by Dan Neuharth
While there are no ideal parents, and while your parents probably didn’t say anything like this, you can symbolically provide yourself with the ideal send-off you never received by writing it in a journal, role-playing it, visualizing it, or meditating on it.
Step Two: Bringing Balance to Your Relationship with Your Parents
Why do you hasten to remove anything which hurts your eye, while if something affects your soul you postpone the cure until next year?
—HORACE
Emotionally leaving home gives you the breathing room to create a healthier balance in your relationship with your parents. A healthier balance, in turn, pays dividends in your relationships with mates, close friends, and family members.
You grew up in an out-of-balance family. In seeking balance as an adult, you may face one or more of the following dilemmas:
How can I set healthier boundaries with my parents?
Should I confront my parents?
Can I forgive my parents?
Can I accept my parents?
Should I reduce or break contact with my parents?
The next chapters show various ways in which those who grew up controlled have faced these dilemmas.
17
HOW CAN I SET HEALTHIER BOUNDARIES WITH MY PARENTS?
Self-defense is nature’s eldest law.
—JOHN DRYDEN
If the pendulum swung too far in your family—if you weren’t allowed to feel your feelings, speak your mind, or go your own way—it’s time to make the pendulum swing back. Yet relating to controlling parents poses many challenges.
What if a parent continues to intrude or abuse? How do you cope with your conflicting feelings? How often should you visit, call, or send a gift or card? What if, despite your best efforts at separating, a parent continues to meddle in your social life, career, or child raising? How can you maintain individuality without either freezing your parents out or forfeiting your independence?
The commonality in these challenges is setting boundaries. Remember the Dirty Dozen—direct parental control of your eating, appearance, activities, social life, decisions, speech, feelings, and thoughts, and indirect control through bullying, depriving, confusing, and manipulating? Each of the Dirty Dozen was a boundary violation, which your parents may still be committing today. Even if your parents are dead or you have little contact with them, your internalized parents can still bully, confuse, deprive, or manipulate you.
As an adult, you can undo the Dirty Dozen by establishing the boundaries that as a child you couldn’t set. Often simply acknowledging a boundary violation leads you to act in your own best interests.
For example, as a child you may have been forced to answer parents’ intrusive questions. Now simply declining to answer inappropriate questions sets adult boundaries in the place of the childhood ones that were ignored at will.
If your parents hurried you, you now have the right to use time as your ally, telling them you need a few days to mull over a parental request, invitation, or comment.
If your parents physically crowded you or invaded your privacy, you can now set the limits of your personal space.
If your parents meddled in your social life, it’s up to you to choose what personal activities you’ll share with them.
If your parents gave you gifts with emotional strings attached, declining their gifts or openly addressing the “strings” can help you achieve an equal footing.
If you grew up with few allies, bring a supportive partner along on your next visit to your parents—or make sure you can speak with a friend or therapist by phone if necessary. If your parents live some distance away, staying somewhere other than at their house can help balance out past privacy violations. Maintaining your normal routine of diet, sleep, exercise, entertainment, and personal growth practices during parental visits keeps you grounded in your adult sense of self, balancing your parents’ control over your food, body, and activities.
When you were a controlled child, your parents chose their amount of access to you. As an adult, you may find that altering that access brings a welcome change in perspective. For example, if contact with your parents is painful, you may want, for a time, to erect a protective boundary. This is done externally by reducing or temporarily halting contact. Or it’s done internally by emotionally detaching, thereby having less at stake in what your parents do, say, or think about you.
A trial period or “vacation” of limited or no contact with one or both parents doesn’t mean you’re forever cutting contact. You have the right to claim separate time or space in any adult relationship when it’s in your best interests. Setting limits on your parents’ access to you may mean simply going through the motions of sending occasional cards or making perfunctory phone calls. This can be a temporary trial period or it can be a long-term strategy built on acceptance of the limitations of the relationship. Turning points such as standing up to your parents or saying no for the first time are rites of passage in separating from and gaining balance in controlling families. They boost your self-esteem.
Your goal is finding peace from a painful childhood and freedom from past and present control. To achieve peace and freedom, you choose “which bridges to cross and which bridges to burn,” as one woman I interviewed put it. There is no predetermined end point, no “right” or “best” kind of relationship to establish with controlling parents. If you feel pressured to make the “right” choice, you may be under the spell of perfectionistic thinking: Even now, the parents in your head are trying to control how you relate to the parents in your life.
It’s hard to view one’s parents neutrally. Yet for many who grew up controlled, one indicator of successfully separating and balancing comes in being able to see a parent as “just another person.” That means applying the same standards and values, no more and no less, to parents as you do to friends or associates. This doesn’t mean you won’t feel loyalties and conflicts. Rather, it means that after a lifetime of elevating or degrading your parents—of seeing them as larger than life or smaller than insects—you’re coming to see them as people, less than perfect, just like you.
