If You Had Controlling Parents

by Dan Neuharth

  A few things to keep in mind: All medications have side effects, though most people can find at least one medication that offers far more benefits than side effects; problematic side effects from antidepressants tend to recede with time; and it may take several weeks of working with a physician and trying one or more medications before you can tell if the medication will help you. Many people taking an antidepressant or antianxiety agent report that they feel more like themselves, not less like themselves or in an altered state. It helps to realize that events not of your own choosing may have altered your brain chemistry; one way to restore balance is a medication of your own choosing with a physician’s supervision.

  Resources

  Anderson, Bob. Stretching. Bolinas, CA: Shelter, 1980.

  Kramer, Peter. Listening to Prozac. New York: Viking, 1993.

  Robertson, Joel, and Tom Monte. Natural Prozac: Learning to Release Your Body’s Own Anti-Depressants. San Francisco: Hampers, 1997.

  Rodin, Judith. Body Traps: Breaking the Binds That Keep You from Feeling Good About Your Body. New York: Quill/Morrow, 1992.

  Weil, Andrew. 8 Weeks to Optimum Health. New York: Knopf, 1997.

  9. Reduce Your Need to Control Life and Others

  The only person you can control is yourself.

  —MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

  Control is the opposite of trust. People who grow up with the trauma of control often develop pessimism about the future and try to control life in order to avoid disappointment. While this was a survival tactic in childhood, it robs you as an adult of optimism about a joyful and challenging future.

  Building trust can come from expressing gratitude, from prayer, and from noticing your strengths and successes, not just your failures or challenges. Every living thing has a spirit, self, presence, essence, higher self, innate consciousness—however you choose to define it. Search for and cultivate your transformative sense of spirituality. It may come through religion or it may not. It may come through gardening or bike riding or volunteer work or exercise or loving others. You may have been raised with a certain religion or view of God or spirituality that doesn’t fit what’s in your heart and your spirit. Spirituality is about faith and trust. Control is about fear and mistrust.

  Trust can take time to build, but each time you succeed or survive a challenge, you trust your abilities more. It can also help to distinguish between things you can change and things you cannot change. The “Serenity Prayer” from Alcoholics Anonymous offers guidance:

  God grant me the serenity

  To accept the things I cannot change,

  The courage to change the things I can,

  And the wisdom to know the difference.

  Exercises

  Meet your future self. When faced with a challenge or decision, envision yourself in five or ten years, then ask your future self for advice. Doing so underlines the faith you have in your own innate development (Napier).

  Trust yourself. Go through an hour assuming that you are completely trustworthy, your feelings reliable, and your intuition accurate. As situations come up, ask yourself, “If I knew I was absolutely trustworthy, what would I do now?” This can help you see that you have within yourself all you need to handle challenges (Muller).

  Trust gravity. One helpful exercise is Napier’s “Gravity-is-your-friend” (70). Lie down and feel the support of the bed or floor. Feel all your weight ease down into it and gradually let the ease deepen for five minutes. The earth will support your weight, and gravity will keep you grounded. Trust it. You can take this experience of trusting into relationships and situations.

  Express gratitude. Take a minute at the end of the day to recollect all the experiences and gifts for which you are grateful (Muller).

  Notice what you do. For one week, each night before bed spend five minutes listing what you accomplished, experienced, or became aware of that day. At the end of the week, look over your lists. You’ll see plenty to acknowledge. This builds the inner nurturer instead of fueling the inner tyrants.

  Explore various paths to spirituality. Pray. Meditate. Read. Visit a cemetery. Read about or visit Jerusalem or other “holy” sites. Explore existential philosophy. Attend various church services such as an inner-city gospel, a fundamentalist tent revival, a Catholic mass, or a New Age or Zen center. Go on a vision quest.

  Resources

  Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. New York: Touchstone, 1984.

  Levine, Stephen. A Year to Live: How to Live This Year As If It Were Your Last. New York: Bell Tower, 1997.

  Levine, Stephen. Who Dies? New York: Doubleday, 1982.

  Moore, Thomas. Care of the Soul. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

  Muller, Wayne. Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

  Wolin, Steven, and Sybil Wolin. The Resilient Self: How Survivors of Troubled Families Rise Above Adversity. New York: Villard Books, 1993.

  24

  MAKING MEANING

  Leaves turn color so we will get the message that before we let go of the tree of life, we need to show our beauty.

  —BERNIE SIEGEL, M.D.

  Overcontrol is a lack of healthy love. By now, you’ve learned that your parents probably didn’t get healthy love early in their lives and it distorted their worlds. Unable to give you healthy love, they distorted your world. Now it’s your turn to break the cycle. To the extent that you can accept and love yourself, you can accept and love those around you. To the extent that you can accept and love those around you, you’ll have less need to control them. By breaking the cycle of unhealthy control, you contribute not just to your mental health but also to the health of those around you as well as all those who will come after you.

