If You Had Controlling Parents

by Dan Neuharth

  By emotionally detaching myself in order to observe, I didn’t have to fight anything my father did; everything he did was data I could learn from. Through observing, I realized his fundamental operating principle: Avoid domination by others. This helped me to see why he had raised me as he did and why he continues to control. Perhaps most important, I could appreciate how his fears and operating principle might prohibit our having the kind of relationship I wanted.

  Contact with parents can become bearable, even a growth opportunity, by your becoming an information gatherer—a sort of family anthropologist. Observe how your parents control and what sets them off. Observe how you feel around them and whether your behavior changes in their presence. You may notice how like children controlling parents can be; in many ways, they have children’s resources, views, and emotions. Their tantrums are children’s tantrums; their attempts at control are children’s attempts.

  Observing means embarking on a research project. Rather than a “decision project” in which you have to know all the answers so you can act, a research project involves a transitional period of time in which you don’t have to have instant answers. Everything that happens provides information that helps you to better meet your wants and needs. You don’t have to be in a hurry; in fact, observing is best done when you don’t feel pressured.

  Of course, observing your parents won’t work if the contact is too destructive or costly, but the benefit of observational experiments is that nothing can really go wrong. Everything that happens is data for you to synthesize in your own way, in your own time, for your own purposes.

  Exercises for Observing

  Count the control moves. In your next conversation or visit with your parents, count each controlling thing they say or do. You might notice which of the Dirty Dozen methods they use (control of food, body, boundaries, social life, decisions, speech, emotions, and thoughts, along with bullying, depriving, confusing, and manipulating). Notice what precedes or seems to trigger their efforts to control. Notice how their control makes you feel. Your method of counting can be silent or overt. Keep a mental tally or take notes. Use a golf-score clicker or cough each time they do something controlling. Don’t tell them what you are counting. Then ask yourself what it must have been like for a child to grow up around such control.

  Imagine that you are a 60 Minutes reporter building a story about your parents. Use a tough-minded 60 Minutes reporter’s eye to see their apparent motivations, quirks, and inconsistencies.

  Visualize your parents in an imaginary shrunken terrarium that duplicates their living room. Imagine you are wearing a “Far Side” cartoon-style white lab coat as you observe their habits. Replay key incidents from your childhood, and study how your terrarium-dwelling parents controlled. When you stand at a distance, you’ll see a lot about their styles.

  Declaring Independence

  Emotionally leaving home means declaring independence, but declaring independence in and of itself doesn’t make you free. The American revolutionaries found that out in 1776 when they declared themselves free but had to fight to prove it. In the Declaration of Independence the American revolutionaries said to the world:

  a. All people have inalienable rights.

  b. The British misused their power and violated American rights.

  c. That after unsuccessfully trying to work it out with the British, the Americans felt their only choice was to sever relations and declare themselves free.

  It is a beautiful, ground-breaking document for human rights. Declaring their willingness to have the world judge the truth, the revolutionaries asked for nothing, threatened nothing, and declared that they needed nothing.

  Emotionally separating from controlling parents may feel like a revolution: life-threatening, yet exhilarating. It’s a bit like learning to walk. As a toddler you were so intent on walking that if you fell or bumped into things or looked awkward, you didn’t care, because it felt so good to join the world of upright creatures and steer under your own power. Emotionally separating is like this; you may fall, bump into obstacles, or feel awkward, but autonomy brings joy and, oh, the places you can go!

  Declaring your desire for independence, even silently, can empower you. It breaks the trance induced by growing up controlled and initiates the powerful process of separation. Declaring independence allows you to see how different you are from the others with whom you identified. It can pave the way to stunning new perspectives about yourself and the world.

  Declaring independence from your parents is different from denying their emotional impact on you. They are, after all, your connection to hundreds of ancestors, each of whom had a part in who you are today. You’ll always have parents; their voices are present in your psyche even after they die. In denying your parents’ role in shaping you, you risk denying a part of yourself. In acknowledging their role, you reclaim part of your heritage.

  Exercises for Declaring Independence

  List the ways in which you have already achieved independence. Note the ways in which you have broken from parental practice and dogma—how you are fundamentally different from your parents.

  Write your own Declaration of Independence. Read the 1776 Declaration of Independence, list your rights (the “Bill of Rights for Those Who Grew Up Controlled” on page 239 may help stimulate your thinking), then consider how one or both of your parents violated them, what those violations cost you, and what you have tried to do about it. For many, declaring independence is an internal, private step never discussed with parents. For others, it may include some communication with one or both of them. (Chapter 18 will explore the issue of confronting parents who control.) You may even want to send your Declaration of Independence to your parents. If you do, sign it boldly, like John Hancock. Remember: You are doing this for you, not for them. That’s what independence means.

  Independence Day. Take your birthday or other significant day as your personal Independence Day holiday. It might be the anniversary of the day you said no to controlling parents, literally left home, or turned a corner in emotional separation. Celebrate your Independence Day as one of your most special holidays.