This equalization may come from letting go of needing, or expecting, or hoping for anything from your parents, including your hopes about what parents “should” have provided that you didn’t get and maybe never will. This takes time and may bring grief, but it also offers freedom. As you give up emotional attachment to what your parents could, should, or do offer you, you may find that you are left with a relationship with simply your parent the man or woman. It’s easier to set healthy boundaries with, accept, and have compassion for another from whom you need nothing.
Despite how massively you may have been controlled, keep in mind what I call the Ten-to-One Principle of Healing: Any action done by choice, consciously and deliberately, undoes the effect of at least ten such actions done unconsciously or in which you had no choice.
Each time you deliberately act in your own best self-interests by countering controlling thoughts, people, or situations, you undo more and more of the effects of past control.
Stories of Boundary Setting: Undoing the Dirty Dozen
Here are stories about how some of those I interviewed set healthier boundaries with their parents by counteracting Dirty Dozen—style boundary violations.
A Christmas “No”: Elizabeth
Most controlled children were rarely allowed to say no to their parents. For many, a key to setting adult boundaries is declining to follow family rituals. Remember Elizabeth, the thirty-one-year-old travel agent whose Perfectionistic, Using mother endlessly rehearsed her daughter in how to say hello when answering the phone? A turning point in Elizabeth’s relationship with her mother came one Christmas. Elizabeth, a student in the middle of a painful relationship breakup, final exams, physical ills, and money worries, told her mother she was not planning to visit for Christmas. Her mother threw a fit and wrote to her daughter, “I hate you and I’m never going to think of you anymore.”
Recalls Elizabeth, “She was like a kid who’d lost her toy.” Yet being rejected by her mother after a lifetime of deprivation and manipulation ultimately helped Elizabeth grow: “When she cut me off, I felt, ‘Oh my god, this is what I’ve always dreaded.’ But I also realized that she could no longer get at me. Her letter validated that I had every right to feel angry. I could see how terrifying it would be for a child to receive that kind of rage from her.”
By saying no to the visit, Elizabeth took a big step toward balancing a childhood of forced attendance on her mother, which eventually allowed Elizabeth to resume the contact on an equal footing.
Balancing Emotion Control: Sharon
As controlled children, our feelings were outlawed, warped, or denied. When feelings conflicted or didn’t make sense, we were usually told those feelings were wrong. Balancing can mean welcoming all your feelings surrounding your parents.
Sharon, a thirty-one-year-old graduate student, has vowed to speak her truth whenever she has contact with her Smothering father, a Holocaust survivor. Paradoxically, doing so has given her more freedom to feel compassion for him. “My father is just like a little boy who is hurt. I try to see beyond things and know that what he is doing, he does to protect himself. Sometimes I just want to tell him I forgive him and let him back in. But he would only hurt me again.”
For Sharon, balancing has meant embracing her conflicting feelings: anger; love; compassion for her father’s limitations; disappointment over her family’s failings; and her desire to live her own life. Rather than trying to reconcile these emotions by placing them in a tidy package—which was the way her family approached emotions—Sharon has found vitality through facing all her feelings, however untidy the process.
Finding Her Own Answers: Ina
Remember Ina, the fifty-three-year-old social worker whose Chaotic mother ordered her to be smart and pretty, with top grades and lots of dates, yet did everything she could to discourage her daughter from acting smart or feeling pretty around the house? Despite her mom’s mixed messages, Ina made it a point to develop her own philosophy of life. At age eleven, she was reading philosophy books from the library. In college, she studied philosophy, psychology, sociology, and literature.
After college, Ina embarked on a plan for freedom as ambitious as that of the eleven-year-old Ina’s quest for her own belief system. She wrote stories, kept a journal, joined a psychodrama group, wrote her autobiography, meditated, danced, and studied martial arts. At age twenty-eight, she moved two thousand miles from her parents, seldom visited, and made and wrote only “empty and ritualistic” calls and letters to them. She focused on “more fulfilling, more promising, and less damaging” relationships than the ones with which she had grown up. Collecting ancestral family stories and “poring over them like an archeologist” was helpful in unearthing the roots of her parents’ behavior.
For Ina, seeking her own answers has helped balance her family’s thought control.
Balancing Boundary and Food Control: Robin
Robin, a fifty-three-year-old design artist, recalled a recent phone conversation with her Using, Depriving mother during which her call-waiting signal beeped. “After I returned,” she says, “my mother tried to wheedle out of me for five minutes who had called.”
When Robin was a controlled child, she couldn’t have secrets from her mother; now she could state firmly that it was none of her mother’s business: “I told her I’d hang up if she kept asking me. She did, and I did.”
Recently while dining at her mother’s, Robin asked her not to put a rich sauce on the chicken. “She did it anyway. I threw the entire dish out. She was annoyed, but the more you give, the more she wants.”
For Robin, blocking her mother’s intrusions into her privacy, social life, and eating habits has helped her find empowerment by doing what she could never do as a child.
