If You Had Controlling Parents

by Dan Neuharth

  Finally, much or all of this part of the book may simply not dovetail with your experiences, values, and views. That’s important to recognize and even more important to honor.

  Exercise for Reckoning with the Costs of Growing Up Controlled

  Envision being the physician or midwife who delivered you. As you hand your infant self to your parents, imagine looking your parents straight in the eye and telling them to always remember that:

  They will be the biggest single determinant in your development.

  You are different from them.

  You may be sensitive in ways they cannot understand.

  Then envision handing them a box of bold warning labels, which are to be sewn on all your childhood clothes, carrying this message: WARNING: IF YOU RAISE YOUR CHILDREN WITH UNHEALTHY CONTROL, YOU WILL PLACE THEM AT RISK FOR DEPRESSION, ANXIETY, LOW SELF-ESTEEM, AND DISTORTED SELF-IMAGE.

  How might your life have been different had your parents heard and heeded these warnings? Acknowledging wounds can bring grief, but remember: Your history is not your destiny. As an adult, you can provide for yourself and for those around you the nurturing, esteem, and healthy habits you were deprived of in childhood.

  13

  LETTING GO OF THE LEGACIES Giving up the Distortions of Your Internalized Parents

  And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

  —JOHN 8:32

  Brainwashing, whether by a cult or a controlling family, is designed to hide responsibility and distort accountability—to keep anyone from daring to announce, “The emperor has no clothes.”

  Though brainwashing is powerful, it is not foolproof. If it were, everybody would be indoctrinated into cults, and no cult member would ever leave. Yet only a minority of people ever join a cult, and the majority of cult members eventually leave.

  Similarly, parental overcontrol has its limits. Yes, you may sometimes feel as if you revert to being like a child when you are around one or both of your parents. Yes, you may sometimes feel as if you are in a trance, unable to assert yourself around someone who acts like one of your parents. But these feelings will pass. Parental control is not nearly as powerful now as when you were a child.

  We explored in Chapter 11 that children have little choice but to internalize their parents’ voices, especially the critical voices. For many who grew up controlled, the key to moving beyond blame and anger lies in finding new ways to cope with these critical inner messages. Internalized parents tend to perpetuate distorted views of the world. Recognizing these views as distortions is a powerful way to begin mastering the challenges in your life. Think of an obstacle or challenge in your life today, then see if any of the following five distortions are present in it:

  1. Distortions of Power and Size

  Distortions of power and size may have been fostered if one or both of your parents demanded absolute control, gave you little independence, or treated you in ways that made you feel small. As a result, you may automatically view yourself as less capable than others or, alternatively, as so big and powerful that you have to protect others from yourself. You may feel you need permission to do what is naturally your right. You may feel intimidated or, conversely, contemptuous in the presence of authority figures.

  For example, Penny, the self-described “Good Girl-Miss Perfect” profiled in the previous chapter, had a distortedly small sense of her own power and size that left her viewing herself as small and flawed in relation to others. Alex, the burned-out super-salesman, had a distortedly large sense of his size and power that left him feeling that he was too big and too demanding for other people to cope with. Belinda, the thirty-year-old computer analyst, felt so small that she found herself cringing at work when she was around authority figures.

  2. Distortions of Feeling and Wanting

  Distortions of feeling and wanting may have been fostered if your emotions were banned, or inflated, or feared, or if your desires were shamed or thwarted. As a result, you may postpone attending to your feelings, thereby squelching them. You may view feelings like anger, fear, sadness, and joy as life-threatening and consequently overreact. You may misinterpret or be unable to listen to a loved one’s strong feelings. Distortions of wanting may lead you to deprive yourself of legitimate yearnings or, alternatively, to live with unrealistic hopes. You may unconsciously come to expect pain in life and become uncomfortable when good things happen.

  Penny, for example, found feelings so big, she felt as if she were going to break apart when others expressed strong emotions. Alex found feelings so frightening, he could not give himself permission to laugh or relax. Belinda found it hard to want to be a parent herself, automatically expecting that she would hurt her children as her mother had hurt her.

  3. Distortions of Thinking

  Distortions of thinking may have been fostered if truths were denied, perceptions discounted, parental responsibility avoided, and blame and shame heaped on you as a child. As a result, you may automatically preempt your attempts to stand up for your rights. You may accept unfair control from others, regarding it as normal. Distortions of thinking may lead you to avoid personal responsibility or assume responsibility for others’ problems. You may also chronically doubt your perceptions or leap to conclusions based on all-or-nothing reasoning.

  Penny, for instance, attended to life’s “shoulds” and rules without questioning whether they were accurate or healthy for her. Alex couldn’t let go of the “untidyness” of Friday afternoon business calls that wouldn’t be resolved until Monday. Belinda feared making decisions because she was sure her choices would turn out to be wrong.

