If You Had Controlling Parents (28 page)

• Children
  never
  cause or are to blame for abusive control.
  
• Most unhealthy control is not deliberate or conscious. It reflected your parents' fears, upbringings, and limitations. It did not reflect anything about you.
  
• If your parents grew up with trauma and never got help, they may have learned to mistrust the world. Mistrusting the world, they may have felt they had to control everything around them, especially you.
  
• Your parents had one or more controlling styles (Smothering, Depriving, Perfectionistic, Cultlike, Chaotic, Using, Abusing, and Childlike). They also used many or all of the Dirty Dozen (control of food, bodies, boundaries, social life, decisions, speech, feelings, and thoughts, and bullying, depriving, confusing, and manipulating). Recognizing and identifying these styles and methods can help you gain distance from the lasting effects of parental control as well as cope with the critical messages from your internalized parents.
  
• Unhealthy parental control may have forced you to distort aspects of yourself. These distortions can be at the root of many adult-life problems. Though it can be hard work, uncovering and balancing distortions of size, feeling, thinking, relating, and identity can allow you to solve present-day problems at the source.
  
• Whatever themes of control you grew up with tend to rear their heads when you emotionally leave home. Notice when your inner tyrants' messages parallel the commands, beliefs, and styles of your parents. These messages tend to come with the territory of emotional separation.
  
• Compliment yourself on any efforts you make to individuate. If you grew up controlled, even the desire to emotionally leave home is a big step.
  
• Cultivate contradiction. Situations are rarely either-or.
  
• Our relationships with parents change over time. Even if you once had either a closer or a more distant relationship with a parent, months or years later new issues may surface that can bring new closeness or distance.
  
• Healing continues twenty-four hours a day. Every minute, once you have chosen to emotionally separate and balance, you are gaining distance and power.
  
• One of the opportunities in healing is struggling with the same issues that defeated your parents—and succeeding.
  
• Recognize that you are the head of your family. Your family may include close friends, relatives, a significant other, children, even pets. You have the opportunity to create a different family atmosphere than the one your parents created.
  
• Healing from overcontrol is a long-term process that can stir complex feelings and spark difficult choices. Have confidence that you will make the right choices. Many people have overcome the legacy of a controlling upbringing. There are many paths to healing.
  
• You don't have to heal alone—even if you were an emotional orphan for years. Seek support where you can.
  
• You cannot change the past, but you can influence your future. Even a small effort to reduce the effects of growing up controlled pays big dividends for you, those around you, and future generations.
  
• Be patient with yourself. The costs of control took years to create.
  

Suggestions for Parents Who Were Raised in Controlling Families

No matter how you were raised, you are not destined to repeat your parents' hurtful child-raising patterns. According to family therapist Michele Weiner-Davis, more than two thirds of adults abused as children do
not
abuse their own children.

Keep in mind:

1. There's no shame in being ignorant about healthy parenting skills. There is, however, tragedy in being unwilling to learn and get help as a parent.
   
2. It wasn't your parents' mistakes that did you the greatest damage, it was their unwillingness to face their mistakes and learn from them.
   
3. Your model for parenting may be distorted. Ask yourself which would have been healthier for you as a child and which would be healthier for your children:
   
   • Having a flawless parent or having a parent who sincerely apologizes for mistakes?
     
   • Having a brilliant parent or having a parent who praises children's efforts at brilliance?
     
   • Having a parent who never hurts children or having a parent who sometimes accidentally hurts children but consistently lets them know they are loved?
     
4. By attending to your
   own
   needs for growth and nurturing, you give your children a great gift. Pain from the lack of inner growth and nurturing can lead parents to overcontrol.
   
5. Despite your best intentions, you may sometimes do the controlling things to your children that your parents did to you. Have compassion for yourself.
   

Suggestions for Partners and Friends of Adults Raised in Controlling Families

1. You have the right to block abusive behavior that partners or friends who grew up controlled direct at you. You can reject their
   behavior while letting them know you are not rejecting them as people.
   
2. Your partners or friends may want you to agree with their viewpoints about their parents, but what they want even more is to feel validated. You don't have to agree with their viewpoints, but you can validate them by letting them know you see their pain and are trying to understand their dilemmas.
   
3. If your friends or partners grew up controlled, minimizing or discounting their feelings may reopen their childhood wounds. Since people who grew up controlled rarely felt heard or seen, simply listening to them can bring tremendous healing.
   
4. Healing has its own timetable. Pressuring others to make choices or move on before they are ready to tends to be counterproductive.
   
5. Respect their privacy. You can offer to listen to friends and partners if and when they want you to, but leave it up to them to tell you about their feelings and their process.
   
6. Realize that although their upbringing may pose challenges in your relationship, it can also bring special gifts to the relationship.
   
7. Remember that trusting others can be especially difficult for those who grew up controlled. It is a sign of trust when friends or partners include you in their healing process by talking with you about it.
   
8. Try not to take personally their projections onto you (i.e., if they accuse you of being “just like” their controlling parent). Their background, not your behavior, is often the cause of their projections.
   
9. Be cautious about verbalizing things from their parents' point of view unless asked to do so. Otherwise, to them it may feel like a betrayal.
   
10. Recognize that healing is uncharted territory for them as well as for your relationship. Perfectionism and judgment aren't helpful. Healing has its phases. Trust them and yourself.
    

