Toxic Parents (7 page)

Children who are not encouraged to do, to try, to explore, to master, and to risk failure, often feel helpless and inadequate. Over-controlled by anxious, fearful parents, these children often become anxious and fearful themselves. This makes it difficult for them to mature. When they develop through adolescence and adulthood, many of them never outgrow the need for ongoing parental guidance and control. As a result, their parents continue to invade, manipulate, and frequently dominate their lives.

The fear of not being needed motivates many controlling parents to perpetuate this sense of powerlessness in their children. These parents have an unhealthy fear of the “empty nest syndrome,” the inevitable sense of loss that all parents experience when their children finally leave home. So much of a controlling parent’s identity is tied up in the parental role that he or she feels betrayed and abandoned when the child becomes independent.

What makes a controlling parent so insidious is that the domination usually comes in the guise of concern. Phrases such as, “this is for your own good,” “I’m only doing this for you,” and, “only because I love you so much,” all mean the same thing: “I’m doing this because I’m so afraid of losing you that I’m willing to make you miserable.”

Direct Control

There’s nothing fancy about direct control. It’s overt, tangible, right out in the open. “Do as I say or I’ll never speak to you again”; “Do as I say or I’ll cut off your money”; “If you don’t do as I say you’ll no longer be a member of this family”; “If you go against my wishes you’ll give me a heart attack.” There’s nothing subtle about it.

Direct control usually involves intimidation and is frequently humiliating. Your feelings and needs must be subordinated to those of your parents. You are dragged into a bottomless pit of ultimatums. Your opinion is worthless; your needs and desires are irrelevant. The imbalance of power is tremendous.

Michael, a charming, sweet-faced, 36-year-old advertising executive, provides a good example of this. He came to see me because his six-year marriage to a woman he deeply loved had become extremely shaky as a result of a tug-of-war between his wife and his parents.

The real problems didn’t start until I moved to California. I think my mother thought it was a temporary move. But when I told her I’d fallen in love and planned to get married, it hit her that I wanted to settle down here. That’s when she really started turning on the pressure to bring me back home.

I asked Michael to tell me about the “pressure.”

The worst incident was about a year after the wedding. We were planning to go out to Boston for my folks’ anniversary party when my wife came down with this horrible flu. She was really sick. I didn’t want to just leave her, so I called my mother to cancel. Well, first off she bursts into tears. Then she tells me, “If you don’t come for our anniversary, I’m going to die.” So, I caved in and went to Boston. I got there the morning of the party, but right off the plane, they start in that I should stay the whole week. I didn’t say yes or no, but I left the next morning. A day later I get a call from my father: “You’re killing your mother. She was up all night crying. I’m afraid she’s going to have a stroke.” What the hell do they want me to do? Divorce my wife, come back to Boston, and move back into my old room?

Michael’s parents could pull his strings from three thousand miles away. I asked him if his parents had ever come around to accepting his wife. Michael became visibly flushed with anger.

No way! Whenever they call, they never ask how she is. In fact, they don’t even mention her. It’s like they’re trying to pretend she doesn’t exist.

I asked Michael if he ever confronted his parents about this, and he seemed embarrassed as he answered:

I wish I had. Every time she’d get clobbered by my parents, I’d expect her to take it. When she’d complain, I’d ask her to be understanding. God, was I an idiot! My parents are slugging away at my wife, and I just keep letting them hurt her.

Michael’s crime was that he had become independent. In response, his parents had become desperate, and lashed out with the tactics they knew best: withdrawing love and predicting catastrophe.

Like most controlling parents, Michael’s were incredibly self-centered. They felt threatened by Michael’s happiness, instead of seeing it as a validation of their parenting skills. Michael’s interests were insignificant to them. According to them, he hadn’t moved to California for a career opportunity, he had moved to punish them. He hadn’t married for love, he had married to spite them. His wife hadn’t gotten sick because she contracted a virus, she had gotten sick to deprive them.

Michael’s parents were always forcing him to choose between themselves and his wife. And they made every choice an all-or-nothing decision. With directly controlling parents, there is no middle ground. If the adult child tries to gain some control over his own life, he pays the price in guilt, frustrated rage, and a deep sense of disloyalty.

When Michael first came to me, he thought his marriage was the major problem. It didn’t take him long to realize that his marriage was merely a victim of the struggle for control that had begun when he moved away from home.

A child’s marriage can be extremely threatening to controlling parents. They see the new spouse as a competitor for their child’s devotion. This leads to horrendous battles between parents and spouse, with the adult child caught in a crossfire of divided loyalties.

Some parents will attack the new relationship with criticism, sarcasm, and predictions of failure. Others, as in Michael’s case, will refuse to accept the new partner or even ignore the spouse’s very existence. And still others will directly persecute the new partner. It is not unusual for these tactics to create such upheaval that the marriage is undermined.

“W
HY
D
O
I S
ELL
M
YSELF
O
UT TO
M
Y
P
ARENTS
?”

Money has always been the primary language of power, making it a logical tool for controlling parents. Many toxic parents use money to keep their children dependent.

Kim came to see me with a variety of concerns. At 41 she was overweight, unhappy with her work, and divorced with two teenage children. She felt stuck in a rut: she wanted to lose weight, to take some risks in her career, and to find some direction in her life. She was convinced that her problems could all be solved if she could only find Mr. Right.

