If You Had Controlling Parents (13 page)
Read If You Had Controlling Parents Online
Authors: Dan Neuharth
Elizabeth: “A lot of the time I think I'm crazy when my mom disputes my version of things. Her beliefs are so strong they kind of just wipe out mine. She'll say I had a happy childhood and I'll think she's right.” Perhaps Elizabeth's mom never noticed her daughter's depression. Or perhaps she would have felt guilty if she were to admit that her daughter had been depressed.
Julia, now a twenty-six-year-old clerical worker, remembers being confused at fourteen by the icy dinner table atmosphere between her Depriving mother and new stepfather. One night she dared to ask, “Isn't it sort of ridiculous that we just sit here and never talk?” Her words were met with stony silence and looks of disgust indicating they thought she was crazy. Julia remembers thinking, “Well, I thought what I said was true but they think I'm crazy. So either they're lying or I'm wrong. They wouldn't both lie, so I must be wrong.”
Julia's dinner table experience is at the heart of how confusion becomes control. When faced with conflicting messages, children can conclude that either:
a. My parents are wrong, lying, or out of control
.
or
b. I must be wrong or missing something
.
Most children invariably conclude that they are wrong or missing something. They don't want to think that their parents are out of controlâeven if they areâbecause it would leave them feeling as if they're in a car hurtling down a mountain with no brakes and no one
at the wheel. By doubting their own perceptions and giving the benefit of the doubt to their parents, children try to reduce their terror. Instead of feeling hopeless, they feel hopeful that perhaps their parents are right, and that nothing really is wrong. Instead of feeling helpless, children can pretend they have at least some power by thinking,
If I just listen more closely, watch more carefully, and try to be good, my parents will treat me better
.
Unfortunately, by adopting misperceptions to reduce their hopeless and helpless feelings, children only increase their guilt and self-doubt. Remember Rosemary, whose Abusing, Using mother once yanked a red bow out of her hair and called her a “whore” for wearing it? “My mother had me completely brainwashed,” she maintains. “She had me lying about the bruises she inflicted on me, saying I walked into a door, and I actually believed it.”
Controlling parents are generally disinterested in exploring their adult children's grievances with them. When one forty-four-year-old man wrote a letter to his self-centered father telling him what troubled him in their relationship, the Using father wrote back with an attack. “He said, in essence, âDon't blame meâeverything good in your life you got from me, everything bad in your life is your own doing,'” recalls his son.
Emotional Dumping
Many controlling parents spill emotional angst in their children's laps, then walk away. The parents may feel relief but their children feel anything but.
Jack, a thirty-five-year-old salesman, remembers how his Childlike mother would hysterically fret and fume to him about real and perceived slights from others. When her son suggested actions she might take, she'd “yes, but” him. Finally she'd undo it all by saying, “Well, it's not worth getting angry about.”
According to Jack, “I'd walk away feeling upset and never knew why. She'd plant all this anger, then say, in effect, âNever mind.' Maybe she felt better afterward, but I'd end up all stirred up with no place to go.” Jack couldn't win. When he suggested solutions, his mother found reasons for why each action wouldn't work. When he invested time in listening to her, she discounted her anger and, by implication, his efforts to help, saying it wasn't worth getting angry about.
When parents dump, their children tend to focus on parental needs instead of their own. Dumping can engender a lasting fear that anyone you love will emotionally engulf you.
Intimidation
Many people I interviewed vividly described “the Look” or “the Voice,” those stern glances or threatening tones they got when doing something “wrong.”
“My mother exercised an amazing amount of control just with looks,” Samantha, the forty-year-old artist, told me. She remembers giggling with her sister while watching a play, then freezing when her Depriving, Abusing mother give her “the Look”: narrowed eyes, pursed lips, and an almost imperceptible shake of her head: “It was a silent kind of control. I was completely under her spell.”
Roberta, the fifty-seven-year-old homemaker, demonstrated her Depriving mother's “Look” just so: a slight tilt of the head, a sternly raised eyebrow, and an uplifted pointing finger: “She didn't even have to raise her voice. I was so tuned in to her. I'd freeze on the spot.”
Others described the threatening tone of voice their parents took when they wanted to control their children. “A growl bristling with contempt,” one man said of his Using, Abusing father's control voice. Many say they still cringe involuntarily when their parents assume “the Voice,” even on the phone. “I can recognize it from the very first word he says,” one woman admits. “I never know what causes it, but I become like a little girl and just want to curl up.”
