If You Had Controlling Parents
Page 13
…the more you could express yourself and connect with others, the more you could respect yourself…
…the greater your self-respect, the more likely you were to act with autonomy and initiative…
…acting with more autonomy helped you to foster healthy boundaries and an accurate self-image. And so on.
By the same token, if your upbringing swung to the right-hand side of the continuum—the prescription for slowed development—the effects were also cumulative:
If you grew up with attack, neglect, or deprivation, your self-image may have become distorted…
…if your self-image was distorted, your willingness to express yourself may have suffered…
…with reduced self-expression, your social isolation may have increased, leaving you more dependent on your parents…
…with enhanced dependency, you may have been more vulnerable to relationships with unhealthy boundaries…
…this greater vulnerability probably created more stress and dependency. And so on.
Controlling families exact a cumulative toll because the key avenues to mental health—access to information, supportive others, emotional expression, and free speech—are generally missing. Children in controlling families tend to lack a sympathetic adult who believes in them. Controlling families also tend to disable children’s healthy natural instincts and magnify the already unequal relationship between parent and child.
Despite the sense of mystery about their upbringing that many people who grew up controlled possess, in retrospect it’s not so mysterious:
The people you depended on for your survival…
The people who had the ability to give you tremendous pain or pleasure…
Controlled you in a dozen tangible ways…
Thousands of times…
In your most impressionable years.
In essence, controlling parents brainwash with a one-two-three-four punch:
Creating an environment hostile to growth
Blaming their children for creating the environment
Criticizing their children when the children suffer the consequences of the environment the parents created
Denying doing any of this
It wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t right.
And you do have the right to feel anger, sadness, dismay, and much more over what was done to you.
If you have doubts about the tremendous power and impact of controlling families, it can help to review their arsenal. Seeing it all together can be shocking—and freeing.
Controlling Parents’ Arsenal…and Cost to Children
Controlling Parents’ Arsenal
Cost to Children
Conditional love
One-down position
Disrespect
Feel undeserving
Labeling dissent as a sin
Eroded autonomy
Long-standing family tension
Sapped energy
Lack of praise
Negative self-image
Harsh discipline
Focus on obedience, not learning
Confusing communication
Rampant self-doubts
Pervasive mistrust
Isolation
Unhealthy boundaries
Distorted sense of self
Excessive scrutiny
Increased second-guessing
Social isolation
No sources of support
Smothering uniformity
Hindered initiative
Deprivation
Lowered expectations
Perfectionistic pressure
Reduced self-acceptance
Cultlike thinking
Curtailed curiosity
Chaotic atmosphere
Diminished trust
Using parenting
Impaired coping skills
Abuse and intimidation
Crippled self-protective instincts
Childlike parenting
Parental needs dominate
Food control
Increased dependence
Body control
Reduced pride
Boundary control
Insecurity
Social control
Heightened depression and anxiety
Decision control
Lessened free will
Speech control
Blocked self-expression
Emotion control
Narrowed resources for coping with stress
Thought control
Complicated inner life
Truth Abuse
Parental denial prevails
Mixed messages
Confusion and paralysis
Two-faced behavior
Uncertainty and mistrust
Scapegoating
Obscured parental responsibility
Infantilizing
Prolonged dependency
Parentifying
Children become caretakers
Triangulating
Split loyalties and increased guilt
Emotional dumping
Feelings of failure
Assumptions of “owning” children
Children accept abuse and control
Attacks on children’s very nature
Shattered self-esteem
Distorted models of relating
Warped expectations for relationships
Black-and-white thinking
Warped intellectual development
The net result of growing up under the guns of this arsenal: To survive, children internalize the controlling voices of parents.
As I’ve said, it explains why parental control may affect you even today.
Why Your Internalized Parents Are So Powerful
There are three “givens” about parents and children:
Parents and children have an inherently unequal relationship.
Young children tend to idealize and mimic their parents, making it difficult to achieve a balanced view of them until much later.
Children need love, attention, and approval from their parents and will do anything to get it.
In healthier families, parents take advantage of these three givens to socialize, teach, nurture, and love so that children will grow up emotionally stronger. In controlling families, however, parents take advantage of these givens to get more control.
Young children, not yet complex thinkers, aren’t able to see the grays and the nuances in life. To them, Daddy and Mommy are big and good, whether they are or not. Children can be scrutinized at any time by parents: when eating, playing, sleeping, and on the potty, but few children see their parents sleeping, making love, or using the bathroom. Few see their parents at work or in the outside world, when the parents may not be as dominant or as in control. As a result, children grow up seeing their parents as larger than life.