  4. Distortions of Relating

  Distortions of relating may have been fostered if closeness was elusive and dangerous, or if you were infantilized for too long or thrust into the role of caretaker too soon. As a result, you may feel unable to get close to others when you want to. You may trust people unwisely or, conversely, find that your ability to trust is stubbornly elusive. You may see others as threats, saviors, or objects instead of as human beings.

  Penny, despite early warning signs, believed that her first two husbands would cherish her rather than treat her like “a thing.” Alex felt trapped in his relationship dilemma of wanting “someone to get close to” but finding that when someone got close, he ran. Belinda could not bear to trust her boyfriend, though he had done nothing to betray her trust in their two years together.

  5. Distortions of Self and Identity

  Distortions of self may have been fostered if your intuition, initiative, pride, or needs were devalued. As a result, you may underrate your abilities, undercut your potential, or underplay your strengths. Distortions of self and identity may lead you to fear or banish parts of your personality, present a false front to others, or see yourself as an object instead of a person.

  Penny found a positive self-image so elusive that she was incredulous when others complimented her. Alex, whose family had never asked his opinion, came to believe he had nothing interesting to offer others. Belinda found herself in the dark about her own abilities and desires after years of her mother’s mixed messages.

  How to Cope with Your Internalized Parents

  Your internalized parents—earlier we also called them “inner critics”—traffic in distortions. Like viruses, they infected you in childhood.

  You may never be able to entirely rid yourself of distorted thinking, but you can see it for what it is: the ghost of your parents’ fears; a self-abnegating mechanism assembled within you before you had the wherewithal to prevent it.

  Here are two tools that can help you abandon the distortions of your internalized parents.

  Tool Number One: Revisit the Eight Styles of Controlling Parenting

  Recall the eight styles of controlling parents from Part One (Smothering, Depriving, Perfectionistic, Cultlike, Chaotic, Using, Abusing, and Childlike). Ask yourself: “Do I treat myself the way my parents treated me?” Having identified your parents’ styles, you may
now have a big clue as to the nature of your harsher self-judgments. Of course, everybody has inner critics, those mental voices that carry on a lifelong monologue—judging, commenting, tempting, and threatening. But for those of us who grew up controlled, inner critics can mushroom into inner tyrants. Do you have an inner tyrant whose messages and criticisms are smothering, depriving, perfectionistic, cultlike, chaotic, using, abusing, or childlike? For example:

  Smothering inner tyrant: Who do you think you are?

  Depriving inner tyrant: You don’t deserve something that nice.

  Perfectionist inner tyrant: Don’t screw up.

  Cultlike inner tyrant: You’re doing it wrong and you’re going to get in trouble.

  Chaotic inner tyrant: You’re losing control.

  Using inner tyrant: You’re selfish.

  Abusing inner tyrant: You’re worthless.

  Childlike inner tyrant: You’re incapable.

  Look at your self-criticisms. You might often feel that you are doing things wrong or that you can never perform well enough. Your thoughts, “It’s wrong” and “I’m not good enough,” represent perfectionistic themes. If you grew up with Perfectionistic parents, you may find that the overarching themes of perfectionism drive your thoughts and feelings even now.

  The same is true with each of the styles of parenting. If you had Smothering parents, you may feel you cannot solve problems on your own. If you had Depriving parents, you may feel you must solve problems without others’ help. If you had Cultlike parents, you may feel you have to know for sure before you can act. If you had Chaotic parents, you may feel too confused to easily solve problems. If you had Using parents, you may find yourself preoccupied with what effect your actions might have on others. If you had Abusing parents, you may be afraid to act boldly. If you had Childlike parents, you may worry that others are so fragile that your actions will harm them.

  The themes of your inner tyrants—the “voice-over” your parents installed—tend to be loudest when you are acting or feeling counter to parental values or rules. When you acknowledge the distorted themes your inner tyrants are hawking, their actual self-critical messages become manageable. Rather than having to fend off each “It’s wrong” or “I’m not good enough,” you can instead see the bigger picture and note, “Ah, perfectionistic thinking, just like how I was raised.” Children of Perfectionistic parents, for example, often feel flawed, not realizing that their parents found fault with everyone—even God. You might then remind yourself that you’re in good company.

  Your goal is not to deny your inner tyrants’ existence or banish them from your psyche—that isn’t possible. Your goal is to get to know your inner tyrants so you can puzzle out how they work. You can, in fact, set limits on your inner tyrants’ influence without disowning their existence.

  Once you have set healthier boundaries with your actual parents as well as with your inner tyrants, you may find you have a greater capacity to cultivate and listen to another voice within—the voice that speaks to you with care, compassion, and encouragement rather than judgment, bullying, and manipulation. This “inner nurturer” is derived from many sources: your deepest self and values; contact throughout life with nurturing others; and the “good parent” you may have dreamed of or caught glimpses of in your parents’ finer moments.

