If You Had Controlling Parents

by Dan Neuharth

  Because as children they didn’t get sufficient help, attention, and love, controlling parents generally feel that they are not adequate—though they may act in quite the opposite way. As adults, they may seek assurances of self-worth through watertight rules, beliefs, and practices. Their overcontrol is a futile effort to secure guarantees that they will be loved and safe rather than powerless, invalidated, or out of control. Yet it is costly because:

  Parents who fear being judged as flawed can never let others see them as they truly are.

  Parents who need to feel powerful must always be on guard against threats to their power.

  Parents who fear invalidation cannot tolerate questions or uncertainty.

  Parents who fear vulnerability view everything and everyone as potentially threatening.

  Parents who must avoid feeling out of control are likely to miss out on joy, spontaneity, and love.

  Parental Control Is Not Personal

  Because they were frightened, your parents may have taken personally much of what happened in their lives. You don’t have to. If you take nothing else from this chapter, I hope you come away with the realization that your parents’ control wasn’t personal. They didn’t dominate you because you were bad, inadequate, did something wrong, or were cursed by God. The reasons had to do with them, not you.

  Ironically, no matter how domineering they are, most controlling parents think they don’t dominate enough; when you’re terrified of the world, you can never do enough to protect yourself. A further irony is that, while many of us spent thousands of hours trying to figure out how to make our parents more accepting and less controlling, they would have controlled no matter what we did. There’s no way you could have stopped them.

  Overcontrol isn’t personal, it’s generational—until someone breaks the cycle, it’s a white-knuckle response to trauma. You can be that someone. Part Three of this book will show you how.

  50 Reasons People Control in Unhealthy Ways

  While control is necessary for living, dysfunctional control is not. We can never know absolutely why others act as they do, but we can make educated guesses that lead to greater understanding and compassion for parents, other people, and ourselves. Here are fifty reasons why people control in unhealthy ways. Notice any reasons that strike a chord in explaining why either your actual parents or your internalized parents control.

  Then, you might review the list and ask yourself if any of these reasons explain why you sometimes control yourself or others in unhealthy ways.

  Cognitive Reasons: People Overcontrol Because They Believe

  Others will take advantage of them.

  Total control of others is possible and that they are controlling for others’ good.

  The world is unsafe and control can ward off danger.

  Disagreements can destroy people and being criticized is life-threatening.

  Values and lifestyles differing from theirs are wrong.

  They are superior to other people.

  Situations are a zero-sum game in which there is always a winner and a loser.

  Intergenerational Reasons: People Overcontrol Because They

  Were raised with excess control and did not fully or healthily separate from their parents.

  Grew up feeling abandoned or smothered and came to see others as potential abandoners or smotherers.

  Felt overridden and deprived as children and are terrified of being overridden and deprived as adults.

  Never felt seen as children and now insist on being the center of attention.

  Had misguided models of how to treat people.

  Emotional Reasons: People Overcontrol Because They

  Fear their needs for safety and dependency and consequently intellectualize instead of facing their feelings.

  Attempt to avoid a huge reservoir of grief, anger, or regret and see others’ emotions as unsettling reminders.

  Are convinced they won’t get gratification so they remain aloof.

  Have poor body images or conflicts about sexuality and are jealous of others’ healthier or younger bodies.

  Possess poor emotional coping skills and cannot teach others how to deal with feelings.

  Envy others’ good fortune.

  Are depressed, anxious, addicted, and/or have poor impulse control.

  Power/Gratification Reasons: People Overcontrol Because They

  Feed off the energy of others.

  Personalize others’ actions.

  Need to feel grandiose because they are petrified of feeling weak or powerless.

  Are addicted to control, which, like a drug or a drink, brings on a rush.

  Need to channel their desire for revenge and to feel others are dependent on them.

  Are just plain mean.

  Unconscious/Existential Reasons: People Overcontrol Because They

  Are unwilling to admit they have weaknesses or fears.

  Are angry with themselves, a spouse, a boss, or their own parents, but displace their anger onto others who are not as threatening.

  Act in ways that mirror their fears (e.g., a father who grew up in a chaotic home may be obsessed with order; a mother who was treated as stupid in childhood may exhort her children to be “smart”).

  Are in denial about their control and the pain they cause others.

  See others as the cause of their problems and are overly suspicious about what others are doing.

  Become inflictors of pain to avoid feeling like helpless, passive victims.

  Disown weak aspects of their selves and can’t tolerate anything small, helpless, and weak around them—like children.

  Fear accepting the humbling reality that few people like, but most of us eventually accept: We all have some power, but events are often dangerous and random and there will always be things outside our control.

