If You Had Controlling Parents (14 page)

One or both of my parents frequently tried to manipulate my:

• Feelings
  
• Behavior
  
• Thinking
  
• Relationships
  
• Identity and sense of self
  

The Dirty Dozen, Truth Abuse, and cultlike manipulations make fertile ground for the harsh inner critics who can control you for years after you leave home. The next chapter will help you uncover more about your inner critics' genealogy.

T
he elements on the left-hand side of the chart below are ingredients for optimal development. The elements on the right are a prescription for slowed development and unfulfilled potential. You might notice where your family fell on each of these continuums:

Prescriptions for Optimal and Slowed Development

In human development, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, if your upbringing swung to the left-hand side of this continuum—the prescription for optimal development—the effects were cumulative:

If you felt safe and nurtured, you were more likely to express yourself and connect with others…

…the more you could express yourself and connect with others, the more you could respect yourself…

…the greater your self-respect, the more likely you were to act with autonomy and initiative…

…acting with more autonomy helped you to foster healthy boundaries and an accurate self-image. And so on.

By the same token, if your upbringing swung to the right-hand side of the continuum—the prescription for slowed development—the effects were also cumulative:

If you grew up with attack, neglect, or deprivation, your self-image may have become distorted…

…if your self-image was distorted, your willingness to express yourself may have suffered…

…with reduced self-expression, your social isolation may have increased, leaving you more dependent on your parents…

…with enhanced dependency, you may have been more vulnerable to relationships with unhealthy boundaries…

…this greater vulnerability probably created more stress and dependency. And so on.

Controlling families exact a cumulative toll because the key avenues to mental health—access to information, supportive others, emotional expression, and free speech—are generally missing. Children in controlling families tend to lack a sympathetic adult who believes in them. Controlling families also tend to disable children's healthy natural instincts and magnify the already unequal relationship between parent and child.

Despite the sense of mystery about their upbringing that many people who grew up controlled possess, in retrospect it's not so mysterious:

The people you depended on for your survival…

The people who had the ability to give you tremendous pain or pleasure…

Controlled you in a dozen tangible ways…

Thousands of times…

In your most impressionable years.

In essence, controlling parents brainwash with a one-two-three-four punch:

1. Creating an environment hostile to growth
   
2. Blaming their children for creating the environment
   
3. Criticizing their children when the children suffer the consequences of the environment the parents created
   
4. Denying doing any of this
   

It wasn't fair.

It wasn't right.

And you do have the right to feel anger, sadness, dismay, and much more over what was done to you.

If you have doubts about the tremendous power and impact of controlling families, it can help to review their arsenal. Seeing it all together can be shocking—and freeing.

Controlling Parents' Arsenal…and Cost to Children

The net result of growing up under the guns of this arsenal:
To survive, children internalize the controlling voices of parents.

As I've said, it explains why parental control may affect you even today.

Why Your Internalized Parents Are So Powerful

There are three “givens” about parents and children:

1. Parents and children have an inherently unequal relationship.
   
2. Young children tend to idealize and mimic their parents, making it difficult to achieve a balanced view of them until much later.
   
3. Children need love, attention, and approval from their parents and will do anything to get it.
   

In healthier families, parents take advantage of these three givens to socialize, teach, nurture, and love so that children will grow up emotionally stronger. In controlling families, however, parents take advantage of these givens to get more control.

Young children, not yet complex thinkers, aren't able to see the grays and the nuances in life. To them, Daddy and Mommy are big and good, whether they are or not. Children can be scrutinized at any time by parents: when eating, playing, sleeping, and on the potty, but few children see their parents sleeping, making love, or using the bathroom. Few see their parents at work or in the outside world, when the parents may not be as dominant or as in control. As a result, children grow up seeing their parents as larger than life.

In controlling families, the negative influences of parents are magnified. If a parent is chronically anxious, the child—self-centered, as children naturally are—may conclude that there is something dangerous or wrong about themselves. If a parent cannot relax or gets tense even on happy occasions, a child may conclude that joy and happiness are not okay. If a parent is uncomfortable around anger, children may conclude that anger is to be feared or that their own anger will damage others. These conclusions go deep and can last a lifetime.

More than anything, children want love. When you are a helpless, tiny creature in a world of giants in which events happen that you don't understand and can't control—a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” as William James called an infant's experience—a parent who loves you and whom you can trust and love is the top priority for survival. Children need not only love but also all that goes with it: nurturing touch; acceptance; safety; belonging; being seen for who they are; and the freedom to laugh, cry, rage, and be afraid. Because they need love and acceptance so desperately, children will take them in any form they can get them. When they don't get love, they'll construe what
ever they do get—including unhealthy control—as love. Therein lie the seeds of problems later in life.

The most unfortunate parallel between controlling families and destructive cults is that parental control becomes internalized in children, just as cult dogma becomes internalized in cult members. No parent can be present twenty-four hours a day. But controlling parents don't have to physically be there because the family system installs an omnipresent inner controller in the child. These twenty-four-hour internalized parents, with their nagging commentary, second-guessing, and criticism, can perpetuate deprivation, perfectionism, and speech-and-feeling control well into adult life. This inner control may surface in the form of poor interpersonal boundaries, feelings of unworthiness, lowered expectations, self-loathing, fear of closeness, or poor self-image.

Looking back, it may be alarming to see how controlled, even “brainwashed” you were as a child. Yet, like members of cults or prisoners of war, you had little choice. You didn't do anything wrong. Anybody in such a closed system would have suffered. Knowing this, you can assure yourself that:

You are not crazy
.

You didn't make it up
.

Overcontrol really happened
.

It was painful and destructive
.

You could not help but internalize controlling parental voices
.

These realizations open the door for a further realization that can pave the way for you to let go of much of the destructive legacy of childhood overcontrol:

 

If you could not help but internalize controlling voices, then many of your self-criticisms, fears, and doubts are not yours, nor are they your true voice. They are merely messages from your internalized parents. They are relics from a controlled past. They are simply bad habits. And you can change them
.

Exercise for Understanding Overcontrol and the Internalized Parents

Recall an encounter with a parent or any controlling person and check off in the first column which of the Dirty Dozen control methods they used.

Then write down any self-critical thoughts you recall having during or after the encounter. These are messages from your internalized parents. In the second column, check off the kinds of control these messages from your internalized parents
represent
.