“The Look” and “the Voice” can cause children to feel as if they have lost their parents' love.
Other Techniques of Truth Abuse
Scapegoating
: Labeling one child as the source of all family problems. Scapegoating is a distraction that hides parental responsibility. It also conveys the message that children have no control over where blame will fall; it is totally up to the parents.
Attaching emotional strings
: Equating money with love or giving gifts with the expectation of getting something in return. Attaching emotional strings may lead children to overvalue material goods or, conversely, to develop a love-hate relationship with money since it was used as a substitute for affection.
Infantilizing
: Reducing children's stature and self-confidence by treating them like infants when they no longer are. Infantilizing parents talk to their grown offspring as if they are still children, pick out clothes for them, or order for them at restaurants.
Parentifying
: Forcing children to take on adult responsibilities before they're ready. Says one woman, “I was never a little girl. I was my mother's mother.” Robbed of adequate time to be young, parentified children are set up to take care of others at the expense of their own needs.
Erratic behavior
: Mercurial moods and unpredictable, dramatic behavior that gives parents the freedom to act however they want. Faced with this, children wonder what they did to spark it. Hoping,
If I can figure out what I did to cause their reaction, I can stop it
, children grow up second-guessing and blaming themselves.
Projecting
: Unconsciously attributing to another person the distressing qualities or feelings that you don't want to experience yourself. By so doing, parents lead children to look inward for blame and to become confused about what is real.
Triangulating
: Unfairly involving children in marital matters, such as by confiding marital problems behind a spouse's back. This gives children a distorted sense of their stature in the family and can leave them saddled with guilt.
Martyrdom
: Playing the role of martyr by using phrases such as: “If it weren't for you,” “I do so much for you,” “This is your fault,” or “How dare you!” Martyrs tug on children's innate love for their parents. Sometimes the parents really are in need, but children can never be sure whether the need is real or not. Rather than let their parents down, they feel compelled to do a dance of caring anytime a parent plays the martyr. When parents violate boundaries in this way, children's abilities to differentiate between their own problems and those of others may be handicapped.
The Results of Truth Abuse
When children are baffled by mixed messages, they often conclude that they're stupid or must have missed something. When parents live a double standard, children conclude that they are not as important as their parents, perhaps not as important as anybody else. When parents deny children's pain, children see their own perceptions as faulty. Above all, they learn not to trust themselves.
Confusing and manipulating children is treacherous to their development. When parents scapegoat, they twist children's experiences of
the truth. When they dump, they twist children's feelings. When they infantilize, parentify, or triangulate, they twist children's relationships with others. When they become martyrs, they twist children's relationships with the parents. When they project or shame, they twist children's relationships with their very selves.
Confusing and manipulating allow parents to strengthen their one-up position. In many cases, controlling parents lack social skills, communication skills, and a tolerance for ambiguity. Instead of adapting to change, which is crucial for parents since children are constantly changing, controlling parents simply do or say what they have always done or said, whether it works or not. By their actions, parents put their children under a microscope and avoid facing scrutiny themselves.
In adult life, the legacy of Truth Abuse is felt especially in our personal relationships. For example, we may seek roundabout ways of making our feelings and needs known, then be upset when others miss our cues. We may expect others to have hidden agendas. We may be slow to assert or protect our rights. We may feel confused when we are wronged, then look to the wrongdoer for guidance about how we should respond. Each of these responses is a relic of controlling-family brainwashing. They are, to our detriment, our internalized parents playing fast and loose with the truth.
Self-Assessment
One or both of my parents frequently used:
- Mixed messages
- Two-faced behavior
- Dysfunctional communication
- Outright denial
- Emotional dumping
- Intimidation
- Scapegoating
- Emotional strings
- Infantilization
- Parentification
- Erratic behavior
- Projection
- Triangulation
- Martyrdom
Truth Abuse and the Dirty Dozen are the first two components of controlling-family brainwashing. The final component: manipulations similar to the thought reform used by destructive cults.
3. Cultlike Manipulations
My mother had me completely brainwashed
.
âR
OSEMARY
, 55,
A MANAGER
While households are not cults, and you were not a cult member (though it may have felt like it), many controlling families share essential characteristics with cult indoctrination and thought reform. In destructive cults, members forfeit their bodies, minds, and lives to the cause. In controlling families, children forfeit their autonomy, development, and spirit.