  Channeling Dad/Mom. If you find yourself acting as your parents did, lightheartedly acknowledge that you are temporarily “channeling” Dad or Mom. Such actions are, in fact, like being possessed by a ghost from the past: Now, when I act bullheaded like my father, my friends chime in, “He’s channeling Al.”

  Another way to externalize your parents’ influence is to see yourself as having a “Dad Attack” or “Mom Attack,” since the experience is like being overtaken with a coughing or a sneezing fit. Be assured that it will pass.

  Mastering the Challenges of Separating

  Emotional separation nearly always begins with pain. During the course of healing the pain may intensify, just as a cut or bruise hurts more in the early stages of mending.

  Emotional separation accelerates when you give voice to the recognition that your parents controlled you in unhealthy ways. This can be hard to acknowledge because, if you grew up controlled, disagreeing with your parents may have had severe consequences. As a child, when you realized that something was wrong in your family you may have felt helpless to do anything about it, and grew frightened when you perceived your parents’ limitations. This is a distressing recognition. After all, if the people you measured yourself against for so many years acted unhealthily, what does that say about the reliability of the lessons they taught you.

  Yes, separation does bring losses, but these are necessary losses. You may have to give up the hopes or fantasies that your parents will protect you or be your “best friend.” But controlling parents probably judge you and love conditionally, so protection and closeness aren’t realistic goals anyway.

  As you emotionally leave home, you may feel a conflict between remaining “true” to your parents or being “true” to yourself and risking losing parental love. You may temporarily become an emotional orphan. This takes great courage. It is
one of the deepest hurts possible to admit that one or both of your parents were not there for you, didn’t see you, and didn’t protect you. As time goes on, the pain tends to recede, though it may never entirely vanish. Remember, you lived for years in an atmosphere of brainwashing. It takes time and work to free yourself.

  Willingly or not, you have invested much of your lifetime in your family, so one of the hardest parts of separating is letting go of your identity as a family member. It can be challenging to differentiate between the ingrained warnings and criticisms of your internalized parents and the helpful messages of your true voice. (Hint: Internalized parents tend to say “Don’t,” “You can’t,” “You should,” “You shouldn’t.”) You may find that part of the grief comes from losing values with which you identified. Giving up earlier “versions” of yourself, while healthy, can bring sadness.

  Yet, unlike when you were an infant, your parents are no longer the most important persons in your life. They are not crucial to your survival as an adult, and your relationship with your parents is only one of many aspects of your life today.

  It may be hard not to include your parents in your process of emotional separation. It’s natural to want parental approval and blessings for any important challenge you undertake. But you don’t need it and, by definition, you can’t have it this time. There’s great value in keeping your separation separate from your parents. They don’t need to know how or why you are separating, what’s hard about it, or what feels validating about it. Save those reports for your friends, mate, and/or therapist.

  It may cause you deep pain to see how much you tried to earn parental approval, how unresponsive your parents may have been, and how you continued to try anyway. Yet grieving over the losses of your childhood is central to healing from growing up controlled. As we saw in Part Two, many controlling parents suffered extreme losses early in life but never grieved over them. As a result, they tried to control a world in which they felt utterly out of control. By facing your grief, you reduce your own need to overcontrol.

  Separation also includes taking stock of how you are similar to as well as different from your parents; of how you were influenced by them along with how you shunned their influence. The first time someone told me I sounded and acted like my father, I was shocked. Most of my close friends who have met my father saw this instantly. I was the one who didn’t. I tried to be different from my father because I wanted no connection to his control. But I am connected. I can deny it, but it would be a lie. I can avoid it, but it is there. I can fight it, but I would only be fighting part of myself.

  Discovering some of your parents’ unhealthy traits in yourself is a phase of healing. One man I interviewed confessed that he secretly hoped misfortune would befall his friends who had happy marriages because he wasn’t in a romantic relationship himself. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was following the pattern of his Using father’s jealousy. “Instead of trying to deny my envy,” he told me, “I simply see that it’s there. Seeing that it’s a part of me begins the healing.”

  Have compassion for yourself. Remind yourself that abusive control did happen and that it was not your fault.

  Feelings Accompanying Separation

  Because of who your parents are—the people who gave life to you—it is natural to have intense and conflicting feelings as you separate. Any of the following emotions and concerns are common during emotional separation from a controlling family:

  Feelings: grief; disillusionment; shame; numbness; self-blame; guilt; disloyalty; anxiety; vulnerability; fear of abandonment; anger; depression; sadness; exhilaration; disorientation.

  Yearnings: wishing your difficult feelings would go away; desire to recapture a real or imagined sense of having a close-knit family; sadness, mourning, and envy when seeing healthier families or friends’ close relationships with their parents; desire for revenge or compensation from your parents.

