If You Had Controlling Parents (12 page)

4. Social Control

One Depriving, Childlike mother always kept the family's drapes closed, and found it “inconceivable” that their daughter would want to leave home to see friends. The mother had few friends, yet harbored a constant fear of social ostracism. Her daughter recalls, “My mother was
always saying, ‘What would the neighbors think?' I could never understand why she placed so much value on the opinions of people she rarely saw.”

One Smothering, Childlike mother would not allow her daughter to visit friends unless she got permission two days in advance. She also kept her teenage son from extracurricular school activities because “something might happen.”

Such social isolation weakens children's autonomy. Children seek neither peers as friends, nor adult figures as mentors, for several reasons: They think nobody would want them; they want to be loyal to their parents; they are told to be self-reliant; or they know their parents simply won't allow any competition. Lacking an outside reality check, many controlled children have no way to know that they are not alone in their suffering.

5. Decision Control

One Perfectionistic, Using father conditioned his son from toddlerhood to be a doctor: “He never let it rest until I flunked out of premed. Then he told me to go to business school so I could make lots of money to compensate for the time I'd lost preparing to be a doctor.”

A Using mother asked her sixteen-year-old daughter what she wanted to be. When her daughter said she wanted to be an artist, her mother said, “You can't. Only a few make a living at it. Think of something more sensible.”

Decision control can be especially painful. There are few wounds deeper for children than having their dreams discounted, being told, in effect,
We don't believe in you
.

6. Speech Control

One Cultlike, Perfectionistic father habitually corrected his nine-year-old daughter's spelling and grammar in her love notes to him.

One Cultlike mother forbade her children to say “Who cares?” or to call their athletic shoes “sneakers.”

One Depriving mother did not allow her son to ask for anything when they were shopping. “We could never say, ‘Please buy me this,'” he remembers. “My mother thought it rude.”

7. Emotion Control

One Cultlike, Perfectionistic family's rule was
Never show your feelings
. “When I was in junior high I was so unhappy, but I felt like a crybaby because I was not able to hold it in,” admits their son.

One Using father devalued feelings. “He'd say, ‘You can't buy anything with feelings. Can you touch them, see them? No. What good are they?'” his daughter recalled.

Controlling parents' mantras about emotions include:

Who cares how you feel? Just do it
.

Bite the bullet and move on
.

Keep crying and I'll give you something to cry about
.

Don't lose control
.

8. Thought Control

One Smothering mother was horrified when her fourteen-year-old son came home with Elvis Presley's “Hound Dog” record. “A young boy shouldn't be listening to that kind of thing,” his mother told him. She confiscated the record and exchanged it for a Mitch Miller tune.

One twenty-five-year-old woman told her Using, Depriving mother during a car ride that she was thinking of seeing a therapist: “Once I breathed the word ‘therapy,' my mother screamed and lectured for the whole car ride.”

9. Bullying

Being hit even once can traumatize a child. One Depriving, Abusing stepfather flew into a rage and slapped his sixteen-year-old stepdaughter. “People had always been very gentle with me, so it was very traumatic,” she says. “I always lived in fear after that.”

One Cultlike military father frequently berated his son in public: “It was the worst when he drank gin martinis. He'd start screaming and call me a ‘stupid fuckup.' My mother would meekly try to get him to stop, but it never worked.”

One woman still has a vivid mental image of herself thirty years ago sitting in the kitchen with her Abusing father standing over her, his fists clenched and ready to strike, because she was laughing and he couldn't hear the TV.

10. Depriving

One Depriving father seemed so disinterested in his daughter's wants and needs that she feels, “I could have been a cardboard cutout of myself and my dad would have treated me the same. He would just not listen. After a while, it makes you doubt yourself.”

Children sense that when parents share their own stories, they share a vital part of themselves. Yet many controlling parents, closed books to their children, are unwilling to talk. Some speak only of a
romanticized past; others, only about shallow details or petty grievances. In fact, several people I interviewed knew little about their parents' pasts. In some cases this is understandable. Parents may be ashamed of something or were raised in families that discouraged self-disclosure. If a parent's past was traumatic, it may be hard to talk about it. By keeping their pasts hidden or by distorting the facts, parents unwittingly magnify the child's natural tendency to form a larger-than-life view of them.

11. Confusing

One Chaotic mother, whose husband molested their daughter, would first be empathic toward her daughter, then blame her for being sexually abused, screaming, “How could you do this to me?”

One Smothering mother told her teenage daughter she should marry late because people who marry young are not mature enough to choose wisely. When the young woman reached twenty-five, her mother urged her to “start seeing somebody seriously now.” But, she added, “Until you marry, you're still going to be a child.” This is a classic bind: The daughter is told she'd better hurry and get married but, until she does, she's still a child, and therefore not mature enough to marry.

One Perfectionistic father accidentally kissed his fourteen-year-old daughter on the lips. She recalled, “He was horrified and ran upstairs shouting, ‘Watch out for your sexuality.'” Though the daughter had done nothing wrong, her Using stepmother called her “Hot Lips” for months despite the daughter's tears and pleas to stop.

12. Manipulating

One Depriving, Chaotic mother blamed nearly everything on her absent spouse. “If I tripped on the way to the bus stop, in my mother's eyes it was my father's fault,” recalls her daughter. The mother waged war against her estranged husband by refusing to feed her daughter dinner until she wrote letters to the father's employer saying how bad he was. Eventually the father was fired.

