Toxic Parents (15 page)

In addition to inflicting enormous hurt and bewilderment, this form of verbal abuse can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jason’s suicidal tendencies are relatively common among the children of such parents. For these adult children, facing and dealing with their toxic connections to the past can literally be a matter of life or death.

When “You Are” Becomes “I Am”

While there is no question that children can be damaged by put-downs from friends, teachers, siblings, and other family members, children are the most vulnerable to their parents. After all, parents are the center of a young child’s universe. And if your all-knowing parents think bad things about you, they must be true. If Mother is always saying, “You’re stupid,” then you’re stupid. If Father is always saying, “You’re worthless,” then you are. A child has no perspective from which to cast doubt on these assessments.

When you take these negative opinions out of other people’s mouths and put them into your unconscious, you are “internalizing” them. Internalization of negative opinions—changing “you are” to “I am”—forms the foundation of low self-esteem. Besides significantly impairing your sense of yourself as a lovable, valuable, competent person, verbal abuse can create self-fulfilling negative expectations about how you will get along in the world. In the second part of this book, I’ll show you how to defeat those crippling expectations by making the internal external again.

6 | Sometimes the Bruises Are on the Outside, Too

The Physical Abusers

I find I get angry at myself all the time, and sometimes I cry for no reason at all. It’s probably my frustration at myself. I keep thinking how my parents hurt and humiliated me. I don’t keep friends for very long. I have a pattern of cutting off whole groups of friends at a time. I guess I don’t want them to find out how bad I am.

K
ate, 40, a blond, stern-faced quality-control manager for a large corporation, came to see me at the recommendation of her family physician. She had been having panic attacks in her car and in the elevator of the building where she worked. Her physician had prescribed tranquilizers but was concerned about Kate’s aversion to leaving her apartment except to go to work. He urged her to seek psychological help.

The first thing I noticed about Kate was that her severe,
unhappy expression seemed molded onto her face—as if she had never learned to smile. It didn’t take me long to discover why:

I was raised in an upper-class suburb outside St. Louis. We had everything money could buy. From the outside we looked like this perfect family. But from the inside . . . my father would go into these crazy rages. They usually came after he had a fight with my mother. He would just turn on whichever of us was closest. He would take off his belt and start strapping me or my sister . . . across our legs . . . on our heads . . . anywhere he could hit us. When he’d start in, I’d always have this fear that he wouldn’t stop.

Kate’s depression and fear were the legacy of a battered child.

The All-American Crime

Inside millions of American households, ranging across all social, economic, and educational lines, a terrible crime is being committed every day—the physical abuse of children.

There is a great deal of controversy and confusion over the definition of physical abuse. Many people still believe that parents have not only the right but the responsibility to use corporal punishment on their children. The most common parenting motto in the English language is still, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Until recently, children had virtually no legal rights. They were widely viewed as chattel, pieces of property that were “owned” by their parents. For hundreds of years, parental rights were considered inviolate—in the name of discipline, parents could do just about anything to their children, short of killing them.

Today our norms have narrowed. The problem of physical child abuse has become so widespread that public recognition has forced our legal system to set limits on physical discipline. In an attempt to clarify what constitutes physical abuse, Congress enacted the
Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974. This act defined physical abuse as: “the infliction of physical injuries such as bruises, burns, welts, cuts, bone and skull fractures; these are caused by kicking, punching, biting, beating, knifing, strapping, paddling, etc.” How this definition translates into law is often a matter of interpretation. Every state has its own child-abuse laws, and most embody definitions similar to the federal one, which is somewhat vague in its scope. A child with a broken bone has clearly been abused, but most prosecutors would be reluctant to press charges against a parent who had bruised a child during a spanking.

I’m not a lawyer and I’m not a cop, but for more than twenty years I’ve seen the suffering that “legal” corporal punishment can create. I have my own definition of physical abuse: any behavior that inflicts significant physical pain on a child, regardless of whether it leaves marks.

W
HY
D
O
P
ARENTS
B
EAT
T
HEIR
K
IDS
?

Most of us who have children have felt the urge to strike them at one time or another. These feelings can be especially strong when a child won’t stop crying, nagging, or defying us. Sometimes it has less to do with a child’s behavior than with our own exhaustion, stress level, anxiety, or unhappiness. A lot of us manage to resist the impulse to hit our children. Unfortunately, many parents are not so restrained.

We can only speculate why, but physically abusive parents seem to share certain characteristics. First, they have an appalling lack of impulse control. Physically abusive parents will assault their children whenever they have strong negative feelings that they need to discharge. These parents seem to have little, if any, awareness of the consequences of what they are doing to their children. It is almost an automatic reaction to stress. The impulse and the action are one and the same.

Physical abusers themselves often come from families in which abuse was the norm. Much of their adult behavior is a direct
repetition of what they experienced and learned in their youth. Their role model was an abuser. Violence was the only tool they learned to use in dealing with problems and feelings—especially feelings of anger.

Many physically abusive parents enter adulthood with tremendous emotional deficits and unmet needs. Emotionally, they are still children. They often look upon their own children as surrogate parents, to fulfill the emotional needs that their real parents never fulfilled. The abuser becomes enraged when his child can’t meet his needs. He lashes out. At that moment, the child is more of a surrogate parent than ever, because it is the abuser’s parent at whom the abuser is truly enraged.

