Toxic Parents (14 page)

During the emotional maelstrom of adolescence, Carol desperately needed a loving and supportive father to give her confidence. Instead, he subjected her to relentless denigration. Her father’s verbal abuse, combined with her mother’s passivity, severely damaged Carol’s ability to believe in herself as a valuable and lovable person. When people told her how pretty she was, all she could think about
was whether they could smell her. No amount of external validation could compete with her father’s devastating messages.

I started modeling when I was seventeen. Of course, the more successful I was, the worse my father got. I really had to get out of that house. So, I got married at nineteen to the first guy who asked me. A real doll: he hit me when I was pregnant and he left me when the baby was born. Naturally, I blamed myself. I figured I must have done something wrong. Maybe I smelled bad, I didn’t know. About a year later, I married a guy who didn’t beat me, but he hardly ever talked to me. I stuck that one out for ten years because I couldn’t face my parents with another failed marriage. But I finally left him. Thank God I had my modeling, so I was able to support my son and myself. I even swore off men for a few years. Then I met Glen. I thought this was it; I’d somehow found the perfect guy. The first five years of our marriage was the happiest time of my life. Then I found out he’d been cheating on me almost from the day we got married. I did a lot of forgiving over the next ten years because I just didn’t want to lose another marriage. Last year he left me for a woman half my age. Why can’t I do anything right?

I reminded Carol that she had done a lot right: she’d been a loving and available mother; she’d raised a son who was doing well in his own life; she had
two
successful careers. But none of my assurances carried much weight. Carol had internalized her father’s image of herself as a worthless, repulsive human being. As a result, most of her adult life was propelled by a self-defeating quest for the love she had craved from her father as a young girl. She chose cruel, abusive, or distant men—like her father—and tried to get them to love her the way her father never had.

I explained to Carol that by asking her father, or the men she chose to replace him, to make her feel okay about herself, she was putting her self-esteem in their hands. It didn’t take a genius to see
how destructive those hands had been. She had to take back control of her self-esteem by confronting the self-defeating beliefs that her father had planted in her childhood. Over the next few months she gradually came to realize that her self-esteem was not lost—she was just looking for it in the wrong place.

Perfectionist Parents

The impossible expectation that children be perfect is another common trigger for severe verbal attacks. Many verbally abusive parents are themselves high achievers, but all too often their homes become dumping grounds for career stress. (Alcoholic parents may also make impossible demands on their children, then use their children’s failure to justify drinking.)

Perfectionist parents seem to operate under the illusion that if they can just get their children to be perfect, they will be a perfect family. They put the burden of stability on the child to avoid facing the fact that they, as parents, cannot provide it. The child fails and becomes the scapegoat for family problems. Once again, the child is saddled with the blame.

Children need to make mistakes and discover that it’s not the end of the world. That’s how they gain the confidence to try new things in life. Toxic parents impose unobtainable goals, impossible expectations, and ever-changing rules on their children. They expect their children to respond with a degree of maturity that can come only from life experiences that are inaccessible to a child. Children are not miniature adults, but toxic parents expect them to act as if they are.

Paul,
33
, a dark-haired blue-eyed lab technician, came to me because of troubles at work. He was noticeably shy, self-conscious, and unsure of himself, but still he managed repeatedly to get into heated arguments with his immediate superiors. This, along with increasing concentration problems, was jeopardizing his job.

As Paul and I talked about his work, I could see that he had
difficulties in dealing with authority figures. I asked him about his parents and discovered that Paul, like Carol, had been branded by insults. As he described:

I was nine when my mother remarried. The guy must’ve studied with Hitler. The first thing he did when he moved in was lay down the law: democracy stopped at the front door. If he told us to jump off a cliff, we had to jump. No questions. I got it a lot worse than my sister did. He was on my case all the time, mostly about my room. He would do this goddamned inspection every day like it was some kind of army barracks. When you’re nine or ten, things are always a little messy, but he didn’t care. Everything had to be perfect, nothing could be out-of-place. If I left a book on the desk, he’d start screaming about how I was a disgusting pig. He’d call me a fucking little asshole or a little son of a bitch or a snot-nosed bastard. It was like his favorite sport to keep pounding me with those lousy names. He never hit me, but the goddamned names hurt just as bad.

I had a hunch that there was something about Paul that had stirred up strong feelings in his stepfather. It didn’t take long to figure it out. Paul had been a shy, sensitive, withdrawn child, small for his age.

When my stepfather was young, he was the smallest kid in the school. Everybody picked on him. By the time my mother met him, he was husky because he’d gotten into working out. You could tell he’d put it all on, though. Somehow, all that muscle always looked like it ought to be on somebody else.

Somewhere inside Paul’s stepfather, a small, frightened, inadequate boy was still alive. And since Paul had so many similar characteristics, he became a symbol of his stepfather’s own painful childhood. Because his stepfather had never accepted himself as a child, he felt
immediate rage at the young boy who reminded him of himself. He used Paul as a scapegoat for the inadequacies he couldn’t face in himself. By tyrannizing Paul with impossible demands for perfection, and then verbally abusing him when the boy fell short, his stepfather could convince himself that he was powerful and strong. The damage he was doing to Paul probably never even crossed his mind. He thought he was helping the boy to be perfect.