  Worries: fear you’ll be angry forever; fear you are becoming controlling like your parents; fear you are selfish, unfeeling, or lacking in compassion; worry that your parents may disown you; worry that your independence will hurt your parents; worry that your parents may die with bad feelings left among you; fear of retribution from your parents.

  Sensitivities: indignation over past and present control; increased sensitivity to others’ comments about you; anger over what parental control has cost you; anger if a parent who abused you denies that the abuse happened; anger at having emotionally fed your parents for so long; embarrassment at having been controlled; sadness at molding parts of your life to meet unhealthy parental demands; pain at realizing how petty some of your parents’ actions may have been; change in eating or sleep habits; spontaneous crying.

  Conflicts: pressure for certainty accompanied by enhanced self-doubt; feelings of freedom, followed by a disorienting sense of “Now what?”; satisfaction if your parents face hard times, followed by guilt over such feelings; impatience with your pace of change, followed by worry that you are going too far or too fast; a feeling of having a dark part of yourself that you want to get rid of; confusion about why your parents did what they did; anger taken out on yourself or others; feeling you should forgive your parents but finding it difficult; anger when someone tells you to forgive your parents.

  As distressing as these concerns can be, make them your allies. Each emotion, after all, provides you with information about some part of you because your hope, frustration, and fear speak to you through your feelings. Don’t be surprised if strong feelings surface. Chances are, strong feelings were stuffed down in your childhood and are still there to be expressed. You might not like some of the initial feelings you experience—anger, sadness, or grief, for example—but these are a testament to the fact that your emotional separation is working. You are doing the unfinished work of a teenager leaving home. The difficult feelings will pass.

  Since feelings just happen, there’s no such thing as a “wrong” emotion. While we can control how we express our feelings, we can’t control what we feel. If you grew up controlled, you grew up with “shoulds” about emotions. Now is the time to let go of these shoulds.

  It can be difficult to reconcile our understanding with our feelings. For example, can we be angry with our parents for hurting us, yet also know that they were in pain most of their lives? Can we acknowledge that we didn’t deserve the way our parents treated us, but also realize that our parents didn’t deserve how they were treated as children? Can we accept that even though our parents were not at fault for what happened to them as children, they were responsible for what they did to us? Can we feel both anger and compassion for those who cost us a great deal yet gave us a great deal? Can we reconcile the realization that our parents may not have loved us consistently because no one loved them consistently?

  To all the above questions, the answer is yes. Though it may seem contradictory, healing from growing up controlled comes, in part, from cultivating contradictions rather than avoiding them. Our parents said that feelings have to make sense or that if our feelings and thoughts were in conflict, one or the other had to be wrong. But feelings are not logical and aren’t designed to match our thoughts. By cultivating contradictions, you see that there is often more than one “truth” in human relations.

  The feelings that accompany separation emerge when they are ready to. They may erupt spontaneously or they may simmer. Remember, healing is a transition, and transitional periods bring unfamiliar emotions and new behaviors. During transitions, it’s important to give yourself time to grieve over what you are leaving behind, to explore your feelings, and to try new approaches to life. It’s also important to acknowledge what you can control and what you can’t. In transitions, as in living, we often have little control over our feelings or the twists and turns ahead. But we can fully choose our goals and actions. That freedom of choice makes transitions both frightening and exciting.

  Exercises for Emotionally Leaving Home

  1. List the advan
tages and disadvantages of emotionally separating. In one column, list all that emotionally leaving home may cost you; in the second column, write down all it may gain you. There are losses as well as gains in leaving home. When you have a clear view of the potential losses and gains, you can best choose your path.

  2. Cultivate contradiction. We want life to make sense and we like to feel certain. But life doesn’t always make sense, and there are so many truths. Take five minutes and identify at least five contradictions, equally true but opposing statements. You might particularly cultivate contradictions that carry an emotional charge, since these provide the biggest opportunity for growth. For example:

  My parents did their best and yet they hurt me.

  I know it’s not good for me and yet I want it.

  I love him/her and yet I hurt him/her.

  I tend to resist new experiences even though they would be positive and enjoyable.

  I know others aren’t perfect, but sometimes I expect them to be.

  The strength of this exercise comes not in resolving the contradictions but in expanding your ability to hold more than one truth at a time. Despite the either-or, all-or-nothing habits of controlling families, both sides of many contradictions are equally true. Often the healthiest form of resolution is just to let both sides be without seeking a conclusion that denies either one.

  3. Give yourself an ideal send-off. Ideal parents would have debriefed you as you left home by saying something like:

  “I know I may have called you lots of bad things and treated you badly at times. I know you have suffered. At times I had my reasons, but at other times my behavior just reflected my weaknesses. Now that you’re leaving, I want to apologize. I want you to leave home unencumbered. Forget all those negative things I said about you. You are none of them. All those times I told you ‘Do,’ ‘Don’t,’ ‘Should,’ or ‘Shouldn’t’—feel free to ignore them. You’re an adult and it’s your life. I trust you to make the right choices.”