If You Had Controlling Parents (9 page)

“I used to try and recall happy memories with my mother but I gave up. It hurt too much that I had a mom who never once said, ‘How are you today? You look wonderful!'” Ellen said. “I have never confronted her with all her abuse. She would probably not even know what I was talking about. So, limited contact is probably the best solution for me.”

When her mother dies, Ellen expects she will have much sadness but few regrets about having sought an arm's-length stance from her mother: “Maybe in my memories she'll be kinder than she has been in reality.”

I asked Ellen if there were anything else she wanted to add. Meditatively running her finger along the rim of her teacup, she took a long breath and confessed, “I really, really loved my mother. But my mother didn't take care of that love for so many years. Eventually, my love just went away.”

Self-Assessment

My parent(s):

• Demanded loyalty, attention, and admiration
  
• Competed with me or tried to spoil my happy occasions
  
• Used other people to satisfy their own needs
  
• Seemed hypercritical or hypersensitive
  
• Seemed immature, self-centered, or childish
  

Next: Abusing Parenting

The next style, Abusing parents, embodies many characteristics of Using parents. But while Using parents do most of their damage through emotional abuse, Abusing parents add physical or sexual abuse or intimidation to the equation.

Key Characteristics of Abusing Parents:

• Control through brute force
  
• Blame their children for “making” them abuse
  
• Feel they have the right to abuse
  
• Have poor impulse control
  

Potential Consequences of an Abusive Upbringing:

• Depression
  
• Addictions
  
• Hypervigilance
  
• Assumption that abuse is deserved
  
• Difficulty in trusting others
  

Jorge, now a thirty-two-year-old psychiatric aide, was twelve and had just come home from school when his mother shrieked his name from her bedroom. That was the signal for him to come and be hit. As always, he resolved not to cry when his mother hurt him
.

On this day some of his mother's chocolates were missing. As Jorge slowly drew alongside his mother's bed, she dug her nails into his flesh, then twisted his arm. But that wasn't enough. Today would be worse than usual. She grabbed him by the ear, then held his hand over a lit kitchen gas burner
.

Pulling him back to her bedroom, she got out a belt, ordered him to stand spread-eagled in the doorway, and began whipping him across his back
.

Finally, he cried
.

Eventually, she stopped
.

His mother ordered Jorge to stand where he was until she told him he could move. Two hours later, when his father came in from work, Jorge was still standing in the doorway. His father walked past him wordlessly, as if Jorge were a mere ghost
.

That night was one of many Jorge fell asleep clutching a picture of Jesus. Jorge thought he was being hurt by his parents because he was a bad person. He prayed that some of Jesus's goodness would rub off
.

 

Jorge was repeatedly abused by his Abusing, Chaotic mother; his father did nothing about it. Sometimes, when he was alone with his father, Jorge would ask why his mother hurt him and why his father didn't stop it. “That's just the way she is,” his father told him. “Behave yourself and let her do it.”

Abusing parents do things to children that are hard to believe. After thousands of hours of therapy, I still sometimes find incredible some of the horror stories clients tell me—and, if anything, the horror and pain are often downplayed or minimized. Despite the increasing attention paid to child abuse,
tyrant
osaurus parents like Jorge's are far from extinct. In 1997, an estimated 1 million children in the United States suffered from child abuse in which excess control was a key factor.

One thing is a constant in Abusing families: Abused children grow up thinking they deserve the abuse. Jorge, who now works with autistic children, told me, “I used to think that if I could just go over a mistake fifty times and think why I did it, I could get rid of my imperfections.”

As an adult Jorge struggles with depression, though he is in therapy and has confronted his mother and father about their abuse. He worries that the pain is so deep he may never recover: “Maybe it's too late for me. Maybe I should concentrate on my children. Maybe only they can make their way out of this family legacy.”

Destructive

What sets Abusing parents apart from other styles of controlling parents is their destructiveness, for they seem bent on destroying their children. While Using parents exploit their children's innate loyalty to get them to go along with being used, Abusing parents simply overpower their sons and daughters.

 

At fourteen, Eve, now a forty-four-year-old secretary, sat in her best red dress at the dinner table Christmas Eve as her father carved the turkey for more than a dozen relatives, including three young nieces and nephews. Earlier that week her father had ordered Eve to give away her pet hamster, but she hadn't had the heart to do it
.

