Toxic Parents (12 page)

“How Dare You Call Your Mother a Drunk!”

If you are the adult child of an alcoholic family, chances are—unlike Steve, with two alcoholic parents—your family drama involved one parent who was a problem drinker and one who was not. In recent years we have begun to learn more about the role of the nondrinking partner in these relationships. As we discussed in
chapter 2
, this partner is called “the enabler” or “co-dependent.”

This is the partner who, despite the suffering that the alcoholic inflicts, unconsciously supports the alcoholic’s drinking. Through acceptance, co-dependents communicate that they will always be there to deal with the damage of their partner’s destructive behavior. While co-dependents may nag, whine, plead, complain, threaten, and give ultimatums, they are rarely willing to take a strong enough stand to force any significant change.

Carla and I began to make valuable progress in therapy. I wanted to see her interact with her parents firsthand, so I asked her to invite them to a session. When they arrived, I could see that Carla’s mother was already upset. The very fact that Carla had asked her to come seemed to unleash her guilt. When I began to discuss the painful realities of Carla’s childhood, her mother broke into tears:

I’m so ashamed. I know I wasn’t a good mother to her. Carla, I’m so sorry, I really mean it. I’m really going to try to stop drinking. I’ll even go into therapy if you want me to.

I told Carla’s mother that psychotherapy is notoriously ineffective for treating alcoholism or any other addictive behavior unless it is used in conjunction with one of the Twelve Step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Carla’s mother pleaded:

Please, Susan, don’t make me go to AA. I’ll do anything for Carla but that.

At this point, Carla’s father interrupted angrily:

Dammit, my wife is not an alcoholic! She is a wonderful woman who takes a couple of drinks to relax. There are millions of people just like her who have a drink now and then.

I confronted him with how truly destructive Carla’s mother’s behavior, combined with his lack of involvement, had been for their daughter. He exploded:

I’m a very successful man and have a beautiful home! Why do you have to drag me and my wife into this? Just concentrate on my daughter’s problems and leave us out of it. My daughter’s paying for you to take care
of her
—not us. My wife and I don’t need this kind of aggravation. Okay, so maybe my wife drinks a little more than most people. But she can handle it. As a matter of fact, when she has a few drinks, she’s a helluva lot easier to be with!

Carla’s father refused to come to any more sessions, but her mother finally agreed both to enroll in AA and to see one of my colleagues for counseling. What followed was a fascinating but not unexpected sequence of events. As Carla’s mother stopped drinking, her husband developed severe gastrointestinal problems, for which—as Carla told me—his doctor couldn’t find an explanation.

Clearly, I had disturbed the family’s equilibrium. It became apparent that Carla’s father could live and function only in a state of total denial. Alcoholic families operate in a precarious balance, with everyone acting out their assigned roles. Once Carla and her mother both started actively working on their own problems, it drastically rocked the family boat. Carla’s father was admired in the community as a model of devotion and loyalty. Carla remembers
more than one family member saying that her father should be a candidate for sainthood because he was so forgiving and tolerant. In reality, he was a classic co-dependent who, through his denial, gave his wife permission to remain a pitiful alcoholic. He, in turn, gained power by this. As she disappeared into a drunken haze, he was free to run the family as he saw fit.

I continued to see Carla and her mother together for family therapy. Carla’s mother began to see how her husband’s self-esteem depended on his having single-handed control of the family. His wife’s alcoholism and his daughter’s physical and emotional problems made him appear to be the only adequate member of the household. Despite the powerful facade he put on for the outside world, Carla’s father—like many co-dependents—was terribly insecure. As most of us do, he picked a partner who mirrored his true feelings about himself. Choosing an inadequate partner allowed him to feel superior by comparison.

Carla’s mother is now a recovering alcoholic and is making some very positive changes in her relationship with her daughter and her husband. Predictably, her husband’s gastrointestinal problems continue.

Unlike Carla’s father, Glenn’s mother was a co-dependent who fully acknowledged the horrors of her husband’s alcoholism and the child abuse that went along with it. Nevertheless, she was no more able or willing to initiate an effective course of action. As Glenn told me:

My mother’s in her late sixties, and I’m still trying to figure out why she let my father terrorize us the way he did. Why did she let her kids get smacked around? There must’ve been somebody she could’ve gone to for help. But she’s like a broken record . . . all she keeps saying is: “You don’t know what it was like for women then. You were supposed to stand by your man no matter what. Nobody was talking about these things out in the open like they are now. Where was I supposed to go? What was I supposed to do?”

Glenn’s mother was simply overwhelmed by the family turmoil. Her helplessness, combined with her distorted sense of loyalty, gave her husband permission to continue his outrageous behavior. Glenn’s mother, like many co-dependents, in essence became a child herself, leaving the real children unprotected. To this day, Glenn is caught between his need to rescue his childlike mother and his resentment of her failure to mother him.

No Fairy Tale Endings

Fairy tale endings are rare for families of alcoholics. In the best of all possible worlds, your parents would take full responsibility for their drinking, enter a treatment program, and become sober. They would validate and acknowledge the horrors of your childhood and would make an attempt to become responsible, loving parents.

Unfortunately, the reality usually falls far short of the ideal. The drinking, the denial, and the distortion of reality often continue until one or both parents die. Many adult children of alcoholics cling to the hope that their family life will magically evolve into “Ozzie and Harriet,” but holding on to this hope can only set you up for a tremendous fall. Glenn found this out in a particularly poignant way:

About a year ago, my dad told me for the first time that he loved me. I gave him a hug and thanked him, but somehow it just didn’t make up for all the years that he told me I was rotten. It was ironic because I’d dreamed of that day all my life.