  As this book ends, we are left with certain paradoxes. You can grow, but you may always have some limits as a result of growing up controlled. You can heal, but you may continue to feel occasional hurt or sadness from your past. While you can achieve a large measure of freedom from growing up controlled, you may never completely stop hurting or feel totally free. Whether you confront, accept, forgive, set healthier boundaries, or break contact with your parents, the relationship may always hurt. Healing from growing up controlled can be a lifelong process.

  Being free after growing up controlled doesn’t mean you won’t be affected by your childhood or your parents. You cannot erase what happened. Accidents happen. Wounds happen. If you cut your hand, ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t hurt can be dangerous and will only slow your healing. Freedom comes from acknowledging your emotional wounds, understanding how they happened, observing how they hurt and limit you, and seeking healing.

  There are no guarantees, no way to control life. Your parents tried that and failed. Instead of trying to empower themselves in the face of life’s risks, they lived reactively, desperately trying to reduce the risks.

  You don’t have to do that. You can build up your strength and flexibility and relationships and self-love so that you are better prepared to face life’s risks. While your life may have lacked happy beginnings, there is plenty you can do to increase the chances of happy endings.

  One way is by making meaning of your past. Making meaning includes synthesizing both the helpful and hurtful from your upbringing. Making meaning isn’t a matter of simply saying, “It was all for the best,” nor is it a matter of disowning the past. Rather, making meaning involves acknowledging the pain in your past along with your strengths. After all, you showed strength even while you were being wounded. Think of it! You derived strengths from painful events. These strengths are just as much a part of you as are your wounds.

  You survived a controlling upbringing because you found ways in which to cope, despite the lack of help and the enormity of parental control. You survived because you developed strengths borne of an unfair, painful situation. It may be hard to switch gears from focusing on wounds to feeling pride in your strengths. Yet both are truly part of you.

 
Though you had little power in a controlling family, you were more than a passive recipient of parental control. It’s helpful to see yourself as both victim and survivor, as innocent wounded child and courageous, resourceful warrior, because you were all of them.

  Never forget that in childhood you showed great resourcefulness. For example:

  If at some point you had the horrifying thought that something was wrong in your family, you showed courage and insight in recognizing it. Completely brainwashed people don’t know they’ve been brainwashed.

  If you grew up feeling unloved, it hurt. But it also may have helped you emotionally leave home more quickly and completely than if you had had more moments of love.

  If you spent a lot of time alone as a child, you may have felt lonely or the development of your social skills may have suffered. Yet if your family was destructive and abusive, your choice to spend time alone showed innate wisdom. Better to be alone than to be abused.

  If you did things to please your parents even though you didn’t want to, such as earning better grades or pursuing extracurricular activities, you still reaped the benefits of your accomplishments.

  If you got lost in your world of play, hobbies, reading, writing, or drawing—though these may have been the only ways you could escape parental control—your activities brought you pleasure and developed your creativity. You carry all those gifts with you today.

  If you’ve been hurt in relationships as an adult partly because of the unhealthy patterns your parents modeled, it’s unfortunate. But it also shows that you have the courage to keep trying, to risk hurt even after a painful childhood.

  If you grew up full of turmoil, it may have fatigued, hurt, or depressed you. But it also shows that you were emotionally responsive—that your true self, highest self, innate self, or however you conceive of it was struggling with all that was heaped upon you. You fought internally the battles you couldn’t hope to win in the external world of your parents. You showed you had an inner spirit that would not just roll over and submit. If you had done everything your parents wanted and accepted everything they said, you would have had little turmoil—yet you would have grown up with a dwarfed will and a diminished sense of self and individuality.

  You were a young warrior in protection of your soul. That doesn’t minimize your pain or how unfair it was. But it shows who you were and who you still are.

  While Part Three of this book has outlined a three-step healing process of separating, balancing, and redefining, in actuality, healing from growing up controlled is anything but a step-by-step process. It is holistic. Over time, a newer self emerges. You will notice, perhaps several times a month, how your values are changing, your emotional range is increasing, or your thinking is becoming more flexible. It takes time to ease out of old lessons and habits and grow into new ones. But it happens.

  Much of the initial work of healing lies in making your wounds real: remembering, uncovering, and feeling the hurt. During this initial phase, much of your identity may be that of a wounded person and your world view may be dominated by the realizations, memories, and feelings that came with that wounding. Yet at some point unique to each person, healing includes moving on. If your identity persists endlessly as that of a wounded family member, you become attached to, not free from, the wounding family.

  You may have gotten stuck with the bill for several generations’ problems, but ensure that the buck stops with you. Use the feelings forged in the trauma of growing up controlled. You grew up “brainwashed,” with little access to information, few allies, and a tightly controlled regimen—and you survived. Knowing this can help you face just about anything.