As he cut into the turkey, he looked directly at Eve. Holding up a turkey leg with the carving knife, he shouted, “You didn't get rid of the hamster, like I told you. I'm going to cut it up with this knife. I'm going to wring its neck.” Eve remembers her cousins squirming and beginning to cry while the other adults looked on in stunned silence. Nobody said anything to her father
.

 

Caring for small, fuzzy things helped Eve survive emotionally. She put milk out for neighborhood cats; at one point, by her count, she had seventeen cats coming for dinner. But her father threatened to poison or shoot them. Once he caught a stray dog, tied it to a pole, and “beat it to insanity,” Eve recalled. To protect the cats, Eve stopped putting out milk and frantically shooed them away when they kept coming.

As a girl, Eve lived in such fear that she spent many waking moments outside her home, hiding in the bushes and pretending they were her real home: “I had one bush be the kitchen and another be the bedroom. I was much more comfortable outside than inside.”

When Eve was nine, her father threw her across the room and dislocated her hip because he didn't like the way she said “Yes, sir” to him. The next day, he told her she had to quit gymnastics before she got injured again: “I think he really believed that I dislocated my hip in gymnastics. I don't think he even remembered doing it to me.”

Her father's control extended to her social life. When Eve dated a “hippie” against his orders, her father hit her. When she dated an African American, he attacked her with a steel pipe. When she married a Latino, he threatened to take her out of his will: “I don't think he did it, though. He wouldn't have wanted to spend the eighty dollars to have his lawyer change it. But he resented any freedom I had.”

Eve's father was as destructive as any parent of the people I inter
viewed. His abuse induced a legacy of low self-esteem that keeps Eve working in clerical jobs even after getting a master's degree. Her upbringing has cost Eve mightily in her relationships with men. She has a permanent restraining order against one former lover who beat her. Prior to that, she was married to an alcoholic who battered her for years until she left him. He later killed himself.

While Eve still fears her father, she turned the tables a few years ago by fighting back. One day her father began chasing her with a lead pipe, threatening to kill her. “I grabbed his arm, stopped his swinging, and gouged him with my nails,” she announces proudly. “He took photos, told all the neighbors I had beaten him up, and said he was going to build a court case. But the balance had shifted. I was no longer going to give in.” Since Eve fought back, there has been no more physical violence between them.

Taking

Some Abusing parents seem bent on taking from their children by every possible method. They are like Using parents, but in the extreme.

 

Rosemary, now a fifty-five-year-old manager, recalls sitting at the dinner table at the age of nine, watching her six-year-old sister, who was beginning to look ill. Her mother was talking incessantly, unaware of her daughters. Next to her mother's plate was a razor strop that she brought to every meal so she could whip the girls if they spilled anything or didn't finish their food
.

Her younger sister, Rosemary would realize years later, was developing an eating disorder from the tension at the table. She would gag on her food, try to swallow it for fear of getting beaten, then gag again. When her mother wasn't watching, Rosemary would sneak some of her sister's food and eat it for her. Their father noticed but said nothing
.

Over the years, Rosemary became obese. Her sister became anorectic. Many nights Rosemary's sister would throw up in bed. Her mother would come in and beat the younger girl for throwing up. Eventually the sisters took a pail to their bedroom so their mother wouldn't know when Rosemary's sister vomited
.

 

Rosemary's maltreatment was pervasive. Her Abusing, Using mother would punch her, then make her rehearse the story she'd tell
outsiders—that she'd walked into a door: “If I ever said anything back, she'd crack me across the face. I'd have a purple face and people would stare at me like I was the Elephant Man.”

Once when Rosemary was singing the happy-go-lucky rock song “Personality” while doing housework, her mother slapped her several times, and shouted, “I'll give you personality!”

“She couldn't stand to see me happy,” Rosemary says sadly.

Another time, her mother ripped a red bow out of Rosemary's hair, screaming, “You tramp. You whore. You know what this means to men? You are filthy and disgusting.” Yet her mother did nothing to stop a sixteen-year-old cousin from molesting eight-year-old Rosemary during their “naps” together.

For most of her life Rosemary has suffered from depression, eating disorders, obesity, alcohol dependence, loneliness, and thoughts of suicide. Some days she wishes her mother would die. Other days, she feels guilt-ridden for having such thoughts.

