Toxic Parents (6 page)

Melanie answered “yes” to every statement! She was astounded to see how truly co-dependent she was. To help her begin to break out of these patterns, I told her it was essential that she make the connection between her co-dependency and her relationship with her father. I asked her to remember how she had felt when he cried.

At first it really scared me because I thought Daddy was dying and then who would be my daddy? Then I started feeling ashamed to see him that way. But mostly I felt this terrible guilt—that it was my fault because I had picked a fight with my brother or whatever. Like I’d really let him down. The worst of it was that I felt so helpless because I couldn’t make him happy. What’s amazing is, he’s been dead for four years, I’m forty-two years old, I’ve got two kids of my own, and I
still
feel guilty.

Melanie was forced to be her father’s caretaker. Both her parents placed their adult responsibilities squarely on her young shoulders. At a time in her life when she needed a strong father to give her self-confidence, she found herself having to pamper an infantile father instead.

Melanie’s first and most profound emotional relationship with a man was with her father. As a child she was overwhelmed by both her father’s neediness and the guilt she felt when she couldn’t satisfy his demands. She never stopped trying to make up for her inability to make him happy, even when he wasn’t around. She just found substitute needy, troubled men to take care of. Her choice of men was dictated by her need to assuage her guilt, and by choosing the father substitutes that she did, she perpetuated the emotional deprivation she had experienced as a child.

I asked Melanie whether her mother had provided any of the love or attention that she never got from her father.

My mother tried, but she was sick a lot of the time. She was always running to doctors and had to stay in bed when her colitis acted up. They’d prescribe tranquilizers and she’d eat them like popcorn. I guess she got pretty hooked, I don’t know. She was always out of it. Our housekeeper really raised us. I mean my mother was there, but she wasn’t there. When I was about thirteen, I wrote that letter to Dear Abby. The damnedest thing was that my mother actually found it. You’d think she would’ve come to me and asked what I was so upset about, but I guess what I felt didn’t matter to her. It was almost like I didn’t exist.

The Invisible Child

Parents who focus their energies on their own physical and emotional survival send a very powerful message to their children: “Your feelings are not important. I’m the only one who counts.” Many of these children, deprived of adequate time, attention, and care, begin to feel invisible—as if they don’t even exist.

In order for children to develop a sense of self-worth—a sense that they do more than occupy space, that they matter and are important—they need their parents to validate their needs and feelings. But Melanie’s father’s emotional needs were so overwhelming that he never noticed Melanie’s needs. She was there when he cried, but he did not reciprocate. Melanie knew that her mother had found her letter to Dear Abby, yet her mother never mentioned it to her. The message from both parents was loud and clear: she was a nonentity to them. Melanie learned to define herself in terms of
their
feelings instead of her own. If she made them feel good,
she
was good. If she made them feel bad,
she
was bad.

As a result, Melanie had a great deal of difficulty in her adult life defining her own identity. Because her independent thoughts, feelings, and needs had never been encouraged, she truly had no idea who she was or what she should expect from a loving relationship.

Unlike many adults with whom I have worked, Melanie was
already in touch with some of her anger at her parents when she came to me. Later, we would focus and work through much of that anger and confront her deep feelings of emotional abandonment. She would learn to set limits on how much she would give of herself to others and to respect her own rights, needs, and feelings. She would learn to become visible again.

The Vanishing Parent

So far we’ve been talking about emotionally absent parents. Physical absence creates its own set of problems.

I first met Ken, 22, in a hospital group for young-adult substance abusers. He was a thin, black-haired young man with piercing dark eyes. It was obvious in our first group meeting that he was enormously intelligent and articulate, but he was also very self-deprecating. He had trouble sitting still for the full ninety minutes; he was a bundle of nerves. I asked him to stay after group to tell me a little about himself. Mistrusting my motives, he played the tough, street-smart hustler, but after a few minutes he began to see that I had no ulterior motive, that I was genuinely interested in easing his pain, and he softened as he spoke to me.

I always hated school and I didn’t know what the hell else to do so I enlisted in the army when I was sixteen. That’s where I got fucked up on drugs. I was always a fuck-up anyway.

I asked what his parents thought of his enlistment.

It was just my mom and me. She wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but I think she was glad to get rid of me. I was always getting into trouble and making her life miserable. She was a real pushover. She let me do what I wanted no matter what.

I asked him where his father had been during this period.

My folks got divorced when I was eight. Mom really got bent out of shape from it. I always thought my dad was hip, you know? He always did “dad things” with me. We’d watch sports together on television, and he’d even take me to a game once in a while. Man, that was great! The day he moved out, I cried my fucking eyes out. He told me nothing was going to change, that he’d still come over and watch TV with me, and he’d see me every Sunday and we’d still be pals. I believed him; I was such a dork. For the first few months, I did see him a lot . . . but then it was once every month . . . then once every two months . . . then practically never. A couple of times I called him up, and he told me he was really busy. About a year after he left, my mom told me that he’d married some woman with three kids and moved out of state. It was hard for me to get it, that he had a new family now. I guess he liked them better, because he sure forgot about me in a hurry.

“T
HIS
T
IME
I
T’S
G
OING TO
B
E
D
IFFERENT
”

Ken’s tough-guy facade was crumbling fast. He was clearly uneasy about this talk of his father. I asked about the last time he’d seen his father.

