Toxic Parents (4 page)

That’s not the reason Sandy is having problems, and I didn’t ask you here to read me a laundry list of her crimes. We really won’t get anywhere if that’s all you’re here for.

It didn’t work. Throughout the session, Sandy’s mother and father took turns attacking their daughter, despite my admonitions. It was a long hour. After they left, Sandy was quick to apologize for them:

I know they really didn’t come through for me today, but I hope you liked them. They’re really good people, they just seemed nervous to be here. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked them to come. . . . It probably upset them. They’re not used to this kind of thing. But they really love me . . . just give them some time, you’ll see.

This session and a few subsequent ones with Sandy’s parents clearly indicated how closed-minded they were to anything that challenged their perception of Sandy’s problems. At no point was either one willing to acknowledge any responsibility for those problems. And Sandy continued to idolize them.

“T
HEY
W
ERE
O
NLY
T
RYING TO
H
ELP
”

For many adult children of toxic parents, denial is a simple, unconscious process of pushing certain events and feelings out of conscious awareness, pretending that those events never happened. But others, like Sandy, take a more subtle approach: rationalization.
When we rationalize, we use “good reasons” to explain away what is painful and uncomfortable.

Here are a few typical rationalizations:

• My father only screamed at me because my mother nagged him.
  

• My mother only drank because she was lonely. I should have stayed home with her more.
  

• My father beat me, but he didn’t mean to hurt me, he only meant to teach me a lesson.
  

• My mother never paid any attention to me because she was so unhappy.
  

• I can’t blame my father for molesting me. My mother wouldn’t sleep with him, and men need sex.
  

All these rationalizations have one thing in common: they serve to make the unacceptable acceptable. On the surface, it may appear to work, but a part of you always knows the truth.

“H
E
O
NLY
D
ID
I
T
B
ECAUSE
. . .”

Louise, a small, auburn-haired woman in her midforties, was being divorced by her third husband. She came into therapy at the insistence of her adult daughter, who threatened to cut off her relationship with Louise if she didn’t do something about her uncontrollable hostility.

When I first saw Louise, her extremely rigid posture and tight-lipped expression said it all. She was a volcano of contained anger. I asked her about her divorce and she told me that the men in her life always left her; her current husband was just the latest example:

I’m one of those women who always picks Mr. Wrong. In the beginning of each relationship, it’s terrific, but I know it can never last.

I listened intently as Louise expounded on the theme that all men are bastards. Then she began comparing the men in her life to her father:

God, why can’t I find somebody like my father? He looked like a movie star . . . everyone just adored him. I mean he had that charisma that just drew people to him. My mother was sick a lot, and my father would take me out . . . just him and me. Those were the best times in my life. After my dad, they just broke the mold.

I asked her if her father was still alive and Louise became very tense as she replied:

I don’t know. He just disappeared one day. I guess I was around ten. My mother was a real bitch to live with, and one day he just took off. No note, no phone call, no nothing. God, I missed him. For about a year after he left, I was so sure I could hear his car drive up every night. . . . I can’t really blame him for what he did. He was so full of life. Who’d want to be tied down to a sick wife and a kid?

Louise was spending her life waiting for her idealized father to come back to her. Unable to face how callous and irresponsible he had been, Louise used extensive rationalization to keep him godlike in her eyes—despite the unspeakable pain his behavior had caused her.

Her rationalization also enabled her to deny her rage at him for abandoning her. Unfortunately, that rage found an outlet in her relationships with other men. Every time she started seeing a man, things would go smoothly for a while, as she got to know him. But as they grew closer, her fear of abandonment would get out of hand. The fear would invariably turn into hostility. She couldn’t see a pattern in the fact that every man left her for the same reasons: the
closer they got, the more hostile she became. Instead, she insisted her hostility was justified by the fact that they always left her.

Anger Where Anger Is Due

When I was in graduate school, one of my psychology books contained a series of drawings that graphically illustrated how people displace feelings—particularly anger. The first frame showed a man being bawled out by his boss. Obviously, it wasn’t safe for the man to yell back, so the second frame showed him displacing his anger by yelling at his wife when he got home. The third showed her yelling at the kids. The kids kicked the dog, and the dog bit the cat. What impressed me about this series of images was that, despite its seeming simplicity, it is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of how we transfer strong feelings from the appropriate person to an easier target.

Louise’s opinion of men is a perfect example: “They are such wimpy bastards . . . all of them. You can’t trust them. They always turn on you. I’m sick of being used by men.”

Louise’s father had abandoned her. If she had acknowledged this fact, she would have had to renounce her cherished fantasies and godlike image of him. She would have had to let him go. Instead, she displaced her anger and mistrust from her father to other men.

Without being aware of it, Louise consistently chose men who treated her in ways that both disappointed and enraged her. As long as she could release her anger at men in general, she didn’t have to feel her anger at her father.

Sandy, whom we met earlier in this chapter, displaced onto her husband the anger and disappointment she felt toward her parents for the way they had treated her pregnancy and abortion. She couldn’t allow herself to be angry at her parents—that would have been too threatening to her deification of them.

Don’t Speak Ill of the Dead

Death does not end the deification of toxic parents. In fact, it may increase it.