One woman freely admits that her father's control made her feel as if she lived in a cult: “There was one dictator and all decisions had to go through him. We were isolated from other beliefs and values and there was a sense of betrayal if you talked to others. If you disagreed, you'd get ostracized. It was, âObey or we will not talk to you.'”
In a process that is remarkably similar from cult to cult, recruitment and indoctrination of cult members works by manipulating five areas: feelings, behavior, thinking, relationships, and identity. Strikingly, controlling families exhibit parallels in each of these five areas.
Parallels Between Destructive Cults and Controlling Families
Destructive Cults | Controlling Families |
1. Manipulations of Feelings | 1. Manipulations of Feelings |
⢠Cults give members approval alternating with appeals to fear and guilt |  ⢠Parents give approval when pleased but withhold affection when displeased |
⢠Leaders ridicule members' emotions that conflict with cult goals while rewarding members' emotions that support cult goals |  ⢠Parents ridicule or forbid children's “unacceptable” emotions such as anger, sadness, or fear while exhorting children to be “proper” |
2. Manipulations of Behavior | 2. Manipulations of Behavior |
⢠Behavior is rigidly proscribed through control of sleep, diet, privacy, dress, access to information, activities, and relationships |  ⢠Parents control children's sleep, diet, privacy, dress, access to information, activities, and relationships |
⢠Sensory overload (chanting, singing, meditating, lectures, speaking in tongues and/or testimonials) dulls members' senses |  ⢠Excessive chores, lectures, repetitive clichés or family rituals keep children preoccupied |
⢠Cults encourage members to inform on one another |  ⢠Parents scapegoat and play children off against each other |
⢠Cults stress compliance to cult rules and rituals that, no matter how mundane or odd, must be followed to the letter |  ⢠Parents stress compliance to rules and rituals that, no matter how mundane or odd, must be followed to the letter |
⢠Questions are shamed or avoided and the focus turned on the questioner |  ⢠Parents silence disagreements by labeling dissent as a “sin” |
3. Manipulations of Thinking | 3. Manipulations of Thinking |
⢠Cults profess freedom and openness but foster dependence, restricted information, and lack of intellectual rigor |  ⢠Parents foster “Truth Abuse” by denying their destructive actions and being unwilling to discuss them even years later |
⢠Cult credo and needs supersede individual needs or desires |  ⢠Parental needs, morals or relationships are seen as all-important |
⢠Black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking pervades |  ⢠Parents have little tolerance for the gray areas in life |
⢠Cult credo generally cannot be explained or disproved and is said to be fully understood only by a select few |  ⢠Parents confuse their children with mixed messages or simply answer, “Because I say so” |
4. Manipulations of Relationships | 4. Manipulations of Relationships |
⢠Cults provide “instant intimacy” at the price of insisting that members reveal innermost thoughts, feelings, and habits |  ⢠Parents violate children's privacy by searching rooms, opening doors without warning, or eavesdropping |
⢠Relationships with outsiders are discouraged by fostering an “Us vs. Them” mentality |  ⢠Families tend to be socially isolated, jealously guard “family secrets,” and harshly judge “different” types of people |
⢠Members forfeit financial, social and emotional resources and give cult leaders the right to make personal decisions for them |  ⢠Parents feel they own their children and can treat them as they like |
⢠Leaders are seen as possessing unique goodness and lacking faults or insecurities |  ⢠Parents rarely admit their mistakes |
⢠Leaders are accorded special rights, privileges and living conditions |  ⢠Parents treat their children as second-class citizens |
⢠Leaders demand that members follow grandiose schemes as a test of loyalty |  ⢠Parents see children's desires for independence as a rejection of parents |
5. Manipulations of Identity and Sense of Self | 5. Manipulations of Identity and Sense of Self |
⢠Happiness is seen as flowing from the group and leader while unhappiness is seen as flowing from within members |  ⢠Families are organized to protect and serve the parents, not to optimize individual growth |
⢠Actions that distance members from the cult bring pain while actions that move members closer to the cult bring pleasure |  ⢠Children feel disloyal when acting or feeling different than parents |
⢠Leaders act as sole judge of worth, truth and behavior, with the right to punish and reward |  ⢠Parents criticize their children's character or nature, rather than their actions |