As our session went along, it became clear that Kim believed she was nothing without a man to take care of her. I asked her where she had gotten this idea.

Well, certainly not from my husband. It was more like I had to take care of him. I met him when I was right out of college. He was twenty-seven, still living with his parents, and really floundering about what he was going to do for a living. But he was sensitive and romantic and I fell for him. My father totally disapproved, but I think he was secretly pleased that I picked someone who couldn’t get it together. When I insisted on marrying him, my father told me he would support us for a while, and if worse came to worse, he’d give my husband a job in his company. Of course this makes my father sound like a terrific guy, but it gave him an incredible hold over us. Even though I was married, I was still Daddy’s little girl. My father kept bailing us out financially, but in return for that, he got to tell us how to live our lives. I was playing house and raising babies and yet. . .

Kim broke off in midsentence. “And yet what?” I asked. She looked down at the floor as she finished:

And yet . . . I still needed Daddy to take care of me.

I asked Kim if she could see the connection between her relationship with her father and her dependence on men to make her life okay.

There’s no question that my father was the most powerful person in my life. He was really adoring when I was little, but when I started to have a mind of my own, he couldn’t handle it. He’d have these screaming fits if I dared to disagree with him. He’d call me terrible names. He was really loud and scary. When I was a teenager, he started using money to keep me in line. Sometimes he’d be incredibly generous, which made me feel really loved and safe. But other times he’d humiliate me by making me beg and cry for anything from movie money to schoolbooks. I was never sure what my crimes were. I just know I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to please him. It was never the same two days in a row. He kept making it tougher.

For Kim, trying to please her father was like running a race in which he was always moving the finish line. The harder she ran, the farther he moved it. She couldn’t win. He used money for both reward and punishment, without logic or consistency. He was alternately generous and stingy with money, just as he was with love and affection. His mixed messages confused her. Her dependency became entangled with his approval. This confusion continued into Kim’s adult life.

I encouraged my husband to go to work for my father. What a mistake that was! Now he really had us under his thumb. Everything had to be done his way—from choosing an apartment to toilet training the kids. He made Jim’s life a living hell at work, so Jim finally quit. My father saw this as another example of Jim’s worthlessness, even though Jim got another job. My father really lit into me about that and threatened to stop helping us, but then he did a complete about-face and, for Christmas, he bought me a new car. When he handed me the keys, he said, “Don’t you wish your husband was rich like me?”

Kim’s father used his financial power in very cruel and destructive ways while appearing to be magnanimous. He used it to make himself even more indispensable in Kim’s eyes and to continually diminish Kim’s husband. In this way he continued to control her long after she left the nest.

“C
AN’T
Y
OU
D
O
A
NYTHING
R
IGHT
?”

Many toxic parents control their adult children by treating them as if they were helpless and inadequate, even when this is drastically out of sync with reality.

Martin, a thin, balding, 43-year-old president of a small construction supply company, came to see me in genuine panic. He said:

I’m really scared. Something’s happening to me. I’m having these fits of temper. It just gets out of control. I’ve always been a totally nonviolent person, but in the last few months, I’m screaming at my wife and kids, slamming doors, and three weeks ago, I got so pissed off I punched a hole in the wall. I’m really scared I’m going to hurt somebody.

I complimented him on his courage and foresight to come in for therapy before the problem got out of hand. I asked whom he would have liked to hit when he punched that wall. He laughed bitterly:

That’s easy—my old man. No matter how hard I try, he always makes me feel that whatever I’m doing is wrong. Would you believe he has the balls to put me down in front of my own employees?

When Martin saw that I looked puzzled, he explained:

My father took me into his business eighteen years ago, and then he retired a couple of years later. So I’ve been running this business for fifteen years. But every goddamned week, my father comes in and starts looking through the accounts. Then he bitches about how I’m handling them. He follows me out of my office screaming about how I’m screwing up
his
company. Right in front of my employees he does it. The irony is, I’ve turned this business around. I’ve doubled our profits, just in the last three years, but he won’t leave me alone. Is this man ever going to be satisfied?

Martin was constantly having to jump through hoops to prove himself. He had real evidence of achievement—his profits—but that
evidence paled beside his father’s disapproval. I suggested to Martin that his father might feel threatened by Martin’s success. His father’s ego seemed to be tied up with having built this business, but now his achievement was being overshadowed by his son’s.

I asked Martin if during these episodes he was in touch with any feelings other than his understandable anger.

You bet I am. I’m really ashamed to tell you this, but every time he walks into the office, I feel like I’m two years old. I can’t even answer questions right. I start to stammer, apologize, and feel scared. He looks so powerful, even though I’m as big as he is physically, that I feel about half his size. He has this cold look in his eye and a critical tone in his voice. Why can’t he treat me like an adult?

Martin’s father used the business to keep Martin feeling inadequate, which in turn enabled his father to feel better about himself. When Dad pushed the right buttons, Martin became a helpless child in grown-up clothing.

It took some time, but Martin finally came to realize that he had to give up the hope that his father would change. Martin is now working hard to change the way he deals with his father.

The Tyranny of the Manipulator

There is another powerful form of control that, while more subtle and covert than direct control, is every bit as damaging: manipulation. Manipulators get what they want without ever having to ask for it, without ever having to risk rejection by being open about their desires.