Bill of Rights for Those Who Grew up Controlled (And Everyone Else)

We hold these truths to be self-evident: All people have the right to:

1. Ask questions
   
2. Dissent
   
3. Confront, prevent, or remove themselves from others' abuse and unhealthy control
   
4. Feel all their feelings and express them appropriately
   
5. Develop their own values, thoughts, and goals
   
6. Learn, grow, and connect with others
   
7. Make mistakes, experiment, and be uncertain
   
8. Choose whom they associate with
   
9. Pursue happiness, success, and health
   
10. Love and be loved, trust and earn others' trust
    
11. Self-respect and to earn others' respect
    
12. Pursue their spirituality
    
13. Be here
    

Notes on Research

To recruit interview participants I posted notices at universities, libraries, other public gathering places, and computer on-line services asking for volunteers. I was stunned by the response. Calls came within six hours of the first posting and continued for more than twenty-four months. Twice as many people responded as I was able to interview.

In the interviews, we explored participants' upbringings; their parents' and grandparents' histories; the legacies of their parents' control; their current struggles to relate to their parents; and, most of all, how they've tried to heal. Participants also completed a lengthy follow-up questionnaire about a year after their initial interview.

This was not an easy process for those who volunteered. Several scheduled appointments only to cancel after having second thoughts. Others participated knowing that it might be uncomfortable. As one
thirty-eight-year-old woman asked, “How much Kleenex should I bring?”

Several people brought family pictures or artifacts. One woman even brought a flowchart mapping out the mixed messages and guilt-inducing statements made by her mother that stymied her early steps toward independence.

Ultimately, most people seemed relieved by being able to talk. One fifty-three-year-old woman said after a four-hour interview, “I know I've talked nonstop but I was never, ever allowed to say anything growing up.”

While the group of forty participants is not intended to represent the greater population in terms of cultural makeup or socioeconomic status, by many measures it was a diverse group. The forty adults interviewed ranged in age from twenty-three to fifty-eight. The average age was thirty-eight. Two thirds of participants were female, one third male. Half were either married or in stable relationships. A third were parents.

Three quarters were college graduates. More than half were working in professional, managerial, educational, or artistic fields. About half were in psychotherapy when interviewed.

A third of those interviewed were raised as Protestants, slightly more than a quarter as Catholics, slightly less than a quarter as Jewish, and the rest with little religious affiliation.

All but two participants were living in the San Francisco Bay area when interviewed, though most participants had grown up outside California. Nearly a quarter of those interviewed were either born outside the United States or had lived a significant part of their early lives abroad.

While this was primarily a group of white, middle-class professionals of Northern European descent, one out of five participants was from a minority ethnic or sexual culture. Two Latino/Latinas, one African American, one Asian American, and at least four gay men and lesbians were among the forty adults who participated. Of course, the role of parents and the meaning of “control” vary tremendously among African American, Asian American, Latino/Hispanic, and other cultural groups. While I was thankful for the breadth and richness of experience contributed by those who volunteered who were Latino or non-white, I make few generalizations about controlling parents in specific racial and ethnic groups. Participants' stories and insights should be considered anecdotal and not necessarily representative of their cultural group as a whole.

Sources for Statistics

1. An estimated one in thirteen adults in the United States has grown up with unhealthy control
. There are at least two ways to extrapolate a reliable estimate of the number of controlling parents and their children:

Method #1. Based on reported cases of child abuse

More than 3 million cases of child abuse occurred in 1997, according to the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. Of these, excess control has historically been shown to be a key factor in one third of child-abuse cases (Gil). That's 1 million cases of child abuse annually in which excess control is a key factor.

Taking into account historical figures of child-abuse prevalence and population size, and adjusting to avoid double-counting subsequent abuse of the same children, this suggests that nearly 13 million of the 199.5 million adults alive today were abused with excess control as children. This is 6.5 percent of the 1998 adult population.

Method #2. Based on estimated prevalence of mental disorders that can lead to a controlling style

Studies of the prevalence of mental disorders show that between 5.1 and 6.6 percent of the adult population has a mental disorder that would likely lead to controlling behavior (U.S. Census figures; the National Institutes of Mental Health 1992 Epidemiologic Catchment Area study; and studies by Swartz et al., Nestadt et al. (1991), Nestadt et al. (1994), Sanderson et al., Mavissakalian et al., Samuels et al., Resnick et al., Brom et al., Davidson et al., Breslau et al., Bourgeois et al., Bourdon et al., Oldham and Skodol, and Loewenstein). The applicable
DSM-IV
mental disorders include obsessive-compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, social phobia, panic disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder; some mood and dissociative disorders; and the narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, schizoid, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders.

Applying this figure to parents born prior to 1962 (the cut-off date for the vast majority of parents of those eighteen and older in 1998), adjusting to avoid counting mental disorders that occur among parents before or after their child-raising years, adjusting to avoid double-counting parents who have more than one disorder, and factoring in historic population and family size census figures, an estimated 13.9
million to 20.9 million adults alive today grew up with
at least one
controlling parent. This is 7 to 10.5 percent of the current U.S. adult population.

Using either child-abuse figures or adult mental-disorder figures, at least 6.5 percent (13 million adults) and as many as 10.5 percent (20.9 million adults) of the current adult population grew up with abusive control. A conservative estimate would be one third the difference between high and low estimates, closer to the lowest estimate. The result: 7.8 percent, or more than 15 million adults, grew up with at least one controlling parent.

I believe this figure is, if anything, on the low side. Much unhealthy control doesn't meet the legal definitions of “child abuse,” and many parents who do not have a mental disorder nonetheless overcontrol their children. This estimate, however, provides at least a starting point for a discussion on unhealthy control of children.