In controlling families, the negative influences of parents are magnified. If a parent is chronically anxious, the child—self-centered, as children naturally are—may conclude that there is something dangerous or wrong about themselves. If a parent cannot relax or gets tense even on happy occasions, a child may conclude that joy and happiness are not okay. If a parent is uncomfortable around anger, children may conclude that anger is to be feared or that their own anger will damage others. These conclusions go deep and can last a lifetime.
More than anything, children want love. When you are a helpless, tiny creature in a world of giants in which events happen that you don’t understand and can’t control—a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” as William James called an infant’s experience—a parent who loves you and whom you can trust and love is the top priority for survival. Children need not only love but also all that goes with it: nurturing touch; acceptance; safety; belonging; being seen for who they are; and the freedom to laugh, cry, rage, and be afraid. Because they need love and acceptance so desperately, children will take them in any form they can get them. When they don’t get love, they’ll con
strue whatever they do get—including unhealthy control—as love. Therein lie the seeds of problems later in life.
The most unfortunate parallel between controlling families and destructive cults is that parental control becomes internalized in children, just as cult dogma becomes internalized in cult members. No parent can be present twenty-four hours a day. But controlling parents don’t have to physically be there because the family system installs an omnipresent inner controller in the child. These twenty-four-hour internalized parents, with their nagging commentary, second-guessing, and criticism, can perpetuate deprivation, perfectionism, and speech-and-feeling control well into adult life. This inner control may surface in the form of poor interpersonal boundaries, feelings of unworthiness, lowered expectations, self-loathing, fear of closeness, or poor self-image.
Looking back, it may be alarming to see how controlled, even “brainwashed” you were as a child. Yet, like members of cults or prisoners of war, you had little choice. You didn’t do anything wrong. Anybody in such a closed system would have suffered. Knowing this, you can assure yourself that:
You are not crazy.
You didn’t make it up.
Overcontrol really happened.
It was painful and destructive.
You could not help but internalize controlling parental voices.
These realizations open the door for a further realization that can pave the way for you to let go of much of the destructive legacy of childhood overcontrol:
If you could not help but internalize controlling voices, then many of your self-criticisms, fears, and doubts are not yours, nor are they your true voice. They are merely messages from your internalized parents. They are relics from a controlled past. They are simply bad habits. And you can change them.
Exercise for Understanding Overcontrol and the Internalized Parents
Recall an encounter with a parent or any controlling person and check off in the first column which of the Dirty Dozen control methods they used.
Then write down any self-critical thoughts you recall having during or after the encounter. These are messages from your internalized parents. In the second column, check off the kinds of control these messages from your internalized parents represent.
Parents used
Internalized parents use
Food control
•
•
Body control
•
•
Boundary control
•
•
Social control
•
•
Decision control
•
•
Speech control
•
•
Emotion control
•
•
Thought control
•
•
Bullying
•
•
Depriving
•
•
Confusing
•
•
Manipulating
•
•
12
THE ADULT-LIFE LEGACIES OF GROWING UP CONTROLLED
A lot of people go through life beating themselves up the same way they were beaten up.
—MARLO THOMAS
Controlling families harm for one predominant reason: They are organized to please and protect the parents, not to foster optimal growth or self-expression among family members. Such a skewed structure can distort a child’s sense of self in ways that last well into adulthood. This chapter focuses on learning to make connections between early control and your present problems. Remember: Growing up controlled is not a life sentence. What you can see, you can heal. You were not to blame for being controlled nor are you to blame for the consequences of that early control. You may have been victimized, but you are not a victim. Grasping how early control relates to current life challenges can be the key to mastering many of those challenges.
You aren’t responsible for what your parents did to you, they are.
You are responsible for what you do with your life now, your parents aren’t.
Here are stories from three people interviewed. Each grew up in a very different type of family, but all share a commonality: Early control is linked to many of their adult dilemmas.
Alex
Alex, forty-eight, a bearish man with black curly hair and blue eyes, has been the top seller in his company for seven years running. He owns a stylish home, impeccably furnished and maintained. Despite his financial success, he finds little pleasure in life.
