants to her bedroom and lay them out on her bed so she could pick the pair he would wear the next day. Then shirts. Finally, shoes and socks. If he dawdled, she would hit him with her scissors.

  One Abusing, Smothering mother cleaned her daughter’s ears with a bobby pin wrapped in toilet paper, invariably poking and hurting her.

  Several parents seemed fixated on giving their children enemas, holding them down as the children cried.

  3. Boundary Control

  One early-rising Abusing father would wake his children at five A.M. on Saturdays with blaring country music. If they didn’t stir, he’d crash into their rooms and throw ice water in their faces.

  One Cultlike, Using father removed all the locks from his children’s bedrooms and the bathrooms so he could enter the rooms at will. He declared, “It’s my house and I can open any doors I want.”

  4. Social Control

  One Depriving, Childlike mother always kept the family’s drapes closed, and found it “inconceivable” that their daughter would want to leave home to see friends. The mother had few friends, yet harbored a constant fear of social ostracism. Her daughter recalls, “My mother was always saying, ‘What would the neighbors think?’ I could never understand why she placed so much value on the opinions of people she rarely saw.”

  One Smothering, Childlike mother would not allow her daughter to visit friends unless she got permission two days in advance. She also kept her teenage son from extracurricular school activities because “something might happen.”

  Such social isolation weakens children’s autonomy. Children seek neither peers as friends, nor adult figures as mentors, for several reasons: They think nobody would want them; they want to be loyal to their parents; they are told to be self-reliant; or they know their parents simply won’t allow any competition. Lacking an outside reality check, many controlled children have no way to know that they are not alone in their suffering.

  5. Decision Control

  One Perfectionistic, Using father conditioned his son from toddlerhood to be a doctor: “He never let it rest until I flunked out of premed. Then he told me to go to business school so I could make lots of money to compensate for the time I’d lost preparing to be a doctor.”

  A Using mother asked her sixteen-year-old daughter what she wanted to be. When her daughter said she wanted to be an artist, her mother said, “You can’t. Only a few make a living at it. Think of something more sensible.”

  Decision control can be especially painful. There are few wounds deeper for children than having their dreams discounted, being told, in effect, We don’t believe in you.

  6. Speech Control

  One Cultlike, Perfectionistic father habitually corrected his nine-year-old daughter’s spelling and grammar in her love notes to him.

  One Cultlike mother forbade her children to say “Who cares?” or to call their athletic shoes “sneakers.”

  One Depriving mother did not allow her son to ask for anything when they were shopping. “We could never say, ‘Please buy me this,’” he remembers. “My mother thought it rude.”

  7. Emotion Control

  One Cultlike, Perfectionistic family’s rule was Never show your feelings. “When I was in junior high I was so unhappy, but I felt like a crybaby because I was not able to hold it in,” admits their son.

  One Using father devalued feelings. “He’d say, ‘You can’t buy anything with feelings. Can you touch them, see them? No. What good are they?’” his daughter recalled.

  Controlling parents’ mantras about emotions include:

  Who cares how you feel? Just do it.

  Bite the bullet and move on.

  Keep crying and I’ll give you something to cry about.

  Don’t lose control.

  8. Thought Control

  One Smothering mother was horrified when her fourteen-year-old son came home with Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” record. “A young boy shouldn’t be listening to that kind of thing,” his mother told him. She confiscated the record and exchanged it for a Mitch Miller tune.

  One twenty-five-year-old woman told her Using, Depriving mother during a car ride that she was thinking of seeing a therapist: “Once I breathed the word ‘therapy,’ my mother screamed and lectured for the whole car ride.”

  9. Bullying

  Being hit even once can traumatize a child. One Depriving, Abusing stepfather flew into a rage and slapped his sixteen-year-old stepdaughter. “People had always been very gentle with me, so it was very traumatic,” she says. �
��I always lived in fear after that.”

  One Cultlike military father frequently berated his son in public: “It was the worst when he drank gin martinis. He’d start screaming and call me a ‘stupid fuckup.’ My mother would meekly try to get him to stop, but it never worked.”