Many of these parents also have problems with alcohol or drugs. Substance abuse is a frequent contributor to the breakdown of impulse control, though by no means is it the only one.

There are many types of physical abusers, but at the darkest end of the spectrum are those who have children seemingly for the sole purpose of brutalizing them. Many of these people look, talk, and act just like human beings, but they are monsters—totally devoid of the feelings and characteristics that give most of us our humanity. These people defy comprehension; there is no logic to their behavior.

The Private Holocaust—There’s No Escape

Kate’s father was a well-respected banker, a churchgoer, a family man—hardly the type most people would imagine when they hear the phrase
child abuser.
But Kate didn’t live in an imagined reality, she lived in a real nightmare.

My sister and I started locking our door at night because we were so scared. I’ll never forget this one time when I was eleven . . . she was nine. We were hiding under our beds and he kept banging on the door. I’ve never been so scared in my life. Then, all of a sudden he came crashing through the door like in the movies. It was terrifying. The door just flew into the room. We tried to run, but he grabbed us both and threw us in the corner and started beating at us with his belt. He kept shouting, “I’ll kill you if you ever lock me out again!” I thought he was going to kill us right then and there.

The climate of terror that Kate described permeates the homes of physically abused children. Even in quiet moments, these children live in fear that the volcano of rage will erupt at any moment. And when it does, anything the victim does to fend off the blows only outrages the abuser more. Kate’s desperate attempts to protect herself by hiding under her bed and locking the door only intensified her father’s irrational behavior. There is no safe place to hide, no escape from the abuser, no protector to run to.

Y
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NOW
W
HEN
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T’S
G
OING TO
H
APPEN

I first met Joe, 27, at a seminar I was conducting at a graduate school of psychology where he was studying for his master’s degree. I mentioned in my presentation that I was writing a book on toxic parents. Joe sought me out at the lunch break and volunteered to be a case study for my book. I had more than enough material from my practice, but something in this young man’s voice told me he needed to talk to someone. We met the following day and talked for several hours. I was impressed not only by his openness and candor but by the sincerity of his desire to use his painful experiences to help others.

I was always getting knocked around in my bedroom, I don’t even remember what for. I could be doing anything and my father would burst in and start screaming and yelling at the top of his lungs. The next thing I knew, he’d start punching me until he’d have me up against the wall. He’d keep pounding me so hard that I’d be dazed and didn’t know what the hell was going on anymore. The scariest part of it was not ever knowing what would provoke his outbursts!

Joe spent much of his childhood waiting for the tidal wave of his father’s rage and knowing there was no way to avoid it. The experience generated powerful, lifelong fears of being hurt and betrayed. Two marriages ended in divorce because he couldn’t learn to trust.

It just doesn’t go away because you move out or get married. I’m always afraid of something, and I hate myself for it. But if your father, who is supposed to love you and take care of you, treated you this way, then what the hell is going to happen to you in the real world. I’ve screwed up a lot of relationships because I can’t let anyone get too close. I’m so ashamed of myself for that, and I’m so ashamed of myself for being so damn frightened all the time. But life just scares the hell out of me. I’m really working hard in my own therapy to get on top of this stuff because I know I’m not going to be of much use to myself or anybody else until I do. But, holy Christ, it’s a struggle.

It is tremendously difficult to regain feelings of trust and safety once they have been trampled by parents. All of us develop our expectations about how people will treat us based on our relationships with our parents. If those relationships are, for the most part, emotionally nourishing, respectful of our rights and feelings, we’ll grow up expecting others to treat us in much the same way. These positive expectations allow us to be relatively vulnerable and open in our adult relationships. But if, as in Joe’s case, childhood is a time of unrelenting anxiety, tension, and pain, then we develop negative expectations and rigid defenses.

Joe expected the worst of others. He expected to be hurt and mistreated as he was in his childhood. So he encased himself in a suit of emotional armor. He wouldn’t let anyone get close to him.
Unfortunately, that suit of armor proved to be more of an emotional prison than a protection.

“I’
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OT
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ROBLEMS
—N
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ONDER
I L
ET
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OU
H
AVE
I
T
”

Joe never understood what set his father off. Other abusers have a need to be understood. They beat their children, then beg them to understand, even ask for their forgiveness. That’s how it was for Kate:

I remember one particularly terrible evening after dinner when my mother was out shopping. My father was really giving it to me with that damned belt. I was screaming so loud that one of our neighbors called the police, but my father managed to convince them that everything was fine. He told the cops that the noise was coming from the TV, and they bought it. I’m standing there with tears streaming down my face and welts on my arms, but they still bought it. Why shouldn’t they? My father was one of the most powerful men in the city. But at least they calmed him down. After they left, he told me he’d been under a lot of stress lately. I didn’t even know what
stress
meant, but he really wanted me to understand what he was going through. He told me that my mother wasn’t nice to him anymore . . . that she wouldn’t sleep with him and it wasn’t right for a wife not to sleep with her husband. That was why he was so upset all the time.