  Tool Number Two: Revisit the Dirty Dozen

  While you had little choice about what your parents did to you, you have a great deal of choice about how to respond to your internalized parents/inner tyrants. Inner tyrants tend to use the same methods your parents used to control: the Dirty Dozen (direct control of food, body, boundaries, social life, decisions, feelings, speech and thought, along with indirect control through bullying, depriving, confusing, and manipulating). While appropriate self-control is a good thing, marching to the strident overcontrol of inner tyrants is emotional fascism.

  Notice your next negative impulse or thought, then see if any of the Dirty Dozen are present. For example, do you: Harbor criticisms of your body and appearance? Give yourself little breathing room to make mistakes? Avoid new people and new experiences? Endlessly second-guess your decisions? Deny your feelings? Ignore your intuition? Scare yourself by frequently imagining worst-case scenarios? Deprive yourself by not asking for what you want? Think of yourself as stupid or flawed? Sometimes use food to punish or reward yourself?

  Each of these critical messages derives from the Dirty Dozen. There is no need to be ashamed of such thoughts; we all have them from time to time. But you might pause for a moment in the midst of one to contemplate the thought and see if it is one of the Dirty Dozen. Next, ask yourself, “Is this critical thought about me really true, or is it really a fear or self-punishment?”

  Recognizing the Dirty Dozen in your psyche can steer you toward shedding the distortions. For example:

  If you live with great inner criticism and scant praise, you may want to block self-criticism and increase self-praise.

  If you are compulsively driving yourself in reaction to parents who called you lazy, you may want to slow down. Conversely, if you are underperforming in reaction to or rebellion against pressuring parents, you may want to push yourself beyond your present comfort level in one or more areas.

  If you don’t pay attention to your emotions, you may want to gradually begin focusing on feelings. This action is like letting fresh air into a cut so it can heal: It hurts at first, but the healing is more complete. Something as simple as noticing at least five feelings a day can build awareness.

  If your emotions feel stifled, you might allow more frequent emotional expression. One hallmark of growing up controlled is thinking, Feelings shouldn’t be. But feelings don’t have to be justified; they just are. Giving breathing room to your emotions can mean reminding yourself, “All my feelings belong. They don’t need reasons to exist.”

  If you feel isolated from support and comfort, you may want to put more emphasis on seeking experiences that soothe and people who reassure.

  If you feel deprived, you may want to gradually give more to yourself and allow yourself to receive more out of life.

  If you have been giving your parents the benefit of the doubt to your own detriment, you may want to seek the guidance of a trusted friend or therapist as you question the validity of these viewpoints.

  If you feel it’s wrong to say no or point out what is wrong, you may want to spend more time saying no where appropriate or speaking out about what is wrong in your family, workplace, or society.

  If you “left” your body years ago by numbing out, you might realize that your body never left you; spend extra time and attention caring for it.

  Exercise for Letting Go of the Legacies:

  Ask yourself: “Am I willing to have a better life than my parents?” Healthier parents want their children to have better lives than they did; controlling parents give children the message that they should not outdo the parents. But don’t you deserve as good a life as you can have? While we can’t completely control the quality of our lives, we can give ourselves permission to have a better marriage, career, emotional life, community of friends, and/or lifestyle than our parents. Giving yourself this permission can overcome lingering familial loyalties or injunctions that may unwittingly keep you from realizing your full potential.

  Next: Why They Did It

  The final chapters of Part Two will help you discover why your parents needed to exert such control over you. Doing so can help you make peace with your past.

  14

  WHY PARENTS OVERCONTROL

  The more we idealize the past and refuse to acknowledge our childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.

  —ALICE MILLER

  The roots of your parents’ control can often lie in events that occurred long before you were born. As one woman I interviewed said, “Knowing my mother’s past allows me to feel less like a victim. Knowing her past means she isn’t just this person who did mean things to me. It�
��s what happened to her, and her mom, and her mom’s mom.”

  Controlling parents tend to be children of trauma. Trauma is an unexpected or shocking event or series of events that threatens your life or some vital part of yourself. This is not to say that everyone who has experienced trauma will grow up to be controlling. Nor is it true that every controlling parent experienced early trauma. But two factors are markedly common:

  a. Controlling parents tend to have suffered severe and often multiple traumas as children.

  b. They got little or no help in facing the consequences of the trauma.

  This combination of trauma without help can lead to overcontrol. Four kinds of trauma are especially wounding to children:

  Loss of a parent: Physical loss through death or abandonment; emotional loss through marked emotional rejection or neglect.

  Attacks: Repeated assaults through physical or sexual abuse or malignantly negative parenting.

  Crises: Societal or family crises such as war, natural disaster, poverty, severe illness, or the death of a sibling or close relative.

  Stress: Chronic long-term stressors such as having an alcoholic or mentally ill parent, long-standing marital discord, or unhealthy family roles.

  Among the more than eighty controlling parents of those I interviewed, the incidence of trauma was striking (see Notes on Research on pp 241—242 for the sources of the statistics):