Alex was married briefly in his twenties, but divorced. He lives alone and is not seeing anyone. Alex’s romantic relationships have taken one of two paths: He either becomes too demanding, and his partners leave, or his partners want more closeness than Alex can bear, and he leaves: “I want someone to get close to but when someone gets too close, I run.” It’s difficult for Alex to laugh or relax and he finds physical contact uncomfortable, stiffening involuntarily when he is hugged.
On the job, Alex is compulsive. “I hate getting phone calls on Friday afternoons at five because there is nothing I can do to take care of it until seven A.M. Monday. I want instant response, instant solutions,” he admits. Alex takes as little comfort from his career successes as he does from his financial ones: “I refuse to quit my job but I almost hope I get fired so I can get rid of everything I own and go somewhere and write novels.”
Alex’s father died of complications from diabetes. Alex has a weight problem and he suspects that he, too, may have the disease but refuses to get checked: “I do have low energy and low blood sugar shakes at times, but if a doctor told me I had to give myself shots, I’d never do it.”
Alex’s Upbringing
As I listened to Alex, I wondered what led to his malaise. It turns out that he grew up in a woefully aloof family with two Depriving parents. Alex does not remember being held, hugged, or told he was loved by his parents. His parents rarely asked his opinions. “One time at dinner a relative asked me my opinion about some world event,” Alex recalls. “I didn’t know what to say. Our family never had opinions. We never talked at the dinner table. I went through childhood like a blob. I had learned for years not to rock the boat.” Once, on an overnight high school field trip, Alex was silent the entire time until, he remembers, “One kid asked me, ‘Don’t you ever talk?’”
Alex’s father rarely spoke to his son: “Some dads tell you that you have to hit a home run each time. My father never even said, ‘Let’s play catch.’”
He never recalls seeing his mother laugh or cry, felt she kept him at arm’s length, and was mostly concerned that Alex “do the right thing.” His mother died five years prior to our interview. Shortly before her death, Alex visited her and took a walk with her. It was the first and only walk he ever took with her in his life.
Connections Between Alex’s Past and Present
The more I heard about Alex’s childhood, the more I could make connections with his current struggles.
It’s understandable that Alex might find touching difficult when he had little physical affection as a child. It’s understandable that he might distrust closeness when he failed to gain his parents’ affection no matter what he did. It’s understandable that Alex sometimes pushes too hard in relationships since love was so hard to get in his family. After a childhood of never being asked his opinions, it makes sense that Alex feels unattractive to others. It’s also understandable that he feels driven in his work life and finds it hard to relax. His family was a place where doing the “right thing” was more important than having healthy feelings.
And it’s equally understandable, though tragic, that Alex secretly hopes to be fired and ignores a potentially threatening medical condition. Alex was never taught to love himself. Since he was rarely held or touched, he grew to feel unlovable. Since his interests were devalued, he learned not t
o value himself. For so many years, try as he might, Alex could not get what he wanted: his parents’ approval and demonstrations of love. As an adult, Alex displays the symbols of success but lacks the substance.
Alex’s challenge, despite his lack of early healthy models for loving and relating, is to cherish himself and gradually open his heart to others.
Penny
Penny has returned to school at age fifty-three to finish her B.A. in fine arts. She has two grown sons and is in her third marriage. “This time, I finally got it right,” she says about her current marriage.
Penny told me she has lived most of her life behind a “Good Girl, Miss Perfect false front” and finds it hard to assert herself, giving everyone but herself the benefit of the doubt. She has trouble accepting compliments: “I’m amazed when people say I am a good listener.”
Prior to her present marriage, Penny tended to pick men with whom she gave endlessly but who never met her needs. “I’d end up with people who treated me like a thing,” she confesses.
Penny tends to be overly concerned with “shoulds” and “rules.” She is often frightened by strong emotions and is easily startled: “Sometimes I jump when my husband, who is super gentle, comes up behind me to hug me.”
Penny had fixed me tea before our interview and was bustling around picking up tea bags and wiping the countertops. She caught herself and laughed, then grimaced: “I am so compulsive. That is one thing I got from my parents. I find myself following guests around and cleaning up after them.”
Penny’s Upbringing
Penny recalls having little room to be herself around her Smothering mother and Perfectionistic, Cultlike father. When she was twelve, a friend of her parents asked her how she liked school; Penny told the truth: She hated it. Her embarrassed mother quickly contradicted her, “Oh, no, she loves school.” Her mother got her to do unpleasant chores by waiting to ask her in front of others, when Penny was too embarrassed to say no.