If You Had Controlling Parents (7 page)

Key Characteristics of Cultlike Parents:

• Control through ironclad adherence to rituals and beliefs
  
• Terrified of doubt and uncertainty
  
• Fear questions, dissent, or new ideas
  
• Seek security from organizations or philosophies
  

Potential Consequences of a Cultlike Upbringing:

• Reduced initiative
  
• Heightened distrust or gullibility
  
• Social isolation
  
• Distorted intellectual development
  
• Complicated spiritual life
  

Now a forty-four-year-old artist, Shirley remembers herself at seven, her honey-colored hair in prim pigtails, spending every day after school as a captive audience in the family garage. She dared not look bored, as her mother, a born-again Christian, lured neighborhood kids with lollipops so they would sit through her proselytizing at her “Good News Club”
impromptu Bible classes. Eventually a school principal sent a flyer warning parents to keep their children away from Shirley's mom: “My mother had a way of frightening children with her constant praying, threats of hellfire, and sudden outbursts of ‘Jesus help me, I am a worthless sinner
!'”

Starting at age four, Shirley had to memorize a dozen Bible verses weekly and attend church meetings four nights a week. Christmas presents were forbidden after her mother realized that the word “Santa” had the same letters as “Satan.” Shirley and her brother could never eat devil's food cake. Shirley remembers sometimes waking in the middle of the night to find her mother “bending over me with a Bible, praying, muttering and whispering to herself
.”

 

Her mother carried to extremes a central trait of Cultlike parents: the need to feel certain. Cultlike parents have to know “the truth” or belong to a group that is “in the know.” I use the term “Cultlike” because these families mimic destructive cults in several ways:

1. Leaders act larger than life and receive special treatment.
   
2. Members' rights are subjugated for the “good” of the group or leader.
   
3. Prejudices rigidly separate members from outsiders.
   
4. Behavior is tightly regimented.
   
5. Feelings are devalued, minimized, and manipulated.
   
6. Questioning and dissent are not tolerated.
   

“My mother always told me that Jesus came first in her life,” Shirley said. Yet her mother's devotion to Jesus left Shirley feeling considerably less than a priority. As Shirley grew older, her mother viewed her daughter's innocent questions about religion as blasphemy. Once, while in her teens, Shirley brought home library books on witchcraft. Her mother immediately summoned church friends for an emergency exorcism: “I had to kneel for four hours. They were shouting, ‘Do you love Jesus?' ‘Are you washed in the love of Jesus?' Finally I fainted because of no food or water and they said, ‘Praise God! The demons have left her. This child has healed.'”

While her mother inundated Shirley with zealotry, her alcoholic, Abusing father cowed Shirley with threats and violence. Once, during a slumber party with two girlfriends, she and her guests were awak
ened at two
A.M.
by shouting from her parents' bedroom: “My mother was quoting Bible verses and screaming, ‘Satan, get thee behind me.' My father was throwing change at her, yelling, ‘Do I have to pay for it?' Then he put his fist through the wall. I never asked friends over after that.”

Today Shirley struggles with the lasting effects of her upbringing: depression, distrust of others, and sensitivity to criticism: “When people criticize or get angry with me, I melt down. Sometimes I'll believe them and buy whatever they say. Other times I'll just go off and cry.

“I feel like a concentration camp survivor,” Shirley adds. “I was at my parents' mercy and they didn't have any.”

Military Families

While some Cultlike parents use religion to know the “truth,” others find certainty in institutions that allow them to know the “rules.” The military, with its authoritarian structure and regulations, can attract Cultlike parents searching for a way in which to order their lives.

 

Caitlin, a forty-one-year-old teacher, recalls that as kids she and her six siblings were rousted out of bed on Saturdays at six
A.M.
by her father, a navy officer. The sleepy-eyed children were trotted to the kitchen and shown the “watch bill” of chores for the week. Military-style standards prevailed. Beds had to have hospital corners and bounce a dime. Garbage-can liners were to be folded and creased square at the corners. Silverware was organized in the dishwasher by implement. Milk was stored in a pitcher, never in the milk carton; butter on a plate, never in the carton
.

Caitlin's Cultlike, Perfectionistic mother would answer her children only if addressed by the words, “Mom, may I speak?” Her father would ignore any statement lacking the prefaces “Father,” “Dad,” or “Sir
.”

 

Cultlike parents zealously adhere to rigid behaviors because they are troubled by the gray areas of existence. Knowing the rules allows them to view life in right-or-wrong, all-or-nothing terms. Furthermore, many controlling parents are not adept at communicating about personal issues and feelings. “In our family we never said, ‘Let's talk things out,'” one woman told me. “‘I don't understand' and ‘Why?' were not a part of our vocabulary.”

Among those I interviewed from Cultlike families, tension and the
impending threat of physical or emotional violence pervaded their lives. “Our home was like the lid on a boiling pot,” says Caitlin. But in true military fashion, the children were supposed to be stoic when punished: “You were the scourge of the earth if you cried. Crying was a sign of weakness.”

Many controlling parents, not just Cultlike parents, interpret children's questions or lack of instant compliance as a deliberate challenge to their authority. They cannot see that in many cases their children are simply afraid, unsure, or preoccupied. When they feel deliberately challenged, some parents respond with violence.

This is not to say that children in controlling families don't seek out ways in which to keep alive the flame of their individuality. The day Caitlin graduated from high school she packed her suitcases. That summer, she slept next to her packed bags, counting the days until she could leave for college.

Her on-edge childhood has left Caitlin struggling with workaholic and perfectionistic tendencies. She has lived much of her life with a low-lying sense of fear and foreboding. Recently, trying to conquer her fears, she sought out the scariest challenge she could imagine and began taking sky-diving lessons. When interviewed, she had recently completed her first solo free-fall dive.