It was when I was fifteen, and it was a big mistake. I got sick of just Christmas cards, so I decided I was gonna surprise him. Man, was I excited. I hitched all the way there—fourteen hours. When I got there . . . I guess I expected some big welcome. I mean he was friendly, but it was no big deal. After a while I started to feel really shitty. It was like we were total strangers. He was falling all over himself with these little kids, and I just sat there feeling like a complete asshole. Man, did I get loaded after I left his house that night. I still think about him a lot. I sure as shit wouldn’t want him to know I was here. As soon as I get out of here, I’m gonna try again. This time it’s gonna be different. . . it’s gonna be man-to-man.

When Ken’s father abandoned his young son, he left a deep void in the boy’s life. Ken was crushed. He tried to cope by acting out his anger both at school and at home. In a sense he was calling out to his father, as if his need for discipline might draw his father back. But Ken’s father seemed unwilling to heed the call.

In the face of overwhelming evidence that his father did not want to be a part of his life anymore, Ken continued to hold on to the dream that somehow he could win back his father’s love. In the past, his hope had set him up for severe disappointment, to which he’d react by turning to drugs. I told him I was concerned that this chain of events would continue to dominate his adult life unless we worked together to break the pattern.

Unconsciously, Ken was still rationalizing his father’s abandonment by taking the blame. As a child, he had assumed that some deficiency in himself had caused his father to beat a hasty retreat. Having arrived at this conclusion, self-hatred was bound to follow. He became a young man without purpose or direction in his life. Despite his intelligence, he was restless and unhappy in school and looked to the army as a solution to his problems. When that didn’t work he turned to drugs in a desperate attempt to both fill his inner emptiness and deaden his pain.

Ken’s father may have been an adequate parent before the divorce, but afterward he was woefully deficient in providing even the minimal contact that his young son so desperately needed. By failing to do this, he significantly impaired Ken’s developing sense of worth and lovability.

There is no such thing as a happy divorce. Divorce is invariably traumatic for everyone in the family, even though it may well be the healthiest course of action under the circumstances. But it is essential for parents to realize that they are divorcing a spouse, not a family. Both parents have a responsibility to maintain a connection to their children despite the disruption in their own lives. A divorce
decree is not a license for an inadequate parent to abandon his or her children.

A parent’s departure creates a particularly painful deprivation and emptiness within a child. Remember, children almost always conclude that if something negative happens within the family, it’s their fault. Children of divorced parents are particularly prone to this belief. A parent who vanishes from his children’s lives reinforces their feelings of invisibility, creating damage to their self-esteem that they’ll drag into adulthood like a ball and chain.

It’s What They Didn’t Do That Hurts

It’s easy to recognize abuse when a parent beats a child or subjects a child to continual tirades. But the toxicity of inadequate or deficient parents can be elusive, difficult to define. When a parent creates damage through omission rather than commission—through what they
don’t
do rather than what they
do
do—the connections of adult problems to this sort of toxic parenting become very hard to see. Since the children of these parents are predisposed to deny these connections anyway, my job becomes especially difficult.

Compounding the problem is the fact that many of these parents are so troubled themselves that they evoke pity. Because these parents so often behave like helpless or irresponsible children, their adult children feel protective. They jump to their parents’ defense, like a crime victim apologizing for the perpetrator.

Whether it’s “they didn’t mean to do any harm,” or “they did the best they could,” these apologies obscure the fact that these parents abdicated their responsibilities to their children. Through this abdication, these toxic parents robbed their children of positive role models, without which healthy emotional development is extremely difficult.

If you are the adult child of a deficient or inadequate parent, you probably grew up without realizing that there was an alternative to
feeling responsible for them. Dancing at the end of their emotional string seemed a way of life, not a choice.

But you
do
have a choice. You can begin the process of understanding that you were wrongly forced to grow up too soon, that you were robbed of your rightful childhood. You can work on accepting how much of your life’s energy has gone down the drain of misplaced responsibility. Take this first step and you’ll find a new reserve of energy that is suddenly available to you for the first time—energy that you’ve exhausted on your toxic parents much of your life, but which can finally be used to help you become more loving and responsible to yourself.

3 | “Why Can’t They Let Me Live My Own Life?”

The Controllers

L
et’s listen in on an imaginary conversation between an adult child and one of his controlling parents. I can guarantee you this conversation would never take place, but if these two people were capable of honestly expressing their deeply hidden feelings, they might say the following.

ADULT CHILD:
Why do you act the way you do? Why is everything I do wrong? Why can’t you treat me like an adult? What difference does it make to Dad if I don’t become a doctor? What difference does it make to you who I marry? When are you going to let me go? Why do you act as if every decision I make on my own is an attack on you?

CONTROLLING MOTHER:
I can’t describe the pain I feel when you pull away from me. I need you to need me. I can’t stand the thought of losing you. You’re my whole life. I’m terrified that you’re going to make some horrible mistakes. It would rip me apart to see you get hurt. I’d rather die than feel like a failure as a mother.

“It’s for Your Own Good”

Control is not necessarily a dirty word. If a mother restrains her toddler instead of letting him wander into the street, we don’t call her a controller, we call her prudent. She is exercising control that is in tune with reality, motivated by her child’s need for protection and guidance.

Appropriate control becomes overcontrol when the mother restrains her child ten years later, long after the child is perfectly able to cross the street alone.