  Need coercive rules and rigid beliefs to maintain the status quo and tidy up life’s messy questions.

  Need to outlaw dissent to prevent anyone from pointing out that perhaps they are not as perfect or as in control as they would like to believe.

  Are trying to distract themselves from their own problems, flaws, or feelings.

  Resent others’ hobbies or close relationships because they feel their influence shrinks and fear that others will come to love someone or something else more than they love them.

  Self-Esteem Reasons: People Overcontrol Because They

  Feel they cannot stand up for themselves and don’t deserve anything any better than what they have.

  Need others’ approval and want to be seen as perfect.

  Hope another’s accomplishments will accord them status, as in “My son the doctor.”

  Cannot cope with the demands of parenthood or adulthood.

  Excessively value beauty, fame, power, or money.

  Interpersonal Reasons: People Overcontrol Because They

  Assign people to a limited range of roles, such as those of servants, masters, or objects, and respond to them as such.

  Never integrated the realization that others can be both nurturing and rejecting, so they keep others at a “safe” distance.

  Felt like “things” around their parents, so view other people as objects.

  Are inept at distinguishing their own needs or fears from those of others.

  See others’ bodies as extensions of themselves (one man said his Perfectionistic father saw him as a “walking, talking, stuffed animal sprung from his loins”).

  Feel defeated in reaching their goals or regret not following their dreams and want to save others from making the same mistake.

  Circumstantial/Societal Reasons: People Overcontrol Because They

  Are overwhelmed by their unmet needs and/or face financial, social, work, physical, or marital crises.

  Do not make healthy relationships a priority or subscribe to societal and cultural values that foster overcontrol.

  Exercise for Discovering Why People Control

  Think of an incident in which some
one tried to control you in unhealthy ways. Which of the above reasons might best describe why they acted as they did? How does understanding why someone else controls affect how you feel about them and about control in general?

  Part Two—A Summary

  It’s hard to acknowledge that you had little choice and control in your early life. It may feel demeaning to admit that you’re still struggling with problems spawned by your parents decades ago. Yet acknowledging your lack of choice and control in early life can spark a freeing recognition:

  Given your upbringing, many of your problems make sense—and they are not your fault.

  Yes, your problems are yours to solve. But they do not reflect innate character flaws, the lack of the ability to love or be loved, or a lack of competence. Many of your adult-life problems may stem from early situations which you had no power to alter. Blaming yourself can only hurt. Healing is not about blaming yourself or others. Healing involves:

  Seeing the controlling-family brainwashing in your past.

  Seeing the “trances” that are induced by the internalized parents in your present.

  Seeing when you are controlling yourself or those around you just as your parents controlled you.

  Learning to appropriately trust rather than automatically control.

  The final section of this book will explore many of the healing strengths you possess, including ones you may not even realize you have.

  PART THREE

  Solving the Problem

  Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

  —GLORIA STEINEM

  In the Introduction I wrote:

  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.

  The remainder of this book is about what you do with your life from now on.

  Solving the problem of growing up controlled has three steps:

  Step One: Emotionally leaving home by separating from the hurtful aspects of your upbringing, parents, and family role.

  Step Two: Bringing balance to your relationship with your parents.

  Step Three: Redefining your life.

  Emotional healing is like physical healing. If you cut your finger, you clean the wound and protect it from infection with a bandage. If you break your leg, you set the bone and wear a cast to protect it from further trauma. This allows your body’s natural healing process to work.

  It’s the same with emotional healing. When you’re emotionally wounded by a controlling childhood, “cleaning” the wound means facing your true past and speaking about it. And the “bandage” or “cast” that protects these wounds from further injury is emotionally leaving home. This doesn’t necessarily mean a physical separation from your parents, but it may entail letting go of counterproductive links with them and your upbringing.

  You cannot mend a broken bone faster by telling it to “heal more quickly.” Healing a broken leg means wearing a cast, which can make walking difficult. Similarly, emotional healing may mean changes in habits that at first feel awkward.

  Like physical healing, emotional healing can happen twenty-four hours a day without conscious effort. You may not know exactly how a cut heals; you just notice that each day it gets a little better. Similarly, people who begin emotionally separating from a controlled upbringing frequently notice over time that they develop more positive values and a greater sense of freedom, often without knowing precisely how.

  Emotional separation opens the way for you to bring balance to your relationship with your parents, whether they are living or dead. Emotional separation also permits you to redefine your life and yourself in terms of who you really are and where you really want to go, not in terms of your parents or your past.

  Step One: Emotionally Leaving Home

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  SEPARATING FROM UNHEALTHY FAMILY TIES

  Honor thy father and thy mother.