Fundamentalist Military Families

Jonathan, a thirty-five-year-old financial planner, grew up with a Cultlike double whammy: a zealous military father and a strict Catholic mother.

 

One bright Saturday morning when Jonathan was twelve, he dutifully spread newspapers on the kitchen floor and set out his father's scissors and razor. His father, an army officer, marched in and, as he did every other Saturday, cut Jonathan's hair in a half-inch butch cut
.

The ritual devastated the boy, who hated his hair so short and, in addition, was forced to assemble the implements and clean up the results. As his father finished his haircut, his mother came in and asked Jonathan, “How does it look?” Near tears, Jonathan didn't answer. His father immediately shaved Jonathan's hair half again as short. “That's for not responding to your mother's question,” he told his son
.

 

Before dinner, Jonathan's father would shout, “Inspection: hands!” Jonathan and his brothers were to thrust their hands forward to show
they'd been washed. “My father had a military model for how cadets were treated, and he applied it to us,” Jonathan comments.

Jonathan's mother, a devout Catholic, blended military discipline with religion. On wash day his mother hovered as her children methodically folded linens three times, crisply, repeating “the Father,” “the Son,” and “the Holy Ghost” with each respective fold.

In junior high, Jonathan realized that he was gay. He felt that he could never tell his parents: “I was a people pleaser, always trying to smile, hungry for approval. It was hard for me to say what I thought.” It wasn't until he was twenty-four that he came out to his parents. To his surprise, his father had little reaction, but his mother collapsed into the arms of a church friend and sobbed off and on for three days. Finally she said, “Jonathan, I know you
think
you're a homosexual…” Jonathan recollects that, “It went downhill from there. It epitomized her cookie-cutter mentality. Here was my mother thinking she knew more about her grown son's sexuality than he did.”

Whenever Jonathan brought up his sexual orientation, his mother would quote from the Bible and try to talk him out of being gay. For a time, he stopped speaking with her. “That was hard because I knew family was so important to her,” he admits. “But what hurt me more was that nothing I could do or say could change her mind. She was willing to lose her relationship with her son to keep her religious belief system.”

After several months of little contact, relations slowly warmed as Jonathan and his mother agreed that discussions of his sexual orientation were off limits. Since then, he has spoken with his mother about how she failed to protect him from his father's abuse and how unhappy their “code of silence” about his being gay was making him. His mother apologized: “What she did say was from the heart. Now it's a relationship I can deal with. I used to cringe when I thought of talking with her.”

As for his father, Jonathan struggles to make a connection. In a letter that he has yet to send, Jonathan writes, “Like a logger clear-cutting his way through a national treasure, you trampled me. That not being enough, it seems you've now discarded me.”

Prominent Families

Some families prominent in social, political, or corporate circles also share a Cultlike style. Doing anything that would embarrass a prominent parent or hurt a parent's chances for corporate or political
advancement is viewed as a mortal sin. These parents see their children's needs as secondary to the needs of the social circle or corporation. Children in these families can end up feeling like props.

 

Herb, forty-four and successful in the medical field, was a ten-year-old curly-haired boy with a cherubic expression when his Cultlike, Perfectionistic father stepped onto the corporate ladder of a large Midwestern manufacturing company. As his parents struggled to fit in with the corporate social set, Herb's and his younger brother's lives changed dramatically. Their father, consumed by his climb up the company hierarchy, intensely examined corporate nuances of office size, seating at meetings, and the makeup of golf foursomes to see who might be edging him out for advancement. This scrutiny eventually extended to Herb. He had to dress right—as well or better than other corporate sons—even down to his country-club swim trunks, which had to be ironed before every visit. He had to think right, getting only top-notch grades, since this might reflect on his father's chances for advancement. Most of all, he had to act right, behaving “like a perfect little gentleman.” Before company social functions, Herb's father would rehearse how Herb should greet his father's superiors or anyone else his father wanted to impress, saying their names in a strong, clear voice and giving a firm handshake
.

“Everyone talked about how well-behaved and good-looking my brother and I were and my parents just glowed,” Herb says. “I felt like we were just dough to be molded into a final product
.”

 

Herb's father, like many Cultlike parents, needed to feel superior to others: “His attitude was, ‘We are special, our race is special, our religion is special, and our corporation is special.' He would always remind me that we had an ancestor who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He'd tell me, ‘Don't trust anyone whose name ends in a vowel.'”

Herb's father's infatuation with appearances left his son feeling anything but special: “I felt that I just didn't figure in his life. I don't know what it was about me that he objected to.”

To compensate, Herb tried to be perfect. When he was a senior in high school, friends invited him to join the decades-old class ritual of painting their class year number on a local bridge. Herb asked his father for permission to go: “I felt like such a schlemiel. Here I was, asking permission to do something you're not even supposed to ask per
mission for and my father saying it was okay to do something like that once in a while.”

Over time, Herb developed a “doofus” persona. He got depressed, became a loner, and abused drugs. Today, he still feels like a “black sheep” despite his postgraduate degree and good job.

Self-Assessment

My parent(s):

• Strongly identified with a military, social, religious, or corporate group or credo
  
• Tolerated little dissent, questioning, or uncertainty
  
• Distrusted strangers and “outsiders”
  
• Saw rules and beliefs as more important than relationships or feelings
  
• Viewed situations in black-and-white terms
  

Next: Chaotic Parenting

The next style of controlling parents, Chaotic parents, combines elements of two earlier styles, Smothering and Depriving parents. While Smothering parents overwhelm children with too much or the wrong kind of love and attention, and Depriving parents starve their children with too little love and attention, Chaotic parents both deprive and smother. Unable to maintain a constant demeanor, they seesaw between overwhelming closeness and rejecting withdrawal.