As hard as it is to acknowledge the harm done by a living parent, it is infinitely harder to accuse that parent once he or she is dead. There’s a powerful taboo against criticizing the dead, as if we were kicking them while they’re down. As a result, death imparts a sort of sainthood to even the worst abuser. The deification of dead parents is almost automatic.

Unfortunately, while the toxic parent is protected by the sanctity of the grave, the survivors are stuck with the emotional remains. “Don’t speak ill of the dead” may be a treasured platitude, but it often inhibits the realistic resolution of conflicts with dead parents.

“Y
OU’LL
A
LWAYS
B
E
M
Y
L
ITTLE
F
AILURE
”

Valerie, a tall, delicate-featured musician in her late thirties, was referred to me by a mutual friend who was concerned that Valerie’s lack of confidence was preventing her from pursuing opportunities in her singing career. About fifteen minutes into our first session, Valerie admitted that her career was going nowhere:

I haven’t had any kind of a singing job—not even a piano bar—for over a year. I’ve been working temp in an office to pay my rent. I don’t know. Maybe it’s an impossible dream. The other night I was having dinner with my folks, and we got into my problems, and my father said, “Don’t worry. You’ll always be my little failure.” I’m sure he didn’t realize how much it hurt, but those words really tore me apart.

I told Valerie that anyone would feel hurt under the circumstances. Her father had been cruel and insulting. She replied:

I guess that’s nothing new. It’s the story of my life. I was the family garbage dump. I got blamed for everything. If he and my mom had problems, it was my fault. He was like a broken record. And yet, when I did anything to please him, he would beam with pride and brag about me to his cronies. God, it was wonderful to get his approval, but I felt like an emotional yo-yo sometimes.

Valerie and I worked very closely together over the next several weeks. She was just beginning to contact the magnitude of her anger and sadness toward her father.

Then he died of a stroke.

It was an unexpected death—shocking, sudden; the kind for which no one is prepared. Valerie was overwhelmed by guilt for all the anger she had expressed toward him in therapy.

I sat there in church while he was being eulogized and I heard this outpouring of how wonderful he was all his life, and I felt like I was being an asshole for trying to blame him for my own problems. I just wanted to atone for the pain I’d caused him. I kept thinking about how much I loved him and what a bitch I’d always been to him. I don’t want to talk about the bad stuff anymore . . . none of that matters now.

Valerie’s grief got her off the track for a time, but eventually she came to see that her father’s death could not change the reality of how he had treated her during childhood and as an adult.

Valerie has been in therapy for almost six months now. I’ve been happy to see her self-confidence improve steadily. She is still struggling to get her singing career off the ground, but it’s no longer due to lack of trying.

Taking Them Down Off Their Pedestals

Godlike parents make rules, make judgments, and make pain. When you deify your parents, living or dead, you are agreeing to live by their version of reality. You are accepting painful feelings as a part of your life, perhaps even rationalizing them as being good for you. It’s time to stop.

When you bring your toxic parents down to earth, when you find the courage to look at them realistically, you can begin to equalize the power in your relationship with them.

2 | “Just Because You Didn’t Mean It Doesn’t Mean It Didn’t Hurt”

The Inadequate Parents

C
hildren have basic inalienable rights—to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and protected. But along with these physical rights, they have the right to be nurtured emotionally, to have their feelings respected, and to be treated in ways that allow them to develop a sense of self-worth.

Children also have the right to be guided by appropriate parental limits on their behavior, to make mistakes, and to be disciplined without being physically or emotionally abused.

Finally, children have a right to
be
children. They have a right to spend their early years being playful, spontaneous, and irresponsible. Naturally, as children grow older, loving parents will nourish their maturity by giving them certain responsibilities and household duties, but never at the expense of childhood.

How We Learn to Be in the World

Children soak up both verbal and nonverbal messages like sponges—indiscriminately. They listen to their parents, they watch their parents, and they imitate their parents’ behavior. Because they have little frame of reference outside the family, the things they learn at home about themselves and others become universal truths engraved deeply in their minds. Parental role models are central to a child’s developing sense of identity—particularly as he or she develops gender identity. Despite dramatic changes in parental roles over the last twenty years, the same duties apply to parents today that applied to your parents:

1. They must provide for their children’s physical needs.
   

2. They must protect their children from physical harm.
   

3. They must provide for their children’s needs for love, attention, and affection.
   

4. They must protect their children from emotional harm.
   

5. They must provide moral and ethical guidelines for their children.
   

Clearly, the list could go on much longer, but these five responsibilities form the foundation of adequate parenting. The toxic parents we’ll be discussing rarely get past the first item on the list. For the most part, they are (or were) significantly impaired in their own emotional stability or mental health. They are not only often unavailable to meet their children’s needs, but in many cases they expect and demand that their children take care of the
parents’
needs.

When a parent forces parental responsibilities on a child, family roles become indistinct, distorted, or reversed. A child who is compelled to become his own parent, or even become a parent to his own parent, has no one to emulate, learn from, and look up to. Without a parental role model at this critical state of emotional
development, a child’s personal identity is set adrift in a hostile sea of confusion.