  One woman still has a vivid mental image of herself thirty years ago sitting in the kitchen with her Abusing father standing over her, his fists clenched and ready to strike, because she was laughing and he couldn’t hear the TV.

  10. Depriving

  One Depriving father seemed so disinterested in his daughter’s wants and needs that she feels, “I could have been a cardboard cutout of myself and my dad would have treated me the same. He would just not listen. After a while, it makes you doubt yourself.”

  Children sense that when parents share their own stories, they share a vital part of themselves. Yet many controlling parents, closed books to their children, are unwilling to talk. Some speak only of a romanticized past; others, only about shallow details or petty grievances. In fact, several people I interviewed knew little about their parents’ pasts. In some cases this is understandable. Parents may be ashamed of something or were raised in families that discouraged self-disclosure. If a parent’s past was traumatic, it may be hard to talk about it. By keeping their pasts hidden or by distorting the facts, parents unwittingly magnify the child’s natural tendency to form a larger-than-life view of them.

  11. Confusing

  One Chaotic mother, whose husband molested their daughter, would first be empathic toward her daughter, then blame her for being sexually abused, screaming, “How could you do this to me?”

  One Smothering mother told her teenage daughter she should marry late because people who marry young are not mature enough to choose wisely. When the young woman reached twenty-five, her mother urged her to “start seeing somebody seriously now.” But, she added, “Until you marry, you’re still going to be a child.” This is a classic bind: The daughter is told she’d better hurry and get married but, until she does, she’s still a child, and therefore not mature enough to marry.

  One Perfectionistic father accidentally kissed his fourteen-year-old daughter on the lips. She recalled, “He was horrified and ran upstairs shouting, ‘Watch out for your sexuality.’” Though the daughter had done nothing wrong, her Using stepmother called her “Hot Lips” for months despite the daughter’s tears and pleas to stop.

  12. Manipulating

  One Depriving, Chaotic mother blamed nearly everything on her absent spouse. “If I tripped on the way to the bus stop, in my mother’s eyes it was my father’s fault,” recalls her daughter. The mother waged war against her estranged husband by refusing to feed her daughter dinner until she wrote letters to the father’s employer saying how bad he was. Eventually the father was fired.

  One Using father’s college tuition checks for his daughter came with the written reminder, “Putting you through college is really lowering my standard of living.”

  Another Using father wrote on every gift he gave, “I hope you realize just how lucky you are to get this.”

  One Chaotic mother sent her daughter a fifty-dollar check each Christmas, then complained about how poor she was. When the daughter didn’t cash her mother’s check one Christmas to help save her money, the mother complained that the uncashed check was messing up her bookkeeping.

  Self-Assessment

  One or both of my parents frequently used:

  Food control

  Body control

  Boundary control

  Social control

  Decision control

  Speech control

  Emotion control

  Thought control

  Bullying

  Depriving

  Confusing

  Manipulating

  Of course, reasonable control of children’s behavior is necessary. But many of the Dirty Dozen methods of control, though seemingly innocuous when seen as a single instance, may very well have happened thousands of times in your childhood. Through repetition, they formed a powerful pattern that makes up the first component of controlling-family brainwashing.

  The second component: “Truth Abuse.”

  2. “Truth Abuse”

  Emotional abusers use guilt the same way a loan shark uses money: They don’t want the “debt” paid off, because they live quite happily on the interest.

  —ANDREW VACHSS

  The Dirty Dozen are psychic Post-it notes by which parental views get inserted into children’s minds before children develop the critical judgment to question them. Because of this, merely thinking critical thoughts about parents may cause those who grew up controlled to feel disloyal, often without knowing why.

  The last two methods of the Dirty Dozen—confusion and manipulation—make up “Truth Abuse.” Truth Abuse can be at the heart of the lingering feelings of disloyalty for many who grew up controlled. The effects of Truth Abuse may still cause you confusion, especially in situations concerning your rights and boundaries. Truth Abuse has several forms.

  Mixed Messages

  Many controlled children grow up with a stream of mixed messages—statements or actions that simply don’t add up. Mixed messages can put children into inescapable binds.