“Acted Like I Didn’t Have Parents”: Claire
When Claire, now a thirty-six-year-old real estate agent, was in her twenties, she reduced contact with her Smothering, Abusing parents to virtually nothing for several years: “I acted like I didn’t have parents.”
Then came a two-year period in which she sent them an occasional card. “I didn’t want to totally write them off but I felt resentful about giving them gifts on holidays,” she admits. “By sending only a card I was honoring my feeling of not wanting to give gifts.” Over time, her feelings changed, and she sought more contact: “Eventually I made gifts so beautiful that I wanted to keep them for myself, but I sent them to my parents.”
For Claire, allowing her feelings to evolve at their own pace helped balance a childhood of being told what to feel.
Emotional Distance: Brittany
Remember Brittany, the twenty-three-year-old sales representative whose Chaotic, Abusing, alcoholic mother used to hit her, banish her to her room, then show up all smiles with a gourmet dinner minutes later? Brittany wrote a letter confronting her mother about the older woman’s continuing abuse and manipulation. Brittany then took three months off without any contact. “I told her that she was both an angel and a devil to me and that I couldn’t take care of her anymore,” Brittany recalls. “I felt free for the first time after that.”
Taking a break despite her mother’s threats was a big step in balancing the manipulation with which Brittany was raised. While her mother didn’t change very much, Brittany found the three-month break an eye-opener. Later, studying communication theory in college helped Brittany identify her mother’s baffling patterns of communication and helped balance the confusion of Brittany’s childhood.
“Made Me Furious”: Julia
Twenty-six-year-old Julia, a clerical worker, visited her Depriving, Chaotic mother and Abusing stepfather for Christmas. The turning point came when her stepfather “was in this incredibly bad mood, having a midlife crisis,” she remembers. “I was afraid he might fly into a rage and hit me. I told him I was afraid of him. After I left, my mother told me that he was hurt and felt abandoned and that I should write to him. That made me furious. Since then I’ve been dropped by him and have had no contact.”
After Julia’s mother entered therapy and eventually apologized for allowing the abuse, Julia felt better: “But it’s not that simple. I can’t wipe out the way I feel about myself. In a curious way, the feeling of being betrayed helped me realize how little I still get from my mother and stepfather, and that helped me to move on.”
For Julia, balancing has meant standing her ground as she sorts through a mix of feelings: anger over not being protected by her mother; the desire to be close to her; and grief at what growing up controlled has cost her.
Mother’s Day Break: Tina
Remember Tina, the forty-eight-year-old social worker whose Smothering mother made her wear a “Please Do Not Feed Me” sign in public as a girl? Tina’s break from her mother’s grasp came, appropriately, on Mother’s Day. She recalls, “I looked at every Mother’s Day card in the store and began crying because those lovely messages were not in my experience. I couldn’t buy a card that said, ‘You were such a wonderful mother. You were always there.’ So I left the store. I thought about taking something to my mother. I looked at the phone for hours. Finally I realized it was eight o’clock, and I’d done it. I hadn’t given her anything.
“I was terrified. The next day at work I typed her a note saying, ‘I can’t see you anymore. I’m in therapy and feeling too angry to see you.’ My mother called my sister, crying and screaming, ‘How can she say this? I have been such a good mother.’ She called me every name in the book. It became forbidden to mention my name in her house.”
For three years Tina and her mother had little contact. However, with time and therapy, Tina began to heal. “Each day got easier,” she admits. Three Mother’s Days later, Tina sent her mother a “little bitty” Mother’s Day card. Her mother responded with a card. After a few more months and warmer cards, Tina asked to visit her: “My mom sent back a big bunny card a
nd said ‘Of course you’re welcome to come.’”
When Tina arrived, her mother threw open the door and said, “We will not talk about the past, right?” According to Tina, “She was still making the rules. I did not agree, and in the years since I have told her a lot about how she hurt and abused me.”
For Tina, balancing meant taking the step she had always dreaded by breaking contact with her mother, then speaking her truth after reestablishing contact.
Potential Risks of Boundary Setting:
May spark bad feelings in your parents or family
Can lead to feeling guilt, grief, or disloyalty
May lead to retaliation from your parents
Potential Benefits of Boundary Setting:
Can offer protection from further control
Can provide a “breather” in which to gain perspective
Can provide empowerment by balancing childhood boundary violations
18
SHOULD I CONFRONT MY PARENTS?
Sometimes it’s better to oppose and be angry, especially when a view of yourself has been imposed on you.
—SHARON, 31, A GRADUATE STUDENT
Children form their identities, in large part, by expressing themselves and asserting their wills. Yet growing up controlled means having your speech, feelings, and thoughts stifled. That’s why a controlled childhood hampers development.
Confronting parents by speaking up about past or ongoing control helps some people balance a childhood of speech control. After not being allowed to speak out for years, many people feel a compelling need to confront their parents by letter, tape, phone, or in person.