Several years of therapy have brought Rosemary to the point of being, as she puts it, “semi-human,” but she cannot make up for her lost years: “It was like being in prison. She was the warden and she had no intention of letting me out. I would have been better off raised by wolves.”

Poor Impulse Control

Patty, who is now a fifty-three-year-old counselor, was in seventh grade when she walked into the living room after school; her dad, slumped in his easy chair in front of the television, asked her the time. “Three-thirty,” she told him, since she had glanced at the kitchen clock a moment before
.

“
I asked you what time it is!” her father screamed. “Don't make things up. You go look at a clock
.”

Patty tried to tell him she'd just checked the clock, but her father kept screaming until she went back, looked again, and told him it was now 3:31
.

 

Recalls Patty, “I guess my behavior looked like disobedience to him.”

The rage reactions of Abusing parents can be so sudden and inexplicable that we can only speculate on what triggers them. Patty's father may have expected to see his daughter reverse course and look at a clock. Perhaps that would have comforted him because he would have felt he controlled her actions as he would a servant's. When Patty
did something unexpected, like answering without looking, it may have taken him by surprise, something most controlling parents do not like, since it upsets their sense of being in control.

Patty's Abusing, Depriving father had several methods of intimidation. He would grab his daughter and hold a lit cigarette an inch from her arm, then say, “If you move your arm, it's your fault because you're burning yourself.” He tried the tactic on Patty's cousin once and burned the child when he jerked away. When Patty was six, her father put her on his bike handlebars and rode downhill at full speed. During those times plummeting downhill or staring at a hot cigarette, Patty felt completely in her father's control. She dissociated: “I floated up around the ceiling somewhere. I didn't identify with the person who was me. I'd look down and think, ‘Look at that pitiful person crying.'”

Her father also ridiculed emotions. When five-year-old Patty became afraid of spiders, her father commanded her not to be afraid. When a sixth-grade teacher recommended that Patty see a counselor because she was so shy, her father commanded her not to be shy. “For my father,” she now realizes, “emotions were things you could just command.”

As an adult, expressing her feelings is one of Patty's biggest struggles. A women's group and twelve-step programs have helped her to feel whole: “In my women's group I realized I could cry and people would not reject me. If anything, they drew closer. It was a shock, because as a child my crying made my mother withdraw and my father furious.”

Physical and sexual violence is often the only close contact abused children can get with a parent. “My dad's physical roughhousing was the only time he paid attention to me, so sometimes I'd even start it,” Patty admits. “I'd end up getting bruised and hurt but I desperately wanted some closeness. Afterward my mother would say, ‘Oh, you bruise so easily.'”

Why Parents Abuse

Abusing parents maltreat their children because they can get away with it; they're bigger and have the power. Many abusers cannot maintain a consistent sense of themselves or others. At times they realize that their children are delicate, dependent beings, but when the abuse impulse gets triggered, they see their children's innocent behaviors as deliberate provocations. In those moments, they no longer see their children as preoccupied, forgetful, and dependent creatures who want
parental approval. Abusing parents do not regard their children as human.

Abusers also tend to experience guilt differently from healthier parents. When a healthier parent hurts a child, he or she will generally be troubled by the action and try to atone. But Abusing parents justify their actions based on what the child did “wrong.”

Abuse runs across a continuum, and most of the people I interviewed experienced less physical violence than Jorge, Eve, Rosemary, and Patty. Yet they hurt just as much and struggle with just as many limits in their lives.

Clients who come from controlling families without physical violence often tell me, “It wasn't so bad. Nobody ever hit me or molested me.” But they wonder why they suffer from fallout as lasting as those who were physically or sexually abused. In my experience, wounds from emotional abuse and control can last long and cut deep. Jorge, Eve, Rosemary, and Patty each admitted that their burns and bruises hurt less than the pain of feeling abandoned, degraded, and betrayed.

We tend to discount the power of verbal abuse and emotional tyranny, perhaps because of the absence of visible bruises. We know sticks and stones break bones, but we forget that names really can hurt us. Labeling a child—“lazy,” “spoiled,” “stupid,” “ugly,” “bad,” “dummy,” “crazy,” “whore,” “selfish,” and a “mistake” topped the “hit” parade among those I interviewed—shatters self-image.