  THE BOOK IN A NUTSHELL

  Children never cause or are to blame for abusive control.

  Most unhealthy control is not deliberate or conscious. It reflected your parents’ fears, upbringings, and limitations. It did not reflect anything about you.

  If your parents grew up with trauma and never got help, they may have learned to mistrust the world. Mistrusting the world, they may have felt they had to control everything around them, especially you.

  Your parents had one or more controlling styles (Smothering, Depriving, Perfectionistic, Cultlike, Chaotic, Using, Abusing, and Childlike). They also used many or all of the Dirty Dozen (control of food, bodies, boundaries, social life, decisions, speech, feelings, and thoughts, and bullying, depriving, confusing, and manipulating). Recognizing and identifying these styles and methods can help you gain distance from the lasting effects of parental control as well as cope with the critical messages from your internalized parents.

  Unhealthy parental control may have forced you to distort aspects of yourself. These distortions can be at the root of many adult-life problems. Though it can be hard work, uncovering and balancing distortions of size, feeling, thinking, relating, and identity can allow you to solve present-day problems at the source.

  Whatever themes of control you grew up with tend to rear their heads when you emotionally leave home. Notice when your inner tyrants’ messages parallel the commands, beliefs, and styles of your parents. These messages tend to come with the territory of emotional separation.

  Compliment yourself on any efforts you make to individuate. If you grew up controlled, even the desire to emotionally leave home is a big step.

  Cultivate contradiction. Situations are rarely either-or.

  Our relationships with parents change over time. Even if you once had either a closer or a more distant relationship with a parent, months or years later new issues may surface that can bring new closeness or distance.

  Healing continues twenty-four hours a day. Every minute, once you have chosen to emotionally separate and balance, you are gaining distance and power.

  One of the opportunities in healing is struggling with the same issues that defeated your parents—and succeeding.

  Recognize that you are the head of your family. Your family may include close friends, relatives, a significant other, children, even pets. You have the opportunity to create a different family atmosphere than the one your parents created.

  Healing from overcontrol is a long-term process that can stir complex feelings and spark difficult choices. Have confidence that you will make the right choices. Many people have overcome the legacy of a controlling upbringing. There are many paths to healing.

  You don’t have to heal alone—even if you were an emotional orphan for years. Seek support where you can.

  You cannot change the past, but you can influence your future. Even a small effort to reduce the effects of growing up controlled pays big dividends for you, those around you, and future generations.

  Be patient with yourself. The costs of control took years to create.

  Suggestions for Parents Who Were Raised in Controlling Families

  No matter how you were raised, you are not destined to repeat your parents’ hurtful child-raising patterns. According to family therapist Michele Weiner-Davis, more than two thirds of adults abused as children do not abuse their own children.

  Keep in mind:

  There’s no shame in being ignorant about healthy parenting skills. There is, however, tragedy in being unwilling to learn and get help as a parent.

  It wasn’t your parents’ mistakes that did you the greatest damage, it was their unwillingness to face their mistakes and learn from them.

  Your model for parenting may be distorted. Ask yourself which would have been healthier for you as a child and which would be healthier for your children: Having a flawless parent or having a parent who sincerely apologizes for mistakes?

  Having a brilliant parent or having a parent who praises children’s efforts at brilliance?

  Having a parent who never hurts children or having a parent who sometimes accidentally hurts children but consistently lets them know they are loved?

  By attending to your own needs for growth and nurturing, you give your children a great gift. Pain from the lack of inner growth and nurturing can lead p
arents to overcontrol.

  Despite your best intentions, you may sometimes do the controlling things to your children that your parents did to you. Have compassion for yourself.

  Suggestions for Partners and Friends of Adults Raised in Controlling Families

  You have the right to block abusive behavior that partners or friends who grew up controlled direct at you. You can reject their behavior while letting them know you are not rejecting them as people.

  Your partners or friends may want you to agree with their viewpoints about their parents, but what they want even more is to feel validated. You don’t have to agree with their viewpoints, but you can validate them by letting them know you see their pain and are trying to understand their dilemmas.

  If your friends or partners grew up controlled, minimizing or discounting their feelings may reopen their childhood wounds. Since people who grew up controlled rarely felt heard or seen, simply listening to them can bring tremendous healing.

  Healing has its own timetable. Pressuring others to make choices or move on before they are ready to tends to be counterproductive.

  Respect their privacy. You can offer to listen to friends and partners if and when they want you to, but leave it up to them to tell you about their feelings and their process.

  Realize that although their upbringing may pose challenges in your relationship, it can also bring special gifts to the relationship.

  Remember that trusting others can be especially difficult for those who grew up controlled. It is a sign of trust when friends or partners include you in their healing process by talking with you about it.

  Try not to take personally their projections onto you (i.e., if they accuse you of being “just like” their controlling parent). Their background, not your behavior, is often the cause of their projections.