  For example, one Chaotic, Abusing father would rage and hit his children, then a few minutes later act as if nothing had happened and take them for ice cream.

  One woman recalls her Perfectionistic mother’s approach: “I was supposed to be spontaneous yet controlled.”

  Another describes her Smothering parents’ philosophy as “Be assertive except to us.”

  Says yet another, “They told me not to be afraid of things, then terrorized me.”

  One man’s Using, Perfectionistic father commanded his son never to question parental authority, then ridiculed him for not standing up for himself “like a man.”

  Mixed messages leave children wondering, Can I trust what I see and feel? As a result, they either give up or try even harder to fulfill their parents’ unattainable demands. Either option weakens a child’s sense of self while accentuating parental power.

  Two-Faced Behavior

  Controlling parents often tell their children to act one way, then act in opposite ways themselves. One Depriving, Using father presented a “saint persona” to outsiders but was uncaring at home. “He was super-polite and acted interested in strangers,” his son claims. “He’d offer to give rides to my friends but he’d make me take the bus.”

  When parents are two-faced with others, their children naturally wonder whether their parents are being two-faced with them. The inevitable, haunting question: If Mommy and Daddy are nice to people when they are around but trash them behind their backs, what do they say or feel about me when I’m not around?

  Dysfunctional Communication

  Some children grow up in families rife with dysfunctional communication: unfinished thoughts, non sequiturs, repetitive phrases, or incomprehensible language.

  Actually, much of a family therapist’s work is helping families alter dysfunctional communication patterns. Dysfunctional communication focuses primarily on who is right and who is wrong, who wins and who loses, who gets hurt and who avoids pain.

  In Conjoint Family Therapy, family therapist Virginia Satir gives examples of dysfunctional family communication (79—93) such as:

  Fuzzy or incomplete thoughts like, “He’s very, well, you know” (He’s very what?) or, “As you can see, it’s obvious” (What’s obvious?).

  Distracting or stonewalling when asked for clarification by saying, “You know perfectly well what I mean,” “You heard me,” “What’s the matter, don’t you understand English?” or simply restating what was said.

  No-choice choices such as, “I want to go to the park, don’t you?”

  In most controlling families, there is an intricate system of confusing communication. One woman arrived for our interview with a flowchart she’d created that mapped out the pattern of
confusing communication with which she grew up. She recited the progression of her Depriving, Chaotic parents’ tactics as follows:

  “If I asked questions or disagreed with them, they’d interrupt me with stock phrases like, ‘You always, you never.’

  “If that didn’t work, they’d distort what I said. They’d become a broken record and turn the focus back on me, saying something like, ‘Interruption surely is a big obsession with you.’

  “If I persisted, they’d try to distract me by bringing up some totally separate side issue. Or they’d make guilt-provoking statements, throw a temper tantrum, or label me a ‘paranoid schizophrenic.’ If I walked away, it would only intensify the process at a later date.

  “The net result was that I’d end up responding to their attacks and lose track of what I really wanted to get across.”

  Unclear communication blocks children from expressing all the emotions and ideas they have bottled up inside, causes them to doubt their perceptions and communication skills, and makes them feel invisible.

  Outright Denial

  Controlling parents can create uncertainty simply by denying things a child knows to be true. Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini and Prince of Tides, wrote in the introduction to Mary Wertsch’s Military Brats that parents can turn children into “unwitnesses of our own history” by changing stories, challenging their children’s experience, or denying their children’s memories (xix).

  For example, when Elizabeth, a thirty-one-year-old travel agent, began therapy in her mid-twenties, she realized how depressed she had been as a child. When she told her Perfectionistic, Using mother of her realization, her mother said, “What are you talking about? You had a great childhood. You were so happy and joyful.”

  Elizabeth: “A lot of the time I think I’m crazy when my mom disputes my version of things. Her beliefs are so strong they kind of just wipe out mine. She’ll say I had a happy childhood and I’ll think she’s right.” Perhaps Elizabeth’s mom never noticed her daughter’s depression. Or perhaps she would have felt guilty if she were to admit that her daughter had been depressed.