  —EXODUS 20:12

  Why isn’t there a commandment to “honor thy children” or at least to “not abuse thy children?”

  —BEVERLY ENGEL

  Emotionally leaving home means emotionally separating from any hurtful or counterproductive links with your parents, your past, or your family role. In so doing, you discover new aspects of yourself and recover nuances of your personality long obscured by a controlled upbringing.

  Family therapist Murray Bowen wrote that the level of emotional separation among family members, which he termed “differentiation,” is one of the key determinants of emotional health (409). As Bowen pointed out, you had little choice about how differentiated your family was. Yet you have great choice in your adult years as to whether you attain a greater degree of differentiation and emotional separation than your parents did.

  Emotional separation is comprised of three elements:

  Observing

  Declaring your independence

  Mastering the challenges of separation

  In healthier families, emotional separation takes place naturally and gradually, accelerating as children reach their teens. In controlling families, this emotional separation, if it is allowed at all, takes place unevenly. Controlling parents often lack the skills to help their children separate; young adults from controlling families often leave home with overwhelming emotional baggage because a natural separation couldn’t take place.

  Emotionally separating from your parents is a major step in adult development. You may not know how big a blot a controlled upbringing is on your life until you begin to differentiate. Those I interviewed described how energizing it was to gain perspective about their painful pasts and take the reins of their lives. Many described feeling as if the “fog” had lifted. Others testified that, by just stepping back, they began to focus more on their own needs and less on their parents.’

  Remember, you grew up under controlling-family brainwashing and it can take time and effort to free yourself. Remember, too, that there are many paths and a range of paces to emotional separation—there is no single right way or best speed. Often separation starts slowly, with baby steps over the course of many months. It can be enhanced by cultivating an internal ally—the strong part of you that is always there, watching—as well as by relying on external allies such as supportive friends, family members, therapists, teachers or mentors, self-help groups, or literature.

  As a child, you may have tried to distance yourself from the pain of being controlled by complying, rebelling, distracting, dissociating, or outdoing your parents. While these methods helped you survive, they kept you emotionally tied to your parents and may still do so today.

  Do one or more of these five coping strategies describe a posture you still find yourself taking with your parents?

  Complying: You seek the path of least resistance, doing what your parents want or what you think they would want, even when it means forgoing your own best interests.

  Rebelling: You seek the path of greatest resistance, automatically opposing your parents to avoid being controlled, even when rebelling harms you.

  Distracting: You make light of or change the subject, rather than directly face your parents’ control even though it reduces your stature in your own or others’ eyes.

  Dissociating: You daydream, sleep, seek out an addiction, or virtually avoid your parents rather than face the threat of parental control even though it costs you awareness and aliveness.

  Outdoing: You compulsively try to control yourself or your parents when you are around them, even though it heightens your stress.

  As an adult, you have more options than complying, rebelling, distracting, dissociating, or outdoing. A valuable first step is observing.

  Observing

  Emotional separation begins with stepping back and observing. This means observing your parents, the effects they have on you, and your responses to them. Despite the “do something” orientation of many controlling families, often the best thing
to do initially in a troubled relationship is simply to observe.

  Observe how you feel before, during, and after contact with your parents. As one woman put it, “When I go home, I have to play the good daughter and be polite. I become part of this machine. My body is there but not my heart and spirit.”

  After contact with your parents, do you feel valued or devalued? Content or irritable? Trusted or betrayed? Optimistic or hopeless? Accepted or judged? Confident or flustered? Energized or fatigued? On a scale of one to ten—ten being the biggest—what size do you feel in relationship to your parents? How does that compare to how you want to feel?

  Ask yourself whether you have contact with your parents because you want to, or out of obligation, as Ellen Bass and Laura Davis suggested in The Courage to Heal. Your answer can tell you volumes about what the relationship both provides and costs you.

  In addition to observing how you act and feel around your parents, notice how your parents act around you. A turning point in my relationship with my father came some years ago when I went to his house for my nephew’s christening. I wasn’t looking forward to being around my father because our relationship had grown icy and tense, but I did want to be there for the christening. A colleague suggested I use the visit to observe how my father controlled.

  During my two-day visit I took my colleague’s advice and mentally counted each controlling thing my father said or did. The total was in the dozens: He dictated when we ate, where we ate, when we got together, when we could approach him, when we had to halt other conversations to listen to him, even what we touched in his house. I was nearly forty and my father’s control, as pervasive as it was, was infinitely milder than it had been when I was a child. Yet I still found myself hesitating and wondering what I had done wrong. I was receiving only a taste of what had been my steady emotional diet, but it was enough to dispel any doubts about how my father’s control had haunted me as a boy.