Glenn finally got his long-sought-after “I love you,” but it wasn’t enough. It left him with a sense of emptiness. It was all talk and no action. His father was still drinking. Glenn’s mistake was that he was waiting for his father to change.

If you’re the adult child of an alcoholic, the key to taking control of your life is to remember that
you
can change without changing
your parents. Your well-being does
not
have to be dependent on your parents. You can overcome the traumas of your childhood and their power over your adult life, even if your parents stay exactly the way they’ve always been. You just have to commit yourself to doing the work.

I suggest to all my clients who came from homes where alcohol or drugs were abused that our work together could be greatly accelerated by their joining Adult Children of Alcoholics or a similar organization. These groups provide excellent support, and through the exchange of experiences and feelings, children of alcoholics and drug abusers come to realize that they are not alone. They can face up to the dinosaur in the living room, which is the first step toward driving it out.

5 | The Bruises Are All on the Inside

The Verbal Abusers

R
emember the old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me”? It’s not true. Insulting names, degrading comments, and belittling criticism can give children extremely negative messages about themselves, messages that can have dramatic effects on their future well-being. As one caller to my radio show put it:

If I had to choose between physical and verbal abuse, I’d take a beating anytime. You can see the marks, so at least people feel sorry for you. With the verbal stuff, it just makes you crazy. The wounds are invisible. Nobody cares. Real bruises heal a hell of a lot faster than insults.

As a society, we have traditionally considered the discipline of children a private matter, to be handled within the family, usually at the father’s discretion. Today, many civic authorities have come to
recognize the need for new procedures to deal with widespread physical and sexual child abuse. But even the most concerned authorities can do nothing for the verbally abused child. He is all alone.

The Power of Cruel Words

Most parents will occasionally say something derogatory to their children. This is not necessarily verbal abuse. But it
is
abusive to launch frequent verbal attacks on a child’s appearance, intelligence, competence, or value as a human being.

Like controlling parents, verbal abusers have two distinct styles. There are those who attack directly, openly, viciously degrading their children. They may call their children stupid, worthless, or ugly. They may say that they wish their child had never been born. They are oblivious to their child’s feelings and to the long-term effects of their constant assaults on their child’s developing self-image.

Other verbal abusers are more indirect, assailing the child with a constant barrage of teasing, sarcasm, insulting nicknames, and subtle put-downs. These parents often hide their abuse behind the facade of humor. They make little jokes like, “The last time I saw a nose that big was on Mount Rushmore,” or, “That’s a good-looking jacket—for a clown,” or, “You must have been home sick the day they passed out brains.”

If the child, or any other family member, complains, the abuser invariably accuses him or her of lacking a sense of humor. “She knows I’m only kidding,” he’ll say, as if the victim of his abuse were a co-conspirator.

Phil, 48, had the outward appearance of a confident man. He was a tall, rugged-looking dentist with a taste for stylish clothes. But when he spoke, his voice was so quiet that I had trouble hearing him. I had to ask him several times to repeat himself. He explained that he was seeking help for his painful shyness.

I just can’t go on this way. I’m practically fifty and I’m super-sensitive to almost everything that anybody says to me. I can’t take anything at face value. I always think someone’s making fun of me. I think my wife’s making fun of me . . . I think my patients make fun of me. I lie awake at night thinking about what people said to me during the day . . . and I keep reading bad things into everything. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy.

Phil talked openly about his current life, but he closed up when I asked him about his early years. With some gentle probing, he told me that what he remembered most vividly about his childhood was his father’s constant teasing. The jokes were always at Phil’s expense and he often felt humiliated. When the rest of the family laughed, he felt all the more isolated.

It was bad enough being teased, but sometimes he really scared me when he’d say things like: “This boy can’t be a son of ours, look at that face. I’ll bet they switched babies on us in the hospital. Why don’t we take him back and swap him for the right one.” I was only six, and I really thought I was going to get dropped off at the hospital. One day, I finally said to him, “Dad, why are you always picking on me?” He said, “I’m not picking on you. I’m just joking around. Can’t you see that?”

Phil, like any young child, couldn’t distinguish the truth from a joke, a threat from a tease. Positive humor is one of our most valuable tools for strengthening family bonds. But humor that belittles can be extremely damaging within the family. Children take sarcasm and humorous exaggeration at face value. They are not worldly enough to understand that a parent is joking when he says something like, “We’re going to have to send you to preschool in China.” Instead, the child may have nightmares about being abandoned in some frightening, distant land.

We have all been guilty of making jokes at someone else’s expense. Most of the time, such jokes can be relatively harmless. But, as in other forms of toxic parenting, it is the frequency, the cruelty, and the source of these jokes that make them abusive. Children believe and internalize what their parents say about them. It is sadistic and destructive for a parent to make repetitive jokes at the expense of a vulnerable child.

Phil was constantly being humiliated and picked on. When he made an attempt to confront his father’s behavior, he was accused of being inadequate because he “couldn’t take a joke.” Phil had nowhere to go with all these feelings.

As Phil described his feelings, I could see that he was still embarrassed—as if he believed that his complaints were silly. I reassured him by saying, “I understand how humiliating your father’s jokes were. They hurt you terribly, yet no one took your pain seriously. But we’re here to get to the bottom of your pain, not to discount it. You’re safe here, Phil. No one’s going to put you down.”

He took a few moments to let this sink in. He was on the verge of tears, but he made an enormous effort to hide them as he said:

I hate him. He was such a coward. I mean I was just a little kid. He didn’t have to pick on me that way. He still makes jokes at my expense. He never misses a chance. If I let my guard down for one second, I get zapped! And then he comes off looking like the good guy. God, I hate that!