“I C
AN’T
B
E
P
ERFECT
S
O
I M
IGHT AS
W
ELL
G
IVE
U
P
”

Paul’s mother divorced her second husband when Paul was eighteen, but by that time Paul’s spirit was already seriously battered. Paul knew he could never be “perfect” enough for his stepfather, so he just gave up:

When I was fourteen, I got into drugs real bad. It was about the only time I ever felt accepted. I wasn’t going to make it as a jock, and I sure wasn’t the life of the party, so what else was there? Just before I graduated high school, I bought some really bad shit and nearly OD’d. Well, that did it for me . . . no way was I ever gonna go through that again.

Paul attended a junior college for a year, but quit despite both a yearning and an aptitude for a career as a scientist. He just couldn’t concentrate. His IQ was extremely high, but he would buckle in the face of a challenge. He’d gotten into the habit of giving up.

When he entered the job market he found himself falling into antagonistic patterns with his bosses, again replaying his childhood. He went from job to job until he finally found one he liked. Then he came to me to try to keep it. I told him I thought I could help.

T
HE
T
HREE
P’
S OF
P
ERFECTIONISM

Even though Paul’s stepfather was out of his life, he still maintained a strong hold over Paul because the demeaning messages continued
to play in Paul’s head. As a result, Paul stayed entangled in what I call “The Three P’s”: Perfectionism, Procrastination, and Paralysis.

I really like this new lab where I’m working, but I’m always terrified that I’m not going to do a perfect job. So, I put off a lot of what I have to do until way after my deadlines, or I’ll rush them through at the last minute and screw up. The more I screw up, the more I keep expecting to get fired. Anytime my supervisor makes a comment, I take it personally and overreact. I’m always expecting that the world is going to come to an end because I’ve screwed up. Lately, I’ve gotten so far behind that I’ve been calling in sick. I just can’t face it.

Paul’s stepfather had implanted in Paul the need to be perfect—Perfectionism. Paul’s fear of failing to do things perfectly led him to postpone doing them—Procrastination. But the more Paul put things off, the more they overwhelmed him, and his snowballing fears eventually prevented him from doing anything at all—Paralysis.

I helped Paul think through a strategy to approach his employers openly, tell them he was having personal problems that were interfering with his work, and ask for a leave of absence. They were impressed by his honesty and his concern for the quality of his work, and they granted him two months. That wasn’t enough time for Paul to explore all of his problems, but it was long enough for us to get him out of the hole he’d dug for himself. By the time he returned to his job, he had been able to take the first steps toward facing what his stepfather had done to him, which made him better able to differentiate between real conflicts with his superiors and conflicts arising from his internal wounds. Even though he was to remain in therapy for another eight months, everyone at work told him that he seemed like a new man.

T
HE
“S” W
ORD

Adult children of perfectionist parents have usually taken one of two paths. They’ve either driven themselves relentlessly to win parental love and approval, or they’ve rebelled to the point where they develop a fear of success.

There are those who behave as if someone is always keeping score. The house can never be clean enough. They can never experience pleasure in an accomplishment because they’re convinced that they could have done it better. They feel genuine panic if they make the slightest mistake.

Then there are those who, like Paul, live a life of failure because they cannot deal with “the ‘S’ word”—Success. To Paul, being successful would have meant capitulating to his stepfather’s demands. Paul probably would have continued to fail at job after job if we had not silenced his stepfather’s voice within him.

The Cruelest Words: “I Wish You’d Never Been Born”

One of the most extreme examples of the havoc created by verbal abuse was Jason, 42, a handsome police officer in one of my hospital groups several years ago. The Los Angeles Police Department had insisted that he be hospitalized because the police psychologist had concluded that Jason was a suicide risk. At the hospital staff conference, I learned that Jason was consistently putting himself into unnecessarily life-threatening situations. For example, he had recently tried to make a drug bust by himself, without calling for the appropriate backup. He came very close to being killed. On the surface this appeared to be a heroic act, but it was actually reckless, irresponsible behavior. The word was out in the department: Jason was trying to kill himself in the line of duty.

It took several group sessions for me to gain Jason’s confidence.
But once I did, we established a good working relationship. I still recall vividly the session in which he told about his bizarre relationship with his mother:

My dad skipped out when I was two years old because my mother was impossible to live with. She got even worse after he left. She had this really violent temper, and she never let up on me, especially since I happened to be the spitting image of my old man. I don’t remember a day when she didn’t tell me she wished I’d never been born. On a good day, she’d say, “You look just like your goddamned father and you’re just as rotten.” On her bad days, she’d say stuff like, “I wish you were dead just like I wish your father was dead, rotting in some shallow grave.”

I told Jason that his mother sounded crazy.

I thought so too, but who’s going to listen to a kid. One of our neighbors knew about it. She tried to get me into a foster home because she was convinced my mother was going to kill me. But nobody listened to her, either.

He paused for a moment and shook his head.

Jesus, I didn’t think this crap bothered me anymore, but my insides turn to ice every time I remember how much she hated me.

Jason’s mother had sent him a clear message: she did not want him. When his father left and made no attempt to be a part of his son’s life, he reinforced the point: Jason’s existence was worthless.

Through his actions on the police force, Jason was unconsciously trying to be a dutiful, obedient son. In essence, Jason was trying to wipe out his existence, to commit suicide indirectly in
order to please his mother. He knew exactly what it would take to please her because she’d told him very explicitly: “I wish you were dead.”