One Using father's college tuition checks for his daughter came with the written reminder, “Putting you through college is really lowering my standard of living.”

Another Using father wrote on every gift he gave, “I hope you realize just how lucky you are to get this.”

One Chaotic mother sent her daughter a fifty-dollar check each Christmas, then complained about how poor she was. When the
daughter didn't cash her mother's check one Christmas to help save her money, the mother complained that the uncashed check was messing up her bookkeeping.

Self-Assessment

One or both of my parents frequently used:

• Food control
  
• Body control
  
• Boundary control
  
• Social control
  
• Decision control
  
• Speech control
  
• Emotion control
  
• Thought control
  
• Bullying
  
• Depriving
  
• Confusing
  
• Manipulating
  

Of course, reasonable control of children's behavior is necessary. But many of the Dirty Dozen methods of control, though seemingly innocuous when seen as a single instance, may very well have happened thousands of times in your childhood. Through repetition, they formed a powerful pattern that makes up the first component of controlling-family brainwashing.

The second component: “Truth Abuse.”

2. “Truth Abuse”

The Dirty Dozen are psychic Post-it notes by which parental views get inserted into children's minds before children develop the critical judgment to question them. Because of this, merely thinking critical thoughts about parents may cause those who grew up controlled to feel disloyal, often without knowing why.

The last two methods of the Dirty Dozen—confusion and manipulation—make up “Truth Abuse.” Truth Abuse can be at the heart of the lingering feelings of disloyalty for many who grew up controlled. The effects of Truth Abuse may still cause you confusion, especially in situations concerning your rights and boundaries. Truth Abuse has several forms.

Mixed Messages

Many controlled children grow up with a stream of mixed messages—statements or actions that simply don't add up. Mixed messages can put children into inescapable binds.

For example, one Chaotic, Abusing father would rage and hit his children, then a few minutes later act as if nothing had happened and take them for ice cream.

One woman recalls her Perfectionistic mother's approach: “I was supposed to be spontaneous yet controlled.”

Another describes her Smothering parents' philosophy as “Be assertive except to us.”

Says yet another, “They told me not to be afraid of things, then terrorized me.”

One man's Using, Perfectionistic father commanded his son never to question parental authority, then ridiculed him for not standing up for himself “like a man.”

Mixed messages leave children wondering,
Can I trust what I see and feel
? As a result, they either give up or try even harder to fulfill their parents' unattainable demands. Either option weakens a child's sense of self while accentuating parental power.

Two-Faced Behavior

Controlling parents often tell their children to act one way, then act in opposite ways themselves. One Depriving, Using father presented a “saint persona” to outsiders but was uncaring at home. “He was super-polite and acted interested in strangers,” his son claims. “He'd offer to give rides to my friends but he'd make me take the bus.”

When parents are two-faced with others, their children naturally wonder whether their parents are being two-faced with them. The
inevitable, haunting question:
If Mommy and Daddy are nice to people when they are around but trash them behind their backs, what do they say or feel about me when I'm not around
?

Dysfunctional Communication

Some children grow up in families rife with dysfunctional communication: unfinished thoughts, non sequiturs, repetitive phrases, or incomprehensible language.

Actually, much of a family therapist's work is helping families alter dysfunctional communication patterns. Dysfunctional communication focuses primarily on who is right and who is wrong, who wins and who loses, who gets hurt and who avoids pain.

In
Conjoint Family Therapy
, family therapist Virginia Satir gives examples of dysfunctional family communication (79—93) such as:

1. Fuzzy or incomplete thoughts
   like, “He's very, well, you know” (He's very what?) or, “As you can see, it's obvious” (What's obvious?).
   
2. Distracting or stonewalling
   when asked for clarification by saying, “You know perfectly well what I mean,” “You heard me,” “What's the matter, don't you understand English?” or simply restating what was said.
   
3. No-choice choices
   such as, “I want to go to the park, don't you?”
   

In most controlling families, there is an intricate system of confusing communication. One woman arrived for our interview with a flowchart she'd created that mapped out the pattern of confusing communication with which she grew up. She recited the progression of her Depriving, Chaotic parents' tactics as follows:

“If I asked questions or disagreed with them, they'd interrupt me with stock phrases like, ‘You always, you never.'

“If that didn't work, they'd distort what I said. They'd become a broken record and turn the focus back on me, saying something like, ‘Interruption surely is a big obsession with you.'

“If I persisted, they'd try to distract me by bringing up some totally separate side issue. Or they'd make guilt-provoking statements, throw a temper tantrum, or label me a ‘paranoid schizophrenic.' If I walked away, it would only intensify the process at a later date.

“The net result was that I'd end up responding to their attacks and lose track of what I really wanted to get across.”

Unclear communication blocks children from expressing all the emotions and ideas they have bottled up inside, causes them to doubt their perceptions and communication skills, and makes them feel invisible.

Outright Denial

Controlling parents can create uncertainty simply by denying things a child knows to be true. Pat Conroy, author of
The Great Santini
and
Prince of Tides
, wrote in the introduction to Mary Wertsch's
Military Brats
that parents can turn children into “unwitnesses of our own history” by changing stories, challenging their children's experience, or denying their children's memories (xix).

For example, when Elizabeth, a thirty-one-year-old travel agent, began therapy in her mid-twenties, she realized how depressed she had been as a child. When she told her Perfectionistic, Using mother of her realization, her mother said, “What are you talking about? You had a great